looking for your comments

so much has happened in the past few days. sunday chip, sharon and i performed the piece at Java Monkey (a coffee house/wine bar) for Kodac Harrison/Rupert Fike's Sunday night poetry series. its a poetry event - but for poets, they are pretty concrete thinkers. and so it was great to feel the shift that had to take place in the room with the abstract base of this piece. and though if it is performed for a more abstract crowd (an abstract crowd????? now, that's a concept.. monkey brain stop!) anyway if it is performed for a crowd that is more on the abstract/modern dance end of the spectrum - it is too literal. ahhhh the border. i always play on the borders.

which makes me think about living between worlds, or as we say in the Herakles piece - he didn't really feel like he belonged in either world, so sometimes he fell asleep with his feet in one and his head in the other -

between two worlds. in this piece is the worlds of: spirit/body, music/voice/body, stage persona/human persona/audience. hmmm there are quite a few of these combinations. Anyone want to jump in here? I could go on for another six paragraphs on this concept. would love some other responses to building these. I am interested that i started with dualities (which i am so working to get beyond) and then i asked - where are the trinities? which of course in this piece you can't avoid the trinitarian concepts... and of course in general, am not interested in a restriction of numbers. rather than between two worlds, its actually that play between infinite worlds..... so this is one spider web spiral. here comes another.

when performing at java monkey (which went great by the way. including that the moment we finished the skies opened with a huge rain deluge. huge. so all the people on the patio watching had to make an instant dash for inside - thus delightfully thronging into the stage area. and after only a few more moments - a sheet of water, like a curtain, came pouring down, right on what would be the curtain line of the stage. the visual was gorgeous. the imminent danger to chip's violin which was on the stage was a little freaky - but all is well.

while performing at java monkey (back to the story, celeste) i remembered why i love to also perform my stage work in alternate spaces - cafes and the like. because they demand of me the improviser in the moment with the material. of course the stage is the size of a postage stamp, so all that great movement has to instantly rearrange, rescale, reinterpret.... and then there is also the immediacy of the audience. which can be immediate in the theatre, but is always immensely immediate and unpredictable in these kinds of places. its a great filter - asking of each and every moment for an honesty, upfrontness.... and also the great challenge of pulling off magic in that kind of a space.

for java monkey i had this wild last minute notion to invite the dancers who have been working with me - dana, suzanne, nicole and sharon to join the event. my idea was to have them spontaneously try and do the movements of the solo, while placed in odd places around the space. on a table, by a potted plant.... etc. sharon was the only one who could be there and so ended up being on the floor in front of the stage. i liked the sort of reflective, echoed sense that happened. its an idea i want to explore more, and with more dancers. especially to decide their role. are they a mirror? an echo? a commentary? a reflection? a distortion? another point of view?

i am still playing with the "no" moment. talking with nicole in our rehearsal today she helped me to realize something that might just be the "thesis" portion of this piece. I never speak the word no. I shake my head no. ANd many people miss it. Normando missed it! (that surprised me) and when we were talking later and he told me: "but you never get to Mary's "no"" And I said - (confused) "Yes, I do. I shake my head "no"" And he said - "oh.... right".
So if a shake of a head is not enough.... what does that say about being able to say "no" in our culture. It begins to say to me that the body doesn't matter. Unless the word is there, what is said doesn't count. and yet we are in a world (the USofA) that the words spoken are so much lies! mmmmm
WHich then the discussion is about the word and the body. I conciously made a choice that Mary's no would not be with a word sounded, but by the body. (Okay theologians and feminist scholars - jump in here. help me say what I am trying to say) And it is so interesting that a share of people who watch it feel the same way Normando did. They want to know where the "no" is. Interesting, the dancers who watch it are not flummoxed by this moment.... The director at Virginia Tech noted that he felt, delightfully, that because it is not spoken it becomes a "non-event", when the emotional set up by the title of the piece is that that moment will be THE event. So the play between our assumptions, expectations, and the concept of "non-event" are also very interesting to me.
So I continue to work with the physicality of the head shaking and to explore this moment in the piece.

In making the piece (thanks to the kids at monument mountain regional high school and their responses) it became clear to me that the use of body and word/voice is specific to each of the "characters" (i use "character" loosely, those of you who know me know how i feel about this convention of theatre). In the piece, the narrator can only speak through defintions, i.e. the words of a higher authority. Gabriel is rehearsing his lines. Mary doesn't form words, she has an alphabet that spills from her mouth. Chip/Violin has music. ahhhhh music. And body. And of course me, the thread, has body - the body that "speaks" between, for, of, translates .... for all the components. Actually it is interesting to think of the body(dance) and body(music) both as the intercessors between all... okay spiraling spider webs this strand is now blowing in the wind

on another strand- i was thinking about communihty members in the piece for when it is performed in its full blown verson at 7 Stages. i think i will set up an afterschool club at The Atlanta School next year to get some kids integrated into the piece. then thought about Moving in the Spirit, the AC (the teen company who i have worked with, and recently Dana and I set one of our pieces on them) Dana - this is news to you... here's an idea, see what you think. It would be lovely to have the AC have a piece just for them within this piece. I was also thinking it might be great to find 14 14-year olds (in honor of Mary) - or better yet "sort of 14, sort of 14-year olds" and set a section for them. reflecting on the "no"s and "yes"s in their lives.

I am pretty hung up on the number 14 for this piece. though i don't know how that manifests yet.

anyway that's it for now. i will try and get the java monkey video posted. and today's rehearsal. meanwhile i am off to the atlanta school for the midsummer night's dream project.
ciao! love you all.