back in philly. new/old solo silly

I will be showing a rework of this solo bit I am working on.

There will also be other performances by , Anonymous Bodies/Kate Watson Wallace, Club Lifestyle, and other awesome people who are up on the scene.

Please get up. and come.

learning curves

My time in Taiwan has been passing like freakin high speed rail train powering down the track headed toward one of the towns with a name that I don't know how to pronounce. I can't believe it will be August in two days.

I want to talk about learning curves. What is a learning curve exactly?

I guess it charts an increase in competence,knowledge, and/or performance ability over time. It deals with a the ideas of noticing it, questioning it, trying it, experiencing it, understanding it, applying it, narrowing it, widening it, failing at it, trying it again, forgetting it, recalling it, sharing it, autonomously choosing and executing it. And then what? Then you gain a skill or tool that will always be at your disposal.

What if we all charted our lives out? ...infinite progressions of curves swooping upwards . we just keep making curves. reacting to stimuli and making changes. We embark on curves together as class mates, as voters, as employees, as girlfriends and boyfriends, as tourists. The curves are not sloping lines...not a step ladder-like pattern... not a rise-over-run that I could easily just step back down and retreat back to the origin. They are accelerating or decelerating curves that make it not so easy to undo the exponents and retrace your steps back to square 1. These curves sweep us up. We can not help but to be carried away. Our life is patterned. Things occur. We notice, and then upon reoccurrence, we learn. Our insides become patterned too.

This is a promotional ad for my time at the Taiwan Princeton Review Office and for my strange/awesome summer in a foreign country. It ended up never getting posted. So 4 months later, here it is.

Tai Chi in Linsen Park

Okay...that is not me in the picture, but I did take tai chi in Linsen Park which is so close to where I am staying. A man named Edward (either that is his English name or he has a Chinese name that sounds remarkably like Edward) taught the class. I approached him after one of his sessions last week and asked him if it'd be okay if I join in and he not only said yes but went out of his way to make me feel welcome and comfortable. So then it rained a whole bunch and I assumed that the classes would not be held in the rain, but it was sunny this past Friday, so I went to join in.

First let me say that people over the age of 30 or 40 in Taiwan, as a rule, are amazing in that many of them make it to the park early every morning or late each night to get in some form of exercise (walking, stretching, aerobics, tai chi, etc). Even 80 and 90 year old people can be found circling wrists and ankles and doing simple repetitive motions. I would not be caught dead in Rittenhouse Square in Philly doing kicks and jumping jacks and weird breathing, walking, flailing, hitting, massaging, and stretching motions, but here, anything goes. Its like a surrealist scape...at 7am in the park, it appears (to a westerner) as if the people have collectively gone a little bit off the deep end. Under the veranda a man digs his elbow into a woman's groin and pats her stomach. Another woman stands behind, holding the passive woman by her arm pits. They repeat jabbing and massaging rituals on each other as nonchalantly as I might pull out a stick of gum and stick it in my mouth. So I don't seem like I am staring, I turn my back to them and then across the lawn I can't miss a group of about 15 people with purple shirts and pink pants on. They are playing some kind of music. There are words on the recording too (maybe instructions?). I can't discern if they have a leader of the pack or not, but they are simultaneously swiping their limbs through space. From an (again westerner's) and dancer's point of view they move like the church choir in Sister Act, but they do larger full-body movements but with an added bit of awkward reservation. The movement is full, and busy, and quick like calisthenics but far far less self-indulgent than jazz-er-cise. I mean it seems like they are there for joy and healing and a release, but they don't feel the need to SHOW it. Its more like a microwave concept where it radiates from inside to out. The whole display makes me think about layers of tackiness and self indulgence and inhibitions and subtlety in public displays of movement that are maybe not meant to be "watched".

