50collective

Saturday I had the chance to attend a workshop and performance by 50collective, an amazing collaboration by 50 international dance artists.

They've formed a grassroots collective that brings them together for short periods of time to pass on their dance knowledge in classes, pass on their performance experience, and pass through.

All 50 originally met for a 2.5 month long workshop in Costa Rica, where they studied two dance techniques - Passing Through and Flying Solo - and their 2010 Passes took them to Havana, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Reykjavik, Maribor (Slovenia) and Bari (Italy).

Saturday in Seattle was the culmination of a month long US tour that brought 11 of them through New York, Chicago, Denver, LA, Portland and finally here.

So, the movement:

It was refreshing. Focused on an entire different set of skills than ballet-influenced turnout and big kicks, and instead on impulse, energy, awareness of the group and oneself, and connection.

One technique:

We practiced this in class and I also witnessed it in the show. One dancer was a "leaf" and the other was the "wind". The wind dancer created impulses by sweeping towards the other dancer, who then reacted with her body as if it were wind sweeping her up and around. In class we even used pieces of clothing to whip towards them and create an actual sensation of wind that they could react to.

Key points of this one technique: devoted attention to your partner, impulsive movement (as opposed to planned), true reaction to the stimulus that's coming your way (visual and physical), subtlety (sometimes the stimulus was small or only affected a single part of your body.

It's exhilarating to practice that awareness and impulse, to let one part of your body or the whole thing get whipped up into a spiral like a leaf spinning in the wind. You have to be very light, and soft, and careful, or else you'll get hurt.

In the Seattle performance, which took place at Open Flight Studio in the U district, the audience was set up on platforms around the edges of the room, so that when the performers stood against the walls around the brightly lit space, we were part of their circle. The piece began with all of them looking at each other, and at us - an immediate immersion in what would be a clear-eyed, present and transparent performance. They wore soft dance clothes with no obvious theme of costuming besides what works well to move in.

The piece built up from walking in spiral and circle patterns, through an ecstatic and focused solo by Viko Hernandez from Mexico (first picture of this post), through big group patterns of bodies spinning and running and tangling up in currents of motion. The dancers collided, flew, found moments of unison, and kept with patterns until a new impulse changed the composition again. As my friend noted, their collisions and partnering were an eloquent and abstracted version of the body language that we communicate with all the time. The use of space stayed refreshing and surprising; humor popped up as they played and notated their own movement with the sound effects of an auto shop or a group of kids playing space invaders.

For a long moment towards the end, the performers stood directly in front of the different islands of audience members, studying us, then moving on to another platform. Their presence was open and genuine, their hard work obvious in their breath and sweat. They stayed with us for a long time, but just as the energy showed the first signs of stagnation, another dancer swept through, shoving them all aside and back into the center space again.


The facilitator of the workshop, Christine Gouzelis from Greece, said at one point "it's kid stuff," which I realized was true. The work was in every moment playful in the way that children's playgrounds or creative movement classes are. It occurred to me that maybe this technique is what happens if you take kid's stuff and practice it and deepen it to a highly elevated degree, to the point of virtuosity - kid's games as only passionate and patient adults could play them. What I felt was not effort so much as a deep fascination and curiosity with the possibilities that were unfolding, as well as a kind of giggly glee at how fun and challenging it was.


And we're lucky, Seattle: one of the dancers, Elia Mrak (second pic above) is a Seattle native. That means more chances for us to witness and experience this expansive and innovative movement practice. He's hosting amazing workshops around town - if you're interested, drop me a note at victoria.jacobs@gmail.com, or contact them through their website at http://www.50collective.com/site/Home.html

Mer Sedna

Mer Sedna is the performance project I've been doing for about a year and a half with Katrina Ellison.

Mer Sedna is a fusion of Butoh (Japanese modern dance-theatre) and American Tribal-Style Bellydance (ATS), and is principally Katrina's brainchild, but she lets me come along and play. I'm trained in modern Egyptian Bellydance and American modern dance, so the techniques are cousins anyway.

