DCDanceBlog

Laura Schandelmeier and Stephen Clapp are holding open rehearsals once/month until their June performance. Yesterday, we saw some of their new work “Portals,” created our own portals, painted portals and then ate some snacks and gave feedback and did another exercise around transformation.
In the feedback session someone asked, if what we saw today was choreographed and the dancers answered yes. And, yes, we as dancers tend to think like that- the dance is usually either improvised or set. But what about, emotion, facial expression, eye contact, intensity, feeling, images - words in our heads - the full experience? I love the level of integrity a piece of choreography has the potential to reach. There are so many idiosyncrasies and levels of details to address. There are so many factors that change a run-through of piece too - energy level, connection with others on stage… Stephen and Laura then spoke of their desire to work with a dramaturge and a participant offered his services. Who knows if they will work together, but what testament to this piece of the process! I admire artists willing to go there… visit www.dancenow.org for more information on Portals/The Open Door Project. Also, if you haven’t been to the new Joe’s, you have to check it out! www.joesmovement.org

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A few observers and most of the dancers came to Daniel Burkholder/The Playground’s second Open Rehearsal/Showing on Sunday. We all resisted a day of playing in the snow, and instead danced our water dance- My Ocean is Never Blue. We performed four CHUNKS of the piece.

Chunk G - Chunk Map - Chunk Drinking Line - Chunk Flock

Each chunk is a marriage of different movement scores that are inspired by water. The dancers are in the process of learning what fits together with what, what the group vocabulary is and what/who will trigger a change in the dance.

I especially enjoyed the sound atmosphere created by Jonathan Matis who was testing out some sound along w/the dance for the first time. The mood ranged from tense, to ethereal, to nature sound, to machine like ones.

I am into this open rehearsal idea and think it could be explored more. I would expect the dance community to be in to it. Why aren’t dancers going to these? It is hard to judge by last Sunday, because of the weather, but I am still curious. There aren’t any more planned open rehearsals for “My Ocean is Never Blue” but there is an upcoming performance in another unconventional space: Transformer Gallery - www.transformergallery.org on March 30. Visit http://improvarts.alkem.org/ for upcoming performances!

Just wanted to tell you about an upcoming show that me and Amanda have been choreographing for, that opens this weekend at Theatre II, at the Gunston Arts Center in Arlington. I will write some about the process which has been ridiculously interesting. Gertrud Stein man… She wrote some amazing texts and the part of the evening that we have wroked on is “Photograph”, a short play in five acts. Here’s more info. Please excuse the rushyness of this post.

Drama Under the Influence, a Surprise-filled Evening of One Acts from Women Playwrights of the Prohibition Years.

A fascination evening of short plays written by some of America’s most brilliant writers; all women, some celebrated and some less well known. Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Eulalie Spence, Sophie Treadwell, Susan Glaspell and Rita Wellman. All distinct voices, all exploring the tensions and social stresses of a changing society as women entered the work force and gender roles were tested during the Prohibition era. Directed by Steven Scott Mazzola.

Click here for more info on tickets and such.

Gertrude Stein

Commercial art is sometimes all I need.  The passion…

buenos aires it is!!! i´m here, living it up w/ boyfriend john, wandering the streets and drinking coffee and checking things out. it´s pretty damn amazing!!!

but i´m in this stupid internet cafe right now b-c the contact improv jam i was seeking wasn´t where it was supposed to be. i guess it must´ve gotten shut down or something, which is a major drag. but i´m still hoping to get lucky b-c i´ve heard there are other jams this weekend. apparently contact is big in BA so i really don´t want to miss my chance.

john and i had the good–or bad, however you look at it–luck to catch the last performance of the city´s annual contemporary dance festival. bad b-c it was the last of some 15+ free modern dance performances, which we would´ve LOVED to have seen, but it ended on our first day here. but good b-c we took a risk and waited in line and were some of the last 10 people to get into an overflowing performance space.

the performance was ok. typically, john loved it and i was bored. as john put it, it was a trompe l´oeil piece–an illusion using bodies that were angled and bent in a way as to look like something they weren´t. women were bent in half, skirts hanging from their waists and over their heads, shoes on their hands, naked butts in the air–making them look like crazy headless creatures. here’s a photo that gives you a sense of the visuals:

later a woman bent over and hid her face under a table, so all we could see were her shoulders, back and arms, and she moved the muscles of her back to simulate a person with her legs spread, having sex. i can´t describe it–it has to be seen. and yes, i guess it was pretty unique and “innovative”, as john likes to say, though also interminably slow in places.

but it was also the icing on a rough day filled with WAY too many gorgeous women and a lot of perfect butts and breasts. Good god! I´m not the most insecure person, and john is a great boyfriend. nonetheless, no guy could avoid looking at all the amazingly beautiful women in this city, and their amazingly perfect bodies, and it eventually can be too much. that erotic show was the absolute limit.

but this is a wonderful city, FILLED with culture of all sorts, lots and lots of alternative people, music, art, and a lot of funding for the arts. each main neighborhood has its own cultural center, where there are art and photography exhibits, performance spaces, and just room to hang out. it´s amazing, and quite depressing when we compare it to dc.

I’ve been wanting to write something about this. Well, I’ve been wanting to write tons of things about it. But I haven’t and I don’t think I will. There’s just no “inspiration” at the moment.

When I think about it, there are really only two things I want to say. One, and that’s about my piece; she’s right. And this fact raises the question, what sucks more? To get a shitty review or to know in your heart that the shitty review is quite right on? Umm…the latter!

Two, she is wrong about some of the other pieces (ok, in my opinion, I should say, she’s wrong). This is especially true for the last piece of the showcase, by Noopur Singa titled “Kids & Science”. This piece challenged a lot of conventions and for that alone I think she deserved some credit.
So what am I talking about? I’m talking about the review of the Choreographer’s Showcase 2007 in DanceViewTimes that Lisa Traiger wrote. Click here to read it. It’s brutal.

Seems like that this guy, Russel Maliphant, is the contemporary choreographer who creates the most buzz in the UK right now. He’s also the one who convinced Sylvie Guillem to dance his stuff.

After the fiftyeleventh try to “embed” YouTube in this blog I’m not trying anymore. Gotta click here to watch the wizkid dance.

Is Sylvie Guillem famous in America? She’s one of the “star dancers”, as the NYT would put it, in Europe. At the same time as she’s ballet oriented, she has worked a lot with contemporary choreographers like Mats Ek. This YouTube (yes still in YouTubeland, how can you blame me?) is of an old Mats Ek choregraphy, “Wet Woman”. To me it’s amazing because it’s one of the choreographies that comes through even in this format, a tiny window of a not so good quality video. There’s just something about his vocabulary that makes it pop through.

If you’re up for watching a little “Wet Woman” click here (if you’ve never seen Sylvie dance you gotta). The choreography is totally nineties, but as always with Ek’s stuff, the movements are universal. His language is universal.

I could watch this forever.

authenticity: the quality of being authentic; genuineness.

authentic: not false or copied; genuine

so what does it mean to create a piece trying to be as authentic as possible???