Life as a Modern Dancer

Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

Photo: Ryan Kwok

Still Resonating: Dicotomía del Silencio by Rogelio Lopez & Dancers

By Molly Rose-Williams

If reckoning is a sensational act - a surrender to past, present, and future converging in a single, visceral moment - then Dicotomía del Silencio gives form to that sensation. The newest work from Rogelio Lopez & Dancers is based largely on Lopez’s exploration of past traumas, and what he calls in his Director’s Note “a need to organize and contextualize” his experiences growing up in Mexico with a “heavily Catholic faith influenced family.” In this deeply personal process of sense-making, Lopez has shepherded to expression not just the concepts that order his chaotic past, but the very sensations from which those concepts arise. The result is a haunting, awestruck, and searching prostration before a realm of visceral truths.

It feels relevant to say as well that just 12 days before I saw this work on its opening night, Lopez’s mother, Ignacia García, passed away. He dedicated the work to her, and the raw power of his grief and love, as well as the love so clearly felt for him by his dancer-collaborators, imbued the evening for me with a rare, near-tsunamic power.

The piece begins in darkness. A single bulb shines through a window upstage left, where Lopez stands playing a small hand crank music box. Behind him, dancer Andrew Merrell approaches him in cycles - coming forward to place a tender hand on his shoulder, and then backing away...to approach again, this time closer...away...to an embrace... The effect of his tidal movement reads almost like a musical element, intertwining the ethereal music box notes and Lopez’s hand that goes around and around and around. Lights off.

In the darkness a singing bowl sounds. The redolent note ripples out like a circular wave. A quartet of dancers - Andrew Merrell, Alexandria Whaley, Kevin Gaytan and Rebecca Johnson - is revealed center stage by two handheld flashlights that illuminate their black-clothed bodies like whispered secrets. They begin to move with full-bodied reverence, devotional patterns both intricate and full. At one point they bare their teeth to the sky, like an open-mouthed salute to the abyss. The darkness slips around the edges of their partnering like a sacred shroud. Pay attention, it urges - not all of what is can be seen, not all of what can be seen is what it seems.

Lopez follows as the quartet gives way to an empty stage. He enters sliding backwards along the floor, whispering a looping prayer in Spanish and shining a single light at the top of the empty stage on a toy truck that slowly retreats.

For the next thirty minutes, the piece continues to unfold in a series of deeply poetic, inexplicably intertwined sections lit only by handheld flashlights. The dynamic of separation between Lopez - who returns to the stage multiple times for solos but doesn’t interact with the other four dancers except as witness - offers a clear structural element to the work, and speaks poignantly of the isolation trauma often begets. The darkness offers a spacious container from which the work’s visceral logic emanates like an ember in the gut; winding like a labyrinth that unfolds with juicy partnering, sensuous details and a delicacy of touch that makes the whole piece resonate like glimpses of the unconscious.

Lopez’s solos are as varied as any infinitely complex internal landscape, from full-bodied dancing so expressive it seems to blur ecstasy and agony, to mumbled prayers, apparent rituals of repentance, and the quiet moment with the slowly-retreating toy truck. The other four dancers easily match his dynamism and feeling with a series of duets, trios, and quartets that speak to the paradoxes at the heart of intimacy, pleasure, trauma, desire, and connection. The dancing throughout is stunning - rigorous, athletic, and highly-technical without a trace of artifice. A single movement motif threads throughout, repeated almost every time by the hands of one person in embrace on the back of the person they hold. Hauntingly expressive each time it appears, the gestural motif evokes for me both devotion and dissection.

A turning point comes as a full-throated song from Lopez rings through the dark. A single bulb comes on overhead to illuminate his body, covered in scissors. El Señor me ha mirado a los ojos, sonriendo ha dicho mi nombre, Lopez sings. En la arena he dejado mi barca. Junto a ti, buscaré el otro mar. Though, I’m unclear what the scissors are meant to express, the image is stark and impactful, and Lopez’s singing holds me in rapt attention. A quartet follows, and then a duet - both which feel like echoes of previous sections but somehow texturally distinct in the twilight glow. The intimacy of the interactions between dancers feels more specific to the people themselves and slightly less symbolic, while the unbidden logic that holds the piece together feels slightly more diffuse without the stark delineation of singular beams of light.

