A particularly challenging and fertile aspect of being a creator of experimental performance is that I often have to describe a project in detail many months or even years before I start on it. When working with 10 or more ensemble members and needing to plan out schedules and spaces that are accessible for dancing, instruments, wheelchairs, props, sets and more, I have to do a lot of advance planning. I joke often with my husband about how I have
One of my favorite things about the creative process is synchronicity. I follow intuition above all else in my art making and find myself continually rewarded by the ways that relationships I never could have dreamed up appear all of a sudden. Until recently I was planning on making a piece called Don't Suck! Cycle II as part of a four month residency at CounterPULSE in San Francisco. The recent deaths of my close friend Sharon and my grandmother moved
I'm often able to tell other people when they are injured how much every injury can be a teacher. When it's not me having to hold back from moving with physical abandon, I see the benefit of learning about our limitations and our vulnerability through our injuries. When I have an injury, my vision is a lot murkier and I have to wade through a lot of resistance before I come to some kind of acceptance of what happened and
I was reminded yesterday of how helpful work in progress showings are. I often forget that this is an experimental form we're working in, and that experimental forms need actual experiments. While performances are experiments, they are high-pressure ones, and I learn as much, if not more from showings along the way. Here's some excerpts from ours yesterday:
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
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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
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
I've come to love tech week--the week leading up to a performance run in which we have tech (technical) rehearsals, dress rehearsals and last minute scramblings to finish. I notice that during this time I am highly energized with a mix of anxiety, anticipation and joy. And I notice that the main thing that keeps me grounded is spending as much time as possible at the theater. I like to get to the place we're performing hours before each event,
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Apr. 20th, 2024 @ 6:00PMEvent Detail Button
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