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!

my mind is completely ADHD right now

Well I worked at the gym for 9.5 hours today...plus I worked out for an extra hour.  10.5 hours in the same place (other than places such as: my bed, a hot tub full of floating candles and rose petals, an all-you-can-eat free brunch buffet with free endless Bloody Mary's and Mimosas, or a tropical beach or oasis) is WAY too long to spend in one place.  My brain feels a bit rotted from sitting in that office doing...um...nothing.  Pure nothing!  I love how I justify it to myself by thinking, "In this economy, you know you really need to work every single job opportunity that comes your way!!! Make that money Christina".

I don't always think like this, but lately I've had a lot of unpredictable expenses: my AFFA Group Fitness certification (yes... come take my Jane Fonda tribute spandex aerobics class when I start teaching classes..kidding), the money to pay the 1st and last month rent and security deposit of the new place that Vince and I will find and move into as of August, and the price of any Summer travels, dance workshops, or time off work that I look forward to taking.  ( I may do a dance workshop in NYC and in nowheresville New England at EarthDance.)  But anyway, I don't know if this is an economic phenomenon that I am discovering ( i'm sure its not) but I find myself thinking about penny-pinching way more lately and pretending to take measures to be cheaper and more frugal than I already was, but I think in reality I am just squandering my money at the same rate that I did before.  I am putting more of my paychecks in the bank...way more, but then by the end of the week, I find myself going to an ATM, getting some money out, drinking PBR out or wine at home, satisfying my cravings with Taco Riendo (which is not super cheap...its just in a neighborhood that makes it seem like it should be super cheap).  This could also be due to the fact that in the past weekend I have been trying to get my mind off certain amounts of shit...and by shit I mean thoughts about where my life is going and what my future holds and why all men should be shot (k...that is me exaggerating and being overdramatic).  But I don't understand men at all: the one's that aren't awkward are either taken, platonically interested and nothing more, or fall under one of the nine-million types of guys that cause me to run in the other direction.  Or they aren't any of these things, but they treat my like crap at times and are flaky.  Anyway...that was my complaining for the day, and now I am going to bed!