All five dancers return to the stage for a final score in which, one by one, the dancers kiss Lopez and then rip velcro strips from his shirt to expose stripes like vertical red gashes. Though the image holds the potential for me to feel disappointingly unsubtle, by this point in the work, all five performers have established such a profound level of humanity that I am willing to read it instead as a guileless expression of the paradox of connection, risk, and pain. At last, only Lopez and Merrell remain. They share a tender kiss, Merrell rips a final strip from Lopez’s shirt, and leaves him onstage with nothing but a heavy strumming guitar. Silence. Lopez carves the movement motif like a devotional gesture on his own body once. Lights out.

For me, Dicotomía del Silencio felt like a physicalized reckoning with the sensations that haunt us. There were elements of the work I wasn’t sure how to read, but each piece felt like a crystal shard - something real and true. In the end, even the diffuseness of the resolution felt as if it served the piece overall, which seemed to ask questions so large their answers may not even exist, or at least not yet. Instead, the work made space for an impactful coalescence of sensation and its expression, while Lopez and his collaborators performed with a rare humanity so deep it felt almost spiritual.

Dicotomía del Silencio plays twice more, on March 23rd and 24th, at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley. If your experience seeing the show is anything like mine, you may find the experience reverberates for you long after the house lights come up.

 

Molly Rose-Williams is a Bay Area artist and writer. mollyrosewilliams.com

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Related post:

Artist profile: Rogelio Lopez

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One Good Quote: fey/done/a/weigh with the Wax Poet(s)

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 Wax Poet(s) in fey/done/a/weigh at ODC Theater in San Francisco March 15-16, 2019, 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."

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Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Leah Cox)

A recent conversation with a theater colleague inspired this series of questions and posts. Please join us!

Questions and wonderings include:

• What is your studio practice?
• Is your studio practice tied up/intertwined with an actual production on the books?
• When do you have time for noodling around, improvising, and playing without product? Is this with other dancers, or mainly yourself?
• The fine line - and intersections - between self-care and creative work, exertion and recuperation, training and art making
• Do you consider being in class part of your practice? Teaching as part of your practice? Basically….what falls under the category of “studio practice?”
• If your answer is NO at the moment to a studio practice, what do you aspire to create or make happen in your artistic life in the near future?
• And, does the topic of studio space play into this? Do you have regular access to a space (free or for a fee)?

Plus,

• What does my body need today?
• Where does my creative spirit + curiosity take me today?

Today we hear from Leah Cox - Dean of the American Dance Festival and an Associate Professor at Bard College.

 

Photo: Jim Lafferty

 

For me, studio practice is a container that can hold practices that further a dancer's way of knowing and that cultivate knowledge and habits of being in the world that directly stem from being a dancer.  Here, I take ownership of the title of dancer as a way of being in the world that has many more expressions than performer and which is a specific way of entering roles that might be primary for other people, such as choreographer, administrator, or teacher.  Studio time is the time I use to allow my dancer self to emerge and practice her ways of being.  This does not include the kind of formal upkeep known as training, nor does it include time to complete work that’s required of me, such as preparing for classes.  It is not rehearsal.  Studio practice is the time I use to further my understanding of dance’s power, and to enact it and allow it to take hold of me.  It is a form of open-ended to focused research.  It might reveal something that moves into a creative process and ultimately becomes a piece.  Then I’d say that studio practice diminishes to allow time and energy for a creative process, and the research and inquiry of studio practice continues in a more abbreviated format that supports the creative work at hand.  Differentiating these terms might seem like splitting hairs, but I find that doing so honors the different ways I use my body, time, and space.  

 

I am fortunate to be a faculty member at a college, which allows me to have access to space for no additional charge.  I do not know what I would do if I had to pay for space, not only because of the cost, but what the expenditure often prompts in me: the need or expectation to not waste time or to be productive in each session.  Often, studio practice doesn’t yield anything immediate and sometimes feels frustratingly unproductive, its fruits being felt much later down the line in un/expected ways.

