Red Thread

2010-04-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Program Notes for Performance Garage shows

2010-03-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

(Photo by Michael Biello of the spray painted objects we use in "unpacking".)

RED THREAD is a term Dutch and German speakers use to describe the line of continuity that runs through a novel or an experience. The Chinese use the term to denote the continuity through successive generations.

The performance Red Thread started with a desire to bring longtime colleagues - Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus and Vicky Shick – into a dance-making process. All are in their late fifties and danced together in the Trisha Brown Dance Company beginning over thirty years ago. How would such longstanding friendships and professional relationships affect dancing and dance-making? What might each learn from the others’ decades of dance research and experience? We found inspiration in the model of women’s quilting circles where art is made in community, patterns are shared, and conversation and togetherness are part of the experience of making something of utility and beauty. Art-making happens as a matter of course, integrated in daily life. The intergenerational aspect of quilting where aesthetics and traditions pass from one generation to another was part of what inspired us to invite our three younger colleagues to join Red Thread. Meg Foley, Gabrielle Revlock and Michele Tantoco are all about the age that the older dancers were when we first met.

The piece has been built through five intensive residencies in Arnhem, the Netherlands, New York, and Philadelphia, the cities where Karczag, Shick and Kraus live. Between intensives, Lisa Kraus and Meg Foley kept the thread of Red Thread going with choreographic research. In December 2009 the full cast met to stitch together the whole piece. We were interested in seeing patterns replicated (as they are in quilts) at different times, with different casting. The work is a patchwork of structures and movement sequences developed in the intensives by Karczag, Kraus and Shick and later the full cast, and in the in-betweens by Foley and Kraus, mixed with “scraps” cannibalized from other dances. Those include (but are not limited to) Meg Foley’s Natural and Cookie, Eva Karczag’s work with visual artist Chris Crickmay, Glimpse by Shick and Shift by Kraus. Meg has been especially generous in sharing not only her own dancing ideas and material but also musical selections.

It has turned out that Red Thread’s recurring motifs often feel more like ‘behavior’ than ‘dance.’ Some are physically on a much smaller scale than what we often associate with concert dance. Our task in making the piece was to be open to whatever arose, and that generated scenes that echo events in our lives, some extraordinary, but many more utterly everyday. This ‘ordinariness’ may reflect something in our shared history - the 1970’s pre-occupation with pedestrian and task-based activity.
We hope the work conveys something of the gratitude we all have for being able to dance in each others’ company, then and now.

Performances of Red Thread are made possible by a grant from the Pew Center for Art & Heritage through Dance Advance. Additional support has been provided by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Independence Foundation, and the Leeway Foundation. Creative residency support was provided by ArtEz Dansacademie in Arnhem, the Netherlands, The Swarthmore Project, Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia Dance Projects Studio Access program, Jonathan and Judith Stein, Thomas Berthoff, Richard Kerry and Alan Mandell.

The Red Thread team extends warm thanks to Terry Fox, Carmella Vassor-Johnson, Bill Bissell, Sharon Friedler, Jon Sherman, Anna Drozdowski, Christina Zani, Dan Martin, Joan Myers-Brown, Mimi Gross-Grooms, Susan Brooks, the department of the Arts at Bryn Mawr College, KHDT studios, and the audiences in Arnhem, New York, and Philadelphia who generously provided feedback after our showings. These performances of Red Thread are dedicated to our mothers.

Choreography and Performance: Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus, Vicky Shick, Meg Foley, Gabrielle Revlock, Michele Tantoco Set design: Michael Biello Costumes: the Red Thread team Lighting design: Matt Sharp Sound selections by: Michael Gordon, Missy Elliott, Asa Chang and Jun-Ray, David Lang, J.S. Bach, Mouse on Mars

BIOS
Eva Karczag is an independent dance artist who, for the past three decades has practiced, taught, and advocated explorative methods of dance making. She has been a member of leading groups in the field of experimental dance, including the Trisha Brown Dance Company (NY), Richard Alston's group, Strider (UK), and was a founding member of Dance Exchange (Australia). She has taught dance at major colleges and studios internationally, including a sustained period of teaching on the faculty of the European Dance Development Center, Arnhem, The Netherlands, is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, and has an MFA degree (Dance Research Fellow) from Bennington College. She has received Choreographic Research Grants from the Australia Council; and Travel Grants from the Australia Council, the Netherlands Theater Institute and the Arts Council of Great Britain. She performs solo and collaborative work in the U.S., and throughout Europe and Australia, in locations as diverse as Dance Theater Workshop, Judson Church, Danspace and PS 122, New York; Dance Umbrella, London, England; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Glashuset, Stockholm, Sweden, and Mu Theater, Budapest, Hungary. Many of her collaborations involve links across the arts, most recently in durational performance/installations, with visual artist Chris Crickmay and composer Sylvia Hallett, at the Laban Institute, London, and the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, England.