Quick rundown on what we're dealing with here, though I'm by no means an expert on either: Butoh is based on ideas of transformation/transmutation, and it often deals with darkness and grotesque imagery. It arose in the wake of the bombing of Japan in the 1940's as a rejection both of traditional Japanese theatre and of western modern dance. Here's a clip of Kazuo Ohno, one of the credited originators of butoh.



American Tribal Style Bellydance, on the other hand, emerged in San Francisco in the 1970's, and it's called tribal "style" because though it borrows some movement/costume ideas from North African Berber tribal culture, it's not really related to any one of the region's 300+ tribes. It's a method of group improvisation where a set number of bellydance movements are practiced to precise unison, and each movement then can be cued by whichever member of the group is leading. It tends to attract a pretty alternative crowd, (as does butoh) so there's usually a large costuming element of dreadlocks, tattoos, piercings, etc.

Below is a clip from Fat Chance Bellydance, who preserve a stronghold of ATS performance and schooling in San Francisco.




Ahem, pardon me, I could dance-nerd out all day about this kind of stuff, and these aren't even my dance specialties.


So, Mer Sedna seeks to fuse these things, which are very compatible in one way - check the slowness, sinuousness, hyper-controlled movement, and well, seriousness of both. But they're also from two different planets in another way, in that butoh is almost purely energetic and formless, where ATS is almost entirely form.

So I think it's fascinating and wonderful that Katrina is working to reconcile these things, and I find the mix to be something dark, feminine, beautiful, formal, energetic, aformal, sinuous, and serious. But you can make up your mind for yourself. Below is last weekend's performance at the Beltane Cabaret, in a lineup of more traditional bellydance acts, which you can click through to see. You can also click through to see our second set.




The audience seemed to enjoy it, and they didn't even need a dance history lesson to get it.

2881 Miles

I've been doing an ongoing dance+writing game with friends all over the world for about a year now. It started with a dance that my mentor Aileen wrote for me, which I made a dance film of. Then my friend Liz wrote about that film, and my friend Charlotte made a video of that dance, and so on, and so on.

It's a riff on the game "Exquisite Corpse" invented by the Surrealists, where you continue a line of poetry without seeing more than the last word/line. The results are pretty, well, surreal.

My friends and I played a lot in college, with a permutation of it called "The Drawing Game" or "Telephone Pictionary" that's a back-and-forth of pictures and sentences. Hilarity ensues. If you have spent any length of time with me, we've probably played this game.

This dance film/writing project is called "2881 Miles" which is the distance from Seattle to Brooklyn, NY, where most of my favoritest college collaborators seem to have moved to at this point. I've also got collaborators signed on in Tennessee, Jamaica, Tel Aviv, and Japan.

What's been humbling and humorous about the process of "2881 Miles" is how INeffective it is to try to collaborate cross country. The form of the game admits that - there's really no direct collaboration, and shades of meaning - in fact, almost all meaning - are completely lost in the translation process from writing to dance film and back again.

But this collaborative process itself - of trying to get someone in Japan to make a dance film, or a political speech writer in NYC to write a text - has been very revealing. Because though the internet gives me the impression that I'm still connected to these people in a million ways - Facebook, email, gchat, tweeter, hooter, mutter, father - trying to work with them creatively reveals that I'm not. I'm just not. They have a million things going on in their lives - tragedies, joys, new loves, breakups, ridiculous amounts of work - that their Facebook status or brief emails can never begin to hint at.

And while there was a time when I spent hours a day by their sides, now, being 2881 miles (or more) away from them, I really have no idea what's going on with them.

Which is to say: Matt Wing, I KNOW that your job is so important it requires two Blackberries, but for GODS SAKE, it's been FOUR MONTHS AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS WRITE A PARAGRAPH.






anyway, once I have some more pieces of 2881 miles, I'll starting posting on here. It should be fun. If Matt Wing ever gets his part done.


Hollar at me if you want to join.

I've never used my blog for this kind of thing, but you know what, this has been driving me crazy.

The Stranger, my favorite weekly rag ever, and according to them 'The Only Newspaper in Seattle', does not have a dance section. Or a dance critic. They bother to send their theater critic or their visual arts critic - both of whom don't know a lick about dance - to one dance concert every 3 months or so. And then they stick it in a tiny spot in the theater or visual art section, because - did I mention? they don't HAVE a dance section.

