Site Specific Settings

I love site specific performance. And there is certainly a relationship between Duncan dance and nontraditional performance spaces. Natural, outdoor settings make a great venue for tunic-draped dancers, and when Karin Carlson asked me if I was interested in sharing any work for her Silk Road project, of course I said yes.

I first met Karin several years ago when she came to a Duncan workshop I taught at Dance Discovery. There were about five people in that workshop—two adults and three teenage students who drove up from San Antonio. It was a mixed group but we had a great time exploring basic Duncan work as well as creating new compositions based on natural dance movement principles.

When I put together my first site-specific piece in Austin as part of the Frontera Fest’s Mi Casa Es Su Teatro in 2007, I asked Karin to participate in an outdoor structured improvisation set in a field in East Austin. That piece, Rooted, consisted of five dancers, two men and three women (and the first time I ever put men in tunics), and each dancer created movement based on a score of planting, uprooting, traveling through space, and re-planting in another location. This is a movement metaphor that I often come back to, as it resonates with the transitory and migratory nature of contemporary culture—not surprisingly, it is also a theme that came up in the Talk to Me Movement course I co-facilitated with Peggy Lamb for Truth Be Told at the Lockhart work facility in the fall of 2007.

The pieces presented in the Silk Road worked with a wide range of different themes and movement metaphors and ranged from solos in silence to group works with recorded and live music as well as text. Choreographers set their pieces at different places along the Lance Armstrong Bikeway, and audiences gathered just across from the downtown Austin YMCA. Yelena Konetchy and I set the stage with our tunic-draped skips, and then the audience followed a swath of silk fabric to the first large sculpture of yellow metal rectangles before following a path that wound down to a small bridge, a side ditch drain, and back up to another metallic sculpture.

Site-specific dance work puts movement in conversation with space, with landscape and architecture, and puts art in dialogue with life in a way that integrates creative expression and daily experience. The art into life aspect of this kind of performance work enables audiences to look through a creative lens at other aspects of life as well, and when we bring creative purpose to lived experience, we discover that intention can actually transform circumstance. Plus, it is a lot of fun to encounter dance and performance in unexpected places.

Autumn Whirlwind

Fall is finally here—on the calendar at least—and October is shaping up to be chock-full of performance projects. In some ways, the events I have lined up for this month recap three major collaborations that I started within the past year, and I feel blessed to be able to continue each of these rich artistic dialogues.

Mid-October saw the Houston premiere of Divergence Vocal Theater’s Autumn Soiree, a haunting and ethereal decapitation-themed seasonal offering. I had a great time morphing between Anne Boleyn’s fearful inner spirit, Isabella and her famed pot of basil, and Annie of Edgar Allan Poe fame. Besides casting long shadows over Alison Greene’s spine-tingling incantation of the woman in green, digging a lover’s grave during Misha Penton’s haunting harkening of Isabella’s tragic fate, dueting with an eerie puppet, and even issuing the evening’s one blood-curdling scream, I also contributed choreography to one of my favorite piano pieces—Edvard Grieg’s “The Poet’s Heart,” played beautifully by Jeremy Wood. We ran for two packed evenings in Divergence Vocal Theater’s space at Spring Street Studios, and, as usual, the Houston audiences were warm and supportive.

The following weekend was the first ever Umlaufaloopa Arts Festival, at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin. My young dancers from The Girls’ School of Austin were joined by local professionals in an hour-long concert featuring dance games, original Isadora Duncan choreographies, and a reconstruction of Loie Fuller’s “Lily” by Jessica Lindberg. Yelena Konetchy and Jessica joined me in dancing a few of Duncan’s early Schubert choreographies, and we finished with a group scarf improvisation including young dancers from the audience.
What a joy to share this dance work in such an unbelievably beautiful setting! 20^th Century American sculptor Charles Umlauf was influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin as well as by Rodin’s pupil Antoine Bourdelle, two European sculptors with whom Duncan shared artistic relationships. (Interestingly, the Musee Bourdelle in Paris hosted a retrospective of that artist’s renditions of Isadora Duncan in 2010).  We’re looking forward to sharing more Duncan dance at the Umlauf in May 2012.

