Please join me...

so this blog used to be one of those "art school grad that needs to get a life" kinda blogs (scroll down...you'll see what I mean)...I'm pretty sure it is still that, but I wanted to add some overtones of shameless self-promotion.

COME TAKE YOGA WITH ME!!!!

not because I am trying to get rich...I gave up that dream long ago(I was 5yrs old), but literally cause I want real bodies and minds of people I know and love to join me in exploring what this "yoga" thing is that I will be real-deal certified in in May(whatever that means). I just want to try to keep it real and sincere! The last thing I'd want to do is turn into a crazed yogi who says funny Sanskrit words that all translate to "SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!) If I ever post a picture of myself in a pretzel pose on facebook, somebody kill me.

Hawthorne Yoga in South Philly

Saturdays @ 11:30-12:45 on April 9th & 23rd, and May 7th and 21st

here is the site

Beginners/All Levels Class

Classes are $5-$15, sliding scale.

part of the proceeds go toward the Marie Ireola Yoga Teacher training program and part toward Hawthorne Yoga itself to fund renovations, new mats, etc.

Either way, these are part of my certification hours, so I would love feedback from your lovely face!!!

Elite Training NORTH in Fishtown (bet. Rocket Cat and Circle Thrift)

EVERY Sunday @ 3-4:30

here is the site

Gentle Vinyasa Yoga

Classes are $10 each. if possible bring your own mat (we have extras though)

This place is new, amazing, and we could go get coffee after class!

About my class:

Christina Gesualdi teaches a gentle Vinyasa yoga class that suits beginners and intermediate practitioners. We will practice softening the mind, releasing the muscles, and sorting out patterns of holding and tension. We will use the breath to guide our movement as we explore our range of motion, alignment, and balance. We will be curious and figure out how we can tailor yoga postures and sequences to fit our own bodies. Christina has experience teaching yoga and stretch classes at various fitness facilities in Philadelphia. She is a graduate of University of the Arts where she received a BFA in modern dance and studied exercise science and anatomy and physiology. Since then, she has continued studying body-mind techniques such as Tai Chi Chuan in Taiwan and contact improvisation. A resident of Fishtown and a prior resident/lover of South Philly, Christina is excited to begin teaching students from this wonderful community.

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

thoughts on light hits the glitz

So "Light hits the glitz" was my fringe piece. I am reworking it for Zornitsa's Current Show which will be free at Mascher space on Saturday, Nov. 14th. I am so excited. Annie is in the piece now, and I can't wait to see the whole thing re-imagined. In rehearsal on Monday I tried to figure out and explain to Kate, Ash, and Annie what the intent of the piece is. But explanations are always lacking and I circled around and around blabbering productively, but not coherently.

So I tried again in email and here is what I came up with:

• images of icing, marhmallow fluff, layers of delicious but extra sugary stuff added. Image of marshmallow fluff or icing smeared onto a person's arms or legs picking up shiny beads or sequins or glitter off the floor.
  
• images of kids named Esme and Sophie and Kaylin and Emma walking around disney world with their parents all bright eyed...They spend 5 days there going to each theme park...it rains each afternoon. They get soaked waiting in line for the rides and attractions. Their parents buy them yellow slickers and glittery princess water bottles and wheely backpacks.
• some kind of idea of "What is a fair Give and Take in art/dance?" How much do I want to glitter and glitz? Do I want people to wait in rainy lines for my art? Do I want people to expect it to be layered with thick sweet icing. Do I want people to run to Sam's club to buy it? Is Disney World a land of IMAGINATION? What is the nature of Imagination? Why do we associate it with children or things that awe us? Shouldn't "make believe" or "pretend" be taken seriously (as adults) not necessarily as fantasy or Lord of the rings or some elaborate sex porno fantasy, but make believe...like the brain/sensory process that fuels what we do every single day. I know a woman who "made believe" that she did not have a tumor the size of a basketball growing inside of her. When we rehearse at fidget, we make believe that we are in mascher space to figure out spacing....
• so I guess a piece that comments on the glitz and fluff and requires the audience to invest in actual imaginative tasks by Kate annie and Ashley and then use their own imaginations to deal with what they see. deal with...not understand, or be awed by...
• oh...and I am getting closer to what I actually mean. I think it is stupid that imagination is always supposed to make us feel good. It is the sole thing that is responsible for making us feel good, outrageous, awkward, ridiculous. I guess my point is that imagination is not marketable...we can't make an infomercial about it...but let us try to anyway. shall we?
  
