Life as a Modern Dancer

One Good Quote: Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society & Rosanna Tavarez/LA DANSA DANSA

Fever Dreams by Blind Tiger Society. Photo by Sophie Leininger.

In Fall 2017, Life as a Modern Dancer launched a new concept for post-performance discussion and writing. The goals are multi-fold:

• What are new ways to invite post-performance writing (since so few publications now print dance reviews, and there are fewer and fewer dance critics in the United States)?
• How can choreographers hear and read more from audience members about their impressions and experiences of dance events?
• Can we offer new mechanisms for choreographers to gather language about their work, to further their work and to promote their work? 

The premise is simple. If you experienced the live performance with Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society &
Rosanna Tavarez/LA DANSA DANSA, November 11-13, 2022 at ODC Theater in San Francisco, please take a few minutes to leave a comment. Write down images, impressions, appreciations, and questions from the performance. These can be words, phrases, or a few sentences. 

We thank you for your time, support, and thoughtfulness. Here's to more dialogue, more reflection, and more writing on the dance performance experience. As choreographer Mariah Steele noted, we are "democratizing dance criticism."

Piece X Piece by Rosanna Tavarez/LA DANSA DANSA. Photo by Angel Origgi.

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Rosanna Tavarez & Bianca Cabrera Travel in Multiple Dimensions

"Piece X Piece" by LA DANSA DANSA. Photo by Greg Meyers.

 

Rosanna Tavarez & Bianca Cabrera Travel in Multiple Dimensions

By Garth Grimball

The weekend of November 11 - 13, ODC Theater ended its 2022 Fall Season with a split bill: Rosanna Tavarez/LA DANSA DANSA and Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society. Tavarez’s “Piece X Piece” is an exploration of time, lineage and migration. Cabrera’s “Fever Dreams” births a fantasia of limbs from the coupling of bodies.

“Piece X Piece” has a clarity of style. The stage has a rack of pale clothes and a sewing table and chair. Tavarez and Hyosun Choi are dressed in white. Choi lies in a fetal position on the grand train of Tavarez’s ensemble, pulled through the space umbilically. 

The voices of Tavarez and her mother, Lelia Tavarez, come through the speakers. Lelia tells of her migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Tavarez and Choi dance in transparent dresses with lines of vertical white piping. The lines on their bodies are like longitudes on a map. They wear their geographies.

Lelia’s voice returns with a reverie of youth and disco. Tavarez dons a white jumpsuit and I see her dancing; I see her being inside her mother’s story; I see a moment when we realize our parents are people too. 

Tavarez and Choi dance like they are moving through questions and reaching for answers. Heads circle, arms throw, weight drops. Only once do they dance together, in unison, faces visible and calm.

“Piece X Piece” ends in a frenzy. The duo subvert the WPA images of “noble work” done in civic pride. The sound of a sewing machine surging amplifies as they move through repetitive actions exhausting their bodies. Tavarez honors the reality of work done by immigrants, women, mothers.

"Fever Dreams" by Blind Tiger Society. Photo by Greg Meyers.

“Fever Dreams” is an orgy of color. Neon. Day-Glo. Saturated Colors. Cabrera, Nico Maimon, Chelsea Mulholland and Nina Wu are covered in multicolored unitards, layers of color, face paint and nail polish, as if alebrijes were painted in radioactive pigments.

The quartet ooze across the stage. Colors and bodies melt and set. A tree of limbs becomes a deep embrace becomes a Hydra. I doubt there is a centimeter of body that didn’t connect with another body. The dancers perform yogic maneuvers with runway confidence. The energy is carnal not sexy.

Like a dream “Fever Dreams” coheres around aesthetics more than any central idea. The dancers make shapes not crafted to miraculously appear a la Pilobolus to evoke the familiar. Transformation takes effort. The audience sees how the shapes are made. At one point Cabrera pulls her body along the floor with her feet. She leaves a trail of sweat, of residue, of effort in her wake.

Like waking up from a dream, the end of “Fever Dreams” bemuses. Animal abstraction gives way to contact improvisation lifts soundtracked by an original song from Cabrera and Ben Juodvalkis. Lyrics of longing are sung with emo yearning. The dancers slough out of their trance to look at you human to human.

 

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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Related links:

Rosanna Taverez/ LA DANSA DANSA

Bianca Cabrera/Blind Tiger Society

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Dimensions Dance Theater: Celebrating 50 Years

Dimensions Dance Theater in "Dai Zoe Bush-The Breaking of the Poro & Sande Bush." Photo by Ed Miller.

Dimensions Dance Theater

Celebrating 50 Years

Lisser Hall, Mills College

October 22-23, 2022

Oakland-based Dimensions Dance Theater is celebrating its golden anniversary this year, fifty years of making, performing, and teaching dances of the African Diaspora under the artistic direction of co-founder Deborah Vaughan. Naming and blurring  the line between the traditional and the contemporary, historical experience and the lived realities of the present moment, the company’s 50th anniversary performance at Mills College did not merely present the audience with finely crafted, beautifully danced choreographies but also wrapped us in a community embrace.

The evening opened with In Dis House (2015) featuring the Dimensions Extensions Performance Ensemble (DEPE) - Laëticia Jacques, Naimah Mba, Jayde Rose, Zuri Scott, Kamiley Shakir, and Marie Soumah. DEPE dancers, who range in age from 12-19 years old, must audition for the ensemble, and train in jazz, modern, hip hop, Haitian, ballet, and traditional African movement (DDT website). Choreographed by Latanya d. Tigner and Abdoulaye Sylla, with video and restaging by Marianna Hester (Tigner and Hester are DEPE’s co-artistic directors), the work was pure jubilation. Barefoot in red pants and white t-shirts adorned with rainbow hearts, the dancers demonstrated the depth and breadth of their African diasporic dance knowledge. When laura elaine ellis came out to introduce the next dance, she said of DEPE, “That’s our future.” I hope she’s right because, if it is, our future is bright.

