On Her Own Two Feet

For a long time, a forming dance feels like a collection of bits or textures that you can imagine coalesced in your head. Holding the imaginary dance is delicate - its shape might change if it has one at all. It might reveal itself to be a different creature than what initially appeared. Then there's the moment when the dance begins to feel like something you can better hold onto, with weight and its own personality, like your child on her own two feet who, though of you, has her own mind and is full of surprises. You wonder how she issued from you. You delight in conversation.

With "Red Thread," as soon as ideas began to be "sections," the way they were constructed - with lots layering, shifting of scale and abrupt transitions - was new for me. With three mothers, the piece's shape is unlike shapes I've had a hand in making before. Choppier, less predictable, but with resonances. By design, something you see early on echoes in another form. Like similar colors sprinkled through a quilt.

As of the showing in Philly, the six-woman version of "Red Thread" is tottering around, not steady on her feet just yet, but with strong bones poised for growth. She's asking for definition, for clarity, and for us to get deeper into what each of her parts are.

We've been pondering the question of durations. Vicky doesn't want to bore the watcher and likes having tastes, or concise episodes, then cutting away into something else. She often suggests interruptions. I keep thinking about how Lucy Guerin in "Corridor" has this "sick dance" duet where the actions are all gestures of physical discomfort with accompanying groans, moans and curses. As soon as you get what's happening, it's highly amusing. It sputters after not too long, but then starts back up with more outrageous behaviors. When it restarts a second time, you're totally hooked - its the merciless boring down into this material that makes it worth putting on tour all the way from Australia. These two poles, Vick's and Lucy's, are most like both/and rather than either/or.

The process of "Red Thread' being long distance and over a long time frame means that each of us will be "marinating" the dance for a few months before the final finish. I feel the ache now that you have in a long distance relationship - that longing to be with the person. In this case, absence is a good thing though. I trust that the time between putting it all together (December) and its consummating final work intensive and premiere (March) will bring the right view of what it is and wants to be.

The Birth

[This photo is of Bryn Mawr College's newly renovated Goodhart Hall where we rehearsed.]

As of yesterday, “Red Thread” has a whole fleshed-out form! Following the October work in New York, our strategy has been to take the 35-minute trio made for me, Eva, and Vicky and teach/transpose/re-interpret it in a new version for all six of us. Adding Michele, Meg and Gabi into the mix has had us looking at particular sections and thinking ‘no way’ for any kind of straight repeat. Instead some parts are represented with one fleeting image or layered now with something else or omitted altogether. A few are run with the older dancers doing the original and the younger ones having interconnected newly-built parts. The overall plan – to make a new dance out of our trio, like fashioning a second quilt with the same materials and basic pattern as the first- has held.

The three younger dancers, dubbed MGM, bring freshness. Their presence feels lighter, more playful. They have been game to try anything and we even asked them to keep in a little tossing-movement moment that arose when they were goofing around.

We asked Meg if she would be willing to throw in some scraps from her piece “Cookie” and there’s a great floor phrase of hers now. Her beginning for “Cookie” – having dancers appear and disappear from behind doors, partitions, etc. - is something we played with and it morphed into a “Line Up” homage. Just a simple way of introducing the new dancers within the piece. A fresh start.

In yesterday’s first run of the whole thing, Eva’s friends Susan and George watched and didn’t recognize the three solos that Eva, Vicky and I do as having been taught to the younger dancers. That’s great! Maybe it’s because they’re not ‘dance people’ and aren’t oriented to looking at movement so specifically. But maybe the energy and quality with which the material is done has individualized them enough now that they read as different. That’s a good thing. Clones are definitely not the idea.

Both George and Susan spoke about the essentialness of having each moment be alive, not as anything that could have been taken from another context, or from history. Risk, precariousness, and the emotional edge in relationships that aren’t stable or easy are things George wanted to see us move toward.

We drove over to show Vick and Eva the Performance Garage. They love it (with good reason) and we spoke about how the scale is perfect, how it’s both intimate and formal, and will focus the eye on the intricacies of the piece.

To cap off the day we watched the videotape of rehearsal and got into a heated debate about whether to make cuts in order not to have it be too draggy or long. The consensus is that in March we will trim any possible fat but for now we’ll just tighten transitions and feel what it is we’ve got: this newborn dance.

Philadelphia - December

Tuesday, December 8, 2009
This past week or more, I’ve been going to sleep and waking, and returning many times a day, to Red Thread. Going over the piece in my mind, running my material, trying to tease out the patterns, both in body and space, searching for the essences in what we’re doing. A few days ago, when the DVD of the NY showing arrived, and I watched it, I began to consider what it is that we’re doing in this piece. Yes, there’s some dancing, but not a lot; yes, there are some intriguing images, but how compelling are they? In the end I decided that what this piece is about, that doesn’t really show on a video, is relationship, our relationship, and the elusive ingredient that livens performance when it’s present, and adds the necessary juice to even simple material, but that’s so difficult to capture with a still camera that’s recording merely for memory.