The final weekend in October meant another performance in another city—this time back to New York for a workshop and showing of Il Senso in Movimento, my collaborative project with clarinetist Cheryl Growden Piana, pianist and visual artist Fiorenza Bucciarelli, and video artist Dino Miglio. This showing marked the US premiere of our collaboration, with previous performances in Italy and Russia. The event was produced by the Noyes New York School and included workshops in Bones for Life, led by Cheryl, and in Noyes Rhythm, led by Linda Rapuano with accompaniment by Blake Rowe.  Who knew that the last Saturday in October would bring such a crazy snow storm? I missed seeing friends who had planned to come in from upstate New York and from Connecticut, but it was so wonderful to see everyone who did make it, especially Lori Belilove and a few of her dancers including my former student Rachel Herzog (who came with Lori to Noyes camp in August) as well as Sam Humphreys and Morgana Rose.

Next weekend? Back in Austin for a site specific showing called "The Silk Road." Also save December 15 for performances of an original choreography "Thel," as part of The Present at Austin's One World Theatre.

Wind & Fire

Elemental themes are primary in Duncan dance. The body is in relationship with the earth, with water and wind and other natural forces. We teach small high sways with the image of tossing a flame from palm to palm. We are encouraged to catch each other’s wind as we explore ensemble improvisation. These aspects of Duncan dance are the reason why the movement is sometimes characterized as “natural” dance. We look to the movement of forces in nature to learn nature’s organic movement patterns in order to apply those principles of gravity, suspension, resistance, and release to our own bodies. Nature is dynamic. And Texas, this week, has experienced one of her most dynamic forces—fire.

Pedernales One/Spicewood Fire, Highway 71

Duncan, herself, was no stranger to the experience of fire. In our 21^st century, Western world, we are relatively sheltered from the devastation and loss that fire can incur. In Duncan’s time, when more building was done from wood and the use of candles and gas and kerosene lights was the norm, incidences of fire occurred more frequently. In the first chapter of her autobiography, Duncan writes, “My first memory is of a fire” (My Life). She goes on to narrate having been tossed, as a young child, from a burning building.  Later she writes of a time in New York, when her family lost everything in a fire in the Windsor Hotel, where they were living and where her sister Elizabeth was teaching dance. In fact, Duncan credits that second fire as the catalyst that propelled the family’s move to Europe, where Duncan synthesized her artistic ideas and found her audience.

In the natural world, fire purges, creates space, and clears the way for new growth. But its method is destruction and it is very difficult to hold hopeful space in our hearts when encountered with the loss of homes and relics of family history.  As a result of the fires that have raged through central Texas this weekend, many families have seen their homes burned to the foundation. They have lost everything but their lives. Fire prioritizes our perspective. We are grateful for the preservation of life, and we experience directly the impermanence of the material world. We also realize that survival and new growth require the support of community.

There are many opportunities to give and to provide support for those faced with the prospect of rebuilding their lives. Firefighters are also in need of assistance to continue battling the blazes. The Texas Wildfire Relief Fund is organizing ongoing support (water, food, equipment, etc) for firefighters, and the American Red Cross of Central Texas is providing resources for those who have lost their homes.  

Movement in Duncan’s work is ebb and flow, a rhythmic giving and receiving. The perspective of fire enables us to express gratitude for what we receive and inspires us to give to those who have lost. May we maintain such gratitude and empathy in all aspects of our everyday lives.

Tunics in Texas Retrospective

Time fascinates me. We measure it in even increments, yet we experience it with tremendous rhythmic variation. There is no even meter grounding human journeys in predictable regularity—unless of course you embrace a perennial philosophical perspective and mark seasonal and yearly cycles as indicators of time’s passage. But even then memory invariably highlights certain events and erases others completely.

Duncan wrote, “I believe in each life is a spiritual line, an upward curve. And all that adheres to or strengthens this line is our real life; the rest is but as chaff falling from one’s progress. Such a spiritual line is my Art” (The Art of the Dance).

Anniversaries invite reflection, and this week marks a full year of weekly Tunics in Texas blog posts. Last year when I started writing, my intention was to create a contemporary forum for Duncan’s ideas—to argue for the continued relevance of her dance practice and for a renewed look at her advocacy for physical and creative freedoms. I have largely explored this through examining my own practice and experiences as a Duncan dancer in a 21^st century global landscape.

Duncan’s life spanned the turn of the 20^th century, the transition from the Victorian era, through the vehicle of the industrial revolution, to the modern world. My experiences span the turn of another century, shaped by the internet, cell phones, and digital technology. Means of personal expression and global communication continue to expand and evolve, and yet the issues of women’s rights and human rights, restricted freedoms, lack of access to education and resources, and an imbalanced pooling of the world’s wealth continue to persist.

