a note to robbie about video

in response to your thoughts and questions about the film:
i think we will move at this faster pace, except for in the formation of that line, which i think should be slower. and in the line, the collapse action and the hold in that, that could be longer.

i had the opportunity to look for the first time at your set up of the video last night. i think it is great to work with the black screen over all. this is a great draft. the images are great and i think we are on our way, with likely MORE than we need. i have now looked again and watched with music. i wish i could watch with the dance, at the same time. but none the less...

Please let me imagine another draft of this with you. what informs these notes is the feeling that there are a bit too many trees. also, that i want to undo the power of the frame as a focusing tool. that there might be too much. OK, an imagined sequence in response to yours follows:

it begins with a frame that comes up center. it shrinks a bit, and moves down left corner.

a tree comes in from the right side of screen and travels into the frame. it turns brown, sheds leaves and disappears.

some other objects move down the black in the path of the up to down tree. i don't know if this should be the previous objects (spoon, glasses, necklace, ear piece) or if they should be more simple, like an apple, a pair of shoes... at this point, i think we have enough of our little beautiful tree. it should not pass up to down. perhaps the gold frame disappears? we don't want to give it too much power.

perhaps a shot of just tree branches, whole frame? have a look at this: http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=2385&picture=tree-branches OR http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos/showphoto.php/photo/6076

your dad in frame, and as soon as he arrives in the frame, move the frame swiftly, to another corner, so dad doesn't have a frame around him but remains in lower left corner.

birds in frame, growing out to full screen,

frame around planes. (i love that!)

kitchen image with frame around birds. (i LOVE this idea, but don't love the kitchen. should it be a window in something else? what do you think?) (skip the second kitchen image with the framed door. i think you accomplish best what you want to accomplish with the first image.)

Jumbo store (i love this, and with the tree coming in.)

road.

(I don't think we need the buy and save as it is so like the Jumbo store. what do you think? )

the lot.

i'd say skip the desert scene, the airport and the train station.

not sure how to end.

thinking through sequence

tried to think through the dance as it is, thinking through it's problems. to consider interruptions, to imagine the visual material, even though i don't know. this will help me prepare for tomorrow.

come in. look at audience. back up. turn away. look back at audience. back up differently. MUSIC ENTERS AT FIRST LOOK BACK?

reaching movements carrying downstage. FRAME first APPEARS?

walk upstage to line, one by one. collapse. ONLY HAVE FIRST CHORD CHANGE AS BEGIN TO ENTER LINE? TREE APPEARS AND MOVES THROUGH SEQUENCE? OR

diagonal line with nestling.
vertical line with marina on floor and michel on top. others stepping sidewards, away. tida/Dorothy solo…
big diagonal line. what happens here??? michel moves away figuring out position he had. he stops and marina scampers upstage. Dorothy/tida continue? Dorothy stop and she and michel race madly for marina position? tida go ot michel and lie on top of him? POSSIBLY DURING THIS SOME OTHER NON TREE THING HAPPENS. OR MAYBE FIRST IMAGE JUST TAKES A LONG TIME? OR??

Marina rumba. which explodes and then gets smaller and smaller. TREE LEAVE FRAME IN VIDEO? CONTINUE ACROSS FROM LEFT TO RIGHT?

walk to grid. either rotating in grid or eyes open/eyes closed. Keith only moving? doing what? arm reaching? SOMEONE WALK ACROSS WITH A TREE PICTURE (STAGE HAND?)

walking downstage, backwards. first three do artifacts washing. just arms (what is this), and tumble weed downstage. second three (only) leaving Lai and having keith walk backwards. (could the other person, alexx, do a stomping pulsing dance facing downstage??) THE SCENES? AIRPORT? VACANT LOT? LONG WINDING ROAD TO INFINITY?

one by one walk to the circle. circle crumble. (lai continue solo). Michel sticky tape to where pile will be.

one by one, walk to lie down in pile. as they arrive in pile, Michel stickey tape, bouncing move around upstage and over to upstage right. stand and shadows of marina dance.. 3 times. then leave? or nearly leave? STAGE HAND WALK OUT AND DUMP A PILE OF LEAVES ON THE STAGE.