We began today by looking at the piece as we had left it in NY, our basic framework, trying to feel out which sections might accept all of us, 3 + 3, and which would work with which of the three other dancers we’ll be introducing during this 2 week work period – a conceptual exercise, but useful in helping us see how to structure our rehearsals most effectively. It was a relief to move after lunch, and begin to remember the piece physically. Once again, we were surprised by how quickly the material returns, even though none of us had spent much time with it during the interim – life, with all its myriad complexities, taking precedence over our intentions to work with it daily, Lisa doing most of the simmering in her twice weekly rehearsals with Meg. It feels good to be back in the studio with these women. We have grown even closer through this process of making, familiarity and ease with each other, knowing how to draw out the most constructive ideas, when to give support, how to challenge. We have a lot of work ahead of us, not just in making structural decisions, but also design choices. It’s a touch overwhelming, but stimulating and exciting as well.




Wednesday, December 9
Excitement builds. We spend the morning continuing to bring the piece back for ourselves. We clean the yarn section, the ‘kitchen duet’, and watch Lisa’s solo. Feelings of satisfaction at being back with, and in, the material, as well as questions, fill the air. We brainstorm over lunch about what we want to tackle first with the other dancers.

In the afternoon they arrive. Introductions over, we begin with the walking phrases. They learn fast. That, after all, is one of the skills young dancers have. Useful, when we have only these few days to both teach and develop material. There’s some jostling with too many ideas from too many choreographers, but Lisa reminds us that this is part of our process, that it took time for the three of us to learn how to work with it, but as rehearsal continues, when the new builds are introduced into our walking pattern, we’re all exhilarated by the complexity that happens in space, and with material and relationships. We end the afternoon teaching our solos – Lisa to Gabi, Vicky to Meg, and me to Michelle. Thrilling to see the young dancers embrace our material so fully, with so much individuality and commitment.

Lisa, Vicky and I are also thinking about costumes, colors, props. We find a color palette we like in the book ‘Earth from Above’, jumping off of Mimi Gross’ suggestion of earth and colorful. Lisa and Vicky are enthusiastic about making clothing decisions, Lisa sketches ideas, we speak about what we can buy or make. Time seems short again. There’s so much to do. During dinner, a communal chopping and cooking event, Lisa’s eyes begin to close and I realize she’s dozing while I’m telling her a particularly interesting story. Yes, we’re tired, but as we comment before heading off to bed, there’s nothing we enjoy more than being in the studio, in process, playing, exploring, making creative decisions. This is where we are in our element. Delicious.

Ryutaro's photos

Photos by Ryutaro Ishikane

We've been hearing about other performances using fabric on heads (although none of us have seen them)-must be the zeitgeist.

Little Steps and Thinking Big

Monday was murky. Small advances – an introductory phrase remixed to include bits from all of us (Eva’s wish), a re-ordering of sections to accommodate Vicky’s “orphan solo”. After making small changes, the flow of things feels off. Often I’m the one expressing discomfort, a sense that we could dig deeper, and then Vick pops out with some total shift: a new order or staging when I was just looking for a little makeover. She’s generally right on. There’s a lesson there about the effectiveness of thinking bigger, with a more ‘anything goes’ spirit.

The day began with the New Jersey Transit train being delayed “for an indefinite time” as I traveled back to NY after the weekend. Four hours door to door. But now rewarded through the kindness of friends who’ve loaned their lovely digs to this peripatetic artist.

Surprise, Surprise

The first surprise is that the Red Thread machine has been oiled and gotten moving so that an idea, thrown into the middle of it, gets torn up and mixed around and comes out very differently than it began. This piece does not feel like my piece or Eva’s piece or Vicky’s, but instead the product of a hybrid sensibility. And that happens while deferring to each other, giving space for one person’s idea and then another’s to get fleshed out fully. Not consensus, but evolution through a series of radical propositions. Darwinian.

Another surprise – we made a form encompassing all our materials in our first NY week that seems OK. We’d been wanting to get to this place and it happened without struggle. And having Vick’s husband Alan come and reflect back gave more certainty that the track we’re on is the one we mean to be on. He was uncomfortable with the parts that make us uncomfortable, appreciated things we can’t see being inside it. His comments also sparked a structural idea that may prove to be the key to the whole thing once we bring in our 3 younger dancers (more on that later).

