Idea for duet

The duet I have been working on since September is really a huge huge work in progress. It kind of reminds me of a tumbleweed...in that it has been rolling/blowing along since September. It started as a poem...a concept for a site-specific duet that takes place nowhere...and along the way it has picked up so much stuff. Maybe its less like a tumbleweed and more like a swiffer in a really dirty apartment of a crack addict. The work and the process have accumulated so much stuff. I turn the swiffer over to look at what is there and woah...(lots of hair, dust particles, grass, bits of tiny glass and plastic, those paper things you pull off of bandaids, advil tablets, candy wrappers, gum wrappers, shards of a stick of gum, cat hair, toe nails, mouse droppings, tissues, cigarette butts, dried up gummi bears, chip crumbs, sugar crystals, soft pretzel salt granules, confetti, ashes, notebook paper ragged edges, pencil lead, receipts, dried bugers, dried bloody bugers, scabs, flakey skin, and more.) Well, the swiffer is just a metaphor but here is a list of the somethings Ashley and I have played around with. It seems like each rehearsal we try some stuff out. some stuff sticks, some doesn't, but I truly believe it is in the act of trying it and doing it/forgetting it that informs us and our beings as artists and then hopefully, informs the piece:

• moving across the space with isolated initiations (just head or just extremities or just pelvis) to Crystal Castles
• push, pull, give into momentum
• manipulate your partner's pelvis...close your eyes and do it
• Doug Varone-like spatial pattern. finding dimension/opportunities/space connections
• false starts
• energy modes established randomly from improving freely. Maintaining energy mode. Distill it/make a phrase with it (Jennifer Monson style)
• learn this set phrase and do it...now don't do it on the counts of the music
• trust games, lead each other eyes closed...initiations
• Surreal initiations...free association sensations. jumping from one absurd image to the next without overthinking it.
• try to contact improv adding and subtracting new rules. fuck the rules. just contact improv without stopping or talking. Do it for 10 minutes straight to the Fugees cd.
• Improvise together and apart..be real, be fake...just don't be precocious.
• Do Curt's warm-up. Add qualities...do it like caramel or a slug or a cracked out jazz dancer.
• Manipulate each other through curt's warm up phrase, almost treating it like bodywork for the other person. Even the masseuse is dancing. Take this and improvise it across the floor.
• Be gay...gayer. Basically take time to listen to the other each other's body before responding...the same amount of time we'd take to listen to our boyfriend's body. Or a significant other that we'd be interested in getting schnazzy with. have this sensitivity when dancing with each other without actually being gay or maybe really do be gay for a moment or a while. get the homophobes up in arms...cause they deserve to be shaken.
• do a ballet barre or yoga warm up facing away from each other but imagining the other person there with you the whole time. Imagine balancing on their upside down body's toe. Imagine them there.
• Make a film for yourself while improvising. zooming in and out and pausing and finding what in the space interests you and how you can change the look of the space by changing your movement and thus changing your vision.
• write down surreal skits that will guide the audience to ideas of nothingness, nowhereness, no oneness, notimeness. Also throw in something, everything, anything; somewhere,anywhere, everywhere; someone, anyone, everyone; sometime, anytime, everytime. Write about specific, fantastical, ridiculous things and imagine a dialougue of us saying them.

Thats all the stuff we have done! Here's all the places we have been developing the work:

• UArts
• my apartment...her apartment
• Last Drop
• Rittenhouse gym
• Studio 34
• Mascher Space
• the streets of philly
• the in/out box for text messaging on my phone/her phone
• emails...facebook

Anyway...lists of stuff! Please know that if you are reading this still, that it is not meant for reading enjoyment, BUT more for my own narcissism and artistic process. I apologize if you are reading this still. Your eyes are probably glazed over.

I envision incorporating tape recorders, with our audience surreal talk on them

I envision the audience sitting very close to us on the floor and on risers

I envision a black backdrop

I envision a new end to the piece. An end in which the two of us do a set minimal rhythmic unison and canon and chopped up phrase. we repeat and repeat and then go back to our side-by-side gimmick recognizable photo-op shot. the music changes. we slowly walk backwards together toward the audience. slowly take off our shirts. we have lots...probably like 50 or more little white people taped to our backs. We reveal this and stand there and slowly rip or pick or brush some of them off. they go flying through the air or falling or whatever. the song ends as this is all happening.