high wire act

Performing is a gamble. There's something deliciously high wire about it. You might be solid, solid, solid--totally sunk into the slim, fast channel of your work--but on every side is the great, yawning, empty space that comes with standing up in front of people and trying to tell them something right now, in this immediate place and time. You can rehearse until muscle memory leaps to attention at the sound of a familiar score; you can rehearse until you don't have to think of anything because it all happens automatically, a physical habit drilled into the body by the obscene number of hours it takes to prepare most dance pieces for the stage. But then you step out into that other world where you are dancing for other people and so much of that falls away. You are walking the finest of lines, racing along it way up high in the air, and because you are there, actually there, live and breathing and thinking, so are the people you're dancing for. In the best of worlds, it's like being pressed forehead to forehead and whispering all your most beautiful secrets, even if you're separated by a vast stage and an ocean of seats.

I love it. Can't get enough of it. I'm a sucker and a glutton for it.

The piece I'm performing in this weekend takes that feeling and cranks it up to neon, quivering brightness. The Water is Clear and Still is a new performance installation by Liss Fain Dance. Most of the dance installations that I see have a sort of casualness about them, a conscious desire to connect to the pedestrian and human. You go into a gallery or warehouse or some other space, and the dancers are people moving around you. They tend to contain themselves, or have some looseness and improvisational ease. I like that. I like the effort to take dance out of the proscenium and bring it closer to the experience of being a normal human being.

This piece is a bit different. When you say the word "installation," this might seem like a better fit. It takes a highly choreographed, visually complicated piece and unleashes it in a lavishly artificial environment that the audience gets to enter alongside the dancers. There's very little casualness about it. The set is an almost alien deconstruction of a grove of trees. Video projections spill across the floor. The score by Dan Wool is an enormous wash of sound spilling out of a battalion of speakers hidden way up with the lighting rig. The choreography is vigorous and absolutely set. The most human thing about the entire production is, I think, the wonderful Val Sinckler, who performs short stories by Jamaica Kincaid in such a warm, vivid way that you can't help but fall in love with them. (I wrote a piece for Fantasy Matters about dancing to Jamaica Kincaid's stories.)

But, somehow, the composed formality of the piece creates an almost forced intimacy with the audience. They enter the world of it with us, and the contrast between the piece and the unexpected closeness and volatility of an audience that can move around at will somehow administers a little shock of that delicious, high wire connection. It's a kind of magic.

Please come to the show if you can... We only have two more shows to go. Tonight at 8 PM and tomorrow at 2 PM.

The Water is Clear and Still
Liss Fain Dance
at Z Space
450 Florida Street, San Francisco, 94110

Tickets are $25 and available online through Brown Paper Tickets and in person at the box office.

things done recently

1.
Shan and I posted a video of a duet that we're making for two of our brilliant dancers, Josi and Kelvin. We film just about everything that we come up with in rehearsals because our memories are never as good as the camera's. Mostly, we've been using the clips to retrieve forgotten choreography and inflicting them on friends who are kind enough to give feedback on half-formed ideas, but we're so giddy with excitement for this project and our dancers that we couldn't resist putting up something to share.



2.
I reviewed a wonderful new(ish) YA novel, The Freedom Maze, for Fantasy Matters here...

3.
And interviewed the author, Delia Sherman, here.

4.
I put on my opinionated bookstore girl hat and contributed a "best of year" list for the Kepler's blog. I have a terrible memory for time when it comes to reading. Books blur together and go from unread to read, and the distinction of when, exactly, I've read something is only a rare landmark on the experience. This kind of list is always haphazard for me, though I cheerfully limited myself to books that came out this year (except for Holly Black's White Cat) to make the job (slightly) more manageable.

5.
We performed Liss Fain's "The False and True Are One" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in November. They filmed one of the performances and have put up a brief edit of different clips. The camera people were literally in our faces for this--they darted around the space and would periodically shock you by appearing right at the edge of the dance floor when you turned around--so the footage actually gives an excellent approximation of the way the piece looks as an installation.