Red Thread is not like anything I’ve made. It’s more pedestrian, more choppy, more all over the place, and more spare. But the idea of patchwork – of placing one color next to another with no apology for contrast or wild juxtaposition - implies exactly the kind of freedom we are taking. And, also as with patchwork, it’s repetition that makes a pattern emerge.

NY

Everything is different now--including the weather. Our upcoming official showing in March is much more a reality, and thus much more frightening. The novelty and fun of finding movement scraps and making clusters turns into a need to refine and define. We are trying to decipher a thru-line--trying to build on what we have, trying to be rigorous, trying to find the inner logic, all while having much conversation and cherishing the intimacy that is always there.

NY

Four months after our April showing at Swarthmore, we’ve settled into a new pattern - 2 weeks of work, 7 weeks off, 2 weeks of work, 6 weeks off, 2 weeks of work – Arnhem, NY, Philadelphia - then another three months later, the performances. On Monday, our first day together here, in NY, we bemoan the fact that we never have a good long chunk of time, say 6 or 8 weeks, in order to be able to really let things evolve, since at the end of each 2 weeks of intense preoccupation with the piece, we always feel we could go on and regret reaching the end. Yet, each time we meet, our shared history, and the accumulating material, has sunk deeper, and we pick up the threads and get into the swing of things faster and faster. Past history has become present absorption. So by Tuesday, at this second 2 week meeting, we’re well into it, revisiting our phrases, putting our clusters back together, adjusting details, clarifying intentions. We’re now asking questions about the whole, we’re back to long talks about content, form, purpose, significance – we’re in the thick of it.

Forest AND Trees

[e-mail to Eva and Vicky]

Red Thread Rides Again!!

In our (trans-Atlantic) conversation today Eva and I were mulling over what we think should happen in the next two weeks in the studio.

We need to make a string of sections/ scores/ a set framework that we can repeat – one half hour or 45 minutes
We can run this as solos/ duets/ trios
Arrive at this form by 2/3 -3/4 of the way thru the 2 weeks

Zoom in zoom out, carefully crafted details and sketching more lightly to consider whole (forest and trees)

Focus on dancing/movement material
Develop more set material/scores for generating movement

Creating balance with image/theatrical moments
Movement not “stuck in”!

Solos and duets with outside eye watching

Each of us can bring to this intensive some ideas of how the whole might work (or cohere) – rhythms, sense of overall pattern, strategies for assembly, ideas about how things may progress or shift

Time line – a day of remembering, 5 days of creating and assembling forms, 2 days of running longer arcs and swaths and continuing to develop new, 2 days of running complete form in varying configurations, letting it morph and considering the coming sextet. Showing.

xo
Lisa

Cabbage Queen

A lady in Western PA, born Italian, who married into a Hungarian family, now feeds her whole town with her scrumptious cabbage rolls. Does this have anything to do with Red Thread?

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09274/1002034-34.stm

Day #10 The Showing

It was generous of our invited audience to tell us what they saw:

Images of females – some “ladies” and some “women.” Which do we intend when?
Head dresses suggesting ornamentation, work, and burden
Walks that could be from many cultures or times
Lots of material “of good quality” that is now unstructured. Several expressed interest in seeing material recur. (This has been the intent all along.)
A title that suggests an image of something red onstage: red thread or red clothing. (We have balked at literalness up until now.)
A section about old people and a section reflecting “youth culture” – several expressed the wish to see the age differences used clearly when we incorporate younger dancers.
Women in their fifties, each with a different performing and movement quality, dancing fully
Beautiful patterns in space
Movement motifs ricocheting between dancers
Elements that go by too fast
Actions performed with care contrasted with actions performed with abandon
Unpacking the contents of a bag – revealing and “heavy”
Contrast of continuous smooth element with simultaneous jagged, charged, emotional element
Action representing an ambiguous but difficult moment – too obscure? Or out of place?
Shift from distress to serenity

Day #9 (Eva)

My turn for a difficult day today. This week has brought a whole gamut of emotions. I’ve felt challenged, satisfied, frustrated, excited. Today I’m feeling doubtful about all kinds of things.

