The 25 dances that saved my life
I have always been drawn to collaborative work. Most of my work is in collaboration with other artists, organizing elements, organizing time, and organizing space for multiple variables.
After a many-year run with working on large-scale projects that entailed many people on stage and off, I wanted to shift the possibilities of my work. The idea of a solo project, no collaborators, no media art, no other performers, seemed a lovely and important contrast to the collaborative forces that had just ended. These large-scale collaborative projects put me on a large stage with large structures. I imagined a solo that could be performed with as few variables as possible. Thus giving me, as the performer and maker more autonomy.
I was also interested in the idea of performance as an open form. One in which many possibilities were available during the performance. Open, not so much in content but rather in composition. Prior to this solo project I had been working with the idea that the audience was there to witness the performance, the performance environment as a world in and of itself. I wanted to create a performance that wasn’t just about the audience witnessing but rather the audience being, as in being apart of the performance. Not so much as audience as performers (which I have since moved towards) but rather audience actively involved in the composition/creation of the moment of performance. The work simple would not exist without them.
In 2006 I was given a residency at Caldera, a residency in the mountains of Southern Oregon, for 2 weeks in the winter. I had no preconceived idea about what would transpire there, only that it was about my body and my body being a map to find relation to other’s bodies.
CREATION OF CONTENT: There was a lodge. It had a large open space to move in with big windows to the outside. There was snow, flakes of endlessly falling snow. There was the silence of snow.
In this silence I remembered something my dad had told me years earlier about how no two snowflakes are alike. In this silence I started to pay attention to the landscape around me. I started to think about the here before me, people here before the this. I thought about indigenous people and the tribes that call this part of the world home. I was drawn to the idea of dance as a way of expression of culture and keeper of the passage of time. Thinking about my own heritage led me to Folk dances. I started to imagine folk dances as the way people collectively decided to keep community together and distinguished cultural differences. I started to think of dance as a cultural identifier. Somehow framing it so simply helped me to identify it within myself.
I started to improvise. I moved around the space with these ideas in my head. I payed attention to the moves that I did over and over again. I understood that this open-ended improve was an accumulation of my education in dance-different styles and techniques that I had learned along the way framed through these techniques with my memory mixed with the history of the map I stored in my body. I noticed reoccurring themes through ways of seeing, ways of feeling, and ways of perceiving. I started to take note of these themes and motifs. Usually I would try to device ways to release my behavioral patterning but for this work I embraced it.
Folk dances: I was intrigued by the importance of music, the importance of simplicity, inclusion, celebration, holding onto, community.
I started to see my ways of moving as part of a personal folk dance. Tracing it back to stored memories in my life or a possible reading of my body as culture, personal culture, educational culture, social culture and family culture, all were intertwining. My body architecture passed down from my parents from their parents, an endless web of function. I named these dances. There was the orphaned girl dance, the first rainfall of every year dance, the “we are young, no one can tell us we’re wrong” dance (Pat Benetar lyrics). I collected and codified these dances. Using folk dance as a framework I found repetitive rhythms for each of my dances. I imagined I could go from one of these dances to another by simply ‘changing the channel’. Changing the channel was an idea I had been playing with for some time. It is apart of the idea of employing methods of technology without actually using the technology. Changing the channel: to switch into other states (physically, emotionally, mentally) as quickly as changing a channel and as seamless as an edit from one video clip to another.
STRUCTURE OF CONTENT: By the end of the two weeks I had 25 dances, as in repetitive rhythmical movements that made physical a personal moment or situation or emotional state, mined from my body and memory. Alone they were abstract fragments of self-referential rhythmical movement, perhaps interesting to watch in and of themselves but not sharing what I felt was most important about them. Strung together with the words attached to each of the dances it became an investigation of movement as cultural identity and language. I experienced the work more as a lecture performance. One in which I could explain how the physical vocabulary was created. Sometimes this took the form of actually talking with a power point presentation and sometimes this took the form of writing on paper as I danced the dances. In both situations I gave each audience a piece of paper with a title of one of the 25 dances. They would construct a part of the performance by saying their title. Each audience member had the right to create their own personal strategies about how to contribute, what to pay attention to, etc., I would respond by doing the dance and ‘shift channels’ to the next.
The work is fluid. It has ability to change and re-arrange depending on where and when and for whom it is to be performed for. The work allows for complete autonomy from theaters and presenters but does not exclude them. I have performed this work on stages, in a freight elevator and in homes.
My costume is made out of clear latex, with the idea of exposure or transparent-ability. It has pockets to hold some of the artifacts (props) some of the dances call for. Sometimes I perform naked under the costume and sometimes I do not.
In my desire to create a solo I learned that everything I create is through the framework of collaboration. The 25 dances that saved my life Is a collaborative dance with the audience, with the space that I perform in and with myself.
