Toolbox in Action: A Week in Review

As I mentioned before, a big part of my apprenticeship has been co-teaching various classes at the Dance Exchange. One of the classes that I'm helping out with is "Community in Creation" on Saturday mornings. Today we only had two participants attend - Dorothy and Bob - so we decided to move around a bit and then tack on an extra class at the end of the session to make up for the missed hour.

Peter led us through an exercise that was new to all of us...he didn't have a name for it, so I've decided to title it "A Week in Review". Here it is, step by step (bear in mind that you could always adjust these steps, add your own, find new ways of exploring this idea):

1. Begin by walking around the room, thinking back on the previous week.

2. Find a place of stillness. Focus on the first day of that week. Pick a place in the room and move over to that place at your own time, continuing to go over the events, feelings, thoughts, actions that you associate with that day. Incorporate some movement into your pathway that comes out of your thoughts, etc.

3. Repeat this six more times, once for every day of the week.

4. Find a partner and tell them about your week, however you like. You may find yourself incorporating some of the movement you just explored into your story, you may not. You can give a brief overview of the whole week, or focus on one key aspect of your experiences. Listen to your partner's story and pay attention to the words and movements that stand out for you.

5. Change partners and repeat. Notice whether or not your story changes, and if so, how? Try to make sure that you have a turn telling your story first as well as second, and see how it may be affected by first listening to what your partner has to say.

6. Change partners one last time and repeat. Again, take note of movements, gestures, words, anything that catches your attention.

7. Everyone comes together in a circle, and we share which moveents, text, feelings etc stood out during this exercise. These collected movements can then be used to build a phrase, can be scripted, can be layered with the text...the collected words or sentences can be used to create a Movement Metaphor or Equivalents phrase, just to name a few more tools that could be used at "the next steps" in this composition exercise...

For more information on the Dance Exchange toolbox, click here. You may need to register, but it's free and only takes a few seconds!

Photo: The Farthest Earth from Thee, a rehearsal shot. The camera crew was filming footage for a promotional/educational DVD and material to go up on the website.

Peter was Artistic Lead on this work, which was developed using many of the D.Ex tools, and is currently in the remounting process for an "animated keynote" performance next month. What's an animated keynote? Stay tuned for all the details.

Have SpaceTimeShip Will Travel (May request inflight musicmovies)

I was wandering around Dupont Circle on Monday because I got there waaay before call time. I seem to attract strange characters, wherever I go - this guy came up to me and started going on and on about all kinds of weird stuff. He gave me this flyer:


And told me to check out this website: Kitsault.com. It's a northern BC ghost town that was bought by a Washington businessman in 2005.

Kitsault was built in 1980 to take advantage of a rich molybdenum deposit in the area. It was a company-built mining town, 3.5 hours drive away from Terrace, BC. The town had all the amenities of any other modern town, including a hospital, rec centre, pool, movie theatre, homes and apartments, post office, bank and grocery store. Many people moved in once construction was finished, mostly company workers and their families. In 1982 there was a huge drop in the molybdemun market, and the mine was closed for good. Everyone moved out of town, the gates were locked and the town was promptly forgotten. It's all still sitting there, including the molybdenum, all 110 tons of it.

I found all of this very strange - I grew up in Northern BC, not that far away from Terrace - and I'd never heard of Kitsault, not even once. I'd like to go and visit, it seems like a very spooky place. "Kitsault was left empty and eerie. The glasses are still stacked for the next pint at the Maple Leaf Pub. The sign-in sheet at the day-care center shows a dwindling roster of 3-year-olds. Amber LaForge was the last to attend -- alone -- on June 27, 1983. The pool was left filled. Residents left the doors unlocked." (The Washington Post, July 2005)

Plans for development include: "an eco-tourist destination or an artist's colony...conferences, gathering scientists for forums and evening salmon-roasts on the beach. Wedding receptions. A corporate retreat. A movie set. Skiing, hiking, a spa, bans on smoking and cars, maybe a high-speed hydrofoil to bring tourists 85 miles from Prince Rupert." The guy who was telling me about all of this was excited about going up there for an artists retreat, he said he was a musician. And also a spacetime traveller. Who has a thing for inflight musicmovies.

If you'd like to meet this guy you can probably find him at Dupont Circle park, or hey - just give him a call! Maybe he'll take you with him in his spacetimeship.

Intro to Modern Dance: Loie Fuller

One of my responsibilities during my apprenticeship is to co-teach some of the community classes here at the Dance Exchange. On Tuesdays I'm helping Elizabeth and Shula teach Intro to Modern, a class for adults that looks at modern dance through the methods of technique, composition and history. Each week we take our insipration from a different person in the history of modern dance - the class gets an assigned chaper of reading, and our in-class work is structured around that icon's technique, concepts and interests.