Before we were treated to the Bay Area proscenium premiere of ruminations. [re]visited., choreographed by ellis in collaboration with the dancers (Denice Simpson Braga, Katrina Deans, Shawn Hawkins, Marianna Hester, Erik K. Raymond Lee, Valrie Sanders, Dorcas Sims, Justin Sharlman, Phylicia Stroud, and Latanya d. Tigner), ellis invited the audience to learn a gestural phrase to “prepare the space for what’s to come.” After a few practice rounds, the audience, on its feet, performed the phrase, that included gestures that point to the belly, the sternum, the heart, to a poem written and performed by Atiya Ziyad. I’ve heard choreographers say that the audience is part of the dance or that without the audience there is no dance, but by getting us up on our feet to learn a gestural phrase from a work we were about to witness, ellis involved us bodily. And when I recognized the gestures during the performance, I understood that the invitation to share movement language between audience and performer bound us to each other in loving community. 

ruminations features textile-art costumes designed by Tiersa Nureyev and richly textured spoken word performances of original poems by Jordon E. Dabney and Ziyad. The work opens with Dabney and Ziyad sitting on opposite ends of the stage as the dancers in shades of orange, brown, and pink enter through the audience. A voiceover references “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot” as dancers sprint across the stage, the poem inviting us to see the running as “recess, tag your it, ready set go” and as traumatic flight at the same time. Gestures of protest and submission appear in counterpoint with soaring leaps. The dancers embody themes of incessant motion and the desire to slow down, of invisibility and hypervisibility—an invisible weight pushes a dancer down while others stagger, shake, and twitch. 

ruminations reflects on the challenges of living as a Black person in an antiblack society; it also pushes back against the neoliberal glorification of the individual as uniquely responsible for their success or failure. There is a lot of individual movement expression juxtaposed against the group, a vision of an ensemble, of a community that holds its members tightly or loosely depending on need. The work ends with the gestural phrase we learned and a joyful step-touch phrase.

After intermission and a video homage to Black dancers lost in recent years, edited by Hester, the company brought down the house with another Bay Area premiere, Dai Zoe Bush-The Breaking of the Poro & Sande Bush, choreographed by Liberian dance and music artist Nimely Napla. Poro and Sande refer respectively to the male and female members of the Vai and Gola communities of West Africa. The work brought the company together with the Rites of Passage youth program dancers in traditional regalia designed and constructed by Napla. (Rites of Passage is an educational outreach program that serves youth ages 8-18.)

A trio of drummers (Eric Bli Bi Gore, Mohamed Kouyate, and Napla) ignite the “ceremonial dance rhythms of Vai and Gola people from Liberia's remote Grand Cape Mount County” (program note). The dance tells the story of a ceremony performed by a female “Jennet” who initiates girls into womanhood in the forest. One day, Jennet is killed by a leopard. The performance enacts communal grieving and the way memory lives in the body. We see embodied connection as the dancers across generations share vocabularies and rhythms.

During a pedagogical scene between Jennet and the youth group, the dancers form a circle, a cypher, and the audience is enlivened and emboldened to shout. This isn’t a cheeky aside that breaks the fourth wall but rather a form of call and response that lies at the center of Black dance, what scholar Thomas DeFrantz calls “corporeal orature”: “Dances offer greeting and debate; a mode of cultural identification and recognition which links African Americans in corporeal orature. […] The call and response mode of performance embraces an inclusionary aesthetic of creativity and invention, in that ‘call-and-response implies that every part of the community is important to its continuity and richness, that everyone has a voice and, through it, the power to act, enact, react’ (Gottschild, 1996: 144)” (DeFrantz in Lepecki 2004).

Dimensions dancers demonstrate the ways bodies are inhabited by lineages. The evening invited the audience to recognize and revel in the complex root system that constitutes African diasporic dance. Equal parts technique and heart--especially those kids in white, smiling broadly while losing their hats and leg bands without missing a beat—Dai Zoe Bush was the perfect way to celebrate 50 years of art, community, and love. I hope folks and funders keep investing in this extraordinary company so they can reach their centennial and beyond.

Dimensions Dance Theater in "ruminations. [re]visited." Photo by Ed Miller.

 

Sima Belmar, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and creator/producer/host of the ODC podcast Dance Cast.

Preview: "We Are All Friends" in the Studio

We Are All Friends: In the studio

By Molly Rose-Williams

So, the thing about a solo show is that there’s really only ever one person on stage. In this case, it’s me. I peel my face away from the white plaster wall and slide over to my computer. I stop recording, and the new video bounces into the timeline on the bottom of my screen alongside eight others that look just the same. For the past 2 hours I’ve been working and reworking a section I call the “Make Out With The Wall” section. I’m trying to hit the right balance of sexy, heartfelt, strange, and funny—but it’s proving difficult to find that sweet spot with my face pressed so tight against the wall. 

Earlier, I tried humping. I thought a vigorous, dry hump with my hips might be just the right addition to smashing my face back and forth against the wall. But instead of erotic, it just felt vulgar. So I tried to abstract and “clownify” it a bit with a full body shake. That was hard to make believable. I took out the body movement and went just for an impassioned face smear/make out sesh with the wall. But that became kind of a character commentary, reading more as “poor misguided soul” than “passionate romantic moment.” Then I tried a slow and sensuous lean-in, focusing on the approach instead of the outcome. I liked the effect of stripping it back to just the lean, but now I’m trying to figure out the timing for the rest of my body. After my face makes contact, how long does it take for my hand to find the wall? My hips? And what happens then? It’s hard to reach an apex of passion, and then make it all fall apart organically. 

I watch the most recent take, paying extra attention to my hands. I like the timing—clearly motivated, sensuous and feeling—but the positioning is awkward. I’ve managed to establish the wall as a person now (which I like), using my eyes to trace “their” form as I slowly lean in for the “kiss.” But if the wall-person remains in the same place, then my hand has just gone straight to their crotch. It feels a little gropey for a first kiss, which is really what this is. 

I’ll run this section a couple more times today, but the real test will come when I get it in front of someone else. One of the absolute highlights of this process so far has been inviting friends, family, and colleagues into my rehearsals to get their eyes and feedback on the work. Sometimes all they do is watch. My mom is really good at this—watching quietly from the side with this kind of full-body attention that feels like a warm bath. I can tell she’s really paying attention because she’ll shift every so often, mouth moving softly, or hands fluttering like she’s trying out hand gestures, making sense of something invisible but material in the air in front of her. When she’s in the room, I find myself paying attention to my movements with a subtlety somehow far more nuanced than any I reach on my own. 

My sister always looks very serious. I set her up on Facetime, leaning my phone by the window so she can watch from her hotel room in some small French town where she’s on tour with her circus company. As she watches, her eyebrows furrow, a look of intense concentration casting her entire face down. The moment I finish, her face swoops upwards as if thrown into the air by some invisible geyser. She gives detailed, precise notes, pregnant with a belief in the potential for this work to become something good. Really good. Her faith is contagious.