 

Studio practice is essential for me.  For many years, I did not prioritize it, letting semester after semester go by without engaging in it.  Looking back on that time, my spirit really suffered, and I grew hard.  I lost connection to ways of knowing that I valued and to a whole self—my dancer self.  Dancing as a way of being in the world must be kept present through dedicated time devoted to it on a regular basis.  Studio practice is my time to do that life work.

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Related posts:

 

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Rebecca Stenn)

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Wendy Jones and Pamela Shoebottom)

Featured Artist on the Blog: Leah Cox

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Tension Remains after Nevertheless

Tension Remains after Nevertheless

By Sarah JG Chenoweth

ka-nei-see | collective and Cat Call Choir produced an adaptation of their 2018 success, Nevertheless, at Z Space last weekend. The show—expanded from its premiere to include new sections, additional performers, and a visual art exhibition in the lobby—was condemning but not cathartic. Certainly the aftermath of sexual assault is many-sided within a single person, and also diverges from one person to the next. Nevertheless characterized a few justifiable responses: a “fuck you” from the choir, a crisp plea for communal reflection from the art pieces, and a touch of misery from the dancing. 

The show pointed strong fingers mostly at verbal abuse and arrogant handsy-ness of (assumingly) men. At one point the choir went as far as telling a story about a group attack on a college student. At another, they sang, staring zombie-like at us, about bashing in a woman’s head. Throughout the show, the choir sometimes spoke as the oppressor, sometimes the oppressed, sometimes omniscient narrators. These singers’ delivery ranged from stoic to slapstick. Delightfully grotesque and unapologetically hammy in their warping of actual statements from actual people about tit size, ass grabbing, internalized misogyny, and other aggressions, they grounded the performance with real talk. It was hilarious because it lampooned the idiocy in what has become commonplace; it was awful because we were reminded of the idiocy that has become commonplace. The choir was pissed-off and despairing in the same breath. In both aesthetic and deed, it attractively nodded to the Greek chorus—a collective voice commenting on staged scenes, often representing the attitudes of the viewers. But here the cat callers expanded on the Greek form by participating in the action and dramatizing society’s most vile behavior. Using sweet harmonies, cheeky lyrics, flamboyant groping, and rhythmic gesture, the Cat Call Choir made a stinging mockery of the “locker room talk” that pervades our culture. 

While the choir chewed up the topic and spit it back out, the dancing left it floating in some somber cloud. Much of the dance was a sad soundtrack to the horrors described by the choir. The ensemble both supported and trashed one another. Dancers literally held each other up and then got in each other’s way. Mangled figures emerged from the onslaught. Chianese’s choreographic mastery shone with the quartet, “You Bitch.” Four dancers swam and shoved their way in and out of unison trios with an ever-changing opposing soloist. The timing and spacing of the transferred solo were surprising and savory, and in a way they echoed the timing and spacing of sexual assault: we never know who will be next. 

In the beginning of the piece the movement, as necessitated by the theme, felt more contained and writhing than some of Chianese’s past work. Various soloists seemed to dance inside of themselves, twisting and squeezing perpetrators’ badgering out of their bodies. As the piece progressed, the movement became more extended and explosive. Correspondingly, the dancers became equally more frayed and more powerful—the exhausted, “persisting” survivor. 

However, the movement was overall too virtuosic and sophisticated for the filth of the content. Aside from some befitting motifs (breast swipes and forced smiles), such gorgeous dancing disagreed with the subject matter. Only one or two moments stung with the discomfort of sexual violation. The most effective was when three dancers, facing upstage, legs spread wide, bent forward and clutched their crotches, one palm over the other. The gesture was simultaneously protective and scared and defiant…and fleeting. The majority of the movement had less impact. 

So, while funny, beautiful, and theatrically flavorful, Nevertheless did not relieve the deepest tensions left after brutal assaults. It did tap into a collective desire to shout, to pierce through apathy with in-your-face dialogue. It did hint at how these offenses diminish their recipients. But, two years into the Me Too movement, we are ready for higher stakes. Christine Blasey Ford bore all to a hostile Congress and national audience. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib publicly called our abusive president a motherfucker the evening before she was sworn in. The now moment has adapted for more brazen action.