Lisa Kraus is a Philadelphia-based dance artist whose career has included performing in the Trisha Brown Dance Company, choreographing and performing extensively with her own company and as an independent, teaching at universities, arts centers and the Paris Opera Ballet, presenting the work of other artists through the Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series, and writing reviews, features and essays on dance for internet and print publication. She has created over 35 performance works presented by venues across the U.S., Europe and Australia including Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, Danspace and PS 122 in New York, the Painted Bride and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, LACE in Los Angeles, Sushi in San Diego, the Place in London, La Fabricca in Barcelona and the Dance Exchange in Sydney. Awarded Choreographer’s Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Independence Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, she has also received support from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, the Jerome Foundation, the Leeway Foundation, the 5-County Arts Fund, Meet-the-Composer and the Swarthmore Project. Since 2003 Ms. Kraus has developed projects over multi-year timeframes, morphing dances into lectures or video projects and placing them in a variety of distinctive venues for diverse audiences.

Vicky Shick has been involved in the New York City dance community since the late 1970’s as a performer, choreographer and teacher. Shick was a member of the Trisha Brown Company for 6 years, during which time she received a New York Dance and Performance Award, a “Bessie” for performance. She has also performed and collaborated with many other choreographers and dancers including Yoshiko Chuma, Deborah Hay, Juliette Mapp, Wendy Perron, Stephen Petronio, Susan Rethorst, Sally Silvers, and Sara Rudner. Shick regularly teaches in New York at Movement Research, Hunter College, and for the Trisha Brown Company. She also teaches and has created dances in festivals, workshops, and at universities in the United States and Europe, including her hometown, Budapest. For the past twenty-five years, Shick has been showing her own work. Since 1994, she has worked with visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick, and since 2003 with composer Elise Kermani. Their collaborative pieces have been presented by Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Movement Research at Judson Church, P.S. 122, The Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, and in Grenoble, France. “Undoing,” Shick and Kilpatrick’s seventh project together received a New York Dance and Performance Award (a “Bessie”) for “outstanding creative achievement. Vicky Shick is a 2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2008-2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.

Meg Foley has been making dances and performing in Philadelphia since 2005. She directs Moving Parts, a company through which she aims to create elusive yet emotionally evocative performance experiences that straddle the fine line between focus and freedom. Her work has been presented at Susan Hess Modern Dance Studio (SHMD), Mascher Space Cooperative, Vox Populi, the Community Education Center, and by Bowerbird. She is a second year Choreographer's Project Resident at SHMD. In addition to dancing for Lisa Kraus, she works with Nichole Canuso Dance Company and danced with Devynn Emory from 2005-2009. Meg was educated and influenced by the good people at Scripps College and Laban Centre London. She loves to teach both technique and critical theory and has led workshops on whether authentic movement really exists and on locating meaning within and constructing self-referential movement. Some of her favorite dances that she has recently seen are Bird Song by Siobhan Davies, Rammed Earth by Tere O’Connor, Keely Garfield’s Limerance, and Jen Rosenblit’s greatest hits duets.

Gabrielle Revlock is both a performer and creator. She is a company member of Jeanne Ruddy Dance performing the works of Mark Dendy, Robert Battle, and Jane Comfort. She has danced recently in the Local Dance History Project presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects and Cookie by Moving Parts/megfoley. Recently she returned from a tour in Holland with the Dutch duo, Isabelle Chaffaud and Jerome Meyer. Other international artists Gabrielle has had the pleasure of working with include Sean Feldman, Suzanna Linke, Willi Dorner and Katsura Kan. Philadelphia choreographers Gabrielle has worked with include Leah Stein, Myra Bazell, Jumatatu Poe, and Matthew Neenan for the Opera Company of Philadelphia. In 2006 she partnered with a violinist in a Pre-Concert Adventure for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Gabrielle's work has received support from PA Council on the Arts (2009), a New Edge Mix Grant (2006) and was selected as the Vassar College Alumnae Choreographer in 2005, where she holds a BA in Art History. She has created work for the Drexel Dance ensemble and will be premiering a work on Bryn Mawr College students in Spring 2010. In 2008-2009 she was a nEW Festival Resident Artist and was chosen to present at The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2009: Philadelphia. Gabrielle has received two professional development awards from Dance Advance. In addition to performance, Gabrielle's films have been shown in 2007 & 2008 at Motion Pictures programmed by Philadelphia Dance Projects.