But about half the pages of The Stranger is devoted to music; there are, I believe, at least 5 different music writers with their own columns, plus several pages of listings for the week's music events. Their aforementioned arts writer, Jen Graves, is apparently one of the only fulltime arts writers in Seattle. So it's not that they don't value the arts. They just don't value dance.

Why? I really don't know. I could make some vague statements about how most people these days don't care about dance, or about how Seattle's dance scene is weak. But I don't think that's true. PNB packs the house. I attended a sold-out performance of Alvin Ailey (one of 4) a few weeks ago. On the Boards, Velocity, Spectrum, Exit Space, Fremont Abbey - they're all putting up tons of shows, filling audiences, sponsoring the young up-and-comers, and generally nurturing the huge and varied Seattle dance scene.

And as someone who's dipped a toe into the modern dance scene, improvisational dance scene, flamenco scene, butoh scene, traditional, tribal style and experimental belly dance scenes, not to mention catching glimpses of the aerial scene, cabaret scene, burlesque scene, breakdancing scene, hip hop scene and contemporary ballet scene - they're ALL lively, wild, exciting, and growing. Fast.

So as far as The Stranger goes, I'd have to guess that 1. they have budget problems (but don't you dare complain about budget problems to a dancer - we practically invented the idea) and moreover 2. They just don't have anyone on staff who personally cares about dance.

But those aren't good enough reasons to leave an entire medium out of the conversation.

It makes dance in our beautiful emerald city less visible to the public, including to folks who might never know they wanted to go see a dance concert unless there was a great writeup in the most influential, youth-oriented, arts-focused paper in town.

It makes dance less visible to artists in other genres who could potentially collaborate with dancers or enrich their own art practice by seeing a different medium.

It makes dance less visible to the dance community itself, which is so disparate that most dancers aren't even aware that they're one of the biggest and most active communities -in- this city.

And it makes individual dancers and companies feel that they're shouting into the void without any critical response to enrich and enliven and challenge their work.


So if that bothers you as much as it bothers me, shoot 'em an email. Give 'em what-for. Feel free to copy and paste any part of this you want.

mailto: theater@thestranger.com
[yes, to the theater critic, because: see line 1.]


And look, Stranger folks? I LOVE what you do. I love the alternative writing style, the slant that admits its a slant, the sense of humor. I love the openness about sexuality, the fearless intelligence, the dedication to the arts. It's partly because I think that what you're doing is great that I want dance to be included in the conversation.
Because when you leave an entire community out, it weakens the whole discussion.

Spam Poetry

I started collecting spam emails in college. There's this incredible incidental poetry that happens when a spam generator tries to emulate your other emails enough to sneak into your inbox. Gmail's spam filter is pretty good, but sometimes one program outsmarts the other, and a weird, poetic email manages to squeak through.

The surprising thing is how beautiful some of them can be - a line like "could blue the day cry" shows up in a blanket of text to promote a new online pharmacy - and you wonder what the hell you're doing trying to write poetry.

But there's something even weirder here - that the spam filters recognize certain jumbles of words as your actual messages, and it recognizes other meaningless umbles of words as artificial messages that have no real human sender behind them. And then a few manage to slip through this conversation between machines - one program judges the other one's output to be just nearly human enough to pass.



I considered turning in a collection of these as a senior project in poetry. I figured my review board would probably really like it and congratulate me on my experimental use of syntax and imagery and my commentary on the inane jumble of information and language that we are presented with on a daily basis in contemporary culture.


I think it would have gone over really well.



Girls drinking booze
Magnifico Aloysius

sky
for I've not afternoon
Every Rocket it
But himself done family voice,
hear with home.
Sands was always there-
I started there-
to see Santa using closed days, slapped around,
he said,
Look, instead
and smiled swiftly

and off the porch we all stay to see.
He went
time up hand
Come were they
green his The Rocket
only there were good things.