NOW need to get out of this world which is feeling pervasively rhythmically the same…

ideas:
get up one at a time. as rise, see audience for a moment, as in beginning? go to grid positions? with back to us. begin a dance that has down up down up down up and pulsating. quick changes in direction and rhythm, that can be set in parts that change, that can begin to travel around the room? that is fun. that is goofy.

ecstatic dancing? arms, core? kind of crazy.

go to clump upstage with backs to audience or looking at sleepers. arms up. some part of up.

all turn to audience, walk forward and take a bow, a goofy one. turn and look at lai, who does arms to audience.

Peace. Be Still

Peace. Be still.

I’m stuck on these words right at the moment. they are Cid’s words. It’s what he says when he talks to himself about how to cope, day to day.

my own lack of stillness:

It is funny how the ideas that float around don’t go away. they seem to always return home to roost. Some times I don’t even recognize them when they return. but then, I do. Most of the time.

I was thinking about our improvisation score, the one that goes: Make a line. Make a circle. Lie down together, close enough so you feel one another’s skin, and heat. I like this score, because I like its simplicity. And, I like the myriad decisions that it reveals, when there are fewer decisions to make. I also think it is a kind of meditation on kindness, on being together. It is a good way to keep autonomy, but to devote oneself to the company of others. What I don’t like about it is its insistent consonance. Perhaps the very thing I like as a practice, I also have difficult with as performance. (hey, what’s that about?)

Well, some time ago, when I was imagining dances, but not making them, I said that there would be two dances, and they would collide with each other. occupy the same space. It just occurred to me, as I try to understand which direction to take, that this score could be one of the dances. and the other, could be a solo that never ceases. perhaps it’s its regularity, not the surprises that it throws our way, its insistence on it’s simplicity that would allow it to be danced alongside another dance. That is the piece that could be made now. a little bit like Lailye’s solo while others form a circle. But in my imagination, it is not a short solo while something else happens, but something that happens throughout. not that this creates less consonance. just a bit more to keep track of. and what is that solo, any way? (a previous incarnation of this was my attempt to imagine combining the veterans performing the combat scene, alongside of the improvised score, or a set dance of lines and circles. but the combination of these two dances seemed to work best on video. live is another thing.)

That is one thought. Then I remember that in a grant application I had written, I had wanted to deal with forces of nature. like gravity, and wind. I had not thought about this before, but gravity (overcoming it, or giving in to it) has been a key movement metaphor in my work for some time: everything from “outside in” to “action conversations.” but I digress. I was thinking about the “imprints” in our dance. how they are about gravity, and I had forgotten that I had been thinking about gravity, for months (maybe years) before I went to the studio for this piece.

You know what I think is the key to making things? the ability to believe however briefly, that what you are doing is important. if you question it too much, you can’t commit to what you’re doing. I find myself going in and out: trusting my intuition, believing that the things we do matter. As we construct them in the room, they do in fact matter. then, in a moment, that sense of trust and belief in the importance of our actions can disappear, like a mist that clears. this happens when I see everything through a non-believer’s eyes. critical eyes. I carry these eyes with me all the time. it throws me off.

there are so many dances that this project raises questions about as we make it. which dance do we pursue? be careful, I advise myself, to not try to do them all. I like Amy’s idea of having video images of instrumentalists who are not there, as if sitting in chairs, making the sounds they made when the camera caught them doing so. absence and presence. but if we were to do that, it’s such a strong idea, that I think I’d have to make a dance with a few monitors on stage, with a missing dancer, or dancers, with televised other things too. I love that idea. but that is not the dance I’m making now. I’d like to finish this one, so we can make that one.

