electromagnetic pulse

Find Me in Here. dance dance dance.

My break from electromagnetism has been too long, but there are fruits -- of a sort.

This past week I turned in a grant proposal to the Queens Council on the Arts to help fund a new project. The decisions are announced in December, by which time I expect I'll have forgotten that I even applied --new to me as of last year, the holidays are not a time for making my own work. It has become a time for making creative holiday cards and pretty wrapping paper and figuring out how the hell I'm going to get gifts for so many people. sigh.

But as I was saying, the grant. I think what I turned in was clumsy - because they limit the CHARACTERS in which you can argue your claim to the funding! Word limits I can live with. Char limits are ridiculous. I was forever having to change around whole sentences because I was 2 bleeping chars over. But never mind that, keep your fingers crossed for me until December and clumsy may not matter.

Whether or not I receive the grant (fingers! cross 'em!), I will be able to go forward with the project, and a nice and simple one it is.

I am going create a group dance. Novel, I know. But really, I haven't made a piece that was much more than a solo since high school. Oh, no wait, there was that one really awful piece in college. That one was so bad, I don't think it counts. And there are many reasons why I haven't bothered to try since then (none of which is my aforementioned failure). They aren't really relevant, let's just say I've been dancing with architecture for the past five years and I want to dance with people again.

Now, don't get too excited. There will be no "phrase" making on my part. The dancers get to do all the movement generating. There will be improvisation, it might feel like comp class at first, and it will probably take a while to sort things out, but it will be wild and exciting. That is, I can't wait to work with bodies in the flesh instead of lines on paper.

When the dance is finished by next June, we're going to visit the parks and see if people will watch us rehearsing the finished dance -- see if we can entice some of them to learn some of it -- hear what they have to say and answer their curiosities and questions. It's going to be a blast.

p.s. If you want to be a part of the project (I need five dancers, a graphic designer, a costumer, and some volunteer publicity help), lemme know. The official search happens in January 2009.

Labels: FMiH

posted by e m p @ 11:38 PM