• oh as for merce, and least common denominator, and such...I want to ask: can we be imaginative and not embellish? We don't have to tell a story with our eyes or expression or gestures or spinal undulations. we don't have to show whimsy or emotion in the face. I we just show really simply "annie ashley and kate thinking and imagining", that is enough.
• as for the Hole karaoke. there is something still really valid about that 7th-grade-alone-in-my-room-self that was all about over emoting andwhat I want to consider being way corny. Hole is so glitzy but so cornily harsh and abrasive. It tries to be irreverent . I just feel like it is a nice layer. The kind of complex feeling of not wanting to make the audience feel turned off or awkward, but genuinely wanting to make eye contact and express and over-emote.
  

Ha. Annie said at rehearsal, "So could you put what you are trying to say in one sentence?" Well, this is my attempt. (NOT) ...one bullet pointed, long ass sentence.

Come see the show. The piece will take half as long as it took me to think of those bullet points. I promise.

chaos has no kickstand

I love how I always start out my blogs talking about how I haven't blogged. It is kind of like when I used to go to confession at C.C.D. "Father forgive me, for it has been ______ since I have last blogged." I kinda stare through that weird shade/screen thing - my eyes level with the shadowy potbelly of the priest on the other side. I think of how he probably just gorged himself with meatballs and spaghetti but mostly meatballs. And I wonder if he has ever had the urge to fart or belch in that tiny dark booth and how bad it must smell, and I wonder if I should confess to him the these comic book-type images. But before I can get that out, he gives me my penance. "Say three Hail Mary's, two Our Father, and for Christ's sake, I check your blog daily and it's really been a let-down. The writing...when you actually do write, it all tries to hard...it kind of hears itself, comments on itself...and for Christ's sake if you use one more ellipsis, I think I'll scream."

I am not sure whether to say "Amen" or "Thank you Father", so I just leave the confessional quietly hoping to leave him wondering if his comment caused me to: faint, disintegrate, or will myself dead and straight to Hell.

So this blog was supposed to be about a performance art piece with a bike that I am thinking about, BUT I guess I got off on a tangent. So the next blog will be about the bike piece.

yearning to bitch/remembering to blog

I haven't blogged for a while. I'd love to get my ideas and ramblings on my fringe piece up in some kind of cohesive manner, but for right now, the ideal place for them is in a notebook, on a napkin, and other lovely places. I just picture myself, at some point in my life, at some European airport. Hey, if dreaming big is allowed, perhaps I'd be coming back from some kind of choreography residency in Berlin. And then, because I always attract crunchy hippies (not that there is anything wrong with crunchy hippies (I've eaten my share of granola and gone braless more than once)), I'd be at customs chatting with a few Bob Marley look-alikes about rebirth and Art. The person at customs would be suspicious of us all and before I'd know it, I'd be in some shady backroom being strip-searched by some large German woman and feeling her awkwardly strong German fingers searching in wrong places for a ziplock baggie of weed or two. She'd be shit out of luck, but out of my cavities she would retrieve pieces of crumpled paper with lots of choreography notes scribbled on them. She would be the one feeling "high" as she stood there like some surreal version of a magician pulling programs, blank pieces of printer paper, tissues, napkins, and receipts all graffiti-ed with my sloppily jotted thoughts on dance, life, and art out of my body.

That is a nasty exaggeration of my disorganization and abstract means of brainstorming, so please know that I do not actually stash dance notes up my ass!!!!

Well, Philly, as much as I love you...as much as I can't think of any other city I'd rather live in... here are some things that I'd like to bitch about:

1. As of August 16th, you drained the public pool on 18th and Catharine of its water and closed it down for Fall. Last time I checked, the rest of August/hottest part of the Summer was still yet to come.
   
