This is so cool!!! i’m finally posting live to the blog. before this lotta has been doing it for me–i’d write something and send it to her to post. now it’s all me.
small pleasures.
so i am having a mellow evening, in particular hoping to sort out some of my feelings about the improv fest, thank people for being involved, etc. i’m still not sure what i feel about the festival. i pretty much ran myself into the ground during the days before and the first couple of days of the festival, so i was a zombie by saturday and didn’t quite get as much out of it as i probably could’ve. but here are some thoughts and impressions:
one thing i really enjoyed was erika schonemann and roxann morgan’s set of pieces down at the WWII and WWI monuments, and the reflecting pool. i really felt like they worked, which in a way surprised me b/c i knew that they didn’t rehearse beforehand. but the dancers all looked good, and the mixing with all of the tourists–who, unlike DC locals, actually stopped to watch–was very successful. i wondered what it would’ve been like with twice as many dancers and all of them dressed in white from head to toe, but it was pretty satisfying as it was. it’s interesting b/c my initial hope in promoting site specific work for the festival was that people would create dances on normal, pedestrian places (like the metro or an average street), but it was great to see that the monuments really do work very well for that kind of art too.
i also really liked ilana silverstein and roxann morgan’s piece at the sculpture garden cafe. they were both in orange and moved with such a regular and deliberate pace, staying in contact most of the time–it was very lovely and inspiring.
i was in the ATM piece that lotta referred to earlier. it was fun and definitely a GREAT location, something worth working with again. but one thing it made me aware of was the general need that a lot of improv has for more structure. i think most people feel that improv means no planning, no structure, no rehearsal, but as someone recently pointed out to me, if you don’t have choreography and composition, you basically have nothing at all if you don’t add any structure. and nothing at all isn’t always so attractive to look at. i think next year i’m going to try even harder to get artists to do more planning and more rehearsing. i just think it can make a huge difference. and even though improv is improv, there are still a lot of layers to it. first there’s just being comfortable improvising, then there’s exploring the boundaries you can push alone, and then there’s improvising w/ others–which i find remarkably difficult sometimes!
me and lotta did our piece downtown, by the way, and i think we both realized that we spent more time working on the choreographed sections and less on the improvised parts, alone and together. i think we both felt great about the performances, but i know i’d like to work on my improvisation so that it doesn’t all run together, so that different sections have different styles and maybe so that we interact more w/ each other.
boy, lots to say, about the festival, about site-specific work–which i want to keep seriously studying–and about dance in DC. but i’ll save some for tomorrow.