 

Sarah JG Chenoweth is a dancer, teacher, and writer based in Oakland, California.

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Related posts and writing:

How to Persist: Nevertheless with ka·nei·see | collective and Cat Call Choir (on diydancer.com)

One Good Quote: Nevertheless (March 2019)

Artist Profile: Tanya Chianese

Reflections from Nevertheless - Molly Rose-Williams (May 2018)

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Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: One Day until fey/done/a/weigh with the Wax Poet(s)

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

I recently got to catch up with artists Garth Grimball and Heather Stockton of the Wax Poet(s) as they prepared for the premiere of fey/done/a/weigh at the ODC Theater in San Francisco March 15 and 16, 2019. Today they share about the theater space, dream of the audience, endurance/exhaustion, and risk taking with the project. fey/done/a/weigh tackles fitting in, conformity, and the potential sense of deformity with fitting in. Grimball and Stockton take the stage together alongside musician Charles Peoples III. 

Why the ODC Theater? Why this space, this venue?

Garth Grimball: Easy answer -  the Rainin Opportunity Fund. We applied and received it. It is an incredible opportunity. Not just to perform in a theater the size of ODC with its capabilities, but the fund allows artists a full week to be in the theater.

On endurance/exhaustion/moments of recuperation to do an evening length duet:

Garth Grimball: For my first solo, I choreographed the beginning to expel nervous energy. Our first duet begins seated and close to each other so we can really tap into our shared energy to keep focused and steady. We have a multimedia element that propels the arc of the show and allows us some rest. For Heather's second solo, she is focusing totally on breath. The finale is so joy-filled that no matter our exhaustion we make it through.

On risk taking, vulnerability, and the dream of the audience:

Heather Stockton: Risk taking is at the crux of creating - if you’re working from an honest place. I teach the art of choreography to 5-14 yr olds, and I can observe their creativity by the risks that they are taking. Garth and I have placed risk and vulnerability at the very heart of this dance. We have written love letters to ourselves and to each other. The final piece to this story is sharing with an audience, so, the dream therein lies in the witnessing.

 

Purchase your tickets today through the ODC Theater. 

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Related post:

Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: Two Days until fey/done/a/weigh with the Wax Poet(s)

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Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Wendy Jones and Pamela Wong-Shoebottom)

A recent conversation with a theater colleague inspired this series of questions and posts. Please join us!

Questions and wonderings include:

• What is your studio practice?
• Is your studio practice tied up/intertwined with an actual production on the books?
• When do you have time for noodling around, improvising, and playing without product? Is this with other dancers, or mainly yourself?
• The fine line - and intersections - between self-care and creative work, exertion and recuperation, training and art making
• Do you consider being in class part of your practice? Teaching as part of your practice? Basically….what falls under the category of “studio practice?”
• If your answer is NO at the moment to a studio practice, what do you aspire to create or make happen in your artistic life in the near future?
• And, does the topic of studio space play into this? Do you have regular access to a space (free or for a fee)?

Plus,

• What does my body need today?
• Where does my creative spirit + curiosity take me today?

Today we hear from artists Wendy Jones (San Francisco) and Pamela Wong-Shoebottom (Toronto).

From Wendy Jones (San Francisco):

Working in an empty studio is very special. I love stepping into a quiet space, a clean slate to play, practice, and investigate my work and its potentials.

As a dance educator on sabbatical, I am reflecting back on my studio practice during the academic year. I wouldn’t define it as a practice. My “practice” as an educator is getting work done, creating technical combinations and choreography for the five classes and company repertory I teach. Although I keep up with the rigorous schedule, I feel that my movement choices are not as investigated as they could be. Hence the sabbatical.

This year I have tried to rent space and take the time to live in my body. I find that I need at least an hour and a half to “get to the meat” of the material. I am learning that the short sessions at Lowell High School are fine for “getting things done” but not valuable for the development of my work.