The group I practiced with was much less "showy" and they just kind of did their tai chi thing together without much fuss. I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb, but it was well worth hanging in there because what a smart technique it is.... We began with finding an internal breath that massages your inside organs but doesn't bring tension into anything else. The body stays grounded, simple, and aligned. Then keeping this root, this energy, from the inside, we found the momentum of our arms, letting the joints hang, glide, and swing. We used this trajectory to literally tap into every obvious muscle group in the body (ultimately hitting ourselves) and thus waking up the skin, connective tissue, and other body parts that lie beneath. This pattern of movement worked its way down...all the way to our calves. Then we did some more breathing and swinging. It seemed like the point was to find these simple energy pathways and joint-folding pathways while rotating and cycling the torso and stabilizing the lower limbs. We did a little bit of leg lifting but the emphasis was on raising things from the center and softening what is not needed. I feel like there is much more that I could say, but I should probably get my ass to many more of the sessions before I pretend to call it my practice.

but from a dance perspective, to sum up, some things that this experience makes me interested in =

• how much of what happens internally must I be able to show or exhibit?
• how do practice, consistency, discipline, participation, just showing up, regularity, etc. affect a form?
• How does the heat/temperature/humidity/rain affect the form?
• How does our mind/body connection manifest itself?
• When do we think about it? Is important to show we are thinking about it?
• Are there limits to where, when, with who, or how I can think about it?
• Since it is mind/body connection, then often Think means Embody?
• What do people in Philadelphia embody? What do people in Taiwan embody?
• What does it mean to embody?
• Out of body experience???
• How much of embodying centers on attention? how much centers on experience? how much is related to flow?
• Forms instilled with ideas. Ideas instilled with forms.

Okay thats enough questions for one day.

later.

Are you there Taipei? Its me, Christina.

It is wild here. Seriously from bathroom etiquette to language barriers...from crazy foods...to hectic traffic patterns...from subway rules to mosquitos, I have pretty much submerged myself in culture shock 101. Its insane how many things we judge when we just don't understand them. As much as I did want to LOVE Taipei when I got here...my original thoughts were "oh shit". It is dreary and polluted. The drivers and scooter people are a collective beast that will prey on you and turn you into a puddle of blood and guts if you are not careful (or even if you are reasonably careful). If you ask for coffee with milk they make you a latte and if you say no milk, they give it to you black and the only thing they will give you is fake creamer (even if you point to the milk carton right behind them). This is bad cause I hate black coffee and I hate artificial creamer, and I don't mind lattes but when your bowels are locked up like fort knox from travel nerves and what not and you consider all the rice and dumplings and doughy baked goods you may be consuming in the near future, you want to avoid boiled milk at all costs. Luckily I don't mind the heat but a mild/safe/glossy alternative to the hot streets and sidewalks are the air conditioned department stores. Things there are fairly pricey and fairly generic and cute, if you have the money to buy them that is. They all look quite similar and are impressive but also seem really lame and anti-adventure/ anti-risk. They seem to scream "consume! Consume!" in an even less bad ass and , to me, more irking, way than shopping malls do in the U.S.! I was told to expect heat waves like I've never experienced heat waves before, but it was unseasonably cool upon arrival and all I could sense was the passive yet chilled nods from people as I passed them. Some were friendly, but when I tried to ask them a question in English, they would freeze up and panic and then apologetically run to find a bilingual employee to help me out. I felt bad that they felt bad. After all, it is their country, their language, their culture, and if anyone should feel bad it should be me. It really started to annoy me at how hard it was to communicate. It is cute at first, but it gets old really quickly.

So all this stuff sounds negative and awful and 1000 plus dollars spent for this trip...it sounds like it was all just a big old waste BUT its really quite the opposite. I have so many good exciting things to share and tell, and I promise I will find the time to get the most poignant of these things down in writing. One thing about traveling that makes it all worth it, is that it is really an exercise in remembering how fundamentally good human beings are. Whether the things they do, say, or believe seem dangerous, or ridiculous or dirty or amazing or mind-blowing or intelligent or risky...no matter how far their style of living-constellation is from your own, there is some fundamental essence there that each person has and it can be sensed and appreciated and even celebrated. That alone, makes the plane ticket well worth it. I don't know... it is like, we talk about having tolerance in the US. We talk about being accepting and having open minds, but I think that we should start discussing how closed our minds really are. Mine is. I don't think its a bad thing as long as we can talk about the "why". Why do we find patterns? What is lifestyle? Why do certain things make us cringe? Why are our life-patterns the way they are? Its like sometimes I just assume that everything is common ground, that all things, people, places, etc. are made equal, that the things that are my impetus to wake up every morning are not too damned far off from that of others. And if it is, I feel like that's a gap worth trying to conceptualize or rationalize or legitimize, but I am starting to learn that this is a step that takes a lot of energy and is useless in the long run. Curiosity for its own sake is crucial in keeping our world view fluid. Curiosity for the sake of trying to figure something out and legitimize it and find a common denominator is absolutely useless.

