TDB Special Projects Generator

Another great idea found in Diego's Sandbox.

http://www.tdbspecialprojects.com/

Check it out...

This photo (Meghan Bowden and a student working on the Dance Exchange CELL film shoot) is completely unrelated to the content of this post. Because really sometimes I just wanna post a pretty picture, regardless of what I'm writing about. And sometimes I just don't have a good picture to go with the stuff I'm writing about. And yes, I know I just used "about" as a sentence ending twice in a row. Nobody's perfect.

New Choreo Ideas

As I was lying in bed last night I came up with an outline for a new work. This project has been at the back of my mind for months, years…but I haven’t felt strong enough to tackle it.

I want to make a piece that is mostly auto-biographical. It will be a duet between myself and a male dancer. The concept of the work will revolve around my dysfunctional relationship with my ex-husband. The cycle of abuse that we became trapped in, and our mutual inability to let go. The way that we reached a point of crisis again and again. His anger and violence, apologies, my forgiveness, acceptance, unexpressed anger that turned inwards upon myself. Feeling trapped. Reaching the point of no return. Leaving, looking back, leaving again, finally letting go.

My challenge will be to abstract this narrative structure, to strip away meaning in the generation of movement and to add it back in during the crafting stages. Today I will be creating a phrase that will be incorporated into the final work. I will be working from some poems that I wrote during and after this relationship to generate a first draft of movement that can be manipulated later on.

I have one section semi-complete already - the chair duet that I posted a while back. (See it here)

I will be continuing work on this piece when I get back to Vancouver. I need to find a male dancer to work with, someone who is interested in contributing to the choreographic development of the work - and who doesn’t mind that this piece will eventually end up set on someone from DC. Hopefully I can present the completed work in Vancouver and/or Seattle this spring. I'll also need to find a partner to continue the work with when I get back to DC this summer. If you're reading this and are interested, email me at shallom.johnson@gmail.com with your CV and picture.

Radical Acts of Prayer: Stones, Earth and Clay

Buoyant,
Plates transform, converge and diverge
Currents within the core wake,
Collide and collapse

New mountains soar
Rift valleys drop the sea to new depths
New darknesses

Change begins below the surface
The rocks are moving
Ripples spread outwards
Manifest in eruption, dissolution, destruction
Creation and decay
New life?

Inspired by rehearsals with Casie Meador for her work 613 Radical Acts of Prayer. Photo: Ilya Belenkov, in aforementioned rehearsal.

Site Specific Performance: Wrap-Up and Review

So, I thought that I'd say a few words about the site-specific performance last weekend, before it slips my mind completely as I am quickly moving on to new things at the Dance Exchange and elsewhere. There have been tons of things that have happened without my being able to write about them, which has been disappointing - but if I'm too busy to write, it's because I'm dancing. Which in and of itself is great.

Anyways, I digress. The site-specific performance went really well. It was the first time I'd done a morning show in quite some time, and my body took a while to adjust - the first show still had a few kinks in it, and our audience was a bit smaller. The noon show went much smoother, and the audience had swelled, including some of the DX company members and staff. It was nice to have their support.

All of the performers did an amazing job! Peter was a wonderful tour guide, leading the audience around the building, helping them to interpret the performance while at the same time building a short movement phrase based on the things they were seeing and hearing. Anne's poetic voice was beautiful, and added an extra dimension to the performance. I particularly enjoyed hearing her words juxtaposed against Dorothy's solo, focusing on the deliberate qualities of her movement and the description of the permanence and strength and texture of the rough brick wall.



My favorite part of the show was Ilya and Sarah's fountain duet. Ilya is a visiting guest artist from Russia, and he is an amazingly talented and creative choreographer and performer. Sarah is a local dance artist, who is equally amazing and beautiful to watch. I have a video of this piece, and of the teens' stairway dance, but I have to edit them as the file sizes are too big to upload.

John Borstel worked with the group to create a really engaging installation/set piece in which dancers manipluated a piece of fabric over the atrium balcony while the Teen Exchange group floated pieces of vellum paper printed with words down over the fabric to the floor below. Myself and other participants were dressed in white, dancing set and improvised movements on the lower level, under the fabric and among the fallen paper. From the audience's perspective, the printed words combined randomly to create jumbled phrases, allowing them to piece together meaning wherever they could find it - or to just read the piece as a whole.

We had a fabulous team working together on this project - I have to admit that I wasn't sure we could pull it off in the time that we had, but in the end everything worked out better than we could have imagined. Every audience reaction that I heard was positive - people were really intrigued by how we pulled them into the space, leading them to view the building in different ways that they had experienced before.



My kudos to everyone involved - Matt and Cassie for givng us a great start and helping to generate and craft our movement material, Peter and Ilya for helping me to keep everything organized and running smoothly, Anne and John for their wonderful artistic contributions, and of course our amazing community and Dance Exchange participants, and the staff at the Takoma Park Community Centre, and the DC Outlaw skateboarders, and the audience, and the perfectly sunny weather, and everyone and everything else that made this performance such a success!

Photos: A step in the process of creating John's installation piece: we used a tool called 3 Column Writing to generate some text, which (after a few more steps) we arranged in places around a room in a way that had some relation to the space and the words themselves. 3 Column Writing is a really interesting and useful tool, I will do a separate post describing the process later on.

Video Post: Solo, Work in Progress

This is one of two solos that I am creating right now. This one is an assignment by the Dance Exchange's Associate Artistic Director, Elizabeth Johnson: creating a solo to be performed as a part of the site-specific performance next Sunday, October 20th.

This work is inspired by writings of Takoma Park's Poet Laureate Anne Becker, whose work is often tied to ideas of place and physical presence, examining the effect of the earth and the environment on the people who inhabit it, and our effect on the physicality of the world. While I was generating this movement phrase, I was working with the concrete structure of moving between round and crescent shapes in my body - and more abstractly, examining through movement the cyclical nature of stabilization and adaptation that occurs in the earth and in human beings. There is another section of the work that was initially generated by using Build-a-Phrase, collecting movements as Anne was speaking about her poem Berry Hollow, stylizing and shaping those gestures into a short phrase. I don't have a video of that part yet.

The next step for the section shown in the video is to find the places where the free flow can be stopped, changed, or broken - to explore using sharpness, bound flow and stillness to break up the rhythm.

Next week Anne and I have decided to meet up and chat about poetry - she has graciously agreed to read some of my work and give me some advice...very excited and also nervous, this will be the first time I've had an accomplished poet read my writing and give me feedback.