Michele Tantoco is a dancer and movement educator living in Philadelphia. Since 2002, Michele has been a member of the Leah Stein Dance Company. In 2006 she and three other Philadelphia dancers collaborated with London-based choreographer/teacher Sean Feldman in a new work Toward Within, which premiered at Swarthmore College. She has also had the honor of working with many Philadelphia-based choreographers such as Gabrielle Revlock, Meg Foley, Daniele Strawmyre, Nicole Canuso, Myra Bazell, Darla Stanley, Charles Anderson, and Kate Watson-Wallace. Most recently Michele performed in Kathryn TeBordo's YOU AIN’T GONNA GET GLORY IF THAT’S WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR in the 2009 Live Arts A.W.A.R.D Show, and in Jumatatu Poe's Philadelphia premiere of FLATLAND. Michele also has a BA in Biology from Bryn Mawr College, and teaches dance, yoga, and pilates-based classes in Philadelphia.

Moment of Truth

2010-03-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

Red Thread needs work. And in just a few days we will roll up our sleeves and cut and reposition and shrink and intensify. Can’t wait!

When you leave a work suspended (in this case since December) and are seeing to the zillions of other things (is that your story too?) it can feel like the piece is a universe away. It’s almost like longing for a long-distance lover. There, I said it. It is being in love this wrestling we do with a piece.

Red Thread is particular because it is no one’s. Its genesis comes in the space between ALL of us, which makes it an unpredictable creature, like a child whose face is an amalgam of many parents. Can’t wait to see its final shape.

2010-02-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

These are "Color In" dresses by Berber Soepboer and Michiel Schuurman (who must be Dutch). They arrive black and white with pens. What I like is:
-The line, although for dance the opaque skirt is just plain tricky. You lose the individual lines of the legs, but get the movement of fabric. A perennial toss-up.
-The way gray scale darkens above the waist, creating a cinched look.
-The pattern which is all-over and busy but unified. I can imagine this kind of active visual overlaid on Michael's chair colors and concept.
-The fit - lean, clean.
Eva likes to wear loose things and Vicky has gradually been trying to get her to wear tops that hug her form. She might be allergic to this!

Chairs

2010-02-03T07:12:00.001-08:00

Michael Biello came to the December showing and afterward came up with a bunch of ideas related to the visual world of the piece. He's designing the set elements and made this prototype for a chair. The covering is related to our manipulations of fabric and thread...How to make the costumes fit well with these? Maybe contrasting through using prints on costumes, solids on chairs?

On Her Own Two Feet

2009-12-27T02:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-18T03:20:00.001-08:00

[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

2009-12-10T06:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-20T03:45:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-17T07:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T22:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

[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

2009-10-02T04:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-21T23:36:00.001-07:00

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)

2009-08-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-19T23:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-13T23:12:00.000-07:00

(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)

2009-08-12T23:13:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-12T22:44:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-08T04:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

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.

A Letter Tied with Red Thread

2008-12-03T07:48:00.000-08:00

A Letter from Emily Sweeney :

November 20, 2008

Dear Eva, Lisa, and Vicky:

These lines from your blog spoke to me:

—All three of us, Lisa, Vicky and I, have traveled the path from hard to soft. (Eva remembers me at a time when I was closer to hard than soft; she helped me take some of my first steps along that path)—

—Even without language, without having made something composed, there is a complete transmission of personality. The idea that we have to be “clothed” with worthy material is suspect. The three of us agree on this: it's not so much what you do as how you do it.—

—We get into the habit of recording, not only our dancing, but also our talking. Sometimes not much of real importance is said, aside from this building of history, this getting to know each other again, in depth, those small and big details of our lives that make us who we are. (This made me think of entanglement—more on that below.)—

It is unbelievable to me that four months (one-third of one year!) have passed since I watched you moving together in Swarthmore on a July afternoon. My response to the work you are making and the purpose of your making it was immediate and non-lingual, which has made it difficult to approach writing about it. But now that I’ve waited, I am glad I have, because I had my own brush with lineage in October—had a red thread surface on my skin and become instantly visible to another with whom I’d never danced. Forgive me… this will be rambling.