I’ve had colleagues learn sections of the material and do it alongside me. Afterwards, we compare notes on what we each felt in our bodies and try it anew, giddy with the collaborative experimentation. I’ve tried talking-based sections with no words, full body choreography with just my face, and movement sections with only sound. I’ve performed entire portions with a bag on my head, just to see what my body’s actually doing when my face can’t get involved. Once I tried to run the whole thing with my eyes closed, but stopped when I got so absorbed in how things felt I couldn’t bring myself to keep plowing forward. That gave me some good information—I had been so focused on building the conceptual arc of the show that I’d forgotten to build in landing pads that would allow me to slow down and feel what I was doing—where I was coming from and where I was going to. 

When I invite friends into the studio, I do my best to not offer too many disclaimers or over-explain. Sometimes (like the day I tried the “Make Out With The Wall” wall section in front of someone for the first time), the effort of not explaining what I’m trying to do feels almost physical. See, what I mean to be doing here… or How I imagine this section eventually working… I want to say. I have a plan! My vision isn’t crazy! Believe me! It’s gonna be good!

In these moments, the vulnerability of sharing something so clearly created only by me can feel like one of those “Oh My God I’m Naked” dreams. It’s like I’m on stage and the rest of the world is watching me air out my deepest emotional questions, my most burning and intimate struggles. Do they realize this is just me processing my own shit? I wonder as I waltz around in offtime rhythms, making strange sounds and doing ridiculous dance moves.

Overall though, I think it’s starting to work. The show opens in 2.5 weeks, and little by little, it’s starting to feel real. Every time I run it, I learn something new. For example, just yesterday I discovered that if I slow down the approach to the “Slippery Hands” section, then a part I previously thought of as a transition suddenly blooms into an entire section of its own—it turns out the Self Help Guru has a story or two of her own to tell! With each run, my British accent drifts less and less Australian, and my invisible lover stays more and more solid while I water the dying grass. Mostly, I’m learning how to try, and try again, and then ask for help and try some more. 

This show has been an incredible labor of love, and I would really love to share it with you! Come check it out, December 1-4 at NOHSpace in San Francisco. Details below. I hope to see you there!

December 1-4, 2022, Thu & Fri @ 7:30pm // Sat @ 4pm & 7:30pm // Sun @ 4pm

NOHSpace, 2840 Mariposa St, San Francisco, CA 94110

Tickets: $15-50 (NOTAFLF) https://weareallfriends.bpt.me/

 

Learn more: www.mollyrosewilliams.com/we-are-all-friends

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Related posts:

• Modern Dance Fan Club: RAWdance’s CONCEPT series: 28
• Blog Series: "Why improv?" (with Molly Rose-Williams)
• Somatic Writing Series: Sima Belmar, Leah Cox, and Molly Rose-Williams
• Review/response: We came, We saw, They conquered

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somewhere in between - Bhumi B Patel

Rogelio Lopez. Photo by Ryan Kwok.

Rogelio Lopez & Dancers: Entre Despierto y Dormido (Between Awake and Asleep)

somewhere in between

By Bhumi B Patel

What I know is that when I go to see Rogelio Lopez’s work, I’m in for a wonderful kaleidoscope of moments of joy, multi-dimensional interrogation, and gorgeous movement. What I didn’t expect was that this piece would take me through time and space on a journey of nostalgia, humor, and dreamed futures while keeping me firmly rooted in the realities of living in a queer, body of color in the here and now.

Before movement, in darkness, we hear Lopez’s voice. This is both a welcome and a story, one that we as viewers need to know before we enter the world made on stage. We hear about Rogelio’s past, his first moments of understanding queerness, the calling in of both the Indigenous and colonizer blood that runs through him, and that still he lives in the feeling of being an outsider. 

The first image we see is an all-too-familiar zoom screen projected onto the back wall. Lopez in shadowy light sits at a desk on stage. Each on-screen box is labeled as “white person.” The primary speaker lists buzzword after buzzword, thanks another white person for sharing their experience of marginalization, and then goes into a vague “new age” movement exercise to “move what you’re feeling.” I could immediately locate this space. I’ve been in this space. I’ve been asked to facilitate this space. Yet here, the piece points to the ridiculousness and absurdity of these experiences, where when we face them in real life they are meant to be taken with such seriousness and gravitas. 

As Lopez gets up from the desk, closing the laptop he was looking at, he tucks himself into a vertically positioned bed on stage with beautifully loud floral sheets. Andy Williams’ Moon River begins and initiates the “dream sequence” so to speak. Two dream fairies appear (Kevin Gaytan and Matt Han), also clothed in florals, and draw Lopez from the bed in a sweet and tender queer trio. Their choice to engage with the codified language of ballet harkens to the dream sequences in many a famous ballet: The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty just to name a few. But Lopez makes clear that he is still an outsider to this form through humor. As he makes the gesture to prepare for a grand turn, he subverts our expectations and claps his hands in front of his body like a dancer marking the number of turns they would do. The audience laughs. Those with dance experience know this gesture, and likely know it well. And then, in thigh high leather boots and thongs, the dream fairies return, grounding us in the queerness of the world we’ve entered, to seduce and entice Lopez through a sexy and sensual trio before all getting back into the vertical bed, where bodies move under the covers suggestively inciting audience cheers.

And so the piece goes on and we continue to see the movement form evolve. Lopez integrates the many lineages that live in his body, available to him in the liminality of the space that is between asleep and awake. We see modern dance inversions paired with Latinx forms of social dance, club and house dancing in conversation with folklorico. The dream fairies lead us, and Lopez, through this unstable, ever-shifting world that futures a place where all of these threads can braid together.

What strikes me about this piece is how deep the idea of in-between spaces permeates. There is liminality from the title of the work, the beginning narrative that addresses borders, and even in the movement form presented on stage. I’m reminded of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space. It is a place where, as Bhabha suggests, the formation of postcolonial diasporic identity can occur. For many diasporic-bodied people, this is simultaneously in between home, and home itself. 

