Permutae and Reception at Counterpulse…we are ripening!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://dev-counterpulse.pantheon.io/pe​rmutae-reception/

Hello CounterPULSE!

This is my first blog post! Ever!

We are getting ready for our shows, Permutae and Reception.

So I’m excited, and I want to share with you a bit about the feeling of the show ripening!

It’s going up in two weeks, now.

Last night i went to see “work more – we wanna tour” and loved it.

Like that show, our show has been in process for the last nine months. Finally Im figuring out some key truths about the work!

Our night is a double bill of work, the first part is Permutae, which “maps the expanding technological-biological horizon through representation and recreation of queer bodies.”

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=188212237908959

For my part of the bill, “Reception”, I’ve been thinking about the process of receiving.

This is a second version of this piece. The first time i did “Reception” was on a group of women. We went through the same material generation processes. That piece ended up being about listening, and the focus that comes from that. It was really beautiful to watch those women listening to each other, and straining to pick up impulses and messages to filter through their bodies from almost an otherworldly place.

This time, i thought i would go through the same processes with people who identify as male, and feel how the production was different. I thought it would be fairly simple. But of course it wasn’t :) Now the piece is about  notion of piercing or puncturing, and how that genders the bodies and spaces it occurs in.

The dancers who generously donate their time, massive energy and resources to this project for free are an amazingly talented group. Honey McMoney, Zack Bernstein, Harold Burns and Macklin Kowal.

The alchemy between these performers, their differing backgrounds, their different ideas of what performance is, and how they should be onstage, plus the different cultural values, and all sorts of other uncountable invisible things, all of those things have affected the initial framework of the choreography to a huge extent.

I kept being confounded by the amazing beauty of what the men were doing in response to the choreographic tasks, and also not understanding it. What are they doing? What is this piece about, i kept asking myself in the months preceding!

i realised that my job was to sit and listen – to be in reception myself, actually – for the real voice of the piece. What is it that i want to say and do with these bodies, what do these bodies naturally say, what do the humans performing need to say?

And, now, for me, the piece is shifting. Its not so much about listening, it’s becoming about puncturing. Finally I’m understanding what my compulsions are around male identified bodies, and some things about the alchemy of this group, and what we have the opportunity to share with you. I guess our aim is to strip down to some essential experience of humanity, and in so doing, connect with you, our audience.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=230844093593468

I have a weeks retreat, and then I’ll be back to rehearse at Million Fishes for the week leading up to the performance. I’m looking forward to that intense week with these performers. As i left Honey McMoney yesterday after his performance in work more, he called after me “see you in a week, when we will probably hate each other”. The week of rehearsals is going to be intense, as we keep figuring out what we are making, what we are doing, and why we are doing it, and puncture each other again and again, consciously and unconsciously – grotesquely and politely. We will put our best work out there. Come and feel it! We want to meet you!

http://dev-counterpulse.pantheon.io/pe​rmutae-reception/