Find Me in Here. Solos in dresses.
I created an order for the piece based on material we had created and this week we tried it out (and got to do so in style! the dancers are wearing Emily's process costumes).
Well, it was informative at least. So I spent the rest of the day rethinking how I got to where I'm at with this piece. More on that later this week, but for now I'll share from the opening of the piece in which Hsiao-Wei and Sarah perform their solos.
Labels: Find Me in Here
Open Studio. 1.
Get chinese knee pads.
First day into the studio to follow my open studio practice.
I'm both excited by my new relationship with movement and bored with my old tricks. I'm trying to find new paths but also letting myself relax into the comfortable. Let it breathe.
I didn't work on structures or time goals today, just remembering what it's like to move. It's fun - it'd be more fun with strong legs (still working on those knees!), but it's also fun to find ways around my insufficiences. Yay.
Enough for one day.
Labels: open studio
Open Studio.
Sometime after discovering structure, after I fell in love with "audience design," I lost my connection to moving. Structured experience replaced "dancing."
I love my structured experiences, but I miss dancing. I miss the raw connection to an audience, feeding off of them instead of controlling them, giving them my instinct, opening a window to my investigation of the moving body.
Open Studio is my return to solo work with a focus on the body. I expect it to be a bumpy and uncomfortable return. My body has changed and I'm more cautious with myself, more careful with what I will give to an audience.
This is a personal exploration. Key to its success is to perform in safe space with welcoming audiences --and scary spaces with unwelcoming audiences. It is to perform under any conditions.
My art is fleeting and I am working in celebration of that. Here are the "rules" for my process:
ObjectiveReconnect with the unique body performing.
Rehearsal practice- rehearse weekly or bi-weekly
- do not video/audio/photo document these rehearsals
- warm up with music, practice without it
- never use a mirror
- if you can't get studio time, use your living room
- write for 5-15min sometime during rehearsal (and post the notes here)
- put out seating for 3-5 viewers (using placeholders if no chairs are available)
- open your doors to anyone who wants to watch you rehearse and offer q+a time at the end
- perform as often as possible in as many different environments as possible
- include these notes in programs
Labels: open studio
"artist statement"
Manifestos. Belief statments. Discoveries in the form of statemnts. I don't like artist statements. They ask you to translate into words ideas that exist in other mediums and forms. They encourage you to commit to one way of being an artist - even if that one way is many ways. But once you've written it down, it's the everything of your art. There should be
better ways to communicate your artistic intentions.
My discoveries are in the form of questions. I dance to experience myself. I make art to explore my interaction with the world. I ask questions to find more questions. I make art to decipher my questions.
I work from the body. I seek to create experience both artificial and genuine. I am excited by an architecture of performance in which space and time are explored with an audience in them.
I like to start from questions. Creating performances that decipher questions means starting with a vision of a response. Visual space, lived time. Building movement to carry us through the shaping of space and time.
Labels: about
Find Me in Here. Solos - Hsiao-Wei and Chelsea
And here are the solos from Hsiao-Wei and Chelsea.
Hsiao-wei added a gestural narrative to her solo, and I suggested she go deeper into the movements in between looking for the narrative motivation that takes her from one place to the next (I seemed to suggest to everyone to look more seriously at the why behind their movements and transitions). I think she's still working on applying this comment, but on repeat viewings, I'm not sure it's the correct one. Well, time will tell.
Early in our rehearsal, I looked at Chelsea's solo and asked her to consider her motivations in and out of movements -why was she moving from this dramatic or gestural moment to that leg kick? How does it all connect. She started working through those considerations and what's recorded here already shows improvement, with the solo having a tighter flow and more interesting performance quality.
Enjoy!
Labels: Find Me in Here
MMeO. Clothing.
I have an appointment for next weekend with
Amy Eidelman, an image consultant, for a Personal Style Assessment, which is "a comprehensive assessment to determine [my] style, wardrobe goals and a customized approach to meeting [my] expectations."
Basically, I'm hoping she can tell me what to wear so I don't feel like a sell-out while still looking "
sophisticated." Advance warning that implementation of her advice may be very long term. Clothing is f*cking expensive.
Amy asked me to do some homework: "look through magazines/catalogues and bring some pictures that inspire you. It could be clothes, colors, or random images that will help us hone in on your style and preferences."
Here's my first response, all images are from Terry Moore's
Strangers in Paradise, a truly magnificent comic:
So here's what I like about Katchoo. Well, first she's totally cute. But so much more than that, she kicks ass (in a way too awesome to be conveyed from these few images... go read the comic,
today). She's sassy
and bad ass. She's petite but unseemingly powerful. She looks good in a dress, but she looks better in jeans and a bra. She's all-girl, whatever that means.
In an effort to venture a little closer to my own reality, here are some more images that "inspire me." Perhaps confoundingly, the first thing that comes to mind is traditional Japanese architecture.
Oddly enough, both of these spaces have circles in them, which I generally don't like, but I suppose accents are important. Images of clothing were more difficult for me to find, as I don't much care for today's fashions.
I do love strong colors, such as
orange, green, red, blue, grey, black, and even the right shades of rich
brown and
yellow.I do NOT like
tepid pastels and
off-whites. Earth tones are ok if they err on the side of
earth-
tone colorS rather than just
variants on
greyish-brown. (Can you even tell that there are four different colors in the word 'variants'? Neither can I.)
I'm looking forward to seeing what this process with Amy will involve. It makes me feel a little like a movie star or something, to be getting advice on what to wear...
Labels: MMeO
Find Me in Here. Solos - Anna and Hsiao-Ting
Today we continued working on the solos, this clip includes Anna's and Hsiao-Ting's progress.
