Category Archives: the dance

Nov30

mammal (save the date)

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Costume for Mammal by Christine Joly de Lotbinniere

Last year I wrote this about the new dance I am building, called The Traveler (terra incognita), part of my new solo work, Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs, which will premiere in Cambridge at the Dance Complex in June 2016.

“It is a dance that is chewing me up.  It is so hard, physically and emotionally, that I am often afraid to rehearse it.  Tom Waits’s music is like the mule driver and the light in the dark. Working on this dance, I enter through a door that I hope won’t explode and find myself sometimes in a mine field, other times in a field of flowers.  It is the music, but mostly what comes slithering and snapping out of my body.”

This year I have been opening another door to a new work called Mammal.  Initially called it Beast, but felt that Mammal was a roomier title, one that had space for the ferocious and the tender.  The dance is still downloading, but the essence is there.

I will be performing an excerpt of Mammal January 17 at the Booking Dance Festival in New York City.  Here are the details.  I will post times and ticket information shortly.  Please save the date.  Please come!

January 17
5:30-11:30 pm

The Allen Room
Frederick P. Rose Hall
Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center

Located in the Time Warner Building at Central Park’s Columbus Circle
Broadway & West 60th St.
New York City

 

 

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Oct23

the dance of fascia

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During the recent ISMETA (International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association) annual meeting, the dinner conversation turned (passionately) to fascia. What is it?  How does it work?  It is the connective body-suit – the structure that, if we removed everything else, would still show our shape as a body.  It is the tissue that supports everything else, through which the other structures thread.  When the fascia becomes dry or inelastic, so do we.  Habitual restrictions are born in the fascia.

Our mobility, integrity, and resilience are determined in large part by how well hydrated our fascia is. In fact, what we call “stretching a muscle” is actually the fibers of the connective tissue (collagen) gliding along one another on the mucous-y proteins called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs for short). GAGs, depending on their chemistry, can glue layers together when water is absent, or allow them to skate and slide on one another when hydrated.1,2 This is one of the reasons most injuries are fascial. If we get “dried out” we are more brittle and are at much greater risk for erosion, a tear, or a rupture. (read more)

Now watch this beautiful video.  How have you nourished your fascia today?  The principles of somatics, including variation, slowing, awareness, connectivity, breath support and focusing on the whole as well as the parts are all essential food for our fascia.

Sep27

watch this dance!

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276-Anna-Halprin

I have been savoring the posts from the Tamalpa Institute in celebration of Anna Halprin’s 95th birthday. This is one of the dances presented during the festivities. It is exquisite. Dohee Lee has staged her interpretation of “The Prophetess,” originally created by Anna in 1948. Watch through to the end – it moved me to tears.

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Here is Anna in the original version!

Jul15

mammal

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This is a sample of the design that Christine Joly de Lotbiniere is designing for Mammal, one of the dances in Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs.

Here is her latest note to me: “This is one of 12 panels for the skirt; each panel having a variation on a theme. I think the hand sewing of the black appliqués, though labor intensive,  lends a very interesting quality to the pattern…. we just would not have achieved this with machine stitching them down. I used vintage threads throughout, some of them from the 1950’s and the quality of the thread is so superior to what we have today! You can decide to leave the hanging threads or to remove them. I believe they lend a fantastic “mammal” organic feeling.

I purchased leggings and will be overdyeing those, possibly painting into them as well. The gloves have been patterned so they are next up: extra length added to them and ombre dyed from black at the fingertips to nude at the top of the arms, I will be applying texture and pattern to those as well. They will have latex applied on the palm and fingers.”

Exciting!  The journey of this dance has been intense. This is how I describe the dance: Mammal is a “shape-shifting” dance – a cellular, poetic echolocation that viscerally connects male and female, human and non-human at the porous borderland where they intersect and blend.

It feels like I have been invoking this dance for two years.  In the process, I have experienced a re-wiring of my nervous system and a re-configuration of my body’s systems:  fluid, bone, cells, fascia.  It is as if my flesh had to be readied to receive the transmission.

For Christine, this has meant staying in the saddle as the dance bucks, shifts and morphs.  But then, she is good at that, really, really good, which is why we have worked together for so long.

If you love dance, if you love theater, design, please help to support this audacious, ambitious project.  We are nearing the end of our Indiegogo campaign, but not the end of our work, our inspiration, and our desire.

You can help support artists and art!

Please DONATE to our Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!