ah! The weather is amazing. I am procrastinating on my grad school applications and enjoying a well-crafted Bay Arean americano. So this should be short- really I should be done before my caffeine peak, so that I can use that induced high for the good of the application process and not rambling here.

I saw Sara Shelton Mann's solo performed by Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos Jr. I truly enjoyed it. I think it would benefit being performed in a larger space than the Joe Goode Annex, which Sara was hinting at earlier in the day. I would see it again. Maybe 5 more times.

I also participated in Melinda Ring's project Mouse Auditions. I have tons to say about that. About all it encompassed regarding voyerism, auditions, director versus interpreters, power agreements, and the humiliation within those topics. I think there are ways it could have been better executed. I think it would have been very different in another context (i.e. a more urban setting or a more populated place such as a museum). It was first put on at the Whitney Biennial. I am sure the outcome there was vastly different. I felt some loss as to what my part was in it and the why I should invest in it became unclear. Usually in the context of an audition there is competition and a sense of "pick me. pick me!!" But here, we all understood there would never be any picking. So I think the tension diluted for this. The public viewing definitely gave me the sense of performing, but it wasn't clear what I was performing. So, maybe Ring was going for that lack of clarity and I think it brought forth some interesting experiences for the participants and the audience, but I also think it clouded it and made it in some regards, uninteresting. I hope I see Melinda Ring continue to investigate this project and find ways to make it thrive and be at it's potential.

I am working on my solo, GOLD. I am finding my way out of the cream-of-wheat-type-confusion and back into precision and clarity.

at Lobot Gallery, on The Fountain.

GOLD Rehearsal @ Lobot with Wet Garden and Brian Durvin from Phoebedance on Vimeo.

about my solo practice: writing during my residency at ODC

OK, so here I am with a residency at ODC. it doesn't include rehearsal space nor a budget nor class discounts. I mean it really isn't a residency about support. It is a residency about us discovering how we support ourselves, how we manage with nothing, how we self-produce without a budget. It's funny to me that there is a residency for such a thing. I keep hearing mentors talk about the "real world" and about not expecting to get paid. I keep asking myself WHY is this the norm? WHY are we telling the emerging artists that they need to expect NOT to get paid. What are we doing? Why is this considered OK and furthermore, why is it what we are continuing to accept and teach to the future artists? It reminds me of women telling their daughters not to speak out, not to ask to be paid the same as men, not to be sexually empowered, etc. etc. How are we viewing ourselves? Where is the critical dialogue about the status quo and what we intend to do about it? I know that I don't feel good about this acceptance of disregard and devaluing of dance artists. I don't particularly have a solution, but it is a topic that I think we can collectively investigate.

Nonetheless, I am doing the residency. I am doing the work. And my chosen idea/focus/interest is my solo practice. What is it that I do when i am alone in the studio? What is it that I do when I am alone or with others, regardless. What is MY PRACTICE? pfff.... good fucking question. I have watched myself over the last month basically not practicing. not rehearsing, not working. I have rehearsed once, but it was not organized. Time was spent errantly playing with the work. I recorded it but moved the camera 5 mins into the rehearsal and ultimately recorded 90 minutes of the ceiling. I have written about the work and scribbled ideas down. I have played with the material and thought about costumes. But without format. Without organized discipline. Now, I think there is value to unorganized creative time/space. But without the container (aka the practice/method/format) the creatively is blown away like dust in the wind.

So, what do I have for tomorrow's showing? I have dust in my eyes. The dust I am supposed to be dancing in. The dust I want on my skin. because it makes my skin soft and grounded. the dust connects my skin to my bones, if that makes sense.

So, I want to write a bit about GOLD, but first, I am going to publicly PLAN my method. My solo method. MY practice. I think I want it to involved silence/stillness, chaos, writing, and precision/exactness.

Here is my plan for now:
10 minutes of silence/stillness
10 minutes of warm up
10 minutes of CHAOS, CRAZINESS, MESSY BOUNDARY CROSSING
30 minutes of organized honing of choreography, using tools and focusing on precision, speed, and exactness(recorded)
10 minutes of exploration and open score of exactness(recorded)
10 minutes of writing

total rehearsal time: 1 hr 20 mins

**I'll let ya'll know how it goes. 

GOLD

well dear solo, dear sparkly friend, dear dirt, dear failure, dear self absorption, dear earth.