So far we have covered Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller. Next week we will be doing Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. This Tuesday, our technical exploration of Loie Fuller was based in the use of momentum and weight. We started with a gentle warmup, then progressed to a couple of simple combinations. The first was a swingy arm combination, feeling the weght of our limbs and their ability to move the body through space. The second was a combination focusing on the lower body, exlopring shifting weight from one foot to the other and finding the undercurve that facilitate a grounded, weighted feeling of being connected through the body to the floor.


We explored these concepts further going across the floor, with low runs leading into a suspension, the leg pulling you back into two slow steps. We found that the most diffuicult part of this exercise was controlling our momentum going into the suspension, and finding the opposition in the back leg to pull us backwards instead of allowing the forward momentum to overpower it. We also played with contrasting "up" and "down" movement qualities, juxtaposing the same long, low runs with quick, light prances.

For the composition exercise, we took all of that movement information (in vocabulary or quality) and added another layer - being inspired by light and fabric. We split everyone into two groups and gave each group a long piece of white fabric to work with. The afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the windows, making a perfect performance space for our creations. Here is what the groups came up with. Simply breathtaking work! I was wishing that I could join in, it looked like a lot of fun. Very inspiring...




Group 1





Group 2

Hello LDSS Dance Students!

Tonight I found out that the dance students at Lakes District Elementary School (Burns Lake, BC, Canada) will be using this blog as a resource for their class - every week they'll be trekking up to the computer lab to read updates and watch the videos, and hopefully I'll be able to broaden their view of what constitues dancing, and who is able to dance, and also help them to see that a professional dance company doesn't have to be stick-thin girls with long legs wearing leotards.

I have my mom to thank for this, she runs the dance program at LDSS, my alma mater. I've been working with her class for the last two years in a row. The first year I set an evening of work on them called Blinders. It revolved around the theme of social blindness, about seeing (or choosing not to see) the truth about the world we live in, and making the next choice to stand up for what we believe in. It was a multimedia work that incorporated a lot of students - live musicians, video projections made by the computer/digital arts class, student choreography, all kinds of stuff.

Last year, I brought two friends (two of the three girls that make up our collective, 30Toes) up to Burns Lake to help me set another evening of work - this time, about this history of hair as a social and political statement. We each took a couple of sections and workd with the kids to create a dance based on variations on this theme. Some of the songs were more serious, some were humorous, some were more technical...we were working with kids from all different backgrounds, so we had a lot of variation in the final show.

My section was sourced from the cutting of children's hair in First Nations residential schools earlier in the 20th Century. For those of you who may not be familiar with the history - In the early 1900's, the American government shifted their genocidal policies from extermination to assimilation of Native peoples. Instead of endorsing massacres, forced relocations and the destruction of villages and food supplies to solve "the Indian Problem", they decided to "kill the Indian, not the man". This translated into a systematic descrution of Native Americans' spiritual, cultural and socioeconomic systems, replacing them with White values while keeping them in a perpetual state of poverty and disposession. Almost an entire generation of Native children were ripped from their homes and communities and placed into Catholic residential schools, where they were stripped of everything identifying them as Indian. Their hair was chopped off, they were forbidden from speaking their own language, from engaging in traditional spiritual practices, and often forbiden from seeing their families for months, even years on end.

*As a side note, hair also played a large part in the "Indian Wars" of the 18th and 19th century, as American governments on the local, state and federal levels levied "scalp bounties" on any Indian hunted down and killed - man, woman or child. The Scalps were taken to prove that a kill had been made. Often other body parts were taken as souveniers. Bounties often ran upwards of $100 per adult male scalp (adult males were usually defined as 12 and over, women's and childrens' scalps were less profitable). Many private citizens' organiztions also paid scalp bounties in the attempt to clear the land of any and all Native inhabitants. This happened to some extent in Canada, but was not nearly as systemic.

Burns Lake and the surrounding area has a very large First Nations population, many of whom were in residential schools or are children of parents who grew up in these institutions. There is also a very large part of the community who are descended from the "settlers" that stole the land away from its original inhabitants - the Gitksan and Witsuwit'en peoples who were forced into small reserves, often arbitrarily placed far away from their traditional villages and huntung/fishing territories. I wanted to draw on this past and present power dynamic, engaging the community's collective experience to create a piece that was relevant, poignant and evocative. I wanted to create something that would make people stop and think.

During the process, we used a few of the Toolbox exercises in creating the choreography. I started by researching text - excerpts from interviews with elders from the area who had gone to residential school as children - and asked the students to pick a few words that stood out for them. We then used the Movement Metaphor and Equivalents tools to come up with movements from the chosen words. We used these movements to Build a Phrase (another Dance Exchange tool), then experimented with different combinations of text and movement. (Click on the links for a full description of these tools) Eventually we ended up with a duet and a small group piece. For the group piece, we also made use of some traditional Native songs, and the duet was in silence.