That Duncan used her status as a performing artist to raise awareness of critical issues and that she envisioned her art as a means to alleviate suffering and bring beauty into the world are but two ways that the example of her artistic life informs and inspires me as a modern exponent of her work.  I intend to continue to use this blog as a platform to examine my artistic practice as a Duncan dancer and to explore how this creative perspective intersects with and informs the world around me.

And has the year been global! I’ve based my reflections here on my current status as an Austinite, but my dancing journey has included multiple regional adventures (mainly Houston with Divergence Vocal Theater) as well as national and international collaborations with musicians and other dance artists in New York, Connecticut, Italy, and Russia. In this next year, I hope to continue to develop these artistic relationships and, through them, to share the beauty, joy, and creative potential of Duncan dance.

Expanding Projects, Expansive Possibilities

One of my favorite Duncan lines is her insistence that, even though she appeared alone on stage, she never once danced a solo. I love the physical and thematic metaphor of relationship in her work.  In Duncan’s dance, the objectivity of the body is a metaphor for human subjectivity, and this weaving of life into art is a multidirectional conduit—it allows art to flow into life as well, and enables aesthetic expression to become relevant in contexts beyond the confines of the concert stage.

The healthcare industry and the jail/prison system are two such contexts, within which I have been working during the past few years. I’ve written here before about both Colors in Motion and Conspire Theatre, and I am excited to announce that both of these projects are on the cusp of expanding in new directions.  

For the next three months, Colors in Motion will be featured on the homepage of Kripalu’s website—click on “Take a Zen Moment” for a sample of Colors in Motion’s dynamic digital footage. This project integrates varying combinations of watercolor, music, movement, and poetry through innovative digital video technology to create calming and centering sensory experiences. This project is being marketed in the healing arts and healthcare fields with the goal of full-scale projection to generate holistic environments, synthesizing external harmonious stimuli with internal, somatic harmonic experience. Give us feedback by taking Kripalu’s survey about your experience with “Take a Zen Moment.”

Conspire Theatre, founded by Austinite Katherine Craft, brings theatre classes to incarcerated women in the PRIDE (People Recognizing the Inherent Dignity of Everyone) program at the Travis County Correctional Complex. I co-facilitated classes there with Kat for over a year, and we worked with some amazing women. One of our former students, a talented spoken word poet and rap artist, is achieving quite a bit of recognition for her work—check out Dan Solomon’s article about her in the Texas Observer.

Recently, Conspire launched an IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds to expand its programs at the TCCC—Conspire will continue to work with the women in PRIDE and will also begin work with women in the maximum security part of the facility. Check out this article recently published online through Austin's Culture Map. I taught through Conspire at the TCCC as a volunteer, and I am so excited to see this organization gain the fiscal strength to compensate facilitators for their time and efforts. The prison and jail systems rely on outside organizations to provide educational programming and opportunities to inmates—spread the word about how to fund these important and effective initiatives! They literally change the directions of peoples’ lives, providing empowering, creative experiences, community support, and skills to make self-actualizing choices.

The great lesson in Duncan’s work is freedom—through breath, through movement, through cultivation of intuitive listening and self-awareness, we learn that we can live joyfully from our hearts in any context. How beautiful it is to witness the expanding possibilities of these two organizations as they remind us that creativity and the arts are vital tools for healing within our bodies, within our relationships to one another, and within our relationships to the world around us.

Return from the Wild

Closing the Noyes Camp is becoming an annual ritual for me.  I like having a few extra days on the property after most people have trickled back to their other lives. I love the solitude of tracing light-dappled paths through the forest for the last time (this year), sleeping alone in tent city, meandering down to Job’s Pond to bid farewell to the blue heron, the family of ducks, and the swarm of lily pads that, by August, have fairly swallowed the west end of the pond. Scattering dryer sheets to keep the mice at bay in the attic archives and heave-hoeing the massive blue tarp onto the freshly-polished Pavalon floor are meaning-filled closures of my favorite summer haunts. Of course, leaving this year is made easier by the knowledge that we set the fall board meeting at camp, and I’ve already booked my plane ticket for the end of September.

Coming out of the woods is hard! Although I do feel lucky to have escaped much of the extreme Texas heat this summer, air conditioned interiors are an adjustment. I find it difficult to be inside and feel claustrophobic, boxed in by walls. I’m grateful to be returning to work at Austin’s Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, another beautiful and art-filled outdoor sacred space, and I even sounded a few notes on my recorder in the garden this week.  I’m also looking forward to the start of classes in the next few days at Tapestry Dance Academy, and to my two levels of Duncan dance at the Girls’ School of Austin, starting in September.