2. Washington Ave. (my main means of biking to and from work every day) and Delaware Ave (my main means of biking to and from Mascher Space Co-op.) both have bike lanes the whole way!!! That would be lovely...except bike lane does not = place to sweep all of the road's and sidewalk's glass, trash, and other dangerous objects! You know those red bins at hospitals and doctors offices for sharp objects' disposal? I feel like city workers or fairies or trolls of Brotherly Love must go out at night and sprinkle the contents of those bins in the bike lanes.
   
3. Speaking of bikes, my friend Christine's beautiful new custom bike got stolen. They literally sawed the pole to steal it. That's something to bitch about!
   
4. The guidelines for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund Grant (the grant that PHA applied for and recieved last year) are not even posted on the website because the whole thing is in limbo due to the city's decisions about Budget cuts and funding. The deadline is Sept. 25th (probably), and I just got off the phone with the secretary at Senator Dominick Pillegi's (spelling???) office. The well trained voice of complacency softly told me that she would pass along my message of concern to the senator. I mean what else could she say? BUT STILL...its frustrating.
   

Well good, I've successfully set up a climax of negativity. The weird thing is...I am in a great mood today. No honestly I have an awesome rehearsal, free snacks (maybe?) at a grant meeting, a night off,and a homemade dinner with Paul and friends to look forward to on this sunny day. More thoughts on TENSE MAG to come...in case you thought I forgot about it/gave up!

"TENSE MAG.: not stiff but Present"

I recently had a conversation about starting a "dance" review or zine...Something like Contact Quarterly in that it would have articles, interviews and innovative free flowing discourse that critically thinks about issues in contemporary dance. Nice...right?

But what an administrative nightmare...finding grants, shuffling and filing paperwork, promoting it, creating a buzz around it, seeking help, recruiting advertisements and sponsors...

I'd probably need a board of directors...I'd definitely need contributors, oh and editing and images, oh and printing and wow...that sure sound like a hell of a lot of work.

I'd probably have to hire some eager college-age interns, maybe a few naive carrier pigeons, an in-house hipster bike messenger, a blonde bombshell personal assistant...a new psychologist to help me cope with the extra load of stress, a massage therapist who could help further relieve my stress and advertise in my zine all in one shot.

I'd probably need to hire a ninja or two to scale the freshly power-washed walls of city hall...scale all the way up to good old Billy Penn, and secure in his hand a larger-than-life neon light-up billboard advertising my brand spanking new dance zine....BUT the sign wouldn't say "dance zine".

No. It would be more mysterious by revealing just the title which would be (drum roll please...) "TENSE MAG.: not stiff but Present". There would be a buzz around Philly, and people would not put 2 and 2 together until they started seeing copies all over the place...It could be like in Las Vegas where you can't walk anywhere without a few pages of the "slutty naked lady zines" getting skewered by the skinny heels of your stilletos. "TENSE MAG." articles would be strewn across Philly. You'd go for a walk, step in some gum, and before you'd know it, you'd have an article entitled "Finding the Sits Bones: Philly's Prime Movers Discuss Pelvic Halving and the Head Tail Connection" stuck to your new Puma's.

So...stay posted...more to come on "TENSE MAG.". If you are a dancer who likes to hear herself talk, a talker who likes to imagine himself dancing, a dreamer who likes to dance herself to sleep, or a talker that likes to force others to the point of sleeping and dreaming , then "TENSE MAG." is for you!!!!!!!! If you are none of these things...go read the Wall St. Journal.

Here are some pics. of rehearsal for SomeAnyOverItch.  (courtesy of Bill H.)  

We have a week until our show at Mascher (Friday, May 29th @8).  I can't wait!

I still haven't ironed out the talking stuff, but I just got back from rehearsal with Ashley, and movement-wise, it feels really chill and exciting.  Tonight we rehearse again and will have some people there to watch and act as audience members that we can be terrified by when we attempt to talk.  I keep thinking of the talking in Miguel Guitierez's work which most definitely is in some way previously written down.  It isn't usually improvised (from what I've seen), but there is something about the way stuff is said or read that seems so real and vulnerable.  Or even in John Jasperse's Misliable to Use of Persecution... the talking is very imaginative and his sensibility and gentle intelligence are so clear.