Continuing with Saturday’s cluster idea, we’re now shaping longer sequences that make compositional and conceptual sense. Frameworks from my score that at first seemed too wide to me are proving to be useful containers - ‘a time of unpacking, ‘a time of beauty’, ‘a time of domestic disintegration’, are holding a number of scenes and seem to create coherent entities. But I’m questioning whether, after years of working improvisationally, I’ll be able to remember patterns and counting, or reproduce movement material that, after numerous repetitions, begins to feel dull and lifeless. Lisa urges me on, reminding me of how movement that enters one’s muscles and bloodstream, becomes tuned to the nervous system and deeply embedded in the subconscious yields liveliness and lucidity. Vicky suggests we work on a more open section and we return to Lisa’s marathon, trying different versions, eventually altering it, and combining it with sitting/watching (as in the ‘charades’) and a round-robin form. Lisa adds her super articulated phrase that she does with Meg, we replace each other and dance wildly to energetic hip-hop music, and I feel the juice return to my body and spirit. Lovely how we hold each other’s uncertainties in check. Our generosity towards each other has been honed through parenting children and parents, navigating relationships, years of watching and thinking and working, experiencing the ups and downs of life. All this we bring with us into the studio.

Between us, we have lived 172 years. As Vick might say - Geez!!!!

Day # 8 (Vicky)

days vary for each of us
we alternate having our doubtful, difficult ones
and yes, “highs” too
the discomfort of a bad day offset against another’s elation

yesterday, we practice/form some of our clusters – trying to shape, refine, clarify
looking for a center, an essence
the ”navel” Lisa remembers someone saying
watching, looking
stymied
the studio feels familiar now
we leave our stuff overnight
it’s hot, we eat chocolate
buy delicious coffee from the machine
Eva makes one phone call each day at lunch

Money in the Pocket

A thought about choreographed “material” – it’s like money. You use it to accomplish or get something else - a unified or related image among people, the possibility of having events clearly recur, clarity about what action is happening so that you can also focus on other elements (landscape of the stage, relationships, rhythms and sequences of action). We are making repeatable walking phrases, personal movement phrases coached by the others, and “kitchen” phrases from Eva’s household moves. It feels like having money in the pocket. We can spend it all over the place.

This a.m. over coffee Vick and I discussed using “scraps” from visual artist friends – they could be ideas for physical frames, or single images that we would then realize. Love that thought… have already broached it with two designer friends. Time to really invite them.

Day # 6 (Vicky)

walking patterns –

Inspired by Lisa walking to the washroom – trudging through the labyrinth of the building – pristine, complicated, maze – like a museum – many path ways , stairs, bridge-like structures – at first I worried I’d always be lost!

We learned each others

1,2,3,4 1,2 1,2 3,4,5,6,7,8

Wow…. we’re exhilarated – excited to have something to run – to “walk”

Phrases

Eva wants to change hers & does – we watch – no, do this, do that, try it faster – yes, it’s fantastic now

We learn it - trying to feel like Eva – geez!!!!

Then Lisa – she’ll never get osteoporosis – not moving like that – she doesn’t need to jump – it’s in her body – big, lush, weighted gorgeous movement

we try to learn it

Feel like Lisa – geez!!!!!

Clusters and Favorite Spots

Saturday we were chewing on whether to keep opening toward the bigger picture – scores – or to develop individual sections. The former was too sweeping, and we were ready to take a step beyond the latter. Language makes all the difference - we hit on the word “clusters.” (Someone has no doubt used this before but it was new to us.) This is akin to the quilting idea of taking some bits of pattern to form a complete block and yielded new insights about how parts are working together. For instance, “fashion show” leading to “chairlift” suggested having Eva performing an elegant “thousand articulations” solo in between. We wouldn’t have seen that possibility without that gap of ‘what now moving toward x?’. Clusters.

Haiku from a Sunday bike ride in Sonsbeek Park:

castle with mailbox
river with egret and wind
my heart has two homes

Sunday is a quiet day in the Netherlands. Laws (with a few exceptions) forbid shops to open. People of all stripes, and frequently extended families, go on walks or bike rides in the country. I biked around areas of Sonsbeek and Zijpendaal where I have recollections of being with my family when the kids were little – the field full of deer, the swan bridge with the pair of swans on the bank nearby, the waterfall which we stuck our heads through, the places we skated or watched herons rise from their nests in the trees, the place where we had a birthday picnic, the rose garden next to the castle, the field animated by a free rock music festival. I discovered the Steile Tuin (steep garden), new since we left Arnhem. The Dutch are bold with their garden designs and this one is all about drifts of single colors in different heights and forms with a channel of water gurgling through the center.

More on Friday's growing pains

The past couple of days I’ve been submerged by domestic events so haven’t followed through on our aim to write, even if only a little, every day. So now, on Sunday, I’m thinking back to Friday.