Where Lopez’s work diverges from Bhabha’s theory is that this third space isn’t, and can never be equal parts of two things. It is a separate thing that is made up of changing proportions of its parts, almost never equal. This space gives diasporic-bodied people the opportunity to negotiate new meanings and new representations. And Lopez does just this. He moves through form reminding the audience constantly that he is not and cannot be just one type of artist and that, in fact, they all intersect and converge. This convergence is not just the choreography. The program notes that Lopez crafted nearly everything we saw on stage: the costumes, the set pieces, the projected films, and even the lighting design. And through the embodiment of a dance work, Lopez is not just occupying the third space, whether that be between sleep and waking or between movement languages, or even in the many hats he wears in the production, but that he is the third space. Royona Mitra writes that taking a “phenomenological approach” which Lopez does here, there is a rewriting of “the third space as an embodied and lived condition” in order to “collapse the conceptual segregation of space and body as distinct entities.” We know right from the beginning that Lopez has lineages of displacement, alienation, transnationalism, and hybridity in his existence, but what we learn from the piece is that the site of reconciliation is the body. It is through the body that he becomes. 

As Lopez returns to bed, our floral-clad dream fairies return. They deconstruct the space and drop Lopez back into what seems like our plane of reality, but he is changed. In a colonial or postcolonial world (though I’m not sure what exactly we are ‘post’) hybridity marks all of the elements of culture because nothing is free from hybridization, and here Lopez honors and touches and embodies the third space with humor, but also with a tenderness and love that is necessary of intercultural collaboration, even when that collaboration is between the forms that live in one’s body. As SanSan Kwan proposes in Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration, love cannot always overcome imbalances of power, but rather “both acknowledges and strives to accept differentials.” Kwan further offers that to meet the embodiment of interculturalism with love is imperative, but that the embodied dialogues between cultures can even set up “the conditions for loving.” In this state of in-between, through the melding of many movement languages, floral prints, humor, nostalgia, and yes, even love, it would seem that Lopez finds the space to become, and, I hope, belong.

Kevin Gaytan and Matt Han, standing. Rogelio Lopez, seated. Photo by Ryan Kwok.

 

Bhumi B Patel directs pateldanceworks and is a queer, desi, home-seeker, science fiction choreographer, movement artist, and writer (she/they). In its purest form, her performance work is a love letter to her ancestors. She has presented at Dance Studies Association, Popular Culture Association, and Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, and has published writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance.

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Related posts:

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until “Entre Despierto y Dormido" with Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

Artist Profile: Rogelio Lopez

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Lasos - REYES Dance

Maya Mohsin (left) and Brooke Terry (right) in "Lasos." Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

 

Lasos - REYES Dance

By Melissa Hudson Bell

10/10/22

Two dancers, dressed in garishly loud primary-colored childlike dresses with over-large pockets stand facing each other downstage. Beads of sweat are visible on each, from almost forty minutes of vigorous jumping, running, gesturing, full-bodied movement. It is a face-off, tense and charged, that the audience has encountered twice already in “Lasos,” the latest choreographic work by REYES Dance presented at Joe Goode Annex this past week. 

This moment of relative stillness is anything but chill. In fact it is an apex of sorts, a notable slowing of time in what is otherwise relentless athletic dance and a cacophonous score of music and sound effects including babies crying, dogs barking, clownish horns honking, alarms ringing and more. This time out of time slowing of action renders the moment an obvious focal point of the choreography. Well, that and the fact that it also happens downstage and center. Well, that and the fact that now, as the audience encounters it a third time, our bodies can physically anticipate the gesture that follows the stillness… 

What we anticipate (and/or, perhaps, hope not to encounter a third time) is the gesture where the dancer on stage left rears back their arm, and with a great swooping action, gestures a slap that slices through the air on a downward diagonal with such force that it sends the other dancer tumbling to the ground in a heap. No actual physical contact is made, but the cause and effect are clear. The fallen dancer then stands, and the gestured slap is repeated. Again. And again. And again. And again. It is repeated enough that my focus goes from the slapping gesture itself to the reverberations of the slap. I notice how the dancers’ body hits the floor, which limb crumples first, how heavily the hips thud, how the arm folds in a little differently each time (perhaps to blunt the inevitable physical impact of such a move?). 

It’s unpleasant to watch, on some level. And yet, in a theatrical setting, it is also familiar. We the audience can both feel the threat of violence, and recognize the threat as staged, as volitional. So, as we-the-audience encounter this stand-off a third time, I find myself pondering the power of choreographic choice. There are a few obvious paths - will Reyes choose to enact this cycle of generational trauma for a third time? There is a Biblical sort of power in offending thrice, we are told… (I should probably mention that theatrical trappings like wigs and costume have denoted it is an elder injuring a presumably younger and more vulnerable human in these encounters.) 

Instead, will Reyes choose to black out the lights and leave audience members with a choose-your-own-adventure ambiguity as to what happens next? This has proven a popular tactic in our American postmodern and post-postmodern dance landscape and would seem a fitting match for the patchwork quilt of a danced narrative she has thus far concocted…

Maybe she will enlist another dancer to stop the action, staging a necessary intervention? In this choice she might be indicating a sort of “it takes a village” mindset for interrupting generational trauma. This seems valuable in a social moment where folks are often finding themselves adjacent to harm of all kind - finding themselves wanting to take action but not knowing how…

Or, in this moment of relative stillness, will we watch the offending figure - who, by the way, has been played by a different dancer each time this motif re-occurs - interrupt their own action? Having spent enough investigative energy in forty-some minutes of churning, roiling, leaping dancing, will they have the wherewithal to make a different choice? To make room for some hope? To indicate the possibility of not only a change of action but also a change of heart?

I don’t think I will give it away.

Instead, I will say that "Lasos," the Spanish word for “ties,” is a performance piece that, as the press materials suggest, concretely explores “the links between childhood trauma and chronic pain in the context of Latin American culture and traditions.” The four dancers - Brooke Terry, Caitlin Hicks, Maya Mohsin, and Jess Bozzo - play various characters in several short films created by Reyes, and then cleverly transition from film to stage as the final film ends with the four dancers cavorting into the Joe Goode Annex moments before they actually appear in front of the audience. In defiance of the gravity of the chosen subject matter, the mood of “Lasos” is not somber. Instead, the piece creates a carnivalesque world where pedestrian-style gestures are writ large with a puppet show sort of quality to them. The gestures are combined with presentational feats of highly structured and organized movement that draws from ballet (someone actually turns fouettes), old school hip-hop, salsa and cumbia, and more. The overall effect is a frenetic kind of story ballet that transports viewers into a world down-the-rabbit-hole (for lack of a better metaphor) in search of not home, but relief. Or understanding. Or connection. Or all of the above.