I chose failure. During last summer, I went to the YBCA to see a queer women of color film festival and there was a documentary about a witch. She told us that she used to have rage as a child. She used to get so so so angry and her mother would command, "Go outside! And DIG a hole in the earth and get in it!!!" And so this child would do just this. She would go outside and dig a hole and get in and be there for sometimes hours. Finally her mother would come outside, kneel down to her child, putting dirt on the child's forehead and kissing her, and calmly say, "Mother Earth has taken all your anger, hasn't she? Come on inside now love and have a cup of tea."

My soul wants to do this. To dig a hole. and get inside and stay there and let the anger and grief and shame seep from my body into the earth. I want the dirt to cradle my bones and sweep my skin.

What is the gold about? Why is it there? is it the excellence? Is it the assumed excellence? the idea of excellence? the fear of failure? is it real? cultural? Is it because I like gold? I like it's richness. I like how it lives in the dirt, with the dirt, encased in dirt, like my bones and my skin.

http://ldolphin.org/Gold.html

walking in circles before laying down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1YX6A3MKVs

this solo is about failure.

in response to http://spangbergianism.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/seventeen-points-for-the-future-of-dance/

First off, i just need to write some. I dont know how much of this is actually a response to this guy's list of heady claims, but, while reading it, I realized I need to voice all in my head about dance. 

These months, in San Francisco and Oakland, I have been much more reserved in my interactions with dancers here. I don't know them very well. I definitely don't call them or go for a beer with them after shows, or even go to shows with them, or talk to them. In fact, i spend most of my time alone or with visual artists and non dance-focused people. I am sincerely informed within my work in dance just as much by these others as I might be with dancers themselves. 

last night I was talking about the word dance and the term choreographer. Yesterday I was looking at Tere O'Connor's new blog, BLEED. I was think about his project that is somehow a trilogy or a tri-part project based on his ways of thinking or something. It immediately came across as "white man makes trilogy about his brilliant head."... I was kinda like, "what? there are 3 distinct ways in which your mind makes dance. and you can separate them? And you want to do that? And you think that is what dance should be sourced from? your own head." Do we think our heads are special in a way that makes us want to focus on the specialness? I am not sure that is effective. Also, I have always really loved O'Connor's work. Sometimes I realize though how locked into classical technique it is. How NYC it is.   And how NYC sometimes instills this slightly cheesy tacky crisp American-pop-ego into the dance that happens there and it worries me sometimes. 

And then there is the academia of dance. The other white male, younger, and his caffeine induced exclamations about the future of dance. "dance as we know it is a dead opera." "Choreography is not the art of making dances (a directional set of tools), it is a generic set of capacities to be applied to any kind of production, analysis or organization." 

#2, 3, 4, 7, 9 OMIT- it's obvious and old and unnecessary in his point making. #8 needs to be expanded on.

10. For dance to have a future it needs to engage in a process of deskilling, i.e. to cancel the proprietary understanding of technique in favor of individual or context specific constructions of abilities, over the generic sense of dance as a sui generis technology.

- I beg to differ. 

#11, why are you talking about architects and Fordism... it's too blablabla. What are you trying to say? Don't use the term Fordism- you sound like an idiot.

#12, great point. yes, I think we must consider ALL bodies. All elements. All parts. But in a society where non-human-body objects are the focus, where most people, who are not dancers, don't even consider the body and have much more awareness in the choreography of non-human-bodies, I worry that this idea needs to be complicated a bit in order to really function. BMC exists in response to the focus on everything but the human body- or at least offers a more integrated way of experiencing the body. Anyway, BMC is out-dated and Axis Syllabus is a much more developed methodology to consider. You might be proposing that we need to just be focusing on the relations of ALL bodies at any given time. To consider them with equal relevance. 

#13 really?

#14 You could have just written the last sentence. And anyway, we all know that. 