First thing Friday morning, Lisa and Vicky go to the market to buy fabric for an idea we want to try and I arrive at the studio early. The chairs, screen and table we used the day before are still in the space, and inspired by work I’ve been doing with visual artist Chris Crickmay (most recently 3 four hour long performances at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, England, with composer Sylvia Hallett) I arrange, add, and rearrange, so when Lisa and Vicky arrive, they enter a different space than the one we left the day before, and when we begin Lisa’s marathon structure, we’re located in and among an installation that includes furniture, colored yarn and cloth. I enjoy moving with the objects, relating to the others, considering our accumulating tasks - this day’s included: it’s ok to be pedestrian. However, later in the day, during one of our many discussions, Lisa mentions how, during the morning’s marathon, she had determined to consciously hold herself to her original 'heightened energy' score because she felt that we were shifting away from the physicality of dancing ‘in an active and expanded way’, and getting too involved in other activities. I’m reminded of Jonathan Burrows, when he observed, during his recent ‘3 x 3’ workshop at Findhorn, that we get virtuosic very quickly, urging participants to remain focused on the material in order to prevent ‘getting carried away by excitement’.

In the afternoon, driven by the desire to see how what we have might begin to fit together, we decide to make scores - three of them - so we each take pen and paper, settle ourselves in the space, and work alone for some time. Not surprisingly, our scores are as different as the way we move. Lisa’s score, devised through chance procedure (another homage to Cunningham?), and using the elements of task, people and music, produces some recurring activities, sometimes with different ‘casts’; Vicky’s score looks at what could work with what, how transitions could happen gracefully, and attends to detail and subtlety; my score has few limitations and holds unlimited possibilities. Our run of Lisa’s score is messy and unsatisfying, but we all agree that it was a useful exercise.

Invitation

Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus and Vicky Shick warmly invite you to a

RED THREAD
Work-in-Progress Showing

Friday 21 August
2 pm

Studio 20
ArtEZ Dansacademie
Onderlangs 9
Arnhem

For further information please call (31) 06-12566839

red dress and growing pains

Vicky and I got to Cora Kempermann, the shop of the Belgian designer with fashion forward garb in a rainbow of deep jewel colors. Vick tried on assymmetrical tops and kept readjusting them to straighten them out. I put on a red dress, like a smock or kurta and Vick was so wildly enthuisastic that I couldn't say no. It was 1/2 price. Pictured here in our great rehearsal space.

Last night, Vicky and I strolled around a bustling Friday night Arnhem, then went to a silly movie, perhaps to escape the sense of our entire beings being consumed by the awkwardly growing piece. Yesterday when we ran the first “score” (mine, put together with chance procedures) it was messy, disembodied, unfulfilled, and arbitrary. BUT we found out that:

we need more trios as opposed to solos/duets (Vick envisions a high octane mercilessly repeating one)

we need more clarity about which aspects of particular sections are the tiny adjustments that make them work, like sitting on a chair as opposed to on the floor

we want more phrases and set choreography (nice to have an appetite now for that!)

we like having sections recur, sometimes with different personnel

There are a set of underlying motifs: beauty & vanity & strength / disintegration, small domestic arena/bigger world. These continuums suggest more image-metaphors…

Three Takes on Day Three

(Vicky) -starting with reading/hearing each other’s thoughts

-today we marathon to Bach
playing with the music
its tempo, its rhythms, its regalia

Lisa wants to see 1 person marathon while others come in adding activities
“framing” according to Eva via Susan Sgorbati
or

-enhancing, supporting, highlighting, refining, defining, underlining

-to off set – and yes, to offer relief even

i end up the “marathoner” and a little derailed by the word “marathon”
imprisoned by my superimposed notion of ongoing, energetic, kinesthetic doing
that i can’t fulfill
when is the response to stimuli hokey, “pat”?
how to figure that out?
Eva has a desire to see a certain episode
we take turns trying
- is something there?
- the transitions seem off
i’m nervous about the sadness – is it the music? is it manipulative? hokey/pat?
- we like the same parts
- does that mean anything is something there?
tomorrow

(Lisa) Going into a fresh work situation gets you revved and moving for a couple of days. But by day three you often hit challenges. Here they were about too many ideas and tricky juxtapositions.

After all of us repeated the “marathon” idea of continuing to dance in an active and expanded (as opposed to a largely still or small way) for twenty minutes, I wanted to move one step forward with it. I have a vision of one person persisting, dancing over a long haul while others come and go, and other events unfold around them (some metaphor!). Getting to actually doing that involved everyone adding ideas and suggestions to the point where I became irritated, just wanting to DO it. Later I realized that my relationship to the idea itself was like that of a child who sees a toy they want to play with. When others had their hands on it, delaying the moment of beginning play, it was frustrating! I never thought of collaboration as being like children figuring out how to play together, agreeing on the game and how it’s played…

The second challenge came when Vicky’s score mixing two duet images seemed to just not find a right balance. One image coming out of the “marathon” involved a chair being held behind her as she progressed forward. Another involved an awkward item with teeth. They could both be read in a number of ways, but seemed to refer to assisting and caretaking, possibly of a parent or child. There was a mixed response when we added a Bach piano largo. It was beautiful but did it verge too far toward pathos? How should one action be connected to the other – through abrupt transition? Should there be a sandwich of actions? And seen at which angles? How exactly to time one person’s moves relative to the other? This was the first form we have done together that has the quality of needing to be impeccable to read at all properly.

