The Messenger (1992)  Photo:  Nick Novick

I performed an excerpt of Mammal at the Booking Dance Festival during the APAP (Association for Performing Arts Presenters) conference on Sunday.

Now I am diving back into The Traveler, the third part of my trilogy, Body Fictions, Ragged Memoirs, that will premiere at the Dance Complex in Cambridge, MA June 3-4 (save the date).

Yes, I changed the name from Little Fictions to Body Fictions. During Sunday’s performance, I had the deep pleasure of being in the same dressing room as my dear friend, the brilliant Claire Porter, whom I met in 1981 when we were in the same Laban program.  We were talking and I said that telling people about the kind of work that I do (not ballet, not modern dance, not contemporary) is challenging. It is theatrical, it isn’t dancey dance. My inspirations range from Wigman to Bausch to Butoh and street dance.  After seeing Mammal, she said that the word body was important, because the work is so from the body.

Which is true, I work not choreograph from tendus, plies and steps ( I do them, of course), but from the organs, fascia, blood, membranes,cells and all the mysteries of the body.  I work from image, connect it inward to bodily systems and then send it out as  movement expression and connection. Some people call that somatic dance, but I find that term to be a bit academic.

Those body journeys can take me into some wild territory, out into untended, ragged turf, stumbling ground, places of rampant, vibrant growth, but also decay and death.  There are beasts there, as well as blossoms.  I work with it all. I am not always in control.

The Traveler is set to the music of Tom Waits.  I was drawn to him because he is the wildest creature that I have found in the musical world – a shaman, a beast, a magician, a wonder.  Watching and listening to him reminds me to keep it real, to be unafraid, to go for it all the way to the wildest edges.  Check it out.