Reyes is forthcoming about the fact that the pain and the trauma she is grappling with in “Lasos” are not merely metaphorical. They are based on her own lived experience. She was, at one point, subjected to corporal punishment. She was, at one later point, so crippled with pain that she couldn’t walk. She knows/believes/senses that the two are linked, and she decided to work her way through these particular ties using the types of dance and the choreographic strategies that had, in her youth, made her feel strong and powerful, despite circumstances that sometimes made her feel powerless. 

Because Reyes’ chronic pain prevents her from dancing fully, she had to collaborate with the dancers in unique ways, sometimes drawing stick figures depicting action to communicate a plan. She shared journal entries, and had them participate in exercises she had learned in her pain management classes. She also leaned on their training and technique in asking them to execute certain ideas that she could only communicate verbally (each dancer is a beautifully unique and grounded mover, by the way). The end result creates a compelling dance vocabulary that is both familiar, and slightly off-kilter from the familiar. 

From left: Caitlin Hicks, Jess Bozzo, Maya Mohsin, and Brooke Terry. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

One main source of movement inspiration for “Lasos” was the wildly popular 1970s Latin sitcom “El Chavo del 8,” where slapstick humor is a central plot device. Here small acts of violence amongst neighbors or family members are passed off as humorous. They are absorbed as a regular part of problem solving in this television snapshot of a Latinx neighborhood. Interestingly, in “El Chavo del 8,” children are played by adults, which enables these foibles to play out more fully than they would if actual children were involved. Reyes found herself rewatching episodes a few years back, while bedridden with chronic pain following her grandmother’s death. She had watched El Chavo and enjoyed the antics in her childhood home, but as a young adult working through complex familial relationships, she questioned the juxtaposition of violence and pleasure, and love and pain, that were so vividly on display there. In response, she and the dancers that she enlisted for the project began to explore this juxtaposition through dance tropes, finding creative and sometimes absurd ways to indicate that any given moment can hold all the things: the pain and the pleasure and the sensations and the stories we tell ourselves about the sensations - all the past and the present and the now - all at once.

It is this general feel that permeates “Lasos.” The ties, it screams, are complicated. They are also generative. They are also quite literally painful, or at least they can be. And through it all, the choreographic choices of “Lasos” seem to intimate that deep investigation of one’s ties - to the past, to familial others, to one’s physical self and one’s deeply buried pain - is a necessary and nourishing feat. Reyes spoke to this in no uncertain terms. “With the show, I was able to finally say some things that I haven’t been able to say so clearly in language,” she told me in a phone interview. “I feel like I have been trying to make this dance over and over again for years and years and I feel like I could finally put it out there… ”

“I feel,” she said, “like I came out of hiding.”

Sounds like a move that requires both a loosening and a strengthening of ties, and an unwillingness to let the entanglements of the past weigh her down.  I’m glad I was there to see it.

Don’t miss whatever comes next from REYES Dance.

 

Melissa Hudson Bell (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, writer, and VP of WKB Industries. She has an MFA in Experimental Choreography and a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from UC Riverside. She recently taught at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and USF. She spends a fair amount of time dancing in her living room, but she is thinking about getting back out there. Melissa is interested in dance as an art form, field of critical inquiry and agent for social change. Dance events that are experimental, accessible, and collaborative. Choreography that is born of and that stimulates curiosity. Movement as a means of shaping and reshaping our world. More at: melissahudsonbell.com

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until “Entre Despierto y Dormido" with Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

Matt Han, Rogelio Lopez, and Kevin Gaytan. Photo by Ryan Kwok.

 

This week we caught up with SF Bay Area artist Rogelio Lopez about his latest evening length work, Entre Despierto y Dormido (Between Awake and Asleep). Rogelio shares about the inspiration, the journey, and why you should check it out this week at the Joe Goode Annex, October 14 and 15, 2022.

Purchase your tickets today through this link.

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When was the choreographic moment for you? 

It has sprouted in many different directions since, but I think the kernel of the work came to me after having seen a modern dance performance that was supposed to be about contending with marginalization in the dance community, set through an acknowledged privileged white lens. And though an honest work, it offended me deeply and sort of enraged me that the experience of marginalization could be just kind of casually made into a lighthearted dance performance and serve as a vehicle in which to promote a choreographer. So I began, in my head, to passive-aggressively make a response work!

Why did you want to make this piece? 

I think this piece has been bubbling up inside of me for a long time. Being an immigrant, with an accent, and being queer, are complex layers that add up to so much cruelty and dismissiveness from the dominant culture. To be honest this piece kind of started in a place of anger and festered as a sort of seeking a kind of revenge. Revenge towards all the systems, organizations, people, family, choreographers, dancers that represented to me the shame cycles that have really shaped a lot of my experience of terrifying loneliness on this planet. Ultimately, it became less about seeking revenge (though there are still tinges here and there in the work), and rather about giving myself permission to be bold in ways (both choreographically and personally) I felt I never had permission for or that I would hurt others if I showed myself truly. And what came out, I think, and somewhat ironically, is actually, a really joyous ride and celebration!

What most excites you about the project? 

I am excited and slightly terrified to show previously unrevealed parts of myself and my work. Particularly that of movement vocabulary outside the western form, my sense of humor, and some unabashed sexuality. I’m also reaching out to my fellow queer immigrant people that I have for too long been out of touch with!

And what feels really scary or risky? 

It’s essentially the same as what excites me. There is still a feeling of tension that I might offend certain people, or maybe that I want to offend certain people???

Can you talk about the use of a trio in the choreography? It is you, Matt Han, and Kevin Gaytan. How do three bodies, including your own, help convey the story?

It is more like a solo and a duet. The solo (myself) is the personal journey and the lens through which the work is seen, representing life’s complexities and insecurities. The duet (performed by the fabulous Kevin Gaytan and Matt Han) is the more surreal representation of the world beyond the self that both tears me down and lifts me up. Matt and Kevin are everything I wish to be, or not to be, or sometimes just general memories. They are the devils, the angels, the saboteurs, and the heroes.

The work has so many components and layers. Your artistry comes through in different forms - as a performer, choreographer, costume designer, set designer….and more! How is each aspect a part of your artistic voice and a part of the meaning making? 