(Eva) We begin with Lisa’s marathon score and continue to add themes we can focus on while moving. To yesterday’s ‘notice when you find a motif’, ‘stay with repetition’ and ‘don’t feel the need to relate to everyone all the time’, we add ‘do savor a meeting/relationship when it happens’ and ‘feel ok about not knowing’. I’m finding that with the addition of ‘parameters’, my enjoyment of the 20 minute span of time grows. In fact, 20 minutes now seems short. There’s so much to notice, so much to do.
Lisa wants to see one ‘marathoner’ in the space with events unfolding around her. Vicky and I flip a coin. Unlike the task of decision-making within a piece, where one intuitively knows what feels and /or looks ‘right’ or not, Vicky and I have seemingly insurmountable problems stepping forward to do or ask for or want something. Vicky becomes the ‘marathoner’. In this context I find myself shifting from my usual ‘dancer imperative’ (as Lisa calls that desire we have to move, to be out there doing), to composer/choreographer imperative (the desire to order, shape, structure, see the whole). I become pedestrian, fulfilling the need of the space and Vicky’s moving. Totally enjoyable.
In the afternoon we work with 2 images, trying them this way and that. I become impatient and want to let it go, but Lisa keeps pushing at it, we try different orders, new spacing, . . . . . Vicky points out emotional/physical states she feels are generated by the addition of music. We’re not sure. We fiddle. I like how we can hold each other in difficult moments that, alone, each of us might have a tendency to discard, yet perhaps, it will, eventually, yield something.

Log from Day Two (Vicky)

what's enough??
too much? what's nothing?

-the delicacy of watching in an engaged way - as Eva sits

-Lisa - the delicacy of how to begin - knowing that someone is sitting, somehow watching

-elegance + fragility against the mundane

-appearing, disappearing

-debris, rubble

Log from Day Two (Eva)

Wednesday August 12, 2009
A different studio today, one with light and air, and a wooden floor, on the upper level of the building as opposed to deep down, underground. A white screen, 3 blue chairs and some balls of yarn are our props and inspiration today.
We busy ourselves the whole day, exploring ideas – one from each of us - elaborating, distilling, working through to a place of satisfaction.
Vicky’s idea of moving in front of the white screen, as if made of a thousand parts, becomes, with the added element of yesterday’s unpacking and arranging, a duet. We search for the important elements in an idea I have about moving with yarn through the space, leaving traces. Clothing becomes elaborate hats heaped high on heads in a walking idea from Lisa. Metaphors abound. We finish the day with 20 minutes of moving together, feeling exhilarated.

Day One (Eva)

Tuesday, Aug 11
We’re meeting on my home turf this time, so, like Lisa and Vicky during our previous meetings, I’m the one juggling home and work. It’s a challenge we’re all trying to meet. Red Thread as a way of bringing together the creative and domestic, and our on-going discussions about our desire for on-goingness in our practice, has prompted me to ask everyone to bring scraps of material gathered from around the house to this meeting. Lisa calls them domestic scraps or in the home moves.

A year ago I wrote:
After I get home, and shift into a world that’s other than the single focus world I lived at Swarthmore where we spent long hours in the studio, I notice more acutely how in this, my every day world, I leap from laundry and shopping, to cooking and cleaning, working in the garden, visiting my mother, doing the bills, running to teach . . . . . I think of crazy quilts, with their odd shapes and many colors, scattering wildly across the quilt surface. I also remember the Gee’s Bend women, and how they combine their quilt making with their daily life.

Again, the question, “what are our practices, what do we do? How do we keep dancing, even when we don’t always have access to space or enough time?”

Deborah Hay, whose presence, like Trisha’s, surfaced often as we worked, comes to mind, and the commitment she asks from her Solo Commissioning Project participants, to practice their solo each day, and inspired by this, I resolve, for a period of time, to sustain a practice of dancing each day.

