in progress

2012 Work in Progress  Jesse Mejia, Matt Leavitt and myself are working on a performance piece that unites dance, interactive sound and visuals, and sculpture. This work will be shown at Austin’s Big Range Dance Festival in June 2012

2011 SONG & DANCE is a duet that grows out of the exploration of movement and sound vernacular of past folk dance and music. Intuitively, this work gathers its own language through a process of assimilation and reinterpretation.

pic by Megan Kathleen McIsaac

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April 2011

If you like the way cities look on a clear night, then you will like this dance.
If the thought of encountering a message in a bottle excites you then you will like this dance.
If you like watching people moving on the bus while listening to your ipod, then you will like this dance.

2/19/11 big picture exploding in my brain-Gee i hope it makes its way out of me and onto the stage cuz I’m running out of room inside me head

I am approaching a Holocene performance where I am going to try layering some film with the dance for the first time. With only two months left I am attempting to define certain aspects of it and am looking at the bigger picture.

In this work we are playing with different ways of being seen. We ask you to see us in different states at certain moments that are shifting and changing constantly. Sometimes the music or the film will demand your attention. A lot of this dance is truly undefined. If you look at the details you might be interested in what you’re looking at but its contribution to the greater whole may be unclear. I am more interested in you leaving with a certain feeling or impression that may not be felt if you’re looking too closely or searching for answers. There is an element of wildness to this project. I’ve left a lot of the content to be decided by the dancers so it’s hard to say its about this or that although that is exactly what I did when I wrote my RACC grant. Sure there is something motivating me to create this work and that is infused in the work but I was much more interested in how the metaphors reflected in the improvisational scores inform the dance than how the outcome of the scores directly state the metaphors, so that it is an abstraction.

I have started to write suggestions for watching this dance.

• let your eye zoom in and out at details and at the whole picture
• forget making sense out of it all and allow yourself an experience
• let yourself fade in and out of the work (often what brings you back is what’s most illuminating)
• observe how space and energy shift

2/6/11 Valentine’s Performance

Dancers: Robert Tyree and Lucy Yim

Musician: Jean Paul Jenkins

1/22/2011 INVITING CLICHé

Courage is the presence of fear with the capacity to manage and overcome it.

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says…I’ll try again tommorow.

Deep Breath, little roar. We’re entering upon a month of rehearsals and I find myself constantly reigning in my anxiety which is so good at distracting me. What is this piece about other than tidy spatial structures that contain spontaneous gesture? What is the spine of this piece? How do you avoid cliché? I guess Tom Robbins says that real courage is risking one’s cliché’s. In celebration of both courage and the inevitable, I am using these found phrases to inspire movement:

take the bull by the horns

march into the cannon’s mouth

get your blood up

beard the lion in its den

screw your courage to its sticking place

1/16/2011

I was assigned a project in Esther Podemski‘s drawing class at Sarah Lawrence where I was to copy a drawing by a historically significant artist. From our copy we were to then create two more, each being a diminished version of the last. I drew Alberto Giacometti’s La mère de l’artiste. I’ve always enjoyed drawing this way. The whole picture is developed and worked until objects and images appear out of many lines and smudges. The development of this piece is reflecting both the process of drawing/sketching as well as alluding to the process of the assignment which got me jazzed about Giacometti in the first place. Today in rehearsal we worked with gestures. We combined them with travelling steps, we altered their shapes and their timing, we did them with feeling and let them change their meaning as we manipulated them. We created many many sketch marks. I’m not sure we defined a whole picture yet but we’ll get there.

1/14/2011

Recently I have been inspired by Giacometti’s sketches and sculpture, poetry by Taije Silverman, and Pauline Oliveros teachings. Sinking into the first stage of our process we are improvising a lot, strengthening our ears and quickening our responses, learning how to make dynamic movement shifts and choices within each dance. A location has been decided and confirmed, a mini fundraiser is underway and beautiful gestural duets are under construction. It is a truly inspiring group of artists. I couldn’t ask for more.

12/22/2010
Here is some video of an improvisation I did in November. We will be working with some of these movement qualities and gestures in our next rehearsals. Sorry for the poor video quality–feedback encouraged!

http://vimeo.com/18104301