Falls Bridge Performance

This is the improvisational solo I performed at Falls Bridge in Jauary 2011.  This solo is the trampoline off of which this year’s Fringe piece will bounce.

After Cedric Andrieux

After Cedric Andrieux.

My muscles were shaking. I was shaking. The last fifteen minutes of the piece my body was in a constant state of getting the chills. I had a difficult time talking. I listened to my friend tell me about The Show Must Go On. I heard other people talking, making small talk and I wondered how they could do it, how could they switch so gracefully into small talk after what we had just watched. I got in line to the bathroom, even though I didn’t have to go I thought I could put off having to talk to anyone. Turns out I talked to someone while waiting in line and then immediately after I left the stall. I went up to Cedric after the show and some words came out of my mouth and I think I told him I liked it. I got on my bike and I started biking down Pine street and then I started bawling and then I thought jesus, this is the summer of weeping while biking down the street. I heard a man yell at his daughter. I saw a woman in her sixties coming out of Superfresh on fifth and Spruce. She was a little stooped. I saw a man smoking a cigarette. I want to say he was Mexican but he might have been Puerto Rican. I biked down the cobblestone part of fifth street between Walnut and Chestnut streets. I thought, this is the first time i’ve biked down this cobblestone street after seeing Cedric Andrieux. I went home. I sat on the steps. I looked at my neighbor’s window. They have one window, a foot off the ground, made of frosted glass and it looks like on the inside there is a thin fluorescent light lining it. I made a sandwich with cheese, avocado and tomato. I wondered why do I make sandwiches like this when I really like most of the ingredients better when I eat them separately. I went outside. The neighbor’s pitbull came running out. He smelled me through the fence. He didn’t bark. I thought, this is the first sandwich I’ve eaten after seeing Cedric Andrieux. The neighbor came out as I was sucking a wayward bit of avocado into my mouth and I said hi through the fence and he asked me how it was going and kept walking without waiting for an answer. The moon was half full. I thought, this is the first moon I’ve seen after seeing Cedric Andrieux. I went in and washed the dishes and ate a stroopwafel and drank milk like a baby the first time she’s given a nipple. I came upstairs and bought a dresser from IKEA. I sat on my bed which has no sheets. I wrote this. This is the first paragraph I’ve written after seeing Cedric Andrieux.

A thought about generosity

The last week with Katie was interesting in frustrating, for many reasons.  Luckily, the frustration sent me into a downward spiral of crushing depression that was immensely useful in allowing me to to shed, if only temporarily, the belief that I need to say yes to every proposal made to me in order to make good improvisation.  I think I have worked to be a particularly generous person in life and performer in improvisation. And I noticed this last week that often I didn’t feel generous and when I went onstage other dancers would flock to me to make proposals because it was generally understood that I would say yes to them.  Perhaps that is imagined, but that is what I perceived.  So very often I found myself observing all these proposals, and then saying “no” to them, because I couldn’t be bothered to be interested in other people’s interests, just what I wanted to do.

Whenever you make a choice to enter the space, you affect others’ choices. In many ways, you restricts the amount of possible choices they have. Any proposal you bring into the space automatically limits the possibility of the choices of other performers.  This is what makes exit so powerful. because you are creating more possible choices in your exit.  Which is cool. Some choices in the space allow others to follow their own line of inquiry, giving them freedom.  Many choices you make force others to deal with you, and limits their choices a LOT.  This is also often exciting- you know how people get really creative with a lot of restrictions? Here is an example that I have dealt with a lot:

You are in the space. You want to relate to another person.  You decide the most direct way is to touch them, and maybe even begin to give them your weight, or manipulate their body in some way.  In this situation the other person generally has to acknowledge your presence and arrange their choice-making around the fact that you are touching them. A couple possible options:

- They can continue to let you physically manipulate them.  They can become passive, “followers” of your physical instructions, waiting for the moment when they can become “leaders” again.
- They can become “leaders” in the action, perhaps giving you their weight, or manipulating you right back.
- They can run away from you, escaping your touch.
- They can continue what they were doing, as best they can, making choices based on impulses other than your physical presence.

