July 4 what happened.
A personal posting.
Musing on Many Things
Taylor K and I got together to dance
today. We had a choice – her apartment
or my apartment. Dancing solo with
Schmoo works, but since Taylor and I wanted to work together, thought it would
be easier to meet at her place. Poor Schmoo. No dog dancing today.
Concept 1: Intimate Space/Studio Space: THOUGHTS, HISTORY, CONTEXT
The Luxury of Space
-It has been such a luxury to have the Core
dance studios to work in. Big open dance space.
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| Core Dance studios, Decatur, GA |
Real Estate
-I have, pretty much since I was in my 20’s,
had studio space. Starting with the
first studio and theatre space I had the lease on when I was in my 20’s. $175/month.
A 70 seat black box theatre and upstairs a studio space – hardwood
floors, brick walls, windows on two sides.
Sidenote: I just came across this interview that was done with me, about
my space, back in the 70’s! I was
talking about how small the theatre space was and how it impacted my
creativity!
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| From an article in Creative Loafing, Atlanta, 1975(?) |
Access
-From then on in Atlanta I always had a
studio. Full time. 24/7 access. Mine.
Living in NY, I rented space (which caused me to work differently), in
DC I had the Dance Exchange space. At Grinnell, I have the college space – but
I also have the “designated dancing space” I have assigned to one room in my
house.
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| My "studio" at home in Grinnell |
Sacred Spaces for Art Making
- Do we need a studio in order to dance?
Small Space = Intimate Space?
- Since being in Pine Lake this summer in
addition to the studio space at Core, I have been dancing in the small space
between the bed and the wall. About
8’x7’. Because I gave myself the promise
this summer that I would be dancing/dance-making every day.
Learning from Small Spaces
- When I saw “Sleep No More” in NY one of the
things that totally blew me away was the intense dancing that happened in small
small spaces. And the dancers did not
rein in their fierceness at all. Maybe
even the opposite. As I age, I continue
to explore not what I can’t do anymore, but how I can learn to move in ways
that are new to me. I watch myself
dancing in contained spaces, and the moments that interest me are when I seem
to find an interiority.
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| Sleep No More |
Not the First or Last Time
-Just today I remembered that when I was a
kid, and needing to dance all the time.
I would push the coffee table out of the way and the living room became
my dance studio. My father’s stereo was
there. Turn on the music, dance. No one ever bothered me. My mother and brother were in the basement
watching TV, my father was in his room reading and writing. I had the space to myself. As a little girl, I imagined it a grand
theatre. I taped a sign to the front
door that said, “Dance Performance 1 cent”
and then lined my stuffed animals up as my audience. Turned the stereo on and danced, danced,
danced (classical music). As a teenager,
late at night when I couldn’t sleep for teenage angst – I found refuge in that
living room dance space. Dancing to
Jefferson Airplane, Rolling Stones, Incredible String Band…
Dancing in Small Spaces
-This week Taylor and I wanted to keep our
dancing/improvising going but the studios at Core were booked. It was frustrating. Where could we find space to dance? Too hot outdoors. We talked about intimate spaces. Earlier that day I had done some phone/skype
dancing with Michael in my 8x7 Space. We
decided to try. Weighing in the Schmoo
factor, we decided to meet at her apartment.
Ha ha, she said it motivated her to clean her apartment.
-We danced in her small space. It worked.
It was inspiring we did it.
Squat Theatre
-Precedence and implications: Squat Theatre, founded in Budapest in the
60’s. NYC 1977-1984. Their name comes from “their ability to create a theater
and a home from unoccupied space.”
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| Squat Theatre, 23rd Street storefront, NYC |
This group of
Hungarian theatre artists “first began working together as a nameless
collective in Budapest in 1969. Their identity was solidified in 1972 when
government authorities withdrew the group’s license to perform after a single
performance of a play entitled The Skanzen Killers … was deemed
“obscene” and “apt to be misinterpreted from a political point of view.” The
following year, when members of the group attended the Open Theater Festival in
Wroclaw, Poland, and gave a spontaneous, anarchic performance, their passports
were confiscated by the Hungarian government. Officially censored, the group
went underground and over a period of four years created more than a dozen
pieces to be shown in unofficial performance spaces, usually the fifth floor
apartment of Peter Halasz and Anna Koos.” Watching the play from adjacent
apartments, of course the question arises “Are you watching the play, or just
life?”
“Unlike underground
“living-room theaters” elsewhere in Eastern Europe – such as Czech playwright
Pavel Kohout’s in Prague – this was not a political theater created primarily
to foster veiled criticism of a repressive regime; its concerns were more
interpersonal, psychosexual, and philosophical. “Working on the edges of
society, Squat from the outset made a beeline for the taboo, the absurd, the
mysterious – utilizing imagery that could be mined on the frontiers of the
psyche,”
When they got to
NY (via Paris) they rented a storefront in Chelsea, creating works that used
the storefront view of 23rd street to question the notions of the
boundaries of life and art. I was fortunate to attend two Squat Theatre shows
in their Chelsea storefront. (They lived
in an apartment above the storefront, complete with two chickens, a rooster and
a goat. I visited them there.) “They operated on the belief that, to make
sense of the world, the artist’s task – in the words of Franz Kafka, who has
been called “the guiding spirit of Squat’s art” – is “to sit at your window
when evening falls and dream it to yourself!” http://donshewey.com/theater_articles/squat.html
Meeting Peter
and Anna, and the rest of the ensemble and seeing their performances was one of
the profound theatre experiences that has shaped me. And now – so many years
later, I find myself channeling Squat theatre.
Notes on the Improvisation Process: July 4
So Taylor and I
danced in her small Virginia-Highlands apartment today. Here are notes on our process.
Our Process:
Round One:
Friday Taylor shared a text she has been
working on. She uses a childhood memory
of fireflies as metaphor for entrapment.
We talked about it, as she explored how she might want to perform it, or
use it as a start for a piece. While we
talked she googled firefly facts. When
we got together on Saturday we decided to start with the improvisation
structure I have been working on. She
got out paper and we took some firefly facts and some lines from her text as
the text to work with. We spread the
papers around the room and did Round One of improvising:
Find a piece of paper with text. Respond to and explore that text. When ready,
move on. Timer set for 10 minutes.
Round two:
We talked about how the small space changed
how we were finding ourselves at a new text.
In the large studio considering transitions to get from one part of the
room to another was part of the improvisation.
In the small space, just two steps and you landed on a new text.
For Round Two we decided to extract main
ideas from each text block, turn the paper over and write the extract
there. They made a strange little
poem. We found an order for them and
posted them in that sequence on the wall.
As in the original improvisation structure, the task for round two is to
understand the text together as a sequential idea.
Round three:
In our debrief we talked about how we had to
orient constantly to the wall where the text was. We could either memorize the text or make
more copies. We made another copy of the
text and placed it on the opposite wall.
Improvisation task: to begin to
catalogue and explore movement ideas that are most salient.
Round four:
We added speaking the text. Each dancer could speak the text, but no
repititions and only one time through.
Task: continue developing movement from the most salient ideas.
Round five
Speaking, but a line could only be said
once. Whoever said it, then that signals
the other dancer to be on that part of the text. Task: to continue to look for those moments,
solo and with each other where a particular movement idea is developing for
particular text ideas.
Here is a video link to Round Five: "fireflies" link
Final Discussion/Next Tasks:
In future rounds, to decide on certain motifs
and begin to weave them throughout the improvisation so that even though there
is sequence, it begins to have more layered depth. For instance, in this one “burrowing” and “digestive”
could show up as motifs.
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