Watching work at Judson Church

This week I went to Judson Memorial Church for the first time.  I went to go to the “free, high visibility, low-tech weekly forum” that Movement Research hosts.  Three different choreographers presented short works-in-progress.

Judson church is famous for being home to many a postmodern dance maker, beginning around the time of Judson Dance Theater in the sixties.   I don’t know what the inside of the church looked like back then, but on Monday it was breathtaking.  Low-tech, high church, and perfect. 

The thing that is surprising to me about James McGinn’s piece, Estrellita, which I loved the most, is that it was the most formal of all the pieces presented that night.   I don’t always love formal.  It’s hard for me to write about, in fact, because I don’t have all the vocabulary of modern dance.  But I’ll try, because I loved the piece, and when I love something, if I can figure out why, it guides me in making my own work.

The piece was  a classic set up.  Female and male dancer (Maggie Cloud and James McGinn), dressed in evening attire, dancing with a very modern dance vocabulary, and heavily relying on unison.  Seen that before, yes.

And yet there were enough subtle nuances and unusual choices, (and exquisite dancing) that I was very taken aback by it.  After listening to a recorded composition by Manuel Ponce, where the dancers stood upstage in stillness, the piece was danced in silence.  But what followed wasn’t SILENCE.  The dancers created a driving beat that is still in my head three days later, just by walking the space side by side, marking the corners and turning in cycles.  That beat held strong throughout the entire piece, as did the fading memory of Ponce’s music,  as the choreography evolved into more complicated and technically difficult phrases.  The rhythm also held strong as the two dancers were separated by distance.  Turned away from one another, and in perfect unison, they drew their hands down their sternums, or turned a head from side to side.

There was a coldness, and distance choreographed into this pairing, they moved so perfectly together and yet seemed isolated from one another.  The more I think think about it, it didn’t rely on all those predictable hetero gender dynamics.   The pair was dancing together, but they were very much two individuals, dancing their asses off, alone. The dancers were flawlessly tuned into one another, and yet they felt worlds apart.

(image at top is Judson Church, not this Monday’s performance, but you can get a feel for the space from the photo.  Audience members sit around the floor, in a 3/4 round)

Work for Pay

Tomorrow I will be performing in a piece about being unemployed.  For me, unemployment this year hasn’t been unemployment as much as “under-employment.”  Not enough work.  Good news is that Lydia Bell, the artist behind the project, is paying her performers.  How bout that?

I am used to being paid at least something in the world of acting, but this collaborative, devised stuff can be tough.

The piece is a pretty simple movement/sound score, that moves in cycles. I think it’s thoughtful and provocative and I’m curious to see how it works in the outdoors at Perform Williamsburg tomorrow.

(photo by Lydia Bell)

For more info about where and what check out lydiabell.wordpress.com

Circuitous Route

Here are some old homegrown video clips of Circuitous Route, the piece that Aphasia grew out of.   This was performed in 2008 as my MFA thesis at UC Davis.  Thanks to Ilya Noe for sitting in the front row and shooting this with a wee bit video camera every single night.  It looks pretty hazy online, but I think you can get a feel.  Sound collaborator is Sean Johannessen.  www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E6RfmU3vqE

Parking lot

This year I am taking part in a site-specific performance practice, with collaborator Ara Glenn-Johanson.  We began making work in site-specific locations when the economy started crumbling last fall, realizing that we didn’t want to wait around for a grant.  Also realizing that perhaps now was a time to leap into alternative ways of making work, that do not rely on the foundation and the grants driven arts world. We have worked in sites of closed businesses,  imagining that working in these temporarily dead spaces can be a way to enliven and publicly use what was previously occupied private space.  Our favorite spot is the giant and very empty parking lot of the now out of business Elephant Pharmacy in Berkeley.  We have transposed a bit of this work twice, with collaborator Jesse Hewit.  Once onto a giant stage in a SF festival, Dancing in the Park, and once into an outdoor garden/sidewalk during the queer arts event dirtstar celebrating urban renewal.  Both times fascinating successes and failures. Can you take a site-specific performance (or rehearsal) and put it on a stage?  See here for a link to Ara’s video of our parking lot piece on a very large stage. www.vimeo.com/4557630  The video brings up another question.  Can you capture any remnant of a live performance on a video, of a stage, that was a site-specific performance? Right…

(project on hold while I move to NY)

Thoughts on Aphasia

 

(photos by Oriol Cara)

So Aphasia was a reworking of my MFA thesis, Circuitous Route.  After 8 months away from it (way away), I came back to it with an intent to take the basic spine of the piece, and just make it better.  I performed it in June at the Fury Factory festival at Noh Space in San Francisco.  The crazy thing that happened, is that while my intent was to break the piece open a bit and put it back together more formally, it got stuck in the broken apart phase.  The piece is poetic and winding, and I’d hoped to make it a little less winding.  Looking back on it, I wanted the satisfaction of a somewhat linear end.  Rather than the piece breaking off, like an unfinished sentence, I realize now that I wanted a climax, a denouement, even though the rest of the piece has no relationship to that linearity.  Well that was a dumb idea. 

While somethings improved and got deeper, I learned a lot of hard lessons about festival performing.  Very limited hours in a theater means that incredibly careful attention to space that I had the first time around just wasn’t possible.  Theater also meant theatrical lighting.  Different.   I no longer had those amazing omnidirectional speakers from the UC Davis technocultural studies department that made audience feel that they were inside the sound.  And while I had hoped to bring Sean Johannessen, my sound collaborator, inside the performance space, I think the changes we made actually distances us further, made our relationship on stage more antagonistic and formal.

I’m not ready to throw in the towel with festival performing (Fury Factory was great to me).  Of course it’s one of the major ways to get new work up and running.  I just need to figure out how to merge my attention to space with the impromptu quality of working in an unknown theater.

 

Is it time to entirely put this piece on the backburner, or is there something left to milk of it?  Not sure.  But I think next time I might want to go back to a space that offers some of the low-budget surprises of site-specific spaces.  Circuitous Route had that outside noise, those windows, the light at dusk…and all those carefully selected chairs…

Starting with right now.

There is much to catch up on in the archive of my performance work in the last years.  My attempts to document live performance of the past and present will hopefully slowly take shape on these posts.

Right now, I am gearing up for my newest creation, Aphasia, at the Fury Factory Festival in San Francisco.  Come check it out at Noh Space in San Francisco on June 9 and 10.  

A collaboration with sound artist Sean Johannessen Aphasia is a hybrid of movement, sound, and words that investigates the politics of speech and the world of the unspoken.