The piece I was working on over the summer when I came to watch you, assembling minutiae, is somewhat related to the Red Thread project because it also explores the notion of interpersonal connection, and how and why such connections exist. I was interested in exploring my movement relationships with dancers with whom I somehow established an instant rapport- thinking about why that might be, and trying to generate videos that captured moments in those relationships. I have been thinking a lot about how we feel inexplicably connected to people (the three of you spoke about your common life experiences, but I feel that your connection might go beyond your life experiences to touch something more deeply physical and elemental).

So, in the piece I surrounded myself with little video capsules of me dancing with those dancers with whom I instantly jived, and then imagined somehow that my experiences with them had become memories only. No specific circumstances surrounding why they might have become solely memories- only that the way for me to reenter those movement spaces was through my memory, and never again through actual physical contact. Then I treated the movement we had created together as though it were a beloved memory: rewinding, slowing down, speeding up, repeating- just trying to massage the phrases really thoroughly over time, getting comfort from the act of evoking these movement-memory spaces in the room. It was meant to be about the act of remembering- about creating a slightly melancholy, occasionally joyful space to linger in memory (evoking precious memories is one of my favorite things to do- a fairly common thing, I suppose, but interesting to consider as a kinesthetic state).The structure of the piece was further informed by my slowly growing knowledge of memory. It is currently thought that when we store memories, they are broken down into various components that are relegated to different areas in the brain. Each time we remember something it is a physical act that requires us to pull disparate elements together, and so to "remember" is really to reconstruct- to pull those elements together again. It is a physical act, and I think a physical sensation, too. I wanted to invite the audience into that memory space with me and have them experience that physical state of remembering as it was happening to me with regards to those women I have loved dancing with.

So, the interesting thing about my experience while watching you (this was particularly true during the duet that Eva and Vicky showed) was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that your common experiences were almost a secondary layer of connection—that your connection to one another was somehow established long before you met—long before you had even had the overlapping life experiences that caused you to meet and feel connected—and that your common experiences were more the result of your connection than the basis for it. I did a little research into entanglement during the creation of my memory piece:

From an interview with Brian Clegg:
Entanglement is a strange feature of quantum physics, the science of the very small. It’s possible to link together two quantum particles – photons of light or atoms, for example – in a special way that makes them effectively two parts of the same entity. You can then separate them as far as you like, and a change in one is instantly reflected in the other. This odd, faster than light link, is a fundamental aspect of quantum science – Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with the name “entanglement” called it “the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.”

It seemed to me that the three of you might be somehow entangled.

Your showing resonated with me so completely (and it’s already taken four months!). But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the “factual” layers of text you had placed with your phrase material with regards to the dates, places, and events that led your lives to overlap were secondary, and that what was primary was happening regardless of whether I knew of your common experiences. There is definitely some transcendentalist thought happening here—I am a huge Emerson and Whitman fan—and perhaps even thoughts of reincarnation… or of simple physical stew, where you three, and, I would posit, Mariella and I as well, were somehow very close to one another in the primitive pot, and when we find one another now, some very, very deep element in us is touched, and we respond.

This is all very current thought on my part, so as I have new and perhaps more thorough thoughts, I’ll send them along.

Please let me know if any of this resonates with you—I would be very curious.

Much respect,
Emily (see more on Emily at http://www.uwishunu.com/2007/08/15/artist-spotlight-emily-sweeney/)

today's grid

2008-11-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

photo: Ellen Gallagher by Nicole Bengiveno/New York Times

Amsterdam’s American Book Center had quite a sales table this August. On it I found After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott. Here is a passage which addresses a thought I’d been having about “quilt” as a container for personal narrative. In Heartney’s essay on Ellen Gallagher she writes:

“It has been a long time since the champions of modernism have been able to argue that narrative and content were the enemy of quality, as Clement Greenberg did in 1940 when he proselytized for an art whose purity was not defiled by reference to any external reality. In a similar vein, forty years later, Rosalind Krauss could still celebrate the widespread use of the gird by artists with the pronouncement “The grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, to hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” The grid, she added, “states the autonomy of the realm of art.”