In this exciting time in my dance practice and artmaking, I’ve learned that my studio practice is fueled by a production or clear project. When on a deadline I crave as much studio practice time as I can get. However, I am trying to make short goals to keep me practicing even when there isn’t a deadline.

When I transition back into the academic schedule, I aspire to find more time for solo practice. Although my choreography is usually grounded in dynamic group work, I understand the importance of practicing for myself. I’ve learned that my body needs to be fully connected to the work I present to my dancers. Time spent in dance classes and workshops is also very important for my own training as well as inspiration.

From Pamela Wong-Shoebottom (Toronto):

Studio time to practice teaching, performance or choreographic material is time I try to be as efficient as possible. I do not noodle freely in that time, in an effort to be cost effective. Though, there are times when I hit a creation-block and I do enjoy improvising for the remainder of the booked time in the studio. I consider a large part of my studio practice to happen in my home, as I often move furniture to improvise, create teaching material and do conditioning work.  

With Director Kenny Pearl, I help run Great Moving Dancers in Toronto. This subsidized open contemporary technique class is available to professional independent dance artists and is taught by a rotation of established local choreographers, performers and teachers. This has been what has made it possible for me to keep an affordable and committed studio practice for nearly a decade. In Toronto there is ample access to affordable studio space, but it is still a challenge for local artists, myself included, to fund this over a length of time, without grants and awards to do so. I aspire to spend more time bodystorming in the studio to independently explore and clarify my movement vocabulary. I believe this type of practice would also fuel creative release and my love for dance. 

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Related posts:

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Rebecca Stenn)

Artist Profile: Wendy Jones

Inspiration: One dance word a day with the 365 Dance project

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Dreaming/Preparing/Dancing: Two Days until fey/done/a/weigh with the Wax Poet(s)

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

I recently got to catch up with artists Garth Grimball and Heather Stockton of the Wax Poet(s) as they prepared for the premiere of fey/done/a/weigh at the ODC Theater in San Francisco March 15 and 16, 2019. Today they offer a peak into the work and working together. fey/done/a/weigh tackles fitting in, conformity, and the potential sense of deformity with fitting in.

5 words/phrases to describe the show:

Garth Grimball (GG): Bodies, pop culture, vulnerability, joy, queer imaginary

Heather Stockton (HS): Queer, exposed, joyful, fat pride, love

On friendship + collaboration:

GG: Heather and I became friends by happenstance. We met each other being in the same department at Mills College, but had shared few, if any, conversations. We found ourselves alone in the student lounge on a Friday afternoon in early September 2011. I mentioned to her I wanted to see the Ryan Gosling movie Drive. She said she did too, and we decided to go together. We took two buses across Oakland from campus to the Jack London theater. From that day, and that movie on, our friendship blossomed.

During our two year shared tenure at Mills, it often felt like we were the only two single people in the department. So, we went on many dates with each other. Almost every Friday night you could find us at the Grand Lake Theater watching movies, or waiting for the 57 bus to get home from the movies.

HS: In 2013 I was commissioned by Les Stuck of the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music to create a dance piece to his music. My time at Mills collaborating with musicians, visual artists, poets and fellow dancers (and best friends, including Garth), provoked me to envision what it would be like to create a collaborative dance collective. The commission seemed like a great jumping off point, so we began our collaborative practice, Wax Poet(s). In six years we have made 17 dances and collaborated with 19 musicians, 3 visual artists, 2 film artists, 1 poet, and upwards of 20 dance artists. Six years later we continue to bring the love in our friendship to the love of working together and creating.

What was the choreographic moment which inspired and started this particular work? 

GG: It wasn’t as much a choreographic moment as a response to a choreographic moment. After our last show, we received many versions of the comment, “The two of you should make work about the two of you.” Not us in service of a greater concept. So we took that feedback and danced with it. Come see the show to find out how!

 

Purchase your tickets today through the  ODC Theater. 

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One Good Quote: Nevertheless, with ka·nei·see | collective and Cat Call Choir (March 2019)

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 ka·nei·see | collective and Cat Call Choir in Nevertheless at Z Space in San Francisco March 7-10, 2019, 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."