That is my ultimate goal for the talking, but I am okay with it being awkward, theatrically horrible, corny, blah blah...etc.  I would rather try something, commit to it, and have it not work, than to bull shit and cop out of doing anything that feels less than comfortable.  I also liked the writing on stage and reading stuff that Jen Nugent and Paul Matteson did at the Mascher show last month.  That was weird, but good- weird cause I could appreciate the fact that they were trying to get at something, and they almost seemed to acknowledge that they hadn't completely found an effective way to get at it.  I feel like a lot of choreographers are wanna-be poets (I totally am) but they realize that poetry is hard.  really freakin hard.  It feels nice to string words together and make images and linguistic choices, but when it comes to editing and honing in on making an actual poem, I am always like, "Uh...that was nice while it lasted, but lets just dance. k?". (well, not "jUST dance", but you get my point) 

So with all that said, I think it will be interesting trying the stuff I have in mind at tonight's rehearsal.  Some talking inspirations/images that come up are: awfully awkward artist talk-back sessions, the language used by a yoga teacher or meditation leader, gumbley-gook artsy bullshit talk over wine on first friday, a professor to his freshman seminar class, Becket's Waiting for Godot, Albee's The Goat, The Sasha Baron Cohen Bruno interview of the fashion show people and of the psychic.  

Well, its gorgeous out!  I am going out to play.  

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.

NYC can be cheap if you let it be!

Wow yesterday was a crazy day! I mean not crazy, like wild-crazy. I mean as much as I could envision myself in just a white t-shirt and white boy shorts underwear backing my ass up to Fity Cent or some shit all "girls gone wild"- style while standing in the pouring rain on top of the Chinatown bus before if pulls off...my day wasn't crazy like that. But it was nonstop and intense!
I got the 11:30 am bus out of Philly after work. I tried to stick to my ritual of getting a coffee and some unknown Chinatown bakery, delicious-looking bun. They were all out of the buns that look good but not so good that I will gain 5 lbs. and simultaneously have a heart attack before even making it to NYC, so I got this pineapple one. It was super sweet and really awful, but I finished it anyway cause the rain was stressing me out and I like to have something to munch on when I am stressed out. It takes my mind off of it. The ride up wasn't terrible.

Even though I knew I was pushing it time-wise, I forced myself to rush around and get the L Train to Brooklyn to go to the 2 o'clock Anna Sperber Class in her studio. The space is really nice. She is really nice. There were two of us in class. The class was $10. The dancing came from an "anatomical and physiological sensitivity through imagery" type approach. I really appreciated her sincerity, and lots of the images she gave made so much sense or some didn't make sense at all but I still liked how they kind of tickled my imagination. The floor in her space is also sweet. She said she did a good amount of research and found that this processed "purgam?" over the plywood that was there and then covered with foam (I think she said), seemed to be the best option. Her space is way smaller than mascher, but for Meghan Breidge's space, it seems like it would be perfect, but possibly expensive.? Anyway...GO NYC and the classclassclass program for having cheap classes that are not about spending your last paycheck to be seen in a fierce leotard or to not be seen in a fierce leotard but to see lots of other annoying skinny chicks twirling around in spandex (although I do still highly enjoy spandex).

I continued to find little slivers of NYC awesomeness that I had always assumed ceased to exist. Although the full out "hipster" boy is usually is not my type ( I like a milder or nerdier or less trendy version)...I had time to kill and I figured I'd rather chill in Williamsburg in their company than go right to Wall St. (where my audition was) and be surrounded by corporate assholes that make me lose faith in the world. I went shopping at Salvation Army and found lots of sweet stuff for really cheap. I actually ended up making no purchases simply because none of the stuff was neccessary...just fun. I also browsed in an awesome record shop. Finally I decided it was dinner time and I sprung for a $3 falafel sandwich at the place right across from the Bedford stop. Holy crap...it was delicious and cheap and I ate it with a perma-smile on my face.

