Photo: Pam White; Paula Josa-Jones in “Auf Dein Eigenes Wohl”
How do you think of dance?
Is it shapes?
Steps moving across a stage?
Or is it the body
steeped in its years
on earth?
Is it the body inseparable
from everything?
Are you dancing now?
If you are breathing,
that is a start.
Are you listening,
to the sound of that breath?
Better still.
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!
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
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.
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.
Thank you!!