I am giving the dancers a lot of room to create from their own inspiration, hopefully so that they'll end up with personal solos that they enjoy dancing. At this stage, the solos are still pretty young, so I'm keeping my comments broad and constructive.
I asked Anna to rehearse her solo, which has a lovely free-flinging energy, with an eye to upping the frenzy or calming it down. We'll see next time which direction she decides to go.
Hsiao-Ting shifted her intense footwork upright (see last week's videos) and really captivated me with this searching yet calming "journey." It's clear she's exploring and to watch is a meditation. This week, she added some jumps to add some variation in height and dynamics. I think we both agree this needs some more investigation - why is she freeing herself so abruptly? Is it really freeing to hurl herself through the air to the ground or is the control of her carefully padding feet, never fully on the floor, more liberating?
Labels: Find Me in Here
MMeO. Haircut, check-in.
"Excuse me." I was lost in my own attempt to find North as a passing stranger sought my attention with a tentative hand on my shoulder. "Great hair cut, that's a great style."
Did that really happen? Nearly two months post awesome new haircut a random passing stranger bothered to stop long enough to compliment me on it. Wow. I had already been impressed that for the entire first month after my haircut, fellow employees at the museum were doing the same. Co-workers ranging from those I interact with hourly to those with whom I have never held a single conversation found it impossible to pass without some positive comment. (I'm not exaggerating, I am astonished.) Was it that my peers finally were able to see the person they held in their minds? Were acquaintances starting to see something more?
I have been silently keeping notes on the effects of this brilliant haircut and that others seem to enjoy it more than what I had before is, I admit, a part that makes me more comfortable with them.
And I like the haircut --I like how it feels and that it is FAR easier to wear through the day than long hair. My hair is naturally full, so when it is bobbed, it does that bouncy, springy thing that I always imagined my long hair doing. And I've actually learned how to style it with a blow drier! Not only that, but there are days when I elect to do so, simply because it makes my hair more manageable for a long day. (There must be so many women out there rolling their eyes at my naivete.)
The real break through here is that I feel liberated in my new commitment to this part of my appearance. Yes! I can look "nice." I can show others a little effort and feel better about how I am connecting with society. And I'm okay with choosing to blow-dry my hair or not, to style it one way (clean, professional) or another (youthful, carefree, or something like that). Admittedly, this is an easy place to start because I've always at least worried about how my hair looks, even if I didn't always know what to do about it. Though it's never been the hair I wanted, I have "great hair," so it's easy to "transform" it.
What I'm doing is a) giving in to my hair's characteristics, b) managing them according to codes of beauty (here and now). And, in this case, I'm comfortable with that. I don't feel my sense of person threatened or changed. What has changed a little is that I worry less about how my hair looks and whether it looks "good." I pretty much know how it looks all the time, and I've got unmistakeably honest testimonials as to its "success," if that's what it is to jive with the pleasure others take in your appearance.
Labels: MMeO
Find Me in Here. Costume talk.
The previous
Find Me in Here post shows Emily's thought process in sketches. Last week when I had the dancers rehearse in skirts, we all agreed they were a bad idea --but the problem was how they obscured the legs rather than their inherent skirt-ness. Emily probably never saw the girls in long dresses, I just asked them to wear whatever they had, but still it was good to confirm what would have been a poor direction to go.
Instead, Emily has clearly been working with the idea of tent (waistless) dresses for a while and this time suggested a design connected more directly to our focus on process. She'll create basic muslin tent dresses for the girls to wear in rehearsal and at the parks when we perform this summer. These are meant to be subjected to normal wear and tear, the signs of which Emily will then use to inform her final designs that are unique for each dancer.
Practical considerations such as quick turn-around between final the park performance and the concert performance (aug 29-30) and the fact that dancers aren't exactly a messy bunch, led to Emily creating some preliminary designs to work from in the end --which we'll keep playing with for a while.
I love this design concept because it addresses the individuality of each dancer within a "uniform" or "group" style and, more importantly, because it relates directly to my creative methodology. Yay Emily!
Labels: Find Me in Here
Find Me in Here. Anna on "solos".
So in last week’s rehearsal, we started working on our solos. I was really feeling a need to move. So I tried to make “big dance.” Chelsea wasn’t there, but I was trying to channel her because she always makes beautiful big full movement.& nbsp; My movement usually tends to be awkward maybe. I like to make things that feel weird or that I think will look weird. Not pretty. So that said, I was struggling with the genuiness of the solo representing me. But I think I will stick with it. Push myself a different direction. Still the solo is not going a necessarily pretty route, more just a space filling and big moving route. The beginning creations are a lot about throwing yourself around and momentum. I like it too.
We also played more with the teaching phrases without the teacher speaking to the learners. I got to be the teacher and it was a very interesting process. It was hard because my movement wasn’t about hitting shapes but about throwing weight and momentum. So for the other dancers it wasn’t about finding the right placement, but about the quality of the movement. That was really hard to convey with no words. Also, I found being the learner to be a lot more fun. It got boring for me to do the movement over and over thinking that yea they got it well enough even though they were still f iguring stuff out. I like being engaged in the figuring out more.
Labels: Find Me in Here
Find Me in Here. A short chat with Chelsea
Here I ask Chelsea to talk briefly about what it's been like to go through our process over the past few months.
I totally agree with her!
Labels: Find Me in Here
Find Me in Here. Guiding.
Here we keep working on the section I'm now calling "guiding". The ladies are wearing skirts so I can see how they feel as potential costume pieces, but none of us were wild about the length obscuring their legs so much. Emily, our costume designer, came up with a great idea and is creating tent dresses that will stay above the knee.. more details on that soon.
In the background, you'll also see Lindsey taking photos, some of which will appear hear in the next few days, enjoy!
Labels: Find Me in Here