#15... 

anyway, I suggest reading the works of the female authors that presented some of these ideas long before this guy: for example, Anne Bogart or Judith Butler

On Gold:

golden babe-os taking a bath

http://www.ridingwithstrangers.com/post/15966905011/rws-mix-01

Also:

My solo:

current title: "Near misses of excellence"

some writing on my solo. it involves fabricated space. it invites you into a room which is the thing left unsaid. it is the entrance into the near misses. the desired misses. the near misses of excellence are chosen? and is the excellence kept in this room? in this vast space. because that is what it feels like.

happening here (photo credit: kristine eudey)

 

kickstarter

told me to make it exquisite.
shorter
brighter
more concise
more clear
direct

to get the money, you need to have a great pitch. A clean, concise, clear, perfect, wonderful, timely, effective, powerful, sexy, short, attractive, direct video that makes the people want to give you money.

when i hear these things it is similar to when someone is speaking in a another language...

kinda like this:

transparency
people's goddamn obsessive thinking and analyzing and opinion creating
ugh
shut up i want to say to them
shut up a thousand times
because it is bullshit what you are saying to me
to my ears
to my heart
and i would like to go and live in the forest, where it is the birds that chatter in my ears
and the sun that blast upon my face


because, you see, you all cannot stop. the incessant chatter
the endless analyzing and explaining.

it was why i have longed my whole life to be a nun. to hold that black and white starchy guard close over my ears and down to my ankles. That shut you up. To shut everyone up.

I would like to give away the bed and the desk and the bike. I would offer you the clothes in my closet
and i would go away
where the chatter is less
where the endless striving ceases
and it is the birds that chatter in my ears
and the sun that blasts upon my face.


The river will take me away. Will take away it all
because we/you have figured it out, haven't you? you have the endless answers.
you have done the analyzing, the obsessive hours of thinking.
and i cannot see.
because it hurts you see.
it all hurts, this endless stuff we engage in. you succeeded, did you? you figured out the perfect song, and you made a better functioning mop, and you can now offer gardening to everyone, and everything has improved.

Ode to my First

the first piece I ever choreographed was about intimacy between two people. it was based on Felini's movie, "La Strada". That was in 2008 (only 4 years ago!). It was a duet with myself and Jessica Pusateri at UCSD in Studio 3 of the Molli and Arthur Wagner Dance Center. It's funny to see what followed in my life during these last 4 years, regarding intimacy. If I was to re-approach the topic of intimacy, it would look quite different.  Anyway, happy to be wiser, calmer.

Here's an Ode to my past sweet self:

My next work is a solo. "Defining excellence"

Make the Work

if I were to go to any of the people that love me who also understand art making and dancing and I were to ask them for some piece of advice, some small bit of crucial wisdom they would all say what *Kristine Eudey said to me at 4:50am this morning. They would say, "make the work." It is a sentence that brings tears to my eyes. Because I have everything I need to make work. everything.


So I read this email she sent me at 4:50am. I read in my bed only 1 hour later and I laid there and felt that paralyzing abyss that I sometimes feel in the morning. The abyss that brings forth the tip of the fear of the world and of life and of the mysteriousness. That deep respect for the proximity of death and for the life that was given without explanation to us. And we hold that life everyday and sometimes we seek answers and explanations, but without fail, the humility of mystery stays with us and so we are humble and beautiful and we must practice acceptance. To be human is to accept the awareness of life without the understanding. So, sometimes, in the morning, when I wake up, I see that and then I turn my attention to... well, normally, to coffee. I get up and I make it like a religion, like an elixir that will help me be and do.


I am aware that most of my writings and work are kind of sad and kind of deep-set in the dark spaces of life. But by no means am I a sad dark person. In fact, it is my own light hand-in-hand with my awareness of our cultural obsession with pretty light things and makes me want to make art about the integrated realness of things. That dark and light are one in the same, both worthy of respect and both here with us and in us. 


*Kristine Eudey (one of the most fascinating photographers based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an artistic colleague I respect and trust deeply) and I were discussing making work and the vastness of what one can do with a day, etc, etc. this morning and there in the sky outside my window, a rainbow extended itself up and over the air beneath it, and a big fluffy orange kitty cat crawled through a hole in the fence, prowling through the wet grass of my backyard, with intention for mischief and discovery.