It has always been hard to defend and stand up for myself, and I often feel that people do not take me seriously. It could be the accent, my struggles with putting sentences together, or not possessing traditional academic intelligence. It is hard to put my thoughts into words. However, I have found my strength in my choreography, lighting, set, and costume design. I have been cultivating my articulation through art. I feel that I constantly work through my trauma with each piece and dance/choreography/design allows me the space to communicate in a way that make the most sense for me. It is unfortunate that the people outside of the arts will never see my work and understand my power. To them, I will always be that Mexican in the room that is slowing everyone down. 

Five words to describe Entre Despierto y Dormido: 

Fun

Angry

Love

Acceptance

Fight

Matt Han and Kevin Gaytan. Photo by Ryan Kwok.

 

Entre Despierto y Dormido 

Rogelio Lopez & Dancers 

Friday, October 14 at 8pm and Saturday, October 15, 2022 at 7pm

Joe Goode Annex, 401 Alabama St, San Francisco, CA 94110

Tickets: https://sforce.co/3Kx46vm

www.rogeliodance.com

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Related posts:

Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

Artist Profile: Rogelio Lopez

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In Full Sunlight: Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works in “Small Dances”

Styles Alexander, Phoenicia Pettyjohn, and Emily Hansel. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

In Full Sunlight: Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works in “Small Dances”

Saturday, September 3, 2022
2pm
Great Meadow, San Francisco Botanical Garden (Golden Gate Park)

By Jill Randall

Editor's note: Please find here the writing/response to the performance as well as a 13 minute audiofile of the author reading aloud this writing. Select whichever format works for you to experience the reflection.

September is one of the best months to experience San Francisco. It is a time of year with bright sunshine and an invitation to come and experience the city, especially outdoors. I made the trek from the East Bay to check out Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works’ latest outdoor project. It was a trafficky adventure to get there and to park, but once I arrived the stress of the past hour and a half was gone. Joy/sun/dancing begins. 

There are four dancers/collaborators in the big grassy meadow of the San Francisco Botanical Garden (Golden Gate Park) and one musician, Clark Buckner, who is sitting off to the side on a blanket. How to describe some of the first movements and sounds? The four dancers are in the big open space with a few feet between each other. As dance educator Sheila Kogan describes these spots - as “perfect spots” - you spread out “far away from everyone and everything.” Styles Alexander stands and expansively arches to the sun. Samuel Melecio-Zambrano is on their back, holding up their head with their bent arms. Phoenicia Pettyjohn is kneeling and upright, and Emily Hansel offers alternating small shoulder moves while standing. Clark Buckner’s music is electronic - some recorded and made prior to the event while other sounds and recitations will happen in real time. 

I brought a blanket, per Jennifer’s pre-show Instagram message, and I take off my shoes.

The first section is sparse. Four lives in motion - at the same time but in separate places. It accelerates in motion and motivation. I think about public and private moments, our existence, our co-existence. 

I miss a few seconds due to notetaking, and I look up to see that Phoenicia has a chair. It is the symbol of our pandemic time (bound, stationary). She is traveling through space carrying it. After a short amount of time, she places it down and dances next to it. 

My mind goes towards improvisational practices. I am not certain that some of the sections are improvised but I am guessing they might be. With improv practices or co-collaborative phrasemaking with artists in the project, we experience 4 or more different languages (i.e. all of the collaborators plus the choreographer/director). Is my dance mind seeking motif, unison? Why?

Samuel is now dancing near Phoenicia and the chair. Call and response. A section with silence. Emily and Styles are sitting and watching in the meadow space. 

The sun
+ Silence 
+ Attentive eyes

Why art in the meadow? Why public space? Why both planned and unplanned audience members? Just some questions crossing my mind at this moment in the performance. 

There is a break. Emily and Samuel walk stage left and Phoenicia takes the chair away to the right. Samuel is now over by Clark and Jennifer. There is a bicycle,and Samuel turns the bike over, so the wheels are up and in the air. Styles is left alone in the meadow.

I write down the phrase “Full Sunlight.” That’s what I would name this dance. Our lives in full view, complete view.

What is Styles’ sound score? The wind in the trees; two different sirens. The sound score of San Francisco.

Styles is such an incredible mover and improviser. It feels like Styles is recounting a story or memory through their improv score. 

Clark now records Samuel spinning those bicycle wheels. More electronic sounds play. 

Hop
Kneel 
Lunge 
Twist 
Wring
Squat drop + stand back up 

Sinewy

Circling

Go 
Go
Pause

Swatting bugs
And more bugs

(Styles’ moves)

Jennifer had mentioned in the introduction/welcome about “small dances.” I appreciate these short chapters/episodes. 

Far away from me - far like 75 yards in front of me - Phoenicia and Styles make a small duet. Moving without accompaniment again. Contact/touch/connection.

Styles Alexander and Phoenicia Pettyjohn. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

My mind transposes the production for a few moments into other spaces. This is excellent post-modern dancing in front of me. I could be sitting at the Forum at Yerba Buena, CounterPulse, or the Berkeley Art Museum. I am envisioning formal white boxes for a few minutes. Then I come back to today’s dancing space, the Great Meadow/SF Botanical Garden/outdoors/San Francisco.

Emily Hansel now comes out to the main space with a helium tank and blows up a marigold yellow balloon, marigold like her shirt. A teeny tiny moment and thought. 

Again my mind goes to post-modern dance - the easeful and pedestrian vocabulary, sounds/silence, individuality. I ask myself again, “Why outside?” But now I am able to answer the question for myself. Outside for delight. I come back to author Ross Gay and finding delight. Delight of modern dance in this great meadow.

Quietly enjoying    
    Watching
    Taking In
    See-hear-think-feel
Together,
Today
Outside in full sunlight

“The sun shone on me a bit differently today,” Styles shares live with a mic in hand. Yes.

“Every cell alive.”

Styles is reciting a poem. Is it their poem? Jennifer’s? Collaboratively written?

A trio comes together - Emily, Styles, and Samuel. The sound is now vocals manipulated, I assume with a looping machine. I come back to a favorite theme of mine - the juxtaposition of our city life and nature. Samuel takes that balloon and gives it to a child at the opposite end of the meadow.

Next there is a playful section with Emily and Samuel putting on light plastic pants and a vest - Emily and Samuel hold a mic and record the crinkly sound of their new clothes. The duet is lighthearted; I notice this is the first time I have laughed during the performance. 

A dance of small dances
Small moments
Tasks, memories, explorations

These 4 dancers, Jennifer, Clark -
This moment in our lives

I am thinking about the asymmetry of our lives and connecting with the arhythmic nature of our current lives. 