I then went to the Tiffany Mills Scholarship Audition and I have rambled on for way too long, so I will discuss dancey-stuff and the audition in my next post or something of the sort! Speaking of dancey stuff though...I had a horrible trip back from NYC at 1 in the morning cause the Chinatown Bus was sucking. I felt like Mark Morris cause I resorted in drinking a big huge can of Saporro on the ride home. It was yummy and I judge Mark less now for using the dancers' emergency ice bucket to keep his reserve of Sapporo perfectly chilled when his company toured to ADF the year I worked on their stage crew. I judge him less for walking around shamelessly and pompously with that silver can in his hand at all times as if it were a bottle of Evian.

the sky was active blue today

I have been cherishing these longer days. Daylight trails on till about 7PM now, and for the first time this year (That I can recall) the morning sky at 5:40 am was active-blue this morning. There is only a window of a few weeks, I think, that the sky is active blue at that time in the morning. I could be making this whole bit of bullshit up, but I swear I saw and felt it today. There is something about the shade of blue that has momentum, wild depth, and clarity. I've never seen an ocean besides the Atlantic, but I swear, this blue of the sky is the straight up copyrighted blue hue that the marketers of resorts in The Bahamas and the Caribbean use to represent the Pacific on their brochures and commercials. Whether its true or not...I don't know. But this sky is incredible. There are no clouds and the blue is like something you could send up your open hand surging into and pull out your hand with a fistful of diamonds and treasure. This sky is still by faith because there is not a cloud in it that can act as a true indicator of whether the sky is actually moving, creeping along at its usual pace, or not. The sky is in endless motion by faith as well. The fact that it is clear with no clouds or blemishes, again makes it impossible to reference its movement against anything else, but the color of the sky alone assures you that it is moving...surrounding you, stretching out, coiling back, exponentially expanding.

The ant on the sidewalk stops looking in front of him for one second and lifts the "head" part of his segmented body to peer up at you. He sees you: the bottoms of your earlobes, the black caverns of your nostrils, the feathery jutting out of your eyelashes...BUT all these shapes and forms are in counterpoint with the background...the active blue sky. For one second the ant wishes his body alignment were so that he could always peer upwards seeing figures in relief, enveloped by the blue sky. Just kidding...the ant doesn't wish that at all cause ant's can't wish things. Plus, the ant went to Art School and has a bookshelf full of the works of Romantic Poets: Blake, Shelley, Thoreau and can get his fill of lovely images whenever he wants to. The ant knows rivers, trees, leaves, nature...The ant looks forward to Spring. The coming of Spring and the active blue sky cause him to scurry across the sidewalk a bit more quickly than normal. He dodges crumbs and shards of glass and wads of chewing gum. He's not sure where he is going, but he moves with a quickness.

Headlong/ Tere O'Connor Workshop

Tere O'Connor has been working with Headlong Dance Theater for the past year or so. Tere is a choreographer in NYC. I have taken a week workshop a few summers ago with him, but have sadly not seen any of his works. He has very thought-out views/theories/ideas about what dancing is and what choreography is. Headlong shared some of these working theories with us in this weekend's workshop. This is my attempt to make some sense of it all for myself as I reiterate what I think I may have learned/become interested in on Saturday.


Choreography is like science in that we use something/anything as a starting point. Then we do research on it. We ask questions that have yet to be asked, or that we think have yet to be asked, or that have been asked already but we hope that they will manifest new truths or untruths or truth-looking things that as a culture and as a generation we can put some faith into and believe in.

Choreographers, like scientists, should be honest in their researching process. Tere seems to be saying that maybe we don't need preconcieved notions of dances or concepts for dances or themes for dances...that all of these things are better left unknown and un-worried about at the begining of a dance making process. We shouldn't worry about what is good, or what people will get or not get, or what is strong or what works. We should simply worry about asking questions to delve deeper into what interests us. Our explorations of those questions doesn't have to be good or interesting or ground-breaking either; it just has to be curious and real. Through this we can figure out what the "it-ness" of what we are making is and ask more questions to explore that It-ness. He calls these repeated bouts of research "it-erations".

With all this said: this is not the be all and end all of the choreographic process. It is one tool that can be used very strictly or could work to simply get a choreographer on a certain track with the creation of movement and to help him/her resist imposing qualitative judgment on his/her process and to resist his/her urge to "make a dance" instead of simply being curious enough to let the dance "make itself".

