Blog
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10/20/09Read More 2)
Lately, I’ve been feeling like a graceless choreographer. That’s because I’m Graceless. Grace was my Welsh Corgi, my kindred spirit, my fluffy joy, my friend. She was euthanized due to illness at the age of 13 this past July. In the wake of this I find myself inevitably heartbroken and, oddly, struggling to choreograph as I once did.
My partner and I live in a loft which is mostly a dance studio where I rehearse every day with my company. Grace was with the dancers and me almost daily for 13 years. This is basically the lifespan of my company to date. The Bang Group without Grace never occurred to me. It still doesn’t make sense.
Corgis are a herding breed. As such, Grace had much to offer a choreographer. Movement patterns aroused her, rhythm aroused her, partnering riveted her, asymmetry provoked her. She had the same fixations I had. Her insane devotion to rhythm echoed my own. When I made an intricate, rhythmic pattern Grace would plunge headlong into the fray of dancers and try to sort them, to bring them to order. Sometimes she seemed just to want to drink in the intoxicating beat. This was rather annoying to the dancers, though her intentions were benign, but it was very helpful to me. I came to rely on her responses. I’d lay something out in the space and look to her. Her eyes would roll in boredom. I’d change the tempo or dynamic or alter the intent. She’d lick her black lips and sink to the floor with a huff. I’d add smart dollops of rhythm and yank the pattern toward crookedness and she’d leap up, yelping and charging. I knew I’d hit on something good....
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9/8/09Read More 0)
...I am often baffled when looking at photographs. I feel like many artists are often trying to trick me (the viewer) into thinking that I am not looking at an hyper-altered and photoshopped image. Each photograph in this show debunked my feeling. I found that each work engaged me to think about how a picture is constructed and how we approach an image. I liked how I had to circle the show a few times and slid across the room to verify what I saw was in fact what I saw. In her essay, Whitaker writes, "There's a modesty to the works of the artists that I find attractive, as if they are simply sidestepping the race to find the next great artist out of the devastation, in favor of more honest pursuits. They asymptomatically approach a basic core, where hard meaning can reliably be found, like a rock smoothed by friction." The works were playful and diligent in engaging the audience with focused imagery which Whitaker describes as "acts not of escapism, but of affirmation." At a time like ours, we need as much affirmation as possible and I appreciated Hannah Whitaker's sincere direction of the show....
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9/8/09Read More 1)
I’ve enjoyed the exhibit on two nights, and was fascinated by the way the different performances affected the way that I attended to the art on the walls. The first evening’s performance was exploratory, sometimes subtle, blurring the line between performance and “real life.” The attentive tone of the piece resounded more than any particular emotive quality. After the performance, the audience migrated to the walls, pulled to the art like magnets. People quietly took in the exhibit, just as we’d taken in the performance. The second time I saw The Noble Savage and the Little Tramp was at the closing night of the season. The dance performance was raw with emotion and afterwards few people looked at the images. I tried to look (because I wanted to be able to see the exhibit and say something about it!) but when I tried to go toward the walls, I felt disinterested, unable to engage it at all. I had to come back to it later....
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9/8/09Read More 0)
...In the first piece The Materiality of Impermanence we could see Kimberly’s interest in drama, theatricality and writing as well as choreography as the atmosphere was mysterious and intriguing using dramatic lighting and spoken words which were part muffled but evocative of space and water, land, relationship and the passing of time....
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8/28/09Read More 0)
....This piece is undoubtedly the most challenging artistic endeavor I have ever been asked to perform, and for that I am deeply grateful to choreographer and friend, Mark Jarecke. Being given a chance to revisit this piece was a true gift. The tremendous physical vigor and porous mind-space required to enter this piece were daunting at times. However, Mark revealed the necessity of me trusting myself and my body, having had a ten-year history of being inside his work and process.
I was being asked to be present in the moment. I was trying not to make a decision or compose in the moment. In other words, I was attempting to be less cerebral, because from Mark’s perspective, that state can dampen the immediacy and genuineness of the movement. Although completely choreographed, the challenge given to me was not to re-create past experiences of the piece but rather to surprise and create anew by being true to each moment of the movement quality itself....
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