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."