I was so impressed with their creativity and enthusiasm for the project. I wish I could have seen the final production, but by then myself and my friends were back in Vancouver. I heard that it went really well. They had an amazing reaction from the community, just like they did the year before - my mom said that people were still coming up to her, months later, to tell her how much they enjoyed the show.

I'm excited that they'll be following me through my experiences here in DC - hopefully I can inspire them to "reach for their dreams" (as cheesy as that sounds) just like I am continually reaching towards my own.

Photo: The Dance Exchange core company rehearsing Lemkin (a section of Small Dances About Big Ideas, another work about standing up for truth and justice) for the upcoming Charter Oak performance. Photo date: Sept 11th, 2007.

For more perspectives on the politics/sociology of hair, here are some interesting links:

Dangerous Hair
Bernice Bobs Her Hair
Nappy Hair
American Anthropological Association Statement On Race
Nappy Hair: A Marker of Identity and Difference

For more information on Indian Residential Schools and related subjects, here are some links:
The Crucible of American Indian Identity: Native Tradition versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America (Churchill, Ward)
Suppression of Indigenous Sovereignty in 20th Century United States(Churchill, Ward)
Gathering Strength: Canada's Will to Reconcile, Recover and Repair
"The Circle Game": A Review

If you've never read Churchill I recommend his work wholeheartedly, I'm reaing his book "A Little Matter of Genocide" right now and it's...making me very sad, and angry, and frustrated at the history of the supposedly "Civilized" Western nations, and the disinformation/misinformation/Orwelian doublespeak that is perpetuated to this very day.

This project is something I'm interested in revisiting at some point, creating a work that will that will have a longer-term research/generation/development period and will involve more of the community.

Video Post: Full Cast, Still Crossing

As promised, this is a video of the entire SEIU Cast performing Still Crossing. It's amazing to see such a diverse group of people all working together, and to see the same simple, beautiful movements on so many different bodies. I am truly honored to be a part of the Dance Exchange - I think they have something really special - by taking contemporary dance beyond the expected , by challenging preconceived notions of who can dance, by giving rdinary people the opportunity to see the value in their own movement and to see themselves as dancers, whether or not they have formal dance training...to be a part of a group that is so dedicated to bringing people together in sharing something as wonderful as movement, dancing, creating, performing...to see people push beyond their own comfort zone, challenge themselves and those around them to take that extra step, to get up onstage, to involve themselves in a project like this...it's inspiring, and overwhelming, and it makes me excited about being an artist. I haven't felt this way for a long time.

Show Time!

Well, just before yesterday's dress rehearsal we found out that we needed to cut an extra minute and a half from the performance. Of course dancers are nothing if not adaptable, so we made some quick edits and pressed on. The rehearsal was long and exhausting and frustrating for all involved, as all tech rehearsals are wont to be. The space is less than ideal - carpeted stage, no wings, no backstage area - but the company and the community dancers and the production crew were really committed and focused and we got through it together. I was really proud of the little step dance kids for staying engaged and focused until we were finished (late, of course, but that's to be expected) and for being so well-behaved in the hallway where we all have to wait before going onstage.

My job as Community Wrangler is actually a lot of fun, I get to worn on my people skills and get to know the cast and the technical crew and the Artistic Leads (Peter and Liz) and Elizabeth, the Project Lead, and just really be involved in every aspect of the production, which I love.

I'm going to leave you with a few pictures from the venue: the International Ballroom at the Washington Hilton.

This is the stage space, and the company rehearsing the "Suffragette" section.

The ceiling of the conference room.

The swirly floor of the space where the audience will be seated (the stage carpet isn't this pretty).

Two beautiful chandeliers in the hallway.

And now, I'm off to our final rehearsal and the following performance. I'm tired, excited and a bit nervous. We still have some choreographic changes to make for the company's section, and we have all of thelast minute detailests to take care of. Hopefully it all goes well! I will be back later on with a full report, and some video from the full cast rehearsal yesterday.

SEIU: First Full Cast Rehearsal

Today we had our first full cast rehearsal for SEIU. It was amazing to see all those people gathered together in one room - dancers of many different ages, ethnicites, body types and backgrounds. We have been very lucky to have the opportunity to work with such a diverse group of people in putting this project together - and it was amazing to see Still Crossing performed en masse. The simple gestural choreography is surprisingly powerful when you see everyone in the group moving in unison - even the smallest gestures are poignant and beautiful.