This is a slightly different kind of dancing to the kind we three naturally do all the time. While we worked, we watched each other as we spoke, making gestures, using our whole bodies to tell stories. We are, after all, dancers through and through. Like Vicky’s story of when her then young son, exasperated with her constant moving, asked her, ‘wherever you are, do you always have to be dancing?’ But this dancing I’m starting to do is different. It comes from the need I feel to spend time in ‘dancing state’, even when I don’t have a daily studio I can go to. This is not the unconscious response of a body trained to respond in movement, but a conscious focusing of attention, watching with compositional eyes the unfolding of movement as I slip between the table and chair and pick up on a shift of weight that sends me towards the left, then work it further as I explore where this particular displacement can go, or repeat, reverse, minimize or maximize the reach to place a plate on the shelf . . . . . . This moving comes from the need to do my dancing no matter what, because without it I feel un-centered, at loose ends, not knowing what to do with myself, manic, sometimes, to the point of desperation. We are, after all, dancers through and through.


Today, a year later, we begin by showing each other the scraps we’ve brought. Since I didn’t specify more than ‘make them in your house/apartment’, we’ve all, of course, interpreted the task differently. Lisa’s scraps have a theatrical edge, are to do with a domestic image that then comes to life in movement; one of Vicky’s scraps is an homage to Cunningham, made in her apartment; I’ve moved around my kitchen and furniture, abstracting and setting the moves I make while cooking or cleaning. Curiously, Lisa’s circling scrap has similarities to my stirring pasta. Or perhaps not so curiously. We’re finding that we now fall into an easy familiarity, picking up threads from our previous meetings. There’s recent history being built, adding on to our shared past, that we now return to when we work.

Day One - picking up the thread

Back in Arnhem! First time dancing in the new Dansacademie building. Because it's next to a landmark Gerrit Rietveld building, the space designed for theater and dance is completely underground - a huge atrium flanked by several floors of studios on each of its long sides. The skylight is covered with sail-like sun shades - feels a little like being on a boat.

We worked on two scores, one about arranging objects which seemed like a fitting extension of Eva and Vicky's "setting the table" (and re-arranging someone else's arrangement) dance. The other was a 'heightened energy' score which (a la Deborah Hay) is intended to clarify its form through repetition. The two forms couldn't have contrasted more completely.

Conceptual Warm Up

Here are excerpts from e-mails and phone call notes in preparation for our upcoming intensive in Arnhem:

(from Lisa): We all would like to come away with a form, a score, a series of sequences- that we can continue to practice/develop/evolve on our own afterward. The Deborah Hay model of “practicing” the dance and having it reveal itself that way applies.

Here’s a quote from Meredith Monk: “Every time you make a piece, fear is always there and you’re always working with it, playing with it, allowing the interest and curiosity of what you’re making to become more compelling than the anxiety. Then you’ve actually walked through the fear, and then there’s a sense of discovery.”

(From a phone chat with Vicky and Lisa:)
Craft what you want to see
Step back from the obvious
Overarching conceit that frames different kinds of activity
Feeling level wants to manifest fully
Layer in elements that are part of the process
Abstract personal emotional material to make it more universal (stand-ins)
Forms, conventions, strictures
Household scraps
Hanging in there until you see how the whole thing will interact
When you perceive something not “happening,” engage rather than withdraw
Persevere through “I don’t get it” – is there a piece of this that’s interesting?
Practicing the dance rather than building it or rehearsing it

(from Eva:) Red Thread tasks/scores/games/structures
July 2008- Post-it note grids
Supermarket Shoppingwalking patterns on a grid
Speaking while moving; tapping into emotion remembering our fathers
Catch 3 moves from each person, teach each other

December 2008 - Lisa shows Desert Island; we replay what we saw.
Vick - specific nothing - alone, then in duets.
Eva - "stitching" - stitching paths to travel lines,and lay grids and patterns."stories and spaces" and ways of supporting in improvisation.
Transformation - letting a movement transform itself through repetition.
Lisa's score for Eva: walk a straight line/straight lines (pedestrian action) and when it wants to happen, take journeys off.
Lisa's score: 5 stories and 3 spaces.
Things we like about stitches- the initial thrust of the first entry of 'needle into fabric'- the aspect of repetition- that small changes can enter- that feet can retain the same pattern and arms can embellish with other ones
Eva's score for Lisa: give time for resting, yielding - nothing time; softening, creating internal space, wrists and heart; connection of hands and heart, hands to earth.
Lisa's score for Eva: find scraps with which you could eventually build, but at this time, don't think of building, don't think of value; don't judge, don't think of having to entertain. Speak about the found scraps.
Eva's score for Lisa: you arrange your things into neat piles before we begin to work; it could bridge the gap between formal structure and the sensory world. Take some time to create a formal physical framework in the space, set up somewhere where you can then spend some 'formless' sensory time.
Lisa's score - 50 moves with repetition.Repetition not just to do it, but because it has a purpose.Play with timing, phrasing, musicality of the moves. Same task having a traveling path - gave clearer purpose.50 moves using the torso (Lisa), and 50 moves leading with the head (Eva) generated unusual material.50 moves with the addition of high drama gave surprising emotional twists in places.50 moves and gathering scraps can be a practice.

