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.