But many artists today see supposedly neutral modernist formulas like minimalist geometry, the grid, and the archive as empty shells to be filled with subversive content. When Haim Steinbach equates art and commodity by placing high-end running shoes and lava lamps on shelves derived from the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd, when Peter Halley takes Mondrian’s geometry and makes it reference electronic circuitry and prison bars, and when Charles Ray homogenizes and serializes the family unit, presenting all members, from father to baby, as elements of equal size, they all make a mockery of modernism’s formalist pretenses by using them for quite different purposes.”

faster? slower

2008-10-12T04:55:00.000-07:00

At the opening of the Olympics, the words ‘faster, higher, stronger’ were in the air. Having just returned from 2 weeks of moving with Lisa and Vicky, I pondered these words as they relate to my dancing.

My first revelation came when, in 1972, I met Pytt (Gerda Geddes) and started attending her T’ai Chi classes. In his book, ‘Dancer in the Light, the life of Gerda ‘Pytt’ Geddes’, Frank Woods quotes Pytt speaking about former Graham dancer, Jane Dudley, who was Lisa’s first dance teacher: ‘Jane used to teach in Studio 3, just above me, and I would hear her shouting: ‘Faster, faster, faster; jump higher, higher, higher,’ whilst I would be saying: ‘Slower, slower, slower; breathe deeply, sink down into the pelvis, and relax.’ . . . . Jane ‘was part of the dance training which was physically very, very hard. We discussed it and we always disagreed about the rigour of what she was doing against the softness of t’ai-chi. But Jane already had arthritis by then. . . . . . . I kept on saying to her, ‘Do be careful, listen to yourself, listen to your own body.’ But she would say . . . ‘oh no, you can’t be a dancer without using force, you have to use lots and lots of force, and this softness is no good.’ We had endless discussions. . . . . . Then she started coming to my classes and became very enthusiastic. I think she saw something in this softness, the yielding part of my movement. It was against her way of thinking, but despite herself she saw something important there.’

With many years of T’ai Chi practice behind me, I’ve found that when I slow down, I understand the subtlety of each moment in the pathway of a movement, its logic, its initiation, in a way that I can never perceive when I move fast. This slowing down and resulting deepened understanding then allows me to play the movement along the whole spectrum from slow to fast. With less effort.

Slowing, softening and deepening are words I use frequently when I teach.

Bruce Frantzis, in his book ‘Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body’, writes, sinking your chi ‘means a complete release, a complete letting go of any sense of control, contraction, strength or binding inside your tissues and nerves, until holding of any kind is replaced by a complete sense of openness, space and comfort . . . . . . In terms of working with chi, feelings of strength indicate blockages, places in your body where chi is not circulating in a healthy, steady flow. The paradox is this, the more you feel strength, the weaker your chi.’ Through this kind of letting go, ‘hard, stiff, tight muscles will become softer but with significantly more tone.’ One discovers ‘An easy, relaxed, and effortless power that cannot be gained by any amount of physical training or weightlifting.’

Lisa, Vicky and I, all share the experience of dancing with Trisha (Brown). In her liquid, easy style, we learned to smooth the edges. You can’t do this kind of dancing by pushing. Rather, the movement is ‘allowed’ to happen.

In her essay, "Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961-2001" Marianne Goldberg says,
‘Brown released the dancer's "set," a particular tensile way of holding the body in the forties and fifties, which she had learned through studies at Mills and at the Merce Cunningham Studio after she arrived in New York in 1961. Through Alexander and also intensive, long-term study of another emerging form, Kinetic Awareness, founded by the Judson choreographer and filmmaker Elaine Summers, Brown began to initiate movement from very different kinesthetic knowledge. These newly surfacing somatic ideas offered alternatives to how to hone her body for dancing. She shed the stylized use of her muscles and the tensile alertness through the spine and skin. Focusing instead on subtleties of elegant, relaxed alignment of her spine and limbs, she moved with ease and a spatial clarity that stemmed from innovative inner imagery. Brown looks at home physically in these moves, and a different virtuosity and creativity emerged, grounded in anatomically clear and efficient action. New sensations, perceptions, and energy developed within her body and between body, space, time, and geometry. . . . . . When she formed her company in the early seventies, she chose performers who also reconceived the human structure and the meaning of physical skill.’

All three of us, Lisa, Vicky and I, have traveled the path from hard to soft.

Vicky tells us stories about her Russian ballet teacher who used to tell the class to get their legs ‘higherrr, higherrr’. I watch Vicky now as she dances. Her ‘father’ dance is beautifully crafted. She unfolds stories within stories, threads opening, returning, weaving; humor, sadness, pain. She moves with a delicacy and fragility, a vulnerability that mirrors her speaking. But there’s also strength, visible in the clarity of her moving, her angular shapes, loose and weighted, abandoned, subtle yet compelling.

