David Parker writes about the creative process and his dog, Grace.
....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....
...I think that the way art makes change is one consciousness at a time. It forces us to stop our usual patterns of processing information sometimes through causing us confusion, sometimes through pointing us to pleasure. It is through arguing for the inherent worth of a life lived with confusion or pleasure that art makes us re-think the world we live in. Because in those moments we are revealed to ourselves and others without pretense. We want those moments but we fear them as well, so we tame them, we cloak them in formulas and focus our attention on less threatening things like income levels and social squabbles. So much for change. Our real job is to be the guardians and cultivators of those moments where ever we find them....
...However, in its place, I would like to count as necessary to art making those things that guilt proposes to negate; rest, sustenance (culinary, intellectual, spiritual), space, time, comfort, ease, attention, health, conversation, movement, freedom (from "should", from over analysis, to change one's mind ((multiple times, if necessary)), to let something brew, to be fiercely obsessive or to be unconcerned), and, perhaps the first thing that vaporizes when the call of guilt sounds its menacing horn: Pleasure....
...It's the gestation period for a dance, and its actual life in front of any audience, that seems out of whack. It disappears way too quickly. How can I facilitate a process that maximizes interactions between me and audiences both in the performer/viewer relationship, and in the relationship of peers talking about performance and the making of meaning?
...Therein lies my problem--- my fear that words have predominated culturally for so long---more valued, neater, easier to parse and disseminate and show their heavy hand in the world. How do we teach others how to live more fully in their bodies? By using words?—or does this work against its purpose?
... I now have a different relationship with the notion of rehearsal AS a practice. Although there is usually a presentation to prepare for and something to create, I think the “practice” element of a rehearsal should encompass these lofty intellectual and humanistic aims I held so dear when I was younger, and still do. If we look to art to inspire us to a greater humanity, in fact elevate us, what as artists should we be practicing during rehearsal? How can we truly create a practice out of rehearsal and what are we practicing?
My favorite thing is going where I’ve never been.
-Diane Arbus
This is one of my favorite things, too.
Every year, for the last several years, I have been going somewhere new for about a week. Sometimes it’s fairly exotic to me, like Italy, and twice now, it has been to a magical valley not too far from home, and very close to the place I lived for four years in college. Even though it is not far away to go to the Hudson Valley, I am visiting the winding, curving roads that were just shy of places I explored before, places just out of my eyesight. They are right next door, but you don’t see them if you have blinders on....
...there is a particular phenomenon that occurs when the show is over. An accurate name might be the POOF! effect. After exorbitant amounts of work, the performances finally come and then POOF! , it all disappears. It is the most amazing and disturbing magic act ever. It is acutely unsettling to some inner compass of mine that has been pointing and guiding toward CREATE and DANCE and ART. Then POOF! and I am alone in the middle of a vast desert with the faint echoes...