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Dancing Around Race Public Gathering

Reflection: Dancing Around Race Public Gathering 

By Bhumi B. Patel

On February 28, 2019, dozens gathered at a gallery space in San Francisco’s Mission District to participate in the final of three public gatherings for the Dancing Around Race Residency. Lead Artist Gerald Casel was joined by scholar Thomas DeFrantz and the cohort of co-interrogators that have been working with Casel for the last year: Sammay Dizon, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Raissa Simpson, David Herrera, and Yayoi Kambara. Dancing Around Race is a program of Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project.

The room sizzled with an appropriately uncomfortable air -- the majority of folks in attendance were white, and for most white folks, the discussion about race creates a deep anxiety and uncertainty. I felt a kind of stubborn rage that wouldn’t settle. To me, it is an indirect ask for the oppressed and marginalized to create comfort for those in power through their uncompensated labor.

That isn’t the labor I showed up to do.

Can this be me-centered if I’m the one that experienced it?

Who am I?

I’m a daughter of immigrants, a queer femme, a dancer, a choreographer, an educator. I bring that lens into every space, and I bring it with me even more so into spaces that are meant for discussions around race and equity. So, rather than trying to explain every facet of the discussions that took place that evening, I will share with you what I came away with.

White curation and white ownership are bedrocks in the very foundation of the Bay Area dance landscape. How do I know this?

Pause. Name 5 well-established organizations that present dance AND were founded and/or are currently led by people of color.

That’s sort of a semantical exercise though, isn’t it? Because even if you can name 5, you had to think about it, and all of the major organizations that immediately come to mind are run and have been run by white folks who haven’t yet shown that they’re willing to give up some of that power.

More importantly is that we are still thinking in the same model that hasn’t been working. We are never going to fit equity into an oppressive system; you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. Handing leadership to a POC isn’t the solution. Reimagining the institutional structure is the only way out of the this oppressive hole. To reimagine the institutional structure, we have to reimagine ourselves. We have to look at the contradictions and impossibilities of being ourselves. And we have to do this without the expectation that POCs are going to understand both everything about whiteness and everything about our own cultures.

I am a first generation South Asian/Indian who has spent a great deal of time assimilating to some hodge podge of white culture. Even more because I so badly want to fit in. To blend in so that I won’t be seen as different, so that I won’t have to wear the “loud, angry brown person” hat in rehearsal when I call out microaggressions, so that I will get hired.

But what I’ve discovered is that as a queer South Asian woman, my cultural landscape is complicated and often I am not afforded control of my own narrative. Many POCs are not afforded control of our own narratives. Our telling of personal violence often gets buried by white supremacy in the service of its racist and imperialist agenda. This is because the cultural logics that help maintain structural racism are stronger than our individual stories. What has become evident to me is that my narrative cannot pierce through the white logics of orientalism which continues to find ways to position brown folks as less developed than the Western world. When we cry, or yell, or speak directly about the harm that is being caused we are not speaking “nicely” and we are not making our hurt “palatable." White folks, you must find your inner stamina for these conversations.

We must continue to mobilize in solidarity with other oppressed peoples and address prejudice within our own. And I intentionally say “we” as a non-black POC who constantly works to combat rampant anti-blackness in our communities. Surely we are all still trying to figure out the best strategies to do this work and to still remain safe and secure. Surely we are going to fuck up. Surely it’s some of the hardest work that we can do because our validation often relies on approval from the very people who may deny us. But this type of work feels important nonetheless to so many of us. And there is power and politics in that feeling.

I’m left with questions that may or may not have answers.

Where is the anti-racist work happening in the Bay Area?

Where do I direct well meaning white folks for support in doing the anti-racist work?

Can’t y’all find each other?

What do I do when I watch the white folks that I trust reveal themselves as racist?

Who am I addressing when I make art?

What are the repercussions of not code switching for institutions?

Are choreographers/art-makers allowed to call their companies diverse if all the bodies move and are colonized by the same western forms of training?

