new year's fruit The rise and fall of breath. Responding and rebuking gravity. Falling in space and recovering with grace. The new year always begins with new ideas and inspirations. But this year I find myself coming around to find full-sized fruit on the tree of ideas I've been working around my dance noggin' for years. I'm excited to get back into the studio, transitioning from brain to body dancing - and then back again. after-school ballerinas
I once taught a high school ballet class to a group of girls. There were 2 very skinny girls who hid behind long bangs. They swore they couldn't point a foot let alone turn. And they grew very self-conscious if they found themselves standing next to another girl in the class who had studied dance for many years at her local studio. How do you get all these girls on the same page? There was a total of about 9 girls in the class. It was great to see them all dance across the floor together, all those different grown-ups-to-be doing things they could do well or things they never ever thought they would be able to do. Everyone was there giving up their after school hours to move because they wanted to be there. As far as I could tell, the girls never teased each other for what they could or could not do. Not at all like the movies they make about high schoolers.
Miscellaneous
When did dance become miscellaneous? I ask this because I now read NYC’s Village Voice online. It’s great because I don’t have to deal with newsprint on my hands, I don’t accidentally hit people on the train when trying to turn the page and I get to skip the pages and pages of ads in the back that keep the paper free to the public and are mostly filled with images of females (by birth & by choice) hawking their wares. I like to read the Art reviews, especially if Jerry Saltz is writing, but the Dance reviews are the main draw. The column size has shrunk, Elizabeth Zimmer is no longer there, but it is a surviving vestige of the legacy of dance writing in NYC. But in my email from The Voice, I had to scroll down past PEOPLE, MUSIC, FILM, ART, BOOKS, THEATER, CARTOON all the way down to MISCELLANEOUS to find 3 dance reviews by Deborah Jowitt preceded by a link to photos of the Village Leather Fest and a link to a review of a video game from the makers of the Jackass franchise. I know there’s a joke in there somewhere. Dance doesn’t even get to be the #2 in a slash relationship with Theater (THEATER/DANCE). It’s miscellany. “Miscellaneous” is a word you use when you catalog things in boxes and you’re left with that pile of random ticket stubs, mementos, buttons that you can’t part with but don’t belong anywhere else. Is Dance miscellaneous? What does this imply for the field as a whole? I see the potential for a great conference topic here…
Rainy book day Today it's raining to make up for yesterday's sunshine. Although the show is only weeks away I still find myself reading up on teen girl angst. "Odd Girl Speaks Out" by Rachel Simmons is a great collection of personal stories written by girls about bullies, cliques, popularity and jealousy. Every parent of a pre-teen girl should probably slip a copy under their daughters' pillow. An extremely quick read was "Sticks and Stones" by Beth Goobie, a fictional novel about a girl whose reputation was systematically destroyed by her peers. The scary part was that the novel didn't seem any more extreme than the personal narratives from Simmons' book. It didn't take long for me to get hooked on the anime cartoons Kirsten loaned me for research. What's not to love about a group of girl superheroes with dilated eyes in a perpetual state of bella donna? (Wikipedia: “the belladonna plant was historically used by women [Bella Donna is Italian for beautiful lady] to dilate their pupils; an extract of belladonna was used as eye drops as part of their makeup preparations. The Belladonna toxin's atropine content had the effect of dilating the pupil, thus making their eyes supposedly more attractive.” By the way, it also caused blindness.)
Blog gaps So what goes on in the gap where I don't write on the blog? We just had a great show at the 2006 dumbo festival at White Wave's John Ryan Theater where we presented the beginnings of a new project, Girl "Y". We're plotting our year ahead and working on new major work. The process of creating sometimes involves the age-old incubation of ideas. Or sometimes a day of dancing in Fort Green Park ; ) Grounds for a good time Yesterday morning we trekked out to Hamilton, NJ for our performance in the Outlet Dance Festival at the Grounds for Sculpture, a gorgeous 35-acre park worthy of becoming a habitual site for a good time. Since we were in the outdoor segment of the show, I kept all fingers and toes crossed for good weather (it was a bit rain last Sunday for our tech) and we ended up getting a glorious day without a cloud in the sky. We could almost pretend it was still summer... The gate attendant at the Grounds said there were more people there for the performances than any other single day in the past 3 years, which is very cool. Yeah to Jamuna (the curator of the fun fest)! Yesterday was my 3rd time in the park and each time I've discovered new works that I missed before. The picture above is of Katrina Tatarovich's Mirage (if I remember correctly) which I fell for on our first visit to the park about a month ago. Soon I hope to upload some cool pix from the show. Thank you all who made it out to the show, especially the kids who came and got their hands dirty (literally). Thank you to the grand parents of the young Manhattanite dancer who wanted to enroll her in my non-existent dance school!
san diego
It's hard to believe that exactly a week ago the dancers and I were on different planes on our way to our performance at the Celebrate Dance Festival in San Diego. Even harder to believe, because we definitely couldn't have made it without all the amazing support we got from our friends and family who stepped forward to help make it all happen.
When I arrived in San Diego, I found out that the dancers' flight was delayed by FOUR hours and that they were re-routed to Los Angeles since San Diego's airport has a flight curfew. So instead of 9pm, they were expected to arrive minutes before 1am. Meanwhile, we had a tech scheduled the next morning at 9am. But in good spirits we just drove to L.A. to pick up the dynamic trio and those who could slept the whole way back. All the folks at Eveoke made our entire time at Celebrate Dance Festival great. They gave us access to their rehearsal studios and we enjoyed the general San Diego sunshine of their personalities. For me, it was my first time bringing the company to the hometown and definitely that far across the country, so all I can say is phew! and great work all. Thanks! Cloud free We couldn't ask for better weather in Sinatra Park for a performance day: relatively cloud free and no chance of a rain out. Just past high noon, our tech was, in part, about contending with the hot ground, something that made us grateful for wearing shoes for this outdoor festival performance (for IN REM we wore bedroom slippers). We had a great, responsive audience for the show, filled with families who planned ahead and brought blankets, amateur and professional photographers, dancing children who took cues from the variety of music and dancers for their inspired improv and passing people who decided to stop and join the dance-watching crowd. People talk a great deal these days about how do we build dance audiences. How do we increase the numbers of people who come see live dance? I think mixed bill performances that are readily accessible to the community should be an ongoing effort in rebuilding that connection between dance and people who may never have been to a modern dance concert in a theater. Each of the past 3 years we've performed at Sweat Outdoors the audience sizes have increased. The moral? Build people a free, outdoor performing arts viewing opportunity and they will come - and they'll even come back with friends and bring their kids!
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