Raving in Wind (1996)

I came across this and wanted to share it.  The music is acommissioned score by the brilliant Ingram Marshall, and the video by the extraordinary Ellen Sebring.  I developed this 23 years ago during a residency at Yaddo, inspired by traveling to the Galapagos and seeing the waved albatrosses, and by the extraordinary avian drawings of Leonard Baskin. The title is from a poem by Ann Lauterbach.

Enjoy!

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The 2019 Summer Festival at the Wassaic Project happens this Saturday.

At 5 pm I will be performing Garçon to the music of Hugues Le Bars.

Please join us!!!

Cost
Free

When
Saturday, August 3rd, 2019
12:00 PM to Late

Where
Luther Barn Field
17 Furnace Bank Road
Wassaic, NY 12592

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I have just finished making Rabbit Hole,  a new solo for the exquisite Lorraine Chapman. She will perform it later this month at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.

Lorraine is a master performer with an impressive resume and some serious ballet chops. She told me that she has wanted to work with me for twenty years.  I am deeply honored.

Making this dance was not easy. I ask that dancers leap into the turbulent, wild waters of the unknown, the mythic, the mystical.  That they give themselves over to the moment.  That they let go of what they know and step into the dark.

Lorraine was up for that challenge and what she has done with this work is dazzling. Watch for it!!!

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Spent the afternoon in Boston yesterday, performing at the Outside the Box Festival. It was very, very hot – 95 degrees.  However, I was a “roving” performer, so I could choose my moments, choose my time and place.  There was something wonderful and rigorous about being a part of this flow of people, discovering more about relationship, audience and the ephemeral, fleeting performative moment.

I found myself bowing, often to young black men and women. I have felt devastated by the happenings in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Dallas, and the long list of other beings and cities. I feel helpless, disconnected, even though my son in law is black and my granddaughter a beautiful blend of Nepali and African American.  Perhaps the anonymous, concealed envelope of The Traveler allowed me to cross a bridge, even momentarily.

I want to connect, communicate. I want to say that your lives matter to me in a very personal and immediate way.  It is not abstract.  I want each and every one of us to have limitless opportunity, a deep sense of safety and nurturance, and the boundless ability to pursue happiness.

Bowing was a way of saying “Hello. I see you.”  It is not enough, but it is a beginning.

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I have not recovered or slowed down from last weekend’s performances at The Dance Complex.  Like The Traveler or The Messenger pictured above, I am moving on, still dancing. Tomorrow I will be performing SPEAK at the Performance Mix Festival at Abrons Arts Center in New York.  Then off to Montreal for the Body-Mind Centering Association conference where I will be teaching and performing.

I want to thank with all my heart those who came to the performances, and all who supported us.  That includes our generous Indiegogo donors, my friends Annie and Stan who hosted some of us during our time in Cambridge, my fabulous, stellar creative team, and the superb staff at The Dance Complex.  And of course my lovely, wise wife and creative partner, Pam White.

Read Marcia Siegel’s review of Of This Body

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I had the great privilege of performing the premiere of MAMMAL last weekend at the venerable La MaMa Theater in New York.

I first went to La MaMa around 1981 to see the brilliant Kazuo Ohno perform.  Watching him slowly raise a single chrysanthemum into the air, his whole body a trembling stem is an indelible kinetic memory.  It is also where I first met Eiko and Koma, who later, during a Delicious Moving workshop in the Catskills, dismantled and then re-calibrated everything that I had previously understood about all things performative.  I had just finished the Laban program, and my body was full of spirals and space.  I will never forget Koma saying tersely to me, “Just go down.”

Eiko came to my performance.  It may be the first time that she has seen me perform.  I was deeply honored by her presence, and by the opportunity to be dancing in this iconic space.

On the second day of the performance, while warming up, I suddenly felt the unmistakable presence of my old, wise stallion, Capprichio – in me, in the space.  I felt his head, the weight of those bones, the mass of him.  I remember thinking, “You can’t move like this.”  And he showed me the quiver of himself, the wildness and the unpredictability.

I am reading Kent de Spain’s wonderful book, The Landscape of the Now.  It is a breathtaking compendium of improvisational practices and reflections by the Big Ones:  Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Nancy Stark Smith, Ruth Zaporah, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay.

MAMMAL is a choreography, but it is also an improvisation, and much shaped by what shows up in the room with an audience and how deep I can drop into that well as I set foot on stage.  It is about gaze and stillness and impulse.  Connection and curiously, faith – that the dance is there, and that I can let it come to me as I also plunge into it.

MAMMAL and the other two dances from OF THIS BODY, THE TRAVELER and SPEAK are coming soon to The Dance Complex in Cambridge, MA.  It is the world premiere of THE TRAVELER, a piece that has been more than two years in the making.  You can buy tickets here:  Of This Body
http://ofthisbody.bpt.me/

Come and see!

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This weekend!

Saturday, April 30 7:30

Sunday, May 1, 2 pm

Read more about it and purchase tickets

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My friend Derrill (father of my godson Jacob) and I had some fun looking at the Tiny Desk Concerts during my last visit. I can’t remember which one of us found Mucca Pazza.

For those of you who have not discovered them, here is your Monday fun fix. Enjoy!

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I watched the video of Gaelynn Lea, winner of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert competition last night.  I am not the same today.  I am changed.  By the end of her 22 minute set on the program, I was in tears.  Gaelynn suffers from Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or brittle bone disease.  She is, nonetheless, all fire, sweetness and beauty in a completely unexpected body.  As I watched, as I let her music move through me, move me, I felt like I was seeing something that is ineffable, impossible to tether to any one description.  By the end, I felt that she had schooled me.  That art and love are all.  That taking what we are given and rendering it to whatever perfection and devotion that we can is everything.

She reminds me of why I do not want to speak ill of any presidential candidate, as much as I am wounded by what they say.  I don’t want to go there.  I want to anchor myself in the place of passion, of desire for what is, in the language of the Buddha, right action, right speech.  In focusing on what I want, not what I fear and loathe. Gaelynn and her music remind me not to waste a moment in hate.  See it, transform it, one note, one gesture at a time.

I chose this photograph because of the branches and my body in them.  The anatomy of the tree.  The difficult anatomy of this musician I so admire and yes, love.  My own body – so willing, so fierce, so lovely.  Each of us rendering art “of these bodies” – of flesh, earth and spirit.

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