Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

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!!

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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

bucket brigade

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Seth Godin shared this post about bucket brigades.  I liken it to a good crowdfunding campaign, like our current Indiegogo effort.

We are trying to fill the lake with $$ to create wonderful art.  It takes a lot of buckets, some big some small, to fill that pond.  Every drop helps.

Please help, please donate!

A good bucket brigade

We can get more done, if we care enough. And trust enough.

From the brilliant Cory Doctorow’s award-winning novella:

I love a good bucket brigade, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn’t just passing things from person to person. It’s a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don’t need to know anything about the system’s whole state in order to help optimize it.

In a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person’s slowness is the whole line’s problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.

meet Katherine Freer

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I met Kate by happenstance.  I was searching for a projection designer, got her name, liked her and loved what I saw of her work.

I am THRILLED that we are working together.  She is smart, visionary, playful.  And her work is beautiful.  What more could one want in a collaborator?

Katherine is a multimedia designer working in theater, film, and installation. Her work is driven by the love of storytelling and the desire to turn her wildest imaginings into reality. Her background in film and computer science combine to generate work that is not only aesthetically beautiful, but pushes the boundaries of conventional theatrical video.

In addition to designing video for the stage, her installation work has been presented nationally and internationally. Venues include the National Building Museum, the Hammond Museum, 3LD Art & Technology Center, Front Room Gallery, and the World Wide Words Festival (Denmark). Her early video work includes Beatbox Flute Inspector Gadget Remix, a simple yet popular video with over 28 million views on YouTube and People’s Choice Award nomination. Kate has taught master classes at Harvard University, Syracuse University, New York University, University of Iowa, and Albany High School. Katherine is a founding member of Imaginary Media.

Here is a little sample of her work for the great Liz Lerman.

Healing Wars Backstage from Kate Freer on Vimeo.

Please Donate to our Indiegogo campaign

and help Kate do her gorgeous work.

Thank you!