Liss Fain - "The False and the True are One" from Liss Fain Dance on Vimeo.

a show and a suggestion

(the YBCA Forum, where we're performing)

In a bit less than a week, I'll be performing with Liss Fain Dance in "The False and True Are One" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The cast happens to include my sister, Shannon, and Carson, who is one of the dancers we're collaborating with on Sharp & Fine Project #1 and a very good friend. The piece is unusual. It combines Liss's choreography--which keeps a whole-hearted commitment to clarity and full, aesthetically aware movement--with short stories by Lydia Davis, an actress (the sweetly indomitable Nancy Shelby), an original score, and a set and structure that try their best to diminish the distance that buffers the audience from the labors of the stage.

The stage is divided into five spaces: four rectangles of varying size for the dance and a raised platform for Nancy. Screens of translucent, shifting blue and green hang between the spaces, and the audience is encouraged to move itself at will. They can stand right up against the dancing space, separated only by common sense (beware the high-flung leg) and modesty. They can walk away from one dancer and walk toward another. They can sit down, or get into staring contests, or install themselves right next to Nancy and listen intently as she reads about women turning into cedar trees, girls turning into stones, and a certain cedar of Lebanon (I have puzzled over that line an absurd number of times when I hear it in rehearsal and have only just now remembered to look it up. My favorite sentence in the Wikipedia article mentions that "the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh designates the cedar groves of Lebanon as the dwelling of the gods.")

(the Yerba Buena Gardens)

I've seen other installation-type dance pieces and work that shakes off the traditions of the proscenium, but I think this piece is interesting because of the way it refuses to turn away from movement that is both rigorous and appealing in its prettiness. There are no histrionics, overt aggression or invasions of privacy. I don't think it's necessarily better than pieces that build on those things, but I do think it's gentler and more welcoming.

The company has been putting up video interviews with some of the artists. Here's mine:



The False and True Are One
November 17-20
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
Tickets available HERE. (general admission $25, seniors and students $12.50)
Also on Goldstar HERE. ($12.50, plus Goldstar fee... which I can't remember the amount of)

Come! We'd love to see you there!
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Malinda LaVelle, a friend of mine who is a daring, hilarious, and brilliant choreographer (and fabulous woman!), just launched a Kickstarter for a new piece that she's working on with five amazing dancers. "Urge" will explore "our untamed appetites" and be performed at two different San Francisco venues in 2012. Malinda's work is unsettling and funny, and it doesn't shirk the obligation of powerful art, which is to make you feel more like a human being. Please head over to Kickstarter and take a look!

the difference between getting caught and dancing

Yesterday, we spent six hours in this room. This is the Black Studio at Left Space in San Francisco. It's 3800 square feet, a cavernous cement box with white walls that curve into the floor on one side to create the illusion of a backdrop. There are fans to create the illusion of wind, and lamps that remain disconcertingly dark until the camera goes off. Then the lamps flash, at precisely the right time, and the photograph is flooded with illumination that is completely unlike the stark ambiance that otherwise fills the room. I couldn't get over this trick of technology. I hopped and twisted and flung myself about for six hours in a room that looked like the one in the photograph above. I watched my fellow dancers (the shoot was for a new batch of publicity photos for Liss Fain Dance) do the same. Over and over, a flash of light would go off, but nothing that felt any brighter or more intense than the flash of an ordinary camera.

And then we would look at the photos, beamed nearly instantly to a monitor on a rolling cart, and it was like RJ (Muna) was taking pictures of some other landscape that our eyes were just too slow or insensitive to appreciate. Those curtains, which were beautiful, but ordinary, wrinkled things of muslin or gauze, suddenly became sheets of ink, or paper sails, or strange and buff-colored sculptures, or columns of smoke. The light was golden and soft or so sharp that it sliced into every dip between muscles and bones. And then you looked back at the space and it looked exactly the way it had before, plain and mostly dim with a single strong light to mark the center. You couldn't even guess at how much time had passed since the light stayed exactly the same the entire six hours we were there.

The disorientation was extreme.

 
There is an enormous difference between moving for a photo shoot and dancing. In the former, you face a cement floor, excruciating repetition, and a merciless eye that captures rather than translates. In the latter, you need to deliver more goods, but you have an audience to talk to, a human brain that takes suggestions and applies connotations. In a photo shoot, you have to evoke movement, trying over and over to do something that can have a minute and static piece extracted from it that will remain beautiful or interesting without the before or the after. It was a weird thing to be reminded of, and it made me admire, more than ever, the work of the very great photographers who manage to invoke entire, open-ended worlds with a single shot.

evidence, on film

Liss Fain Dance posted video excerpts of "The False and True are One," the piece we performed at Z Space/Theater Artaud in December and (in a slightly modified version) at the Mill Valley Public Library in February.

