Category Archives: the performer

May15

performance!

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EDITED FEET (6 of 55) - Version 2Photo:  Pam White;  Sculpture:  Gillian Jagger

I will be performing on June 28 as part of the Body-Mind Centering Association conference at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.  The performance is billed as “a showcase of somatic choreographers.”  I am not sure what that means, and there seems to be some disagreement online.

For the moment, I am liking what Barbara Mahler, from the Naropa Institute has to say about it: “I believe we, as a culture, have come to think of somatic work as having a loose and undefined physicality, as well as the opposite, which is dance as a conglomerate of outer-worldly movements and contortions, acrobatics and legs wrapping around one’s head. That is not all there is to choreography, dancing and performance.  For me, choreography has form, structure time, design, composition, emotion, perspective, clarity, movement invention, and rigor; and the many parts make up a whole.”

I will be performing the full-length version of SPEAK, which is rooted in my curiosity about language and the absence of language in its usual form.  It was sparked by work with my autistic godson and some physical research into aphasia, apraxia and synesthesia.  In the dance, I obsessively manipulate a number of bodily “languages:” gestural, postural, spatial and dynamic.  Are somatics a part of that?  Absolutely.  Was that my point of entry in making the dance?  Absolutely not.  Could somatics be a point of entry for making a dance?  Absolutely.  Do somatic explorations thread their way through my dancemaking practice?  Absolutely.

I will be sharing the program with Veena Chandra, Chrissy Nelson, Elaine Colandrea, Kate Morgan and a film by Lauren Kearns.  Should be a lovely evening.  Contact me to inquire about tickets.

 

 

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May9

growing the dance

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Photo:  Pam White, from The Traveler by Paula Josa-Jones

Making solo work can be lonely.  In the studio I am alone. This is new for me, always the director, always in the company of interpreters (dancers) of my visions. Now I have set my feet on a new path – making a suite of solo dances that will premiere next year.  It is scary, exhilarating, necessary and as I said, often lonely.

During my February residency at the  Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, there was the collegial support – shared meals where we could diffuse the intensity of a day spent alone with our work.  There was something reassuring and playful so that making the journey back into the studio the next day felt more of a shared journey.

One of the solo dances I am building, The Traveler, is about a character who is similarly alone – journeying through perilous landscapes, finding and losing balance as the terrain shifts and buckles.  Besides the movement, I am making film, working with a projectiion designer, pushing into new visual landscapes.

I have not been sharing images or news about the work.  It has felt important to hold it, to let it grow like mushrooms in the dark, the quiet, the damp.  I am reminded of this by Mary Oliver:

Today

by Mary Oliver

Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.

“Today” by Mary Oliver from A Thousand Mornings. © The Penguin Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Dec27

wild woman

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messenger 3

The Messenger, choreographed and performed by Paula Josa-Jones; Photo:  Nick Novick

“You have to make yourself some kind of an antenna for the songs to come to you.  So you have to make yourself a kind of a musical yourself.  You have to be of music and have music in you – some way for songs to continue to want to live in you or near you.  You gotta be real quiet sometimes if you want catch the big ones.”

Tom  Waits, July 1992, Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words

I made The Messenger in 1992, the same year as this quote by Tom Waits.  What he said there about music then is what I have been saying for as many years about dance.  That you have to become dance.  You can’t do dance, it has to eat you alive and spit you out speaking in tongues and breathing fire or tender and wet as a newborn lamb.

I am making a new solo called The Traveler (Moth to the flame) to music by Tom Waits.  I will perform it at the APAP Booking Dance Festival in New York on January 10.  The dance is about a traveler in an unpredictable landscape.  It is a dance that is chewing me up.  It is so hard, physically and emotionally, that I am often afraid to rehearse it.  Waits’s music is like the mule driver and the light in the dark.

A friend of mine said that she was looking for a way to dance (she is 50) that won’t destroy her.  I am older than she is but don’t seem to have that kind of restraint.  Working on this dance, I enter through a door that looks like it won’t explode and then find myself in a mine field.  Sometimes it is the music but mostly it is what comes slithering and snapping out of my body.  I don’t want to shut the door.

Building work from and for my own body only is harrowing and exhilarating.  For many years, I opened those doors for dancers in my company, and traveled with them wherever things led.  Dancing now is different than it was twenty years ago.  I have learned how to move in back and forth from what is a sheer, intuitive download to refining form without losing the heat.  I have more patience and faith.  That only took a lifetime.

Come and see!

Booking Dance Festival

 

 

 

 

Nov25

performance: mark the date!

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DSC00272Photo:  Pam White

On January 10, I will be performing part of a new solo, The Traveler (moth to the flame) at the Booking Dance Festival NYC.  Once again, we will be at the beautiful Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Time TBA, but probably around 8 pm.

Broadway  at  60th  Street,  New  York,  NY

www.bookingdance.com

I hope to see you there!