I will continue to work through these questions. I will continue to ask the folks I surround myself with to ask these questions as well. I will continue to do the labor that I am able to, and turn it over to other folks when I am too tired to continue doing the labor.

I leave you with this: If no one sees your anti-racist work, will you continue to do it?

Bhumi B. Patel creates queer, feminist movement art that holds the focus of creating movement at the intersection of embodied philosophy and dynamic sensation taking precedence over stagnant form. To move through the world as a queer artist of colour, the pursuit of collective safety is both an act of labor and of necessity. Making art is her way of coping with the world at the moment.

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time

 

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

A conversation this week with a theater colleague inspired this series of questions and posts. Please join us!

Questions and wonderings include:

• What is your studio practice?
• Is your studio practice tied up/intertwined with an actual production on the books?
• When do you have time for noodling around, improvising, and playing without product? Is this with other dancers, or mainly yourself?
• The fine line - and intersections - between self-care and creative work, exertion and recuperation, training and art making
• Do you consider being in class part of your practice? Teaching as part of your practice? Basically….what falls under the category of “studio practice?”
• If your answer is NO at the moment to a studio practice, what do you aspire to create or make happen in your artistic life in the near future?
• And, does the topic of studio space play into this? Do you have regular access to a space (free or for a fee)?

Plus,

• What does my body need today?
• Where does my creative spirit + curiosity take me today?

I then think of some concepts from somatics and make a poem for today.

Somatic Words for a Studio Practice

Allow

Notice

Soften

Slow down to feel

Support

Yield

Whole.

I also pulled Using the Sky: A Dance (by Deborah Hay) off of the shelf today. Resonating and intersecting words include:

"What if where I am is what I need?" (page 121)

"When I notice my whole body there is a sense of weightlessness to my experience. I imagine the brevity of a single note to describe how I notice, a buoyancy that lands nowhere. In contrast, focusing on my body feels dense. It draws my attention inwards, making it cumbersome to focus elsewhere when the choice arises. It is as if focusing is bound by time and space and noticing is not." (page 29)

I want to thank Rebecca Stenn for diving in and sharing her thoughts on Studio Time and Studio Practice. Stay tuned for future posts in this series from other artists.

Megan Williams and Rebecca Stenn

I have always maintained some kind of a studio practice – for the last 30 years or so, I have found myself consistently drawn to the studio, to be alone, to experiment, research, play, listen and make. I almost always start my creative process alone, in the studio, by myself – the music, space and actually, sometimes the mirrors, my only companions. I think every project I’ve ever been involved with has, in some way, started this way.

My studio practice is almost always tied up or intertwined with an actual production on the books. I find it very difficult to make or work if I don’t have some kind of deadline in mind. It can be loose and it can be very far off in the future, but for me, this has proved to be important. I think the idea of time factors into making for me, and somehow fires me up. I also really like what happens to the process when there is a deadline and it approaches and the energy ramps up and studio time becomes exciting, scary, fraught, meaningful, completely frustrating and fulfilling at the same time.

Studio time and the practice of being alone in a studio becomes for me a form of self-care. I don’t make a distinction between self-care and creative work; they seem to be one and the same for me. I don’t consider being in class part of my creative practice. A different part of my mind is working as I take class. I do however think that teaching has become, over the years, a part of my practice, in that I bring to my students a choreographic question or moment I am wrestling with, as much as I bring to the studio a question or idea that came up with my students. What falls under the category of “studio practice?” Going into a studio on a regular basis (at first alone and then after a while with the dancers I am currently working with) and paying attention, committing to an idea, trying something over and over and over, and unraveling a thought process.

Interestingly I have also, more recently, developed a studio practice as a painter.

The topic of studio space played directly into this because as I began to become more serious about painting, I began to yearn for a studio space that I could dedicate solely to this practice. I wanted a more consistent practice! I finally saved enough money that I could purchase a very small garden shed, that I have turned into a painting studio (it is 8ft by 12ft – perfect for my canvasses, easel and paints). It has truly changed everything for me, to have a dedicated space to work in.

-Rebecca Stenn

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Artist Profile: Rebecca Stenn

Rebecca Stenn writes about her new book, A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide

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