While Lisa and I were teaching together at EDDC, our children were still young. I became more generous with my acceptance of the shifting quality of time and space after I became a mother. My intuitive sense became honed to respond to my child’s needs. This quality entered my work. I watched Lisa’s dancing also soften during this time. Her ‘straight lines’ yielded more, her edges became more permeable. Watching her perform, I was able to drop even deeper into her inner self, her life blood, her source. Watching her now as she moves through her ‘father’ dance, I’m touched, both Vicky and I are touched, by her honesty, her passion. Her moving is laced with gestural detail, has intensity, is charged and totally committed. Her movement material is so undeniably her.

Even now, in our 50s, our bodies are resilient, our dancing is strong. We can call up integrated speed, and we can plumb our depths. I return to the words, ‘faster, higher, stronger’ and think no, I’ll stay with slower, deeper, softer, and more powerful.

(Eva)

Fruitful Friction by Eva

2008-09-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

On the last day, after Vicky has already returned to NY, Lisa and I decide that the most challenging and therefore fruitful and creative places are not where we see eye to eye, but rather, those where we differ. (With Lisa, there is this element in our relationship. Coupled with the immense respect and love we feel for each other, there are places of divergence within our work. Are we able to express them more freely, the longer we know each other, precisely because of our closeness?)

Some places where the three of us agree:
- that 'how' is more important than 'what';
- that we want to dive deep into the heart of the matter;
- we demand specificity, rigor, intelligence from our dancing (most likely partly a legacy of having danced with Trisha);
- we all train and dance with a genuine respect for the body, all have many years of experience in 'somatic' techniques - we all want to keep dancing, injury free, into old age, so use our bodies wisely;
- we are all fascinated by movement, any movement, that we see around us, (like Vicky's description of the woman she watched in the subway making small gestures, that have inspired her to make some wonderful minimal-gesture material).

Some places where we differ:
- Our attitudes towards improvisation. Improvisation plays a big part for all three of us in our work, but we stand on various ends of the spectrum. Where Lisa and Vicky use improvisation as a starting point, then tend to set material and make repeatable compositional choices, I prefer to stay with improvisation to the very end, all the way into performance;
- How tight or how loose we're willing for a performance to be.

Over the two weeks, we've often spoken about structure coupled with intuition.The rigor of form coupled with the flight of free expression.We look at the Gee's Bend quilts and their incredible surprises - of line, color, shape, pattern, texture - coupled with such a sense of what sustains, not just catches, the eye.

Noting our tendencies, Lisa and I speak about the challenge we have of acknowledging, and giving space in this piece, to our different work modes and sensibilities. We agree that we want to learn from each other, to stretch, to grow. Yes, even now, having passed 50, we have curiosity for the unfamiliar and even the unknown.

some photos

2008-08-30T13:25:00.000-07:00

Ordinary Eloquence - by Eva

2008-08-07T03:33:00.000-07:00

Two weeks is just a drop of time in the ocean of our lives, but for the three of us, all working mothers, it takes meticulous strategy to carve out even this from the rush of our daily living. But this meeting of kindred spirits, respected and admired colleagues, is what the three of us want, and we've all done everything we've needed to do, to make this time possible. So here we are at Swarthmore, in this beautiful, spacious studio, lying next to each other with feet up against the wall. Such a familiar way to be together.

Talking seems to be the way we begin. This becomes a form, from the first day till the end. It's a way of locating ourselves for each other, catching up, noting similarities and differences, a de-briefing where we use words to offer facts and insights that somehow become the ground on which we then place our moving. We tell stories of our lives (laundry, kids, relationships, teaching, dancing), we ask questions, offer thoughts. We get into the habit of recording, not only our dancing, but also our talking. Sometimes not much of real importance is said, aside from this building of history, this getting to know each other again, in depth, those small and big details of our lives that make us who we are. But at other times we become eloquent as we talk: about our passion for moving, our love of the art of dance, our visions of how we aim to create, our struggles, and ways we do succeed. Outside of this charged context, where the three of us are sparking each other, it's difficult, often impossible, to recapture such degrees of subtlety and articulateness in our language, so we want to have a record of what, and how, things were said. (Who will transcribe the tapes?)