Then there is the choreography that we have been working on. what IS it? as I attempt to follow the score, as if it were a spine, am I diluting and confusing two things? what are the rules of this choreographic dance? it is not clear to me. I am working intuitively, noticing things I find interesting. but this is driven by something I don’t fully understand. If I don’t understand, is that a problem? I somehow feel that I ought to critique the “working from my intuition” process. slave thoughts. what about following rules and getting to new places because of a rule?

some dances are “easy” to make, in a way. I think these are the best kind. you are ready. you know what you are doing. when something is hard to make, I think it is because there is still more research to be done.

so, the dancers walk onto stage. they form a line. then, in their own time, they turn and walk downstage to form another line, on the edge of the stage, looking out at the audience. why do they return? isn’t it a bit of hemming and hawing?

I’d like to do an improvisation in which everyone is still and then they all try to move at the same time. this is a non-sequitur.

OK. so what if the dancers start by walking to the edge of stage, and look at the audience. forget the line upstage. then, they turn and “go into the stage” with the imprints. what IS going on with these? they eventually form a line. they collapse a little. another line is formed. nestling. another line is formed when marina drops to the floor. leaving things behind. nestling continues. carol lying on top of marina. others gradually walking away. Tida dancing in the back. WHAT IS THIS? the diagonal. pivoting on the spot. all walk away. marina returns. she dances her cipher dance. Lailye or michel lies down where Marina had been. she finishes her dance, holding onto the last little bits of it. when it is gone, she walks out, back into the space.

Perhaps:

1. all walk in from the wings and spread out in space: are still. (and then move together, ecstatically, but Marina, who is still). OR all pivot in place, but marina, who attempts to go down to the floor or who is still? OR who all do “delicious feet.” perhaps everyone walks out from the wings to space, but one person, who dances, barely visible in the wings.

2. it is here that someone walks a tree across the space.

3. it is here that someone brings dead leaves onto the stage and drops them.

LETS MAKE ANOTHER SHOW. another Pieter. when?

PIETER performance video posted

Hello All-

Here's a vimeo link to the video of PIETER performance. Not the best video (I felt the need to sit with video being projected, rather than running the camera...) Still, you can see some of it here.

I'll be posting the 2nd improv here soon.

Best, Robbie

VIMEO LINK:

http://vimeo.com/16837835

my ruminations, post PIeter

I would like to make something that requires a different kind of looking than most of my dances require. i want to make something beautiful, but not new agey. i want to just shift the way we see so that we feel like we are looking at something we have not seen before. Right now, i'm thinking that i could work on the "imprints" section of the dance with more extreme focusing of pressure. how to turn my ordinary expectations of the body moving into discovery? i'm wondering. how to make the body seem like new territory for human subjectivity or experience?

I think nearly all art comes down to making sense of our finiteness. the fact that we will die. i would like to do that here. (not die!) and also not fall into cliches. dan said he was noticing the "surprises" in the choreography. the interruptions in his expectations? when these interruptions or changes in the "program" occurred, i wonder the nature of these interruptions? i mean, were they ruptures that made sense, that increased the size of the frame, that productively or confusingly messed with the sense of intention of the work? when the dancers suddenly look out at the audience, what is the effect of that moment? does the experience that it catalyzes relate to other moments later in the dance?

when i made this, i was not thinking about surprises. i was feeling my own need for consistency and also new information. i had early on thought about interruptions, but i had let it go, (I thought), not knowing how to do it.

I am asking myself, what can i be doing to deepen my own choreographic practice? Not 'what new thing can i try,' but where is my next step in my relationship to my work. What did "dancing to music" do that i have been afraid to do? what conventions of "what a dance is" am i being too obedient to? what would be brave to do, and also true for me?

