Residency
playtime/fugue state
Writer friends describe residencies as open time to think, read, research, write and not write. Friends in fine art tell me about long solitary explorations of a new medium, taking walks and sleeping. Is it unique to performance/dance that a residency be highly populated, logistically dense, tightly scheduled, intensely overstimulating? Or just to my experiences? This is not a complaint, it is a question that I should ask more choreographer friends.
I loved every minute of both 2022 residencies working on the Iris Dance with these gorgeous people, but I did very little reading or sleeping - or eating for that matter. The thinking and writing I did was feverish, ferocious. Not totally reliable but somehow still actionable. Often it was so exciting for me (though the dancers may have felt otherwise) that I had to consciously slow my heart and speech rate. Was it the rush of witnessing dancers making fascinating choices? Seeing long imagined structures becoming embodied? A still COVID-conscious contact-high from getting to move as a group in one room together? All of this and then some for sure.
Here are some images from the UW bst residency in March 2022, captured by the wonderful photographer Dean Glawe who joined us nearly every day:
Video footage captured by Katie Wise, music is David Behrman’s Leapday Night:
Dazed but still buzzing reflective free-writing just after the residency:
March 26, 2022
In the last run, for the showing, I became increasingly aware of the dancers compositions, individually, overtime. I would see Mary Margaret returning and returning to things and having a relationship to her own personal crafting of content, constructing a composition inside the composition as well as being responsive. I also saw how the grooves were being made over and over and over again. I like the idea of a minimalism that exists through abundance, or many many many, or lots and lots or everything at once. There has to be enough time in the first landscape for people to see the same things over and over and over. Feel the repetitions together in different ways. Feel how the paths exist, See them.
It seems that Caitlin and James both felt the transparency of it. Apparently it did not feel too long. With James the word “makingness” came back. The visibility of it’s making.
Remember Alyza DelPan-Monley observing how interested she was in relationships in space, and how many different forms she would see whenever two people came together. Appreciating all the versions and varieties of duet and appreciating that no one got buried in duet. There was engagement without some kind of character action or need for defining the relationship. I feel like somehow this could also be what “unnamed shapes” refers to. A kind of indefinable relationship between bodies that you can still recognize, and see as it changes its form.
I want to remember how I can pierce through. Like fire rings, or paper panels. I can feel all the anxiety and I can still “run toward the danger.”
Remember, was it James who said that it felt like “fertile viewing?” I love this idea. A landscape that has as much activity for the viewer as for the performer. Allows space for the viewer to be thinking their own thoughts and mulling their own ideas.
What if the process of the dancer is as materially important to the work as the process of the choreographer? What is the choreographer’s role then? What has it ever been? I like the idea that the choreographer is a kind of archivist, making meaning from collected things that don’t really belong to them. What is being shaped? What is being carved? What becomes the material to hand?
Remembering “lining up” as our foundation. Answers lie in what is already present, not in superimposed choreographic “tactics.”
The second 2022 residency in Portland’s Performance Works Northwest was a shared venture with Jason and our son into which we invited a lot of other local musicians and dancers to play and explore. Segments were reserved for my continued exploration of the Iris Dance, with a new/altered cast.
Images (mostly mine) from the PWNW residency:
Beauty!