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.

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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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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.

You can help support artists and art!

Please DONATE to our Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!

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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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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

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Thank you!!!!!!

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Today I feel like i am out, exposed, vulnerable.  Launching our Indiegogo campaign did that.  Pushing the “launch” key was very nervous making — like a premiere, or a coming out party.  Interesting.

For the next month +, I HAVE to be on social media in a very active way.  Not hiding in the cracks, being careful, but really out there with my whole heart.  Asking for help.  Asking for money.  Soooo hard.

When I got sober 30+ years ago, I had to learn to ask for help.  For whatever reason, I am less good at that now.  Maybe then, this is good practice.

So here it is.  I need your help.  I have a big dream, which is to make and share Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs, this beautiful, beautiful performance work.  It is the hardest and best thing that I can do at this time.

Please help me pull it off.

Thank you.

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We are on the cusp of launching our bold Indiegogo campaign.  Just putting on the finishing touches, polishing up our perks and getting ready to invite you to become a part of Little Fictions, Ragged Memoirs, my most ambitious dance theater project yet.  Watch for it!  (We will let you know, of course)

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I am focused on the dance part at the moment. After seeing Soledad Barrio at the Joyce, I bought tickets to see Crystal Pite’s brilliant company Kidd Pivot in December.

But that is not the real story. The real story is that in this video of Crystal Pite improvising by Brian Johnson and in the poem that follows (thank you to the Writer’s Almanac) are two of the reasons that I want to live to ninety.  Movement that is common and uncommon. Both ravishing. Both essential.  It’s about living a moving life, living wide awake, riding the moment.  Start that now.

To Ninety

from cinematographer Brian Johnson:  I was commissioned by Knowledge Network in 2009 to create 19 short pieces in collaboration with the same number of artists across BC. These were then assembled into a kind of cultural survey of the province – mapping the diversity of those who live and create here. It can be seen in its entirety on the Knowledge website.

http://www.knowledge.ca/program/cartographies

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My friend, the beautiful dancer and aerialist Paola Styron sends me poems.  This is her latest gift.  She is the one who took me deeper into Rumi and Hafiz and whose dancing is like poetry – a thing of essential wonder and mystery.

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon   by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

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