Samuel Melecio-Zambrano and Emily Hansel. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

More rhythmic music, like earlier on in the dance, plays. Then the piece calls us to look stage left. Phoenicia begins a solo - a quiet traveling solo back into the main meadow space. Then for the only time in the event, a recorded tune other than Clark’s is used. The Al Green soul tune “Tired of Being Alone” plays for a few measures. “I’m tired of being alone. Help me girl as soon as you can.” Our anthem for crawling out of the pandemic!

Samuel Melecio-Zambrano. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

Samuel comes closer to the audience on my side of the meadow and takes off their shoes. Another incredible solo moment is explored with spiraling, lunging, expansive and expanding movement. 

I am back to the idea of delight. I am thinking about the planned and unplanned audience. Watching/absorbing/questioning/connecting. Making personal connections.

As Samuel completes their solo and runs off stage left, they break into a smile. Does exertion and endurance take us to a place of ease, joy, presence? 

As the piece nears its end, all of the dancers come back into the meadow space with all of the props (plus a roll of blue painters tape and a spool of ribbon). Chair, bike, bike pump, helium tank, plastic outfits. 

The body shares
The body exposes
Movement becomes dancing
    with purpose
    +intention
    +flow

A blue tape web is made over the overturned chair; strings and mess cover space. Each dancer is doing their own little absurd solo with the props. 

Emily Hansel, Styles Alexander, and Phoenicia Pettyjohn. Photo by Hillary Goidell.

We are living parallel lives. For the third time in the performance, an electronic score offers a cinematic feel. I think of Miranda July’s Me, You, and Everyone We Know. There is a sense of wanting, of solo-ness. At the same time, outside here in the SF Botanical Garden, a wedding party is passing on the path right behind me. (The potential for togetherness; proclaiming togetherness!)

I am thinking about:
Entanglement; connectivity
Nearness; self-space
Just bodies; bodies+items

The dance concludes with a final section of the dancers in close proximity, seeing each other, switching places. 

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Pulling words from Jennifer’s post-performance speech:

…to gather
in public spaces
for free art
in urban landscapes
in community

Thank you to Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works for a beautiful hour together, and thank you to the intended and unintended fellow audience members who collectively watched, felt, absorbed, and connected with art in full view and full sunlight this afternoon. 


Jill Randall is the founder/director of Life as a Modern Dancer and the Artistic Director of Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA.

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Related posts:

A Practice of Unknowing, Breaking Away from Structures and Habits: An Interview with San Francisco Dance Artist Jennifer Perfilio

Resources on Site-Specific Dance for College Courses (Updated July 2022)

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New Graphic for Arts Administrators

 

I love a good graphic/visual, and I also love reflection questions. Thanks for checking out my latest 8.5x11. Thank you to my cousin Jenny Lederer for the design help.

Download Arts Administrator Color Wheel

Please also consider checking out:

The Verbs of Arts Administration

The Arts Administrator's Alphabet

 

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FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Dances Through Genre

FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival Dances Through Genre

By Garth Grimball

Editor’s Note:

For some dance events, securing a dance writer/reviewer can be a difficult task due to timing and availability. But the questions still can linger: How can artists receive feedback and impressions? How are works of art documented in writing for audiences, artists, and funders? Writer Garth Grimball attended Weekend 2 of the FACT/SF Summer Festival in-person, and offered to view the video of Weekend 1. Given Grimball’s writing throughout the pandemic about many performance formats, including recorded and streamed events, this seemed like a great opportunity to ask Garth to engage in a recording of Weekend 1 as well. 

- Jill Randall

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FACT/SF’s Summer Dance Festival featured six artists over the weekend of July 29-30 at the Joe Goode Annex. Unfortunately no writers from Life As A Modern Dancer were able to attend the festival live, so here I am, six weeks later, writing about recordings of the performances. Which is to say, my responses are to a 2D rendering of a 3D form, and I watched on my laptop from the solitude of my bedroom, not engulfed in the energy of an excited audience. This is an experience of which I am now quite familiar. 

slowdanger. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

slowdanger, based in Pittsburgh, PA, opened the festival with “Resonant Body.” Co-artistic directors Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson, clad in white windowpane-patterned jumpsuits, move behind two microphones stationed on the diagonal from upstage right and downstage left. Their bodies blend and separate like their amplified voices. “Resonant Body” is evocative of Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” (1968); Knight and Thompson explore sound and the body with a specificity that expands.

Sharp & Fine. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Megan and Shannon Kurashige, co-directors of Sharp & Fine, premiered “This Time Tomorrow,” a duet for Eric Garcia and Moscelyne Parkeharrison. The dance opens with the duo speaking back and forth through a tube of packing paper discussing the end of the world. Garcia is dressed in a pink tutu and brandishes the paper tube and a pair of scissors like a fairy wand. “This Time Tomorrow” uses a blend of the mundane and fantastical metaphorically to explore how humans deal with the enormity of things like a pandemic or climate change.

Drama Tops. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

“Boys, Boys, Boys!” from the Seattle-based duo DRAMATOPS makes an effort of effort. Elby Brosch and Shane Donahue enter wearing replicas of Elton John’s famous Dodgers sequined baseball ensemble. After hyping up the crowd they perform lap dances to Ginuwine’s “Pony” that evolve into gymnastic partnering in wrestling singlets. Camp becomes force. Brosch and Donahue lift, drop, cantilever their bodies in endless configurations until they sit facing each other, pounding their torsos together, over and over. Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight” plays and the pounding continues until the drum beat hits. Delayed gratification.

Amit Patel & Ishika Seth with Akhil Joondeph. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

“They,” choreographed and performed by Amit Patel & Ishika Seth with Akhil Joondeph, “is inspired by the concept of Ardhanarishvara, the Hindu God represented as half woman-half man.” The trio makes the greatest use of the stage space, creating narrative out of spatial relationships. Blending classical Indian dance gestures with modern dance partnering, “They” moves between harmony and disharmony as Patel, Seth, and Joondeph merge in and out of sculptural tableau.

Chinchin Hsu and Brianna Elyse Torres. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

Chinchin Hsu collaborated with Brianna Elyse Torres on the duet “time eater.” The dance succeeds in sticking to its central contrasts. Torres dances all over the stage. Hsu remains stationary. Torres’s movements shift and vary. Hsu is dedicated to one task. Torres undresses as she moves leaving clothes scattered. Hsu slowly empties a burlap bag of grain hoisted across her shoulders. “time eater” shows how the experience of time depends on context as much as measurement.