There are, I’m sure, many others, but those are some basics.
Because I try to be so nice and generous, when someone comes up to me and begins to do this, I try to say yes to it, taking up one of the first two choices, or switching between leader and follower.  But man, this last week with Katie I just couldn’t do it. I really like the people I’ve been dancing with, so it wasn’t a personal reflection of them, but shit. I was so sick of everyone, and saying “yes” to everyone, and trying to make a dance together, and everyone kept trying to dance with me, to touch me, to try to make a fricking dance, make this thing work, and I kept having to duck away, to look away from people, to connect with someone who didn’t want anything from me, and dance for them, or with them.
Doing that made for some very strong moments for me and for the dance.  Which was satisfying and sad, in a way. I guess it’s just another strategy for making dances.

There’s more around this subject, I think.

Talking about dance is like making music about architecture

This post I think is the seed or kernel or small beating heart at the core of what is exciting about being an artist.

In Sylvain’s class one day, we worked with moving our hands in the space around our bodies.  It felt really shape-oriented and boring until I started thinking about it as a way of mapping the body, mapping the space of the body, etc.

Then the trippy part began.  Sylvain reframed the exercise, asking us to touch parts of our body, or touch space near our body and ask ourselves, “Is this me? Is this me? how is this part of me (arm, for example) different than this part of me (space between ear and shoulder)?”  So this became super emotional very quickly as I have been asking myself for the past six months what exactly I mean by “I,” and “me.”  What exactly are the things I use to triangulate my position in the world? What sort of performer am I? What sort of creator am I? Where is my home? Is my arm a truer reflection of “me” than the words that come out of my mouth?  Once the familiar emotions sort of calmed down, images started passing through my head.  It felt like I was playing a mental theramin, my body was a theramin and where I put my hands a different memory or image was stored, a different image, mahogany and burgundy to the left behind my shoulder, a sunset over a field of cows behind my knees, sweet wet grass on my floating ribs.  It was awesome and weird and reminded me of what my acupuncturist back home told me about Chinese medicine. Warning: I may have gotten this theory completely wrong and may just be making it up for my own purposes. Acupuncture was originally a way of balancing the ghosts in your liver with the ghosts in your bones.  Or the ghosts in the different systems with each other.  In that exercise I felt very not-alone, in a weird, supernatural way.  I didn’t feel connected with anyone else in the studio, I felt connected with someone else that wasn’t there.  It felt partially like I was tapping into my memories in a vivid, sensual way, so it was sort of the “ghosts of Annie” sorta thing, so maybe that’s what the ghost vibe was about, but I also felt connected with something older and further away from myself.

The next exercise was five minutes of automatic writing.  I tried writing about the images, but writing about the images that arose in the “is this me?” exercise felt meaningless.  Like the quote “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
(side note- this quote brings up the whole thing about what makes most site specific work absolutely unpalatable.  And I’d like to direct you to an interview with Miguel Gutierrez, which is, overall, incredible, particularly his thoughts about site-specific work- Interview Here)
The automatic writing reminded me of trying to describe to Alex what he smelled like.  There weren’t words. He smells like himself, maybe a bit Greek, but there is no way to describe a loved one’s smell.  I began to think about Ezra Pound’s fascination with Japanese description.  In some essay, he writes that if I were to ask a Westerner what the color red is, the explanation would become increasingly abstract- red is a color, a color is a place on the light spectrum, red is lower, the light spectrum is the refraction of light, etc. etc.  If I were to ask someone from the far east what red was, the explanation might be a picture of a cherry, blood, lips, a rose, etc.  There are no things that will explain what an image is, but there are other images that might reflect upon it a certain way.
Right after the automatic writing we did five minutes of continuous movement, with a partner watching us.  And I slipped back into this weird spontaneous image-maker.  Images kept swimming up to me, the memory of shelling at 5 AM with my dead grandmother, running across a field to my mother as an eight-year-old, a smoke-filled car on a cool Sewickley night.  And sometimes my movements would “describe” or “reenact” those memories, but those moments only served as another way to spin deeper into the body.  The imagery and the movement felt related but synchronistic, not in a  cause and effect relationship.  And man, it was spontaneous.  I used my face and my breath, and made sounds which was also exciting because I kept finding myself getting stuck in the same neuro-muscular pathways over and over. Using my face and voice was scary but felt like a way in between those movement habits, just a way of nudging space into them, opening them up and becoming spontaneous.
And then I wonder if this is how karma works. Having no karma might be like having no movement habits, being able to be completely spontaneous.  Because that’s what it felt like during the exercise, I would be moving, and grooving with the movement, and then all of a sudden, I would be on my back, again, and I would think, how the fuck did I get here? And it bore a creepy resemblance to habitual emotional situations where I’d be going along, things would be good, and then BAM! all of a sudden, I’m having the same fight I’ve had countless times.  And it’d be like, ah shit.