The piece was unusual in that it invited, encouraged, and demanded a certain kind of audience participation by transforming a proscenium stage space into four rooms separated by walls of varying transparency that the audience walked through to see the dance. The choreography is by Liss Fain, the music was composed (and mixed live) by Dan Wool, the production and lighting design is by Matthew Antaky, and Jeri Lynn Cohen is our fantastic narrator who reads short stories by Lydia Davis. The piece is also about 45 minutes long, and since we never actually leave the "stage," surprisingly intense. My white silk dress was thoroughly soaked after every show.

Most of the footage is from our dress rehearsal, except for the last video, which cuts together little snippets from an actual performance (I had no idea someone was filming us from above!). Anyway. This is me, dancing.

Excerpt 1: Me, Bethany Mitchell, Shannon Kurashige

Excerpt 2: Shannon's "Caveman Duet" with Private Freeman.

Excerpt 3: Alec Lytton hauls me through the air.

Excerpt 4: Shannon, Private, Bethany, and Jennifer Beamer Fernandez dance to "Happy Memories"

Bits and pieces from the whole thing, with the audience

libraries are for dancing in

Yesterday, we performed "The False and True Are One" as an installation at the Mill Valley Public Library. The library, which is an absolutely gorgeous building surrounded by redwood trees and filled with amazing, mid-century furniture, is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. They're hosting a series of events that feature people or organizations with a connection to the North Bay/Marin County area, and as the event prior to us was a talk by Daniel Ellsberg (the man who let the Pentagon Papers out of the bag), we felt like we were in excellent company.

There's something charming about small town libraries, particularly beautiful ones like this one. You can imagine, quite easily, spending a large portion of your life there, bits and pieces of time that accumulate over the years. It's an entirely different feeling from the one I get when I visit one of the great libraries of the world, the ones that are vast and old and dreadfully famous. Those feel like cathedrals to me, and even if you spent the equivalent of years there, even if that was your library, I imagine there would still be a tiny bit of reverence hovering in the background.

(I really want this desk.)

They transformed the Main Reading Room into the dancing space. The periodical shelves and the couches were cleared away, leaving enough room to set out our separate "rooms." This piece was designed as an installation, but this was our first attempt to take it out of a theatrical setting and integrate it into an existing location.

There is a vogue in the world of contemporary dance right now for "escaping the proscenium." Everyone wants to make dance more relevant and more appealing, to shatter the "fourth wall" that develops between the stage and the audience. We go on and on about this kind of thing, really, we do. It's a strange and insidious concern for those of us on the inside of this particular fish bowl. Dance should be one of the most visceral, understandable, and universally appealing of arts. It is a natural human reaction, refined and exaggerated to the point of metaphor. But I don't know very many people who can say that they've gone to a dance performance that changed their life. I don't even know very many (non-dance attached) people who go to see dance (or even theater in general) just for the pleasure of it. Dance has somehow become intimidating, inscrutable. People have started to think that it requires translation, or that it's difficult.

It shouldn't be, really. And I think we're trying to figure that out.

Anyway, the original version of this piece invited the audience up onto a stage that had been transformed into this kind of strange, elegant gallery. They could walk through a set of hanging, transparent walls and watch the different pieces of the dance from whichever perspective they chose. We had some glorious lighting (designed by Matthew Antaky) and our composer (Dan Wool) mixed the score live.

In the library, we danced under the existing lights, in front of a massive fireplace and between the stacks. It was entirely more casual and entirely more strange. I didn't realize how much of a difference it would make to take away even more of the theatrical elements. It blew my mind to discover that the absence of the tiny membrane of distance provided by stage lighting, the flimsiest of barriers to separate the dancers from the audience, would be almost disorienting. We were suddenly existing in exactly the same world at exactly the same moment, and the intimacy and vulnerability of it was both wonderful and a challenge.

(The amazing library staff, reclaiming the Main Reading Room)