And of course there's the dancing.We all recognize how important the time of being still, being small and close to the floor is for centering and integrating before moving big. We warm up together, sometimes just moving how we feel like moving (Deborah Hay enters the working space with her admonishment - get what you need), sometimes trying out on each other things we teach in our classes, sometimes doing the Meridian Stretches, the series of stretches, developed by Shizuto Masunaga, that Lisa and I taught students at EDDC, and that now I'm teaching to Vicky when Lisa heads home after a day of work. We play with scores and tasks, we agree and disagree, we laugh, and at times we cry. We move, we watch each other dance, then move in response. We are inspiring each other.

a straight line?

2008-07-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

7-19 (The blog is gradually catching up to the experience.)

We watched the Alabama PBS DVD “The Quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend,” each of us moved by this art that starts with next-to-nothing, that communicates vibrancy and joy despite the harsh conditions under which the makers have lived. These ladies, the (until recently) geographically isolated descendants of slaves in Alabama, have made quilts that are bold and visionary in a relaxed, everyday way. One woman interviewed said that she at first couldn’t imagine making a quilt but got started because she had no choice. Her family needed bedclothes to keep them warm. With no money, she picked up her needle and thimble. This woman’s quilts are among the most stunning, in part because she uses scraps that are obviously worn out clothing – many gradations of blue in the jeans with faded knees.

In being inspired by these women we recognize an appetite for the social aspects of the quilting circle - the conversation and singing that take place while they stitch. We have been listening to each other. One aim of Red Thread is to pay attention to how we weave our daily and dancing lives. We seem to naturally begin each morning with a debriefing that veers into a particular subject: our children, our marriages, our parents, caretaking, our relationships with our bodies, our difficulties in carving out sufficient time for our creative work and hewing to “dailiness” - continuous process, especially when not engaged in collaboration or under a deadline. The effect is less kaffeeklatsch than coming clean – airing issues and transmuting their energy from individual burdens and joys to shared understandings to be folded back into the work.

We improvise as a starting place - solos which are “fed back” as duets. I am inspired by Vicky’s physical veracity. She may not know what she is doing in a given moment, but what I see is the her bemused involvement with the movement she is finding, absent any sense of awkwardness about exposure while “not knowing”. I feel more self-consciousness.

What do we do when unsure, not “at home”? Stay loose and awkward? Or pump out movement, repeating an action, maybe part of our bag of tricks, putting oomph behind it that rings false? In this open dancing I see so much of who we are. Even without langauge, without having made something composed, there is a complete transmission of personality. The idea that we have to be "clothed" with worthy material is suspect. The three of us agree on this: it's not so much what you do as how you do it.

We pored over “The Architecture of the Quilt,” the catalog for the Gee’s Bend quilters’ show that was in Baltimore last winter. (It’s coming to Philadelphia in September). How strong the choices are – to put a bunch of big, nearly same-shaped squares around a block of a bunch of little bitty ones, to have three rows of four blocks of a pattern all in parallel lines and then the fourth row slid off that grid. To use blacks and whites and subtle colors over an entire quilt and then place two little bits of red, one on the side edging, one in a tiny square. Most striking is the fact that the lines are rarely straight, as though each fabric piece is a lively entity, not completely subsumed by right angle and grid. In a finished patchework, curving lines can easily produce puckers. Rather than aiming for the Amish's quality of linear precision, these Gee’s Bend ladies use their skills to produce flat finished patchwork comprised of lots of curves and not-straight lines.

"The greatest straightness looks like crookedness." Lao Tzu

the first two days

2008-07-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

7-15 Swarthmore College

We intend to make part of the material of Red Thread our shared roles as women artists who weave art-making with domestic work, just as quilt-makers have long done. Getting settled and shopping at the food Co-op is then part of the work: What foods to buy, how many, of what quality? How to negotiate these things? Who sleeps where? Who gets and does what domestically?

Eva and Vicky remark on the beauty and atmosphere of Swarthmore. The big dance spaces have high ceilings and windows looking out to Crum Woods. They are the kind of quiet that’s not just about sound, but about being settled. The people around are supportive, good-natured colleagues.

In the studio we start on the floor laughing and catching up about children and spouses and our aging bodies. This is the material too. Three pairs of legs leaning against the wall, feet up, as we lay on our backs – the classic parallel joint-folding action.

