Category Archives: the dance

meet Christine Joly de Lotbinniere

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I have been collaborating with this costume diva for over two decades.  She has made costumes for Branch, The Yellow Wallpaper, Antigone’s Dream, Wonderland to name a few.  She is a wild woman.

Now she is building my costume for Mammal. 

Mammal is a “shape-shifting” dance in which the character is a pentimento: repeatedly under-drawn and over-painted aspects of male/female, human/animal qualities, movements, responses and perceptions. The dance is a cellular, poetic echolocation that viscerally connects male and female, human and non-human at the porous borderland where they intersect and blend.

The design r & d period for this one has been particularly strange and interesting, beginning with when it was called Beast. The costume ideas have morphed then morphed again and again.  We think that we have it.  Part of the challenge is that the dance is a growing, shifting, live thing – so that catching it in color and shape has been slippery.

I will be performing Mammal as a work-in-progress at the Body-Mind Centering Conference at Reed College in Portland, OR on July 25.  If you are in the neighborhood, come and see!

 

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Please DONATE to our Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!

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meet Susan Hamburger

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SUSAN HAMBURGER (Lighting Design) is the newest member of the Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs team.  We are so excited to be working with her.

SUSAN is based in New York City. She 
has worked extensively in live theater with such notable artists as Craig
 Harris, Lucinda Childs, Shirin Neshat, Philip Glass, Mark Rucker, and numerous dance companies including the Bessie Award winning Urban Bush Women and Bessie winner Nora Chipaumire. Other notable dance companies include Troika Ranch, Blondell Cummings, Urban Tap, Ellis Wood, Alice Farley, Christopher Caines, Susan Chirniak, Carol Nolte and David Parker and The Bang Group among others. She has also designed The Abundance Project,
 Hamletmachine, Logic of the Birds, On The Verge, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Little Shop Of Horrors, Suddenly Last Summer, The Great Highway, West Side Story, The Cryptogram, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Waiting for Godot and Mame, as well as many other original plays and performance pieces.

Here is what kind of magic she does with light!

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Please DONATE to our Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!

 

 

 

blessed to be obsessed

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I had a lovely conversation the other day with my friend Adrianne Ryan, a horsewoman and photographer who lives on Martha’s Vineyard.  We were talking about work and she said, “Well, I am blessed to be obsessed.”

Me too.  Movement – finding it, growing it, blowing it open, turning it into something ineffable, inevitable and fierce is my obsession (one of them.)

It is work and it isn’t work.  The movement claims, re-shapes and hones me.  And then I want to share it – speak through it, connect with it.

Last year, during a creative residency, I became obsessed with editing and layering these photographs taken by Pam White (above) that have become a part of The Traveler, one of the dances in the LFRM trilogy. I wanted to evoke something about layering, overlay, what is there and not quite there in all of us.

Yesterday I listened to a wonderful Diane Rehm podcast with Buddhist priest, philosopher and writer Mathieu Ricard.  He was talking about his new book Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World.

Listening to him, I realized that my wanting to share and connect with the world through movement is a form of altruism.  Maybe earlier in my career it was about something else, something less generous.  But now it is about making a connection, about sharing the best of myself and reaching out to the best in you.  I felt that so clearly when I watched Kyle Abraham’s solos filmed by Carrie Schneider, that his vulnerability was a deep gift to us.  I was/am so deeply moved by that.

As artists, I think we have to aim higher than personal ambition, beyond what we know to reach that skyward, earthly part of ourselves that connects to the skyward, earthly place in each other.

Please help me share my work with you.

You can do that by making a donation to my

Indiegogo campaign.

 

Thank you!!

meet Paola Styron

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Paola dancing with Capprichio in FLIGHT                Photos:  Jeffrey Anderson

Aerialist.  Dancer. Writer.  Artist.  Beautiful.

I had the great and rare privilege of working with Paola several years ago when we created FLIGHT.  That work was inspired by her and could not have happened without her.

Paola has danced with the greats:  Martha Clarke and Margie Gillis among many, many others.  She has agreed to be my director for Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs.  My tough, generous, wise outside eye and mentor.  I am so very, very lucky.

Please help nourish this big, wild dream and so that we can share it with you.  Please make a donation to our

Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!

T