We put as much of the production together as we could in a short period of time, trying to figure out our transitions, pathways on and offstage, and the timing of the various groups' routines. Tonight we will get a better idea of how the entire show will run, as we will be rehearsing in the performance space - the conference room at the Washington Hilton.

Random bit of trivia: it's the hotel where Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.

Anyways, I have video footage of today's rehearsal, and I will try to upload it by tonight or tomorrow. Probably tomorrow, as I'll be getting home very late tonight.

Squirrel Dance

Even the squirrels like to dance in DC! I was in the park last Friday near Union Station, and saw these two squirrels acting like cute little kittens, rolling in the grass, chasing each other, playing hide and seek, jumping around and acting silly! I got right up close and turned on my camera, got it all on tape...

Video Post: SEIU Project Rehearsals

Want a closer look into what goes on before the production hits the stage? Here are a couple of videos of the SEIU project - footage of the core company members and adjunct artists during today's rehearsal. Bear in mind, this is still a work in progress - we've got a whole day of rehearsals tomorrow to get things polished and ready for performance.

The presentation is made up of four sections, each pertaining to a time period or event in which people stood up for what they believed in and effected social change. This first video is the "Suffragette" section of the work. "Suffragette" is the term given to members of the Women's Suffrage Movement, who rallied and protested for the right to vote in the early 20th Century. The movement originated in the United Kingdom and quickly spread to the Unites States and Canada. It starts with a solo by Martha Wittman, and progresses to a group section including the other female members of the cast: Elizabeth, Cassie, Meghan, Samantha and Shula.

The second video is a chair section, and will be performed directly after the Suffragette section. Included in this shot are (from left to right): Samantha, Matt, Elizabeth, Thomas, Cassie, Megan and Shula. I'm not sure what meaning this section has in relation to the overall theme, or how it was developed - I suppose that's a good question to ask the company members during our lunch break tomorrow.

This last video has a few wobbly bits in it (and a stray finger over the lens at one point), because I was also running the audio and almost forgot to repeat it when the song finished. Oops! This section includes the whole company, and is the last section before the community participants join in for an excerpt of a Dance Exchange repertory piece titled "Still Crossing." The original work was created by Liz Lerman in 1991, and performed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, one of six international companies selected to perfrom at the statue's centennial anniversary celebration.

(If you're wondering, the puppy in the picture is Madelaine, the resident Dance Exchange Mascot and part-time company member. She had a small role in The Farthest Earth From Thee.)

First Week at the Dance Exchange: SEIU Project

Well, I'm finishing up my first week of apprenticeship at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, in Takoma Park, MD. I've travelled all the way across the continent, from Vancouver, BC, Canada - and I'm finally getting adjusted to the time change, the hectic schedule, and the humidity. I meant to start blogging right away, but I've been so busy this week that I haven't had much of a chance to get my thoughts organized.

So far, my days have been jam-packed with rehearsals (for two different projects - more on that later), co-teaching a few weekly classes, various administrative tasks, and jobs relating to my position as "Community Wrangler" for an upcoming performance.

The core company, adjunct artists, and participating community groups are preparing for a project that culminates this weekend. The performance on Sunday is taking place at the opening ceremonies of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) conference. This important conference happens every four years, and includes union members from all around the country. The SEIU is one of the largest unions in the world, made up of the people who keep our society running - janitors, health care workers, waitresses, home care workers, maids, etc. They are mostly Latino women, and mostly recent immigrants.

During the symposium, the union members will hear speeches from all the Democratic presidential candidates and vote on which candidate they would like to back in the upcoming federal election. In order for the candidates to even attend the conference, each candidate must walk a day in the shoes of one of the union members, to get a taste of what it's like to live farther down on the social ladder. They must also agree to a Q&A session where they will answer any and all questions posed to them by members.

Two weeks ago, the Dance Exchange was invited to perform at the conference. We will be doing three performances. The first (on Sunday) involves external community groups as well as the core company members - Tappers With Attitude, the Dance Place Step Team, SEIU members and volunteers from the community at large, all dancing together. The second and third performances are on Monday, and will only involve the core company and will include some performance, discussion and audience participation activities to keep the delegates engaged in between all of the speechifying and pontificating. The conference will be broadcast on national television - CSPAN will be there to film the whole thing!

My job in all of this? The esteemed "Community Wrangler", I have to be the person on-site who can answer any and all questions - I have to know contact information for everyone involved, know the choreography, know the facility layout, the rehearsal/performance scheduleand anything else that may come up. Sound like a lot of work? It is. We've been packing rehearsals into every spare moment - and with just three more rehearsal periods to go before the show, we'll be going full steam ahead right up until the last minute.

I have to go and warm up for rehearsal, but I'll be back later with more updates, info on the other projects in the works, and some rehearsal pictures!