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.