Okay...that is my philosophical rant for the trip. Its hard not to go all semi-anti-Nietzsche-esque when I look out the window in my room and see the tops of mediocre city buildings with foggy but breathtaking mountains in the background. But for far-less lofty and pretentious purposes, here is a running list of foods I have eaten so far here that I have never had before. Cheers to tangible and edible experiences (often on wooden skewers)!

LIKE A LOT: sticky rice/pig's blood cake on a stick with spicy sauce and peanut powder, fried turnip cakes, lamb dumpling, this weird tentacle thing dipped in ginger sauce, anything from the bakeries here, grilled pork wrapped scallions on a stick, wax apples with salt and some kind of sugar powder, lychee, Taiwanese mangoes, bubble tea (real deal), Taiwan beer, this really amazing cranberry yogurt at 7-11, and some good vegetables that I can't describe but I got a whole plate of em at this buffet for 65NT ($2 american). so yes...good damned food, so I can't complain.

This blog = Taiwan Blog #1

This used to be a dance blog/or a me blog, a self-indulgent virtual diarrhea...It will become that again...probably all too soon...BUT the big distinction is that for the next 3-ish months this will be a Taiwan blog. I am certainly much more interesting when separated from my readers by a 2o-some hour plane ride. I am certainly more interesting when teaching SAT class 9-5 every day. right? ehhhh. okay maybe not.

Hello gaping cultural divides...I will be eating stinky tofu and sweating my balls off and bathing in a sulfurous bubbling springs. This should be fun and if not fun, just plain different.

so...see ya in September Philly.

K.Bye!

Christina

new solo. a hair in my salad and other minor annoyances

I like this title for a dance work or a book or for something. I have nothing to use it for, but if anybody does, feel free to steal it. Presenting, "A Hair in my Salad. and other minor annoyances...". Maybe some day I'll want it back. Thats generous of me right????

Hmmm...lately I have been bugging out and nerding out on what it means to be generous. The idea of an artist having a 'benefit' just seems so crazy. Its so conflicted cause generosity has nothing to do with funding (or does it?) and other artists that get invited to the benefits are no good at being philanthropists. Artists are good at sharing resources, they doggedly exert massive amounts of energy for causes that help more than just themselves, they dive in head first, they genuinely care about works and "invest" in work of their peers. They spend money. yes, from way back, artists have spent money to buy wine for their social gatherings. Maybe to buy absinthe for their artist salons. I am just guessing, but I feel like this is part of modernism. They like galas and getting dressed up and boozed up and they like being bohemian and semi-fancy all at once. They like the juxtaposition. They like the feel of being semi-poor and semi-underfunded. It keeps them real, gives them art-cred. They also like to flaunt their anti-establishment mentalities at their peer's Benefit Events that take their structure/impetus/intent...etc. from those that well established organizations put on. Although a for-profit business probably spends more on one day of boxed lunches for their corporate lunch meetings than a nonprofit spends on a whole damn benefit event, the fact of the matter is, both are about spending money...both are lavish in the sense that: the employees could have packed their lunches or the non-profit could have asked Yards for a money donation that would go straight to their cause instead of getting beer donated. Ultimately, people and artists like food and beer, we like entertainment, we like to get a bang for our buck and if not a bang, at least something worth writing home about. We are spread too thin. We have expenses that need to get paid, things we feel like spending money on, things we forget we spend money on, things we can't even foresee having to spend money on...yet.

We are scared of money. I am. We know that by giving it too much worth, we are falling into a trap...the trap set up by "the man". But we can't keep our middle finger hard and erect forever. Sometimes we have to acknowledge the idea of currency and money and credit and worth. Our finger goes limp and then our hand goes limp and we reluctantly and wimpily offer our dead-fish hand shake to "the man".

and rant on. rant on...I am not sure yet what my point about benefits are. I am going out to buy a beer. or maybe go support an artist and, in a round-about way, buy a beer. either way...cheers to benefits. more to come I promise.

