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

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The other side of Cho, Spanish Galgo, and former street dog of Cadiz, Spain.  It takes a lot of restorative yoga to be able to sustain cross-country gallops when you are 17-years old.

Today I am off to Boston to teach my workshop, Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  It is exciting to me to return to Boston to teach.  Many years ago, Pam and I were among the founders of Green Street Studios, which has become a vibrant center for dance and performance in Cambridge.  I developed my chops as a choreographer in Boston, and made many dances with many fine, generous dancers.  Tomorrow’s workshop is at the sister studio, The Dance Complex, another hive of creative energy for movement and dance.  So I am going home.

And not.  I feel a profound difference now which has to do with my long absence from the conventional concert dance scene and from Boston in particular.  I am older, and I have spent the past 13 years in two different kinds of studios.  The one with the wooden floor where I move and stretch like a dancer, and the other – the arena, the field, the paddock, the stall, the saddle, with my partners, the horses.  I feel a little like the wild dog coming home after a big tear across the fields.  But there is a cosiness there too – a desire to settle and nestle into the moment.

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