March 2009- Tasks: Grid Stitching and lacingMovement becoming smallerErasing Post-it notes

For Aug 2009- Instructions from Eva: make and bring 5 scraps - material you gather/ collect from around the house. Domestic scraps or in-the-home moves.

Sharing the Scraps

Here’s what we showed at Swarthmore on April 5:

-Stitching – one person is the upper thread and one person the lower on the kind of sewing machine that makes fancy patterns. This is hard to improvise and needs to be either very simple (just two actions) or set.

- Lacing- post-it notes become the holes through which movement laces. The notes are places for shifting direction/weight. Laying out post-it notes is a spare ritual. (But will there be actual post-its in a performance or will they give way to something stronger visually?).

- “Glimpse” – The photo above is from the beginning. Two solos and the duet between Eva and Vicky from Vick’s just-performed show. Unassuming movement, sometimes with multiple repetitions or sometimes one-offs full of rich detail and tiny adjustments. Meg and I slipped the “broken” duet of ours , growing smaller and smaller, into the middle which the two of them watched. Watching becomes a theme…

-Grid Game: One person (Meg) initiates a short dance within a square of space marked by post-it notes. Next person (Lisa) enters and does the “same” dance in her own way in an adjacent square. Then all four (Vicky and Eva enter) do their versions of the original together in a grid of four squares, followed by several variations where dancers and placements are unknown. It’s a formal plan, with interest in the ‘waiting’ time and simultaneous whooshing in and sweeping out.
Jano Cohen said she enjoyed bits of the showing where the “game” was obvious. This is one of those.

-Stillness and Moving Improvisation – half in silence/ half to Hungarian pop music. The most “open” of the forms with mutual moments of quiet and activity of all sorts and durations.

- “Natural” – Meg’s twitching hip-hop based material as solos and a duet with Lisa to Lil’ Kim.

- Kaffeeklatsch – narration of a traumatic story to a David Lang composition with stops and starts. A place-holder for the quilters’ sharing of personal stories with each other and its interconnectedness with their artmaking…

It felt like a lot. Not a bad place to be in roughly a year before the "premiere."

Finding Form, Dancing Desert Island

After mulling over the paradoxes posed in our July work sessions, questions of ‘authorship’ and initiative loomed large. Three people saying “After you,” “Oh no, after you,” tends to produce a Marx Brothers bottleneck at the doorway. One way forward was to consider a process with individual authors of separate sections. And so our work in December involved taking turns giving direction and suggesting forms.

I offered up Desert Island initially with no explanatory information and was interested to see it mirrored back (this is my solo on a carpet which plays, more and less seriously, on the image of being a sole survivor of a plane crash). Vicky saw the ecstasy and suffering. Eva saw the abandon and tension. Here’s the initial score:

How to Dance on a Desert Island (psychological score)
- Don’t know you’re on one. Be confused, panicked, but hoping against hope that you didn’t really crash. Deny that it is what it is.
- Figure out the limitations of your situation, growing increasingly angry.
-Try to look on the brighter side. See the possibilities: lots of rehearsal time! Built-in meditation retreat! Try to figure a way out, make a deal with the Universe.
- Get exhausted. Surrender to that. And to hopelessness.
- Let go.

Anyone who recognizes Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of adjusting to death and dying here would be on target. It seems a very hefty score laid out in this way. But it also has meta moments of acknowledging that it's just theater -recognizing the present moment reality of performer in a space with audience - plus a pure physical task sequence:

How to Dance on a Desert Island (physical score)
- Be shot out of a cannon, running in decreasing spirals until you run across the Desert Island. Hold your hands to keep them from flailing and to make the upper body lift. Once on the island, play with opposite directions in feet and upper body, causing the carpet to slide on the floor and to lengthen any moments of falling through counterbalance. Do this until you can’t stand it. Gap.
- Measure the space, feeling along its edges, respecting imagined ‘walls’. Pick up momentum and tension, as though pulling a slingshot back repeatedly and letting it hurl.
- Move all over the carpet with shreds of movement, talking to yourself with random memories and pep talk. Let energy shift repeatedly, working with levity and gravity, pedestrian and virtuosic.
-Gradually melt. Rest on your back like an insect with knees up, arms angled, elbows on the ground and hands palm up in the air.
- Lengthen the legs upward then flip them abruptly to one side to return upright. Soften back toward the floor and roll languidly , body parallel to front edge, off the carpet.