1
Mar, 2011
2
Mar, 2011
Refueling
Being a person is hard work. And then being a person who is living as an artist adds a whole new layer of difficulties. A lot of the time I pride myself on being able to keep on keepin' on, no matter how hard the traveling becomes. And I am committed in my creative work to not settle for easy answers, but instead to approach challenges directly, even inviting them to come forward. Developing capacity for great emotional and physical
3
Mar, 2011
Surprise Gifts
There always seems to be surprise gifts that come from creating a performance work--things that enhance my life and/or art making that I didn't expect to receive from the project. With the Friend project, a major gift has been a reminder about the joy of making stuff. By stuff I mean visual art (sculpture, collage, installation, etc.) This gift has come at me from two sources. My friend Sharon was a visual artist at heart, always making sculptures of various
8
Mar, 2011
8
Mar, 2011
Humongous Hearts for CounterPULSE
Dear CounterPULSE Family, As many of you know, in light of the very exciting program and staffing changes taking place at CounterPULSE this season, I must announce to you that my time at CounterPULSE has come to a close. While I am very sad to leave the organization, I know that CounterPULSE will continue to thrive in the hands of this terrific team that literally keeps it pumping every single day; I am so happy to have been, for a
10
Mar, 2011
Artist Interview: Eric Kupers of Dandelion Dancetheater
PART 1 PART 2
10
Mar, 2011
Artist Interview: Kegan Marling
PART 1 PART 2
14
Mar, 2011
Coming Home
I've often thought about what it means to come home to someone. When you come home to someone, there's comfort and consistency. A dog's tail wagging, rich smells from the kitchen and maybe a kid slamming the screen door to escape outside into the air and wilderness and unknown. But coming home feels like too many slices of other peoples dreams. I get lost in them. They're flip books from another era and a different group of people sitting around
25
Mar, 2011
Falling Apart / Piecing Myself Together
It's been longer than I would have liked since my last post. I'm in the final stages of "birthing" our Friend project, and these past few weeks have felt like the major hump to get over. As I catch up with myself and the work, I'll be posting some eclectic reflections from the adrenaline-fueled final phase of this particular creation process. Here is a post I started two weeks ago, when I felt right in the middle of the fire,
27
Mar, 2011
Art vs. Fundamentalism
For Dance Anywhere Day this year we performed a minimalist movement structure in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland. Ensemble Member David Ryther led us in an improvised piece based on a street performer he had witnessed many times in Santa Cruz. We traveled slowly around the plaza, waving and looking back and forth with a highly exaggerated and slow motion smile. There happened to be someone shouting what sounded like Fundamentalist Christian doctrines on the plaza for a good
29
Mar, 2011
Showings, Feedback and Protecting Clarity
The showings that Dandelion has been doing as part of our residency at CounterPULSE have taught me a lot. Here's an incomplete list of insights, reminders, clarifying moments that I've gathered so far from the three monthly public showings of our Friend project: 1. Public showings are crucial to the development of the kind of experimental performance we create. They force us to get things together on a deadline, to try them out and then to retreat and re-tool. There
29
Mar, 2011
Light the Fire
I’ve never felt I fit in with what I believed was THE gay community, a culture that seemed to be marked by an ease and openness around sex that I did not possess. I've always felt a tension between the family-oriented grown-up part of me and this coy inner-child navigating an overtly sexual community. Over the past few years, as I’ve begun to explore multiple queer communities and identities, it seemed important to understand what originally led me to thinking