New work. Bones and Old People

I am working on a new piece with Kate, Ashley, and Annie (again).

I will post video of my last piece "Light Hits the Glitz"... I swear...that will be the next post.

But for now here are some of the thoughts about the new work. Actually they are questions... a shit load of them. But if there was ever a time for lots of questions to ponder and dance out, now is the time because I am so excited for all the amazing dance stuff going on in Philly right now. It pretty much makes me want to jump up and down and do everything possible to refrain from peeing my pants with joy. To name a few: PARD at the Mount Vernon Dance Space (almost daily awesome class...yay), Mascher got a hefty cultural fund grant, so did Pink Hair Affair, people I know are starting things...companies, dance talk series, work in progress showings...etc., another year of Snip Its and Sounds series is gonna happen. In this less than lovely economy Philly dancers are giving "the man" the bird. And I can't wait to see the outcome.

Anyway, here are my questions about bones and old people:

I am thinking about what is brittle? What is stiff or has lost its elasticity? What has lost its sponginess? I am into making lists of all the things that are like old people's bones and muscles? ...a sucked on candy cane, an egg shell, really really thin glass, certain ceramic, certain metal things, pencil lead, piece of chalk, wicker basket, leaf, bark? what are the differences between the qualities of these items and why do they seem so subtle until you actually think about it and the differences are pretty vastly different.? old people...Why do they break easily? Why do they have trouble moving? How do they feel aches and pains? Why don't they respond as fast? Why are they slow? Why aren't they agile? What is physically going on? How do they sense this gradual progression? What happens in their joints? What happens to the cartilage? Does it just rub away...erode...dry up? How does it feel to hold an old person? What is their weight? What if one fell and you had to pick him/her up? What would that dead weight be like? What does their skin sense? Why are the muscles get less elasticy by getting tighter, but the fat and skin get less elasticy by getting looser? Do the bones still protect the organs? Can old people sense their organs? Where are the nerve endings? Where are the blood vessels? Do they change in quality? Why do you care about old people? Who do you know that is old? Do you feel like they sense their body? What is their mind body connection like? How do they look/move when they are: sleeping/walking/doing tasks/...etc? What can they do to be "physical"? take a shit perhaps is the most embodied action of the day...or climbing stairs?

What happens when we think "bones" and when we move "bones" and when we dance "bones". What happens if we extract a bit of visual or sensory muscularity...seems to get rid of a lot of the crap. seems to get to a root of seeing people dancing in a much more simple way. What are our own personal connection to our bodies? What are the full skeleton ways we connect and get to our bones???: sensing our height...rib cage expansion/ bending of knee joints, Most of sensing bones comes from muscles or skin association. What do we think about bones...what are their qualities? White? wrapped in sheaths of tissue and encased in lots of stuff. attached to alot. space between them. like chicken bones or baby back ribs...those are ribs you know... close together. articulating. pointier ends than we think? maybe protrusions and tuberosities and different circumferences? are they slippery?

these are some questions. Maybe I will post answers but probably not. I will however post rehearsal footage soon.

beginning of a short story in which nothing happens

I haven't written in a while so here is some of the fiction writing I have been up to:

Hey you again,

So you want to run away with me to Berlin? I bet we could find a flat in Berlin and eat food out of cast iron skillets and ride vintage bicycles and have vintage sex. "vintage sex"?...haven't quite put my finger on it yet, but I've masturbated it several times and it is always fairly quaint and fairly satisfying.

Maybe it could work.

I can picture you and I in the airport...not the cinematically-good-looking couple that often gets a down-spot in an airport, or plays/movies about airports, or plays/movies about love and life that so often seem to be about airports.

But not us - oh not us.

We've got enough quirks to beat the band.
I with my chicken scratch handwriting, scribbling on crumpled napkins, and you with your teeth-demolished toothbrush. I have never seen such fucked up bristles in my life.
But two normal kids like us are supposed to have a couple fucked-up-isms each...
subtle ones. We are subtly tired of existing in this pathetically normal atmosphere.
If the world of existentialism and Bukowski were chocolate pudding, we'd place our lightweight fucked-up-isms on the skin and use our fingertips to press ever so slightly downward, tracking and watching the swell of the pudding-like pudding that exists below the un-pudding-like skin.

