DCDanceBlog

i think this looks fun (though it’s a bit odd that the dance/metro dc folks aren’t sponsoring anything):

Dance Artist Mixer
December 14, from 5:30 until the party ends
Gazuza
1629 Connecticut Ave., NW (above Chipotle)
Join Dance/MetroDC at Gazuza to celebrate the holiday season and hang out with fellow dance artists. Dancers, choreographers, dance admin staff - anyone in the dance field is invited.
The event is free, but attendees must pay for their own food and drinks. Happy hour specials run from 5:30-7pm.

i’ve been getting email updates recently from nicole bindler, an improviser from philly. i must be on the email list she uses to publicize her performances, though we’ve only met once, a few years ago. right now she’s in japan, or was, to collaborate with a dancer there. i kind of idly read the first update last week, then got hooked. there’ve been three so far. i wish they were online somewhere so that i could link to them, but no such luck so far.

i’d like to share them b/c they’re so great! she’s in japan, encountering an almost completely alien culture and environment. i love reading her observations of japanese life and people, and imagining what it must feel like to be somewhere new and feel so stimulated by the idea of living another way.

i really like her descriptions and how honest she is about herself–including the awkwardness she feels about being new and sometimes off-balance in a bizarre-seeming country. it’s always so great when people admit their insecurities; it lets you inside them a little more.

she took classes with butoh master kazuo ohno and her description of the surreal instruction made me remember all the trippy dance classes i’ve taken. that’s partially what i fell in love with about modern dance, that sense of being totally free, totally out there, not having to adhere to specific rules about how things are done.

and i envy her simply being there, an “experimental dance artist,” traveling to a new place to expand her perspective and meet other artists with whom she can schmooze and network and talk about art.

it’s not the traveling itself that grabs me. it’s the sense i get from her of being inspired and alive. i know that feeling and i think it’s possible to find it w/o leaving home, but it takes a little more effort and life-restructuring.

i feel bad that i haven’t written here in a while. however, i’ve decided that right now it’s more important that i pour my creative energy into thinking about what i do with the rest of my time–that is, the 40 hours per week when i’m not dancing, thinking about dance, or writing creatively. i’m trying to figure out what might be a better fit for me than the arrangement i currently have.

which leads me to ask this of readers: if you are trying to be an artist or creative person of some sort, how do you make money? i talked with a dancer last night who spends at least 20 hours per week dancing in various companies (mostly for free), 15 hours making money at a desk job, and some more hours teaching dance to make up the balance.

if you are trying to make it as some kind of artist, how do you do it? what type of jobs do you have, spending how many hours at each? and do you make enough money to live on without seriously stressing?

today i was looking out the window and saw a lime green taxi go by.
and i thought how great it would be if everything in the world was brightly colored like that.

then i wondered if all the colors of the world have been discovered, or if one day people will find one, or some, that’s never been seen before.
it sounds crazy, but think about it…
there are a lot of colors to combine. take the regular ROYGBIV spectrum. if you mix red with yellow, or with green, or with blue, you get different colors. or you can mix red with yellow-green, or blue-green, and those would produce other colors. what if you mixed red-orange-green then with blue-purple? another color.
it’s actually infinite, all the colors you can combine with each other to create new colors.

so i was figuring that there really is a good chance that we haven’t seen all the colors of the world yet.

but my colleague at work put it in much more concrete terms.
he said that the first tvs, in the 1930’s or so, showed 256 colors, all stemming from 3 basic colors.
but today, high definition tvs have 16 million colors.
that’s only in the past 3 years or so.
16 million!
that’s not infinity, but for all practical purposes, it’s close.

i love this guy’s movement style. it’s very different from what i generally gravitate to, but wonderfully precise and angular and yet fluid in its own way.  (this video comes actually from the third rail projects, a dance company that has a blog on great dance.)

new idea: i’m going to spend some time looking at dance on you tube before my next rehearsal or low-key outdoor performance. why not take advantage of what’s out there, all the dance and various styles, and use it to expand what i can do?

my trip to mn this past weekend turned out great. i did indeed visit the museum below, in fact i walked right through the scene in the picture, though it was under 5 inches of snow at the time. it’s a beautiful building, with galleries inside that wind upward gradually rather than having clearly delineated floors.

i also took a modern class in mn that was offered by zenon dance company. the teacher was a sub, which was nice since apparently the normal teacher has a warmup he uses every time and whips through quickly. this way i wasn’t the only new person.

it was a great class. the teacher, eddie arroyo (?) was a beautiful mover and extremely physical–one of those guys who probably came to dance from a lifetime of serious competitive sports. he was in tip top shape and obviously made an effort to stay that way, and his body seemed perfectly integrated. his style was extremely physical but also very idiosyncratic, emphazing circularity and a swirling ribcage above strong but light legs. a challenge to get, but fun.

at one point eddie said that he’d created the phrase we were working on “while listening to gnarls barkley, so it might not work right now,” and everyone laughed. i’d never heard of gnarls barkley, so i assumed it was a local mn band. much to my surprise, i read about him sunday in the ny times and apparently he’s really popular! good grief, am i that out of it??? the students were considerably younger than me, so maybe i’m just beyond that sphere of influence…

in general, the other dancers were nice but not particularly impressive. it was a surprise since i’d been thinking of minneapolis as an arts mecca.  but maybe it is. i was there for a wedding so i didn’t get a chance to fully investigate, but a new friend who i met there sent me a link to this article about a new downtown venue for dance. one of the key quotes is “Minneapolis is a great city for dance, especially for people who are intellectual, brave, and people who are OK with not being popular all the time.” nice.