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.