How to resume a regular schedule without losing the calm center gained from a few weeks of rhythmic dance practice in the woods? How to re-enter our fast-paced, technologically driven culture and retain a sense of groundedness, of space in the body, of release at the bottom of the exhale? Every fall, it seems, I ask myself these questions. This year, the goal is to stay in the music, to explore fullness of breath—and to get back in my tunic as soon as possible!

An Early Modern Dialogue

I have written before about the synergy between Isadora Duncan’s dance and the work of her contemporary Florence Fleming Noyes.  Both women developed movement practices in the early twentieth century that work with a high center and are informed by the line and shape of the body in classical Greek statuary.  Both women danced barefoot in tunics and in accordance with organic (or natural) movement principles. The work of both women has also been preserved and passed down through body-to-body lineages of dancers for over a century.

I came to the Noyes Rhythm work as an Isadora Duncan dancer, but my process in the Noyes work has been to shed my Duncan dance identity in order to enter fully into the Noyes Rhythm experience. My immersion in Noyes has, nevertheless, been informed by my Duncan work, and last week Lori Belilove, Artistic Director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation and my primary Duncan dance mentor, came to spend a week at Noyes as the Artist in Residence. The week also brought a few other Duncan dancers to the Noyes work, including Beliloveable Rachel Herzog, whom I also taught when I was working with Lori in New York, and Audrey Cozzarin, who came up for an afternoon.

What an amazing week! We had a full schedule of Noyes Rhythm work in the mornings and two hours of Duncan dance in the afternoons. It was a full camp, and the Duncan dancers opened up to the Noyes work, and the Noyes dancers caught the spirit of Duncan. It was great to see dancers from both practices begin to make connections between the movement forms. We also had informative dialogue about the different intentions of the practices and held space for the similarities as well as the distinctions. 

I do have to admit, early on during playtime, I realized that my dancing was more Duncan when I passed close to Lori and more Noyesian when I flew past Clio (Noyes master teacher Nancy Nichols), and it was a great challenge to let go of my awareness of the presence of so many teachers and just have my own playtime experience. We had some wild and fun improvisations this week, and our dancing was supported by the presence of two amazing pianists.

Saturday Night was a riot—and the irreverent spirit of Saturday Night was in full force when the two emcees opted to portray Duncan and Noyes time traveling to the year 2011. I ached from laughter when they incorporated Rachel into a skit as their mutual student and asked her to simultaneously dance as woman (Duncan’s perspective) and to embody animal rhythms (metaphor of many Noyes techniques). Rachel hysterically portrayed confusion when told she had no body and no head and was also asked to explore conversational gesture. After so many years of work within both of these techniques, I especially appreciated the push and pull of that particular skit.

There were several more serious memorable moments in the last Saturday Night of the season, including Noyes master teacher ThaLia’s (Barbara Luke) interpretation of a Chopin Nocturne, sharing the Duncan Tanagra Figures with the Noyes community, and Lori’s offering of Duncan’s choreography The Mother. I was also tasked with directing the last masque of the season, and I chose to work with the story of Danae, mother of Perseus.

In honor of the passing rhythm metaphor in the Noyes work, and of my personal experience of the passing rhythm between Duncan dance and Noyes Rhythm, I asked Rachel to dance Duncan’s Chopin Prelude as the first part of the masque introducing the character of Danae as a self-realized, young woman. Then a group representing the tower closed in on her, as she struggled for escape. We worked with a metaphor of creative, feminine energy that cannot be bounded and contained, and the group dancing Zeus’s shower of gold came down from the hill carrying lanterns through the darkness.  The two groups then patterned through space, circling and weaving together before moving into an image of Danae and Perseus locked in a barrel and cast into the sea. The masque concluded with a series of strong chords sending the dancers heroically off into the darkness—emphasizing the aspect of Danae responsible for gestating and birthing a heroic force.

I also made my recorder debut playing duets of two songs—“Cukoo” and “Oats, Peas, Beans, Barley and Corn.” After a few do-overs, and the realization that laughing while playing recorder does not produce the most pleasing tone, I managed to play something recognizable. Thank goodness for that, because during last week’s auction fundraiser, I did auction off a recorder serenade for next summer, and even though I have made my debut, there is still (whew!) ample time for improvement.

All in all—a rich and inspiring week. I am looking forward to an expansion of the dialogue between these historic, yet still so relevant, dance practices and the tunic-draped women that comprise these communities.