I want to use these ideas to keep going with Ashley and my duet, SomeAnyOverItch. It actually relates quite nicely to my original concept of adding layers to Nothing. There again though, notice that I actually did go into the dance with a "concept" that ended up censoring/influencing/pressuring the movement that emerged as the duet. There was always the question of "How does this movement or this section relate to my concept???" But why am I so precious about my concept anyway? I am not in sales or marketing or advertising...I am not selling chocolate ice cream cones to lactose intolerant kids! I am not selling anything because believe me...if I was, I wouldn't be sitting at the gym at work right now, I'd be home counting my millions of dollars (all in 20's) (packed neatly into 3 black briefcases). So why do I cling onto a concept? Probably because I don't trust that at the "end" of the process, I will know what the heck is going on if I don't have some kind of starting point. Ash and I have many starting points though. We have been playing since september with contact and giving and taking impulses, and improvising, and being sincere in a performance, and creating imagined space, and charging fictitious imaginations.

I'd like to think of an assignment for rehearsal tonight...something to slow us down and make us take the time to do some research. Maybe do a strict it-eration thing individually like we did in the workshop but then add something. We have so much duet/contact stuff to play with. Maybe we start with that and one person does research on a sliver of some aspect that interests them. The other person's score is simply to react. The researcher can give the reactor some physical or verbal cues. If they use verbal it must be loud, resolute, and brief. something like "Press into me harder" "Keep pressing" "STOP" "DO THAT AGAIN".

Or maybe we should do the strict iteration thing and see ..."hey what is leading us into contact anyway? Maybe there is nothing there...maybe that is forced. Hmm...I guess we will have to wait and see!

OH BALLS

If you wikipedia "Ball Pit" this is what they tell you...
A ball pit, also known as a ball pond or ball pool, is a pit, usually rectangular and padded, filled with small hollow plastic, multi-colored balls. It is typically employed as a recreation or exercise for small children. Some ball pits are shallow and only suitable for "wading", while others are deeper and may be used for "swimming".

Ballpits are often found in nurseries, carnivals, fun centers, amusement parks, fast food restaurants, and large video arcades. Chuck E. Cheese removed their ballpits due to safety concerns and becuase the pits were a drain on resources, since children would often steal individual balls till the pits were far below capacity, and thus, unuseable.

While ballpits are commonly thought of as a child's play-thing, there are some that can accommodate adults. Many ball pits have been removed because they are thought of as unsanitary because it is hard to clean each individual ball and because unsafe objects can collect at the bottom of the pit. Beginning in the late 1990's, many urban legends have surfaced saying that kids have died or been critically injured due to poisonous snakes and hypodermic needles at the bottom of the ballpit. China Meiville's short story, The Ball Room, is a horror story centered around a ballpit in an Ikea-like furniture store.

Wow! I love it. I think it was at the last Mascher meeting I attended, when someone mentioned having a room full of balls for a fundraiser party event and the whole thing got me remembering the loveliness of ballpits. I used to love swimming around in those sweaty awesome balls. It was extra fun in those swishy jogging suits I used to wear when I was 5. I'd have a tummy full of Chicken McNuggets, milk, and Animal Crakers. I loved those moments where your feet clearly touched the bottom and then you would try to walk and do one of those trip-steps and sink shoulder or neck deep in that crazy pit of goodness. I can remember ignoring my mom as she stood at the netting surrounding the pit telling me it was time to leave. I remember thinking that the likeliness of her coming in to get me was slim to none so...whatever. Then I thought about how awful the car ride home would be so I waded/swam on out.

The hypodermic needle thing cracks me up because just last night, PHA was rehearsing at Mascher and we heard the icecream truck outside at 9PM. We were all like, "who buys ice cream this late at night?...until we were enlightened by Laura that the truck sells both ice cream and drugs...woa! And the fact that someone wrote a horror story about a ballpit is pretty great too. It makes me think, How great would it be to do a Fringe piece in a moon bounce? and the moon bounce would maybe deflate as the piece went on. Or in inflatable swimming pools and the pools deflate as the piece goes on. The audience sits in baby swimming pools. Or inflatable rafts or innertubes that deflate as the piece goes on. You'd hear that"pssssttttttttt" of the air coming out the whole time. It'd be like one long infinitely lasting, yet controlled, fart that is made collectively by the whole audience. And I, for one, could perform much better if I knew that the whole audience was farting throughout the whole performance. (You know how they say, to cure stage fright you should picture the audience naked or taking a dump??? well this is a new and better twist on it).

So balls and farting...Happy Monday kids!