I also wonder about the video. you (Dan) seemed to think the tree image, the leaves, was fairly cliched? the pots and pans seemed like a non-sequitur? the dad, also a non-sequitur? the frame? the projection worked well on the wall, but that's because it was also responding to Pieter's room-ness. A theater has only theater ness. how to project in the theater? i was thinking that we could make a movie and stream it on people's smart phones. but among other things, there is very little phone reception at REDCAT. i remember mark told me that. (but wouldn't it be cool to make a piece that both happened onstage and also people watched on their smart phones, and that it 'talked' productively back and forth? like close-ups, like reminders to look at the stage, like commentary, description...). another idea for this dance: have many framed images projected in one single video image on the back wall. inside different frames, different movies play. one frame could have the movie, with the tree. another frame could have a newsreel montage. another frame could have Robbie's dad, who would now and then talk. another frame could have a flipbook of presidents. another frame could have messy kitchens, one picture after another. cut to a rear view mirror and the road receding, behind. cut to the edited clips of the vets doing their combat play. or maybe the back wall, no matter what, is too conventional in the theater. it is the place where we hang our set ideas. I think about the audience's smart phones again. i remember that there is no reception in REDCAT. i think about televisions that go on and off, sitting on various levels of tables and stools on the downstage edge. i remember that the AWARD show probably won't let me have a set. what to do with video at REDCAT?

in any case...

i am thinking that the choreography could go further. the way we think about the bodies moving could do more to explore the idea of presence, or absence. why DO the dancers look at the audience. or more, why are they not beginning by looking at the audience? first, it seems like the dance is inviting the viewer to look at the dancers who seem to be inhabiting some "state" some sort of internal experience. then those dancers shift their focus, to us. but they have always known we are there. so why look then?

I am wondering if maybe each dancer should pick one person from the audience who they know, who will "walk them up to the stage, to the downstage edge," and leave them there. then, the dancers could all be looking back out at the person who brought them up there, as they return to the audience, the dancers could begin by looking at the audience. Then, the dancers would only turn around, to begin their imprints on the stage. skip the way it began on wednesday (the dancers standing in a clump in their internal state). maybe that could come later, if at all.

maybe the dance wants to say: i know you are watching. we are not pretending otherwise. but we are also going to go places inside ourselves, to tell you about something.

i think my idea of beauty has to do with giving a gift, that was unexpected, but becomes precious. so what is a gift like that? some idea like: how lovely another person's lips feel on your neck, or the pressure of another person's weight... how lovely the ecstatic, sexy dance that we do, in public places, with someone, alone... when we know that our time is finite. we are not here forever. in life, there is not a moment of arrival, of satiation, or conclusion. we do not say, "aha. this is what the whole thing was about, or this is what i was living for." so how about a dance that is a reminder that we are in our best moments now. uncomfortable, tired, whatever. and about a dance that doesn't cozily provide a nice ABA structure, but sputters or doesn't finish when it is time for it to be over?

how to make a dance like that?

Notes after Rehearsal, 11.1

efforts to understand effort
to understand the effort involved in letting go of being interesting
and just being.
I have a lot to learn.
when working in rehearsal from a place of total consciousness, I first hear the voice of self-judgment.
as a dancer, asked to do less and less and less, I momentarily feel my knowledge being called into question.
what do I know about dancing?
what do I know about being a performer?
what do I know about being?
"You are enough."
repeat.
you are enough.

walking across the space with performers.artists I can and am learning so much from and
appreciating the difficulty in letting go of previous ideas about dancing, previous languages, previous approaches,
a process of forgetting?
walking in a diagonal line offstage, knowing and forgetting, remembering and knowing and forgetting again.
Or just making space for new approaches.
for new ideas and possibilities of being.
somehow, a feeling of loss in that process.

Not trying to be interesting
but being interestED.
But in truth, when not trying to be interesting, some choices made are still better than others.
Are they more interesting choices?
Trust in Vic's eye and direction to discover which choices are better.worse.more-something and just continue trying things
based on impulse, awareness of the group and what the group needs.what serves the group.

Keith says, 'I think it's very simple and very beautiful and I think it takes courage.'
I think even saying so takes courage.
afraid of disappointing.
I want to practice being my best self - most awake, most open, most receptive, most trusting, most fearless - in order to grow and contribute
something of value.

Ellen Bass' poem: If You Knew

If You Knew
What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?