I recount how at the recent 36th birthday for Contact Improvisation, a younger dancer with whom I was doing a ‘one-on-one’ told me that my legs are out of alignment and that I should do this very form. The others were slightly indignant on my behalf. I don’t know; we are really all beginners all the time. The same tendencies I had in the 70’s that prompted Elaine Summers to encourage me to practice that parallel alignment exercise are tendencies I still have today. Although we think we are resolving issues, it may not be apparent to anyone else. How many times has a student told me that my physical feedback to them is exactly what other teachers have told them before?

Eva asks “what are our practices in the studio, what do we do?” We begin to answer, moving and telling, for each of us the commentary shifting between reflecting on developing performance work and on teaching. The question feels too large. We will answer it day by day, in installments.

Here’s a distinction – Eva senses herself always eager to move; a perennially kinetic being. Vicky and I are less motivated that way now. I do not usually want to move until propelled by an idea, like a shape I want to try, or a piece of great music, or the goading of others around me with energy rising. I need a big motivator to get really activated. Is that from years of stress, too little regeneration time, or aging?

We hit a few points of not exactly tension, but places where we stretch away from each other. I propose an exercise – after an improvised solo, the other two enter to repeat what they’ve just seen. That implies relating as a duet, so at issue was having to both recall and form a new relationship. Too much for Eva and Vick who prefer attending to one or the other. I find doing both liberating because it’s more than one can easily encompass; moving from a score and working with what’s unfolding in the space. But how you think about ‘repeating’ is crucial here. Is your goal to mirror, offer feedback of what you recall, respond, extrapolate, or continue?

On day two when we dive into stories about our fathers, all deceased, we begin to wonder about finding a right approach to emotional exposure. Working with very personal material brings with it the delicate relationship of art-making to therapeutic practice. If we are using authentic movement-like forms, moving with a memory or a deep emotional score, how does it become a seed for good theater – not indulgent, but clean.

Questions hang in the air about using language. I feel, even after incorporating text for many years, that I fundamentally still don’t know how. Eva suggests that simpler is better. I think of the John Jasperse monologue that opens Misuse Liable to Prosecution – a spiel on class and consumerism, tongue in cheek and barbed simultaneously. Palatable but stinging. I say I need to really study this language thing and Eva suggests that working in the trio is an opportunity with feedback immediate for clunkers.

With a group of younger dancers who I’m paying, I don’t care whether they like a form I propose or not, I just want to see it not for itself but for what it might lead to. But with these peers, I want them to see what I see – the potential for something to be of interest. The spatial form I suggest, lifted directly from looking at the Gee’s Bend quilts in “The Architecture of the Quilt,” is one that has a kind of foreign-ness for the others. I have been dealing with space and floor pattern extensively from the work on the Partita Project and its baroque antecedents. But with Vick and Eva I want them to like the form = to like me. Time to just let that one go. (Lisa)

get set, go

2008-07-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

Three women, seasoned, coming together to dig deep and find shared form. One a Bessie-winning New York choreographer and performer, one a Netherlands-based dance adventurer and gifted transmitter of body knowledge, the third a slow-cooking Philly teacher, writer, choreographer and presenter. All imprinted by the legacy of dancing with Trisha Brown.

The first time I saw Eva Karczag was when she was dancing for Remy Charlip. She crawled from one end of DTW to the other balancing on rubber balls, kicking one ball forward and placing a hand on it each time she took another feline step. I had never witnessed such liquid simplicity. I thought she was the most beautiful dancer I’d ever seen.

The first time I saw Vicky Shick was at the 1977 Contact Improvisation gathering in Putney, Vermont. We met through a mutual friend, Richard Colton, on whom I had choreographed my first dance at age 13. We shared that watershed dance moment when attention to feeling and touch were transforming how we all moved.

All together in Brown’s Glacial Decoy, Line Up, Locus, Son of Gone Fishin’, going to the limits of strength and complexity. Witnessing the unfolding of genius and sometimes the drudgery of maintaining exactitude.

Fast forward nearly thirty years. A decade shared with Eva at European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands. Grown or nearly grown children, graying mates. Continuous activity in the dance world, both humble and heralded. Now - a rehearsal studio.

What will we find? What matters today? In a post-Judson, post-9/11, post-oil boom world, how does dance making continue as an eloquent medium for us?

Beginnings, with their limitless possibility, are so simple. Hopefully maturity will aid us in drilling down into the heart of what we find and sticking with the faint currents of unfamiliar direction. We will share our findings here. (Lisa Kraus)