What about vices?

...imagined as wanting to cheat on you with Bill Clinton and real as eating crunchy peanut butter minuscule mouthful after mouthful for ten minutes straight before bedtime.
...imagined as consistently packing a gizzed-on towel in your gym bag and real as letting your toenails grow till they rip minuscule holes in your ten pairs of dress socks.
...imagined as me being your first and real as you being my first...or viceversa
But in chocolate pudding, all things real and imagined don't matter much. It just splays itself out nakedly upon the cold silver metal of the salad bar. In Berlin though we'd never eat at salad bars.

I hate the noise of those snapping plastic containers.

No, we'd shop at open-air markets and then go home to our flat and chop and dice fresh vibrant things for us to eat.
Just imagine the roasted vegetables, crepes, and salads we'd make...
leaning on each other, shoulder to shoulder
leaning into one another, stepping our feet out laterally from the weight-bearing center-line of our newly united state.
oh the things we would make, pressed shoulder to shoulder precariously counterbalancing one another,
taking care of the other person's Tower of Pisa-body by pressing back equally.
The first few weeks this tilted orientation would give us vertigo.
The first few weeks the fresh food would give us the collective runs.
We would stand as a unit by the bathroom door, me saying, "Baby, you go first. I can wait." and you saying, "No you. I'm fine. I'll wait".
And we banter on kindly like this for hours, forgetting, until our jaws grow tired and our rectums grow sore, working overtime, squeezing, compressing...
Eventually we take a deep inhale, and upon that breath's release, I go ahead and sit down first, savoring the sensation of my German toilet on the backs of my thighs. And in Germany, it often rains.

I love the dome-shaped space our German umbrella creates around our dome-shaped skulls.

We walk under it...us doing our diagonal lean...our shoulder-to-shoulder counterbalance.
The connective tissue in my right shoulder molds around the bony protrusions of your left and inversely vice versa.
They fit together like a key in a lock...like when we have that vintage sex and leave the doors in the flat wide-open so my scream can throw its echo, bouncing from cement wall to cement wall in the courtyard.
I scream in German saying, "das cool", "das cool!!!!".
You tell me I don't know German and should take up French.
I say, "le poison douche et la pomme".
You pour some wine.
My teeth grow purple and my mood starts to sour.
I bake some brie and serve it with grapes.
You shove a whole tablespoon of brie into your mouth. You have brie smeared on your lips.
You are still chewing when you give me a hug and say, "Loosen up baby. I love you".
We hold the hug. While there, you reach for the baguette behind me and rip off a hunk. Crumbs tumble down the back of my German sweater. I probably start to produce tears to match the crumbs' downward trajectory.

It all feels somewhat like a mini-avalanche. Doesn't it?

I imagine Germany's winters must be dark and cold.
You say, "I wish you'd learn to ski"
I say, "I wish you'd invest in a scarf"
If I knew how to knit, I'd make you one. a deep vintage red with German yarn and German fringe.
I remind us that we too are on the fringe.
We are not like them... we are pioneers... we are in it together.
There is just us.
We are two, hand-in-hand, facing the cold, squinching up our faces in spite of the chill.
I hold your free hand as you smoke your cigarette. I blow puffs of hot air into the chill to mimic your puffs.
People all around us are speaking German. We can only make out words like "Doritos" and "facebook".

a little more Light Hits The Glitz

I couldn't find it in me to drop this piece. SO we are bringing it back in a few spots around town:

On Stage Philadelphia!
Monday, February 8th, 7-10PM

@ Plays and Players (3rd floor Skinner Studio)

$10

We will perform a full version of Light Hits The Glitz. It will be on a shared bill with a bunch of sweet dance and theater groups.

http://www.playsandplayers.org/performance/onstagepreview

Friday, January 22nd till the AM of Sat. Jan. 23rd

@ The Annenberg Center on 36th and Walnut

Light Hits the Glitz excerpt on the "micro-stage" @ 11:15PM?

Pink Hair performs twice more @ 12:15 and 1:15.

Come see us and this play cause it sounds insane!

http://www.bratproductions.org/events/24-hour-bald-soprano