-with they're soiled.
on and the last hands,
blue we Saturday
Dad go a-twitching,

as never be forests jump,
holding him behind
could blue the day cry.



You Need to Know This

Cried fisher
suddenly the prime minister.
Possibly be necessary
to accept this.
Distribution
under the horse
and yet more.
Well
you
what if with.



This is not a myth

Distance and given her dishpan is true. Never seen and exclusions may often heard... Polychrome was near the ends of course. Body and exclaimed ojo in much. Suddenly appeared to help the money; Dishpan is coming here in return. Well, to remove the passage. Demanded the glass cat was another.

Everyone in the red wagon.



Described below: Apply to sleep in jinxland.

Close together with both the foot. Presently came running to have.
Asked scraps had fallen into plain... Frank Baum the hollow tube.

Making Dances

I just started rehearsals for a new piece last night, called "Little Lives". I have five gorgeous dancers who are authentic and fierce and ready.
There's nothing sweeter than the first moments of making work, the infinite possibility of directions it can take, the good, clean floor and the sweet, warm dancers that sweep across it, adjust their posture, sweep across it again.


I would make you a flying dream dance
a lunchtime + siesta in the grass dance
a Sorolla on the beach dance

dust on the footlights

In Aileen's first dream,
she was dancing.

She was a tiny girl,
but she wrote the dream down.

She was dancing in a theater,
and she could smell it.

machu picchu

broken down, green and brown
we walk winding trails between fallen walls
with our hot fingertips lingering,
til these yellow flowers wilt at a [touch]

we are surrounded by waves of white clouds that hide
then reveal a broken temple, hide
then reveal the giant steps of the mountains that surround us, hide
then reveal
the long haired llama grazing the grass
as always grew and will regrow

we are 19 and in love
for the moment
looking for each other in the ruins,
glimpses
hidden and revealed
between gaps in the walls

we play, call this fallen structure a temple,
this one a llama store
joke about which one we will choose for our home
but of course they aren't our homes
they withstood and shall stand
much longer than our fragile shoulders
and our little enormous love.

staggering, breathless, up Waynu picchu
is not expressible through muddy hiking boots
because they used to sprint it,
barefoot,
but the poet in me persists:

on the tallest cliff
you can watch clouds steam off the Urubamba River to swallow
the peaks of the Andes
they hide and reveal
they burn off with the heat of noon
you're not the first to sit here, or the last
you're not the first to be 19 years old and in love
but you never again will be
sitting on a mountaintop 13,000 feet up
beside a man who will grow older, rage,
disappear
and in the wet bubbles of his reflecting eyes now
the old city
rolls in out of focus
behind clouds that come
and go

in transit

Well-fed, light-skinned people,
wrapped in the sweaters
of our success
bearing our
shapely black suitcases
red Eddie Bauer
backpacks.
We hold our
belongings carelessly,
we have all made it
through security, no
shifty eyes, itching
fingers here; everyone
is sleepy in the
indoor heat, the rock
of the silently rushing
train taking us to
N gates; plus! it is 10pm,
we are all in soft clothes,
subdued cheeks, preparing
for the redeye.
What is there
to worry about? It is
late, we will be asleep on
a Boeing 757 soon,
cuddled in the shadowy
nursery of the plane,
our individual
nightlights
winking on
and off in the warm,
rumbling darkness,
winking off,
on,
a whole wave of them off,
and finally at
5 in the morning ET
2 in the morning PST
one quiet light still glittering
on
over a bowed white head
an open page of a Tom
Clancy novel,
while a sleepy stewardess
shuffles down the aisle
touching the backs of our chairs.

old skool freestyle [from the vaults]

Yes there are fences that still hurt like they used to. Why do you think I'm blurting these words for my journey? For the sake of St. Nicholas I'm waxing ridiculous. I didn't quite sin for this twinge of loneliness that pops with its finger this pink bubble I'm chewing and the juices drip out of my black and white film leaving only a shadow of color and light like the scent and the clatter of burning pages at night





You kissed my knee and climbed up to see the depth of this valley when the blanket of clouds snores on down the river. A 6-pack of whispers unpacked could smash me back in return for that jab.