Then we each did a solo where we moved around while thinking about a chosen state of mind of presence.  It felt again like continuous movement, only keeping the mind focused on a particular image or quality, and then seeing what arises from the body.  The questions that arose for me:
How do you quickly and efficiently access this spontaneous image-maker?
When doing continuous movement, there are moments when I was really bored and moments I was really excited by.  When I was performing my solo, it was difficult to move into those boring moments b/c I wanted all the moments to be exciting.  It felt like the exciting moments were the one most performance-worthy. Perhaps it’s all performance worthy, and one of the deals with improvisation is that you don’t have the luxury of editing out the boring parts or “lows,” and have to open your arms as wide to those moments as you do to the exciting moments.

Was there something about this class that used the thinking mind in such a way that it got out of the way of the body and of mental imagery?

How does pause work? Do you pause until the next impulse comes? Or does pause take you out of the immediacy of the moment?

Eye work and warmups

We’ve been doing a lot of eyework in the program.  There’s been a lot of focus on three main eye “focuses.”

If there’s anyone reading this who isn’t in the workshop, you can identify the three ranges by holding up your hand. There’s close, middle, and long range.
Look at the details of the hand, the lines in your palm, where you can see the veins.
That’s close range.
Then look at your hand as an object in space, at the whole thing.  You maybe can see details, but you’re not focused on them.  More you can see your hand as a whole entity, and that’s mid-range.
Keeping your eyes on your hand, look at the whole room.  The hand now has equal importance with the dress hanging on the shelves, as the dirty laundry in the corner, as the chair by the window. This is long range.

Early in Sylvain’s workshop we warmed up traveling the studio with our eyes only in close range.  The most fun of this exploration was oscillating between the body leading the exploration and the eyes leading the exploration. If the body leads, things get really interesting, the eyes are passive. The feet become sensitive, the back becomes sensitive, looking out for other bodies or the wall or the uneven part of the floor that the eye would normally look out for but isn’t because it’s so zoomed in on my clothes, on the floor, on the wall.  If the eyes lead, it’s also quite nice. The body is a bit like the tail of a meteor, because it’s following the eyes it’s following the head and sort of trailing behind.  Either way you find your body doing things you wouldn’t normally “make up,” which is always satisfying. It got difficult when we started coming into contact with other people. If you can only see someone’s thigh, can you interact meaningfully with them? Can you give them your weight? Can you gather enough information about the other person’s body in space with your body? In this exploration, no. I failed. I knocked Talya over a mess of bodies.

Kitchen

I’m finally living my dream of making face dances. Made with Talya Epstein and Sheri Burt.

Memories of the World Cup

Sitting in Vondel park, drinking warm beer.  Watching Spain win in the end. The sense of deflation in every cell in the park.

Being told I had to pay for the bathroom while men urinated in those stand up stalls. Not what I would expect from such a gender-progressive country. Hiding behind a tree instead.

Biking slowly home, then out again to get beer at the after-hours bar. Biking along, seeing four grown men kick along a vuvu suela, African noisemaker.  Like a line of Charlie Browns traveling along DeClercqstraat.

Arms sticky along the bar.  Talking about music, about improv, about dance, about movement, about talking about all these things. Behind me an old man orders a shot of jenever. He walks away.  Santiago tells me the old man was a pioneer of free jazz in Amsterdam.

Walking out into the night, there are stars, there is a moon, somewhere far away a city is warm and overflowing with beer and spirit, people are kissing and high-fiving, fires are burning.

Free Jazz Man approaches me, speaking Dutch, quickly switching to English as he sees my quizzical look.

“A Dutch poet once said, understanding is losing.

“The loss is the understanding.

“When you lose, you gain understanding.”

Finally, he settled on:

“Losing is part of the understanding.”

He couldn’t remember the poet’s name, and I wouldn’t have remembered anyway. He told me about his daughter in Iowa. He lit a cigarette and climbed on his bike.

My grandfather, who I never met, was a barfly.