FACT/SF. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.

FACT/SF closed the evening with “Number 6.” Choreographed by Charles Slender-White and performed by Slender-White, Katherine Neumann, and LizAnne Roman, the trio feels like a precursor to the following weekend’s premiere, “For a.” The dancers prance in wearing shiny amber rompers and black socks. The trio is mostly unison choreography of body halves with gesture accumulation to music by Joel Corry & Jax Jones Feat. Charli XCX. “Number 6” is a brisk 3 minutes 15 seconds. Its breezy quality is undercut by an adherence to Modern Dance Face. A little more face would take this dance a long way.

Attending a dance festival can encourage one to proclaim trends or locate a throughline that may be non-existent. What does seeing these six works tell me about dance, about dance makers? Nothing, writ large. But in these six dances I see a grappling with the question of, How to be? What are the connections a body can make in this time and place? Good questions to ask and keep asking.

Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.

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Related post:

FACT/SF & DISCO RIOT Dance On Making

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until “death pod/kid subjunctive” at CounterPulse

Funsch Dance's kid subjunctive. Photo by Robbie Sweeny. Pictured left to right: Emily Hansel, Shareen DeRyan, zoe huey, and Phoenicia Pettyjohn.

 

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: 3 Days until “death pod/kid subjunctive” at CounterPulse

By Jill Randall, with Christy Funsch and Nol Simonse

 

Christy Funsch, Nol Simonse, and Jim Cave premiere new works at CounterPulse in San Francisco, September 8-10. The other day, I got to catch up with longtime colleagues Christy Funsch and Nol Simonse via a virtual dialogue (i.e. email threads and Google Docs). Read further to peek in through the window on the work.

Purchase your tickets for the upcoming performances here.

Funsch Dance. Photo by Robbie Sweeny. Pictured: Phoenicia Pettyjohn, foreground, and zoe huey and Emily Hansel in the background.

Jill Randall (JR): Thank you for sharing your press release and a short video of you two talking about time and your current works. 

Listening to you two in dialogue, I am thinking of a few word pairs that play out thematically and choreographically. These concepts are fun to consider in light of both of your works. Can you each share what comes to mind with these ideas?

Settled/unsettled:

Christy: I was settled but now I am unsettled. I think I feel unsettled because of the version of settled I was in. I think these two states are relative, and I have worked hard to be okay being unsettled. If I consider my work as an ongoing practice, I relieve myself of the pressure to make a perfect piece, or even to make a finished piece. Sometimes I think being settled is a fiction, because there is no such thing as stillness.

Nol: Oh, I would love to feel “settled”! But as a choreographer, I don’t know if that’s possible. “Settled” feels like some version of “finished”- and I don’t know if anything ever really feels finished - I’m trying to be ok in an unsettled, unfinished state, which is the forever present.

Formal/informal:

Christy: The lively interplay of these constructs has been the subtextual content of my work for the past ten years! I’m in love with them both and want to coax them to live together in the worlds of each piece I make. I feel tender towards formalism, because like “settled,” I think it might be a fiction. It’s definitely oppressive. Informal is the child of me dancing on and with the vacuum cleaner; it’s the foundation of how dance has always been my meaning-making. 

Nol: I also feel tender towards formalism. There is something comforting about the curtains, the suspension of disbelief, knowing what to expect and how to experience it - feeling comfortable with the container. Informality is unexpected, and has a tinge of excitement.

Present/future:

Christy: Things are not okay right now. Things might be okay, or at least better. I am not living in the present, sorry California, I am remaking the past when I remember it, and I am conjuring the future as per my desire. In the words of fiction writer Jean Chen Ho: “To live in the subjunctive is a manner of seeing the past not as a fixed story but as one that the present continuously acts upon. The present is what determines the past, not the other way around. I can write it any way I choose, at my own pace. That’s another thing about the subjunctive: There’s always enough time there. All the time you could want, and need.”

Nol: I’m trying hard to be present, and make good choices. Probably not succeeding, though.

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JR: What are 5 words or phrases to describe your latest work?

Nol: Death, friendship, comforting, ritual, dream

Christy: Broken; efforted; anchoring; building; terrifying (this is how I feel about the piece more than the piece)

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JR: When was the choreographic moment for you? Why did you want to make this piece?

Nol: Jim, Eli, and I were talking in a cemetery. The conversation was deep, rich, funny, honest, educational, and real. I thought, “I’m an idiot - I should’ve been recording this.” And then I thought, “I wish I could put this on stage.”

Christy: Each choreographic adventure drops me off where I need to be to start the next one. Kid subjunctive arose from what I refer to as the “residue of unfulfilled desires” that are in the wake of every piece I make–in this case it was last year’s 12-hour EPOCH. EPOCH was so much about “sitting in it–”it” being the present. Kid (referring to playful curiosity) subjunctive (referring to imagined, desire-projected futures) is my attempt at moving towards possible ways of being. Ways of determining what we want and asking for it. Ways of negotiating our projections with the people around us holding us accountable.

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JR: “The performance is now,” Nol shares in your recorded conversation. So much is up for discussion at this time about performance, engagement, audience, collaborators, agency, and decisionmaking. How do each of you define “performance?”

Christy: I have framed my dance-making history as a way to grapple with the question of what is performance and what it can do. The work I am most engaged with as a viewer challenges me to expand my perception. The construct of “performance” is ongoing content in my work. Sometimes oppressively so, in that I pull people along to swim in the complexity of ideas without always fully holding and honoring their desire(s) and personhood(s). I try to name, as early as I can, what I think I am up to in each project, in order to give collaborators an out if their interests do not align. Yes, the creative act and all of the decision-making it requires is an oppressive assertion of “I am.” I try to own the politics and values inherent in all of my choices and ask for assistance with this from my audience. I hungrily invite this! I also ask for receptivity from the viewer. I’m not interested in coddling or fictions or happily-ever-after. That isn’t what I think the function of art, of performance is. For me, and I write this with full ownership of my bias, performance should not numb but expand perception.

Nol: Anything can be a performance really. Watching some birds at Lake Merritt can be a performance. For me, a key ingredient is exploration - as an artist - did you explore something? An idea, a method, a feeling? And do you want to show people that exploration? (Or what you’ve learned, or how you’ve changed.) That’s something I like to see in a performance.

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Jim Cave. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.