of possible interest, #1

Alex Ketley, who is blast to work with, a choreographer, and a man in possession of a quite strange, though frequently gut-socking, artistic mind, is premiering a new piece at Ballet Nouveau Colorado this weekend. He made a very odd little film for it (a preview? a trailer? I do not know...) that mostly involves pandas staring at people. You should watch it.


- Happiness - from Alex Ketley on Vimeo.

Why is the panda so angry? Why is the panda so creepy? Don't you wish you were in Colorado so you could find out? If you are, you lucky duckster, why not assuage curiosity?
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The wonderful Kat Howard recently interviewed me about being a dancer and a writer for the Interstitial Arts Foundation. I was really, really honored that they were interested in my work, and Kat's questions were fun to think about. 

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Next weekend, burns : work will be showing an excerpt of the new piece at Dancing in the Park, this great San Francisco dance extravaganza organized by Mark Foehringer Dance Project every year. A stage gets set up in that great space between the De Young and the California Academy, and starting from noon, you get five whole hours of dance, from all kinds of companies and schools. Hopefully, the weather will be nice. I'm excited. I like dancing in unusual spaces, and an outdoor stage takes me back to those years before I understood how hard dance can be, when it was all larks and we performed at fairs.

Grilled corn on the cob. Fried potatoes. Ferris wheels. Calliope music. And dancing. That's how it used to be.

miscellany

For what it's worth:

burns : work will be performing an excerpt of the piece we're working on as part of a program featuring Alyce Finwall Dance Theater on the 30th and 31st at The Garage in San Francisco. The Garage is a tiny, but rather fiercely eclectic venue. It is, literally, a converted garage. Our piece is still only at the beginning stages, but we've started to explore some great ideas and this is a chance for us to take raw material and see how it fares under the eyes of an audience.

Some of my amazing dance friends work with Alyce, and these shows will hopefully help them raise funds for a tour to the Joyce SoHo in NY, so I'm really glad we get to share the experience with them.

Howl. Carson Stein and Joy Prendergast, two of my favorite people and dancers, performed at the Togonon Gallery as part of Dance Anywhere, an event that incited dance performances all over San Francisco in unexpected places and would probably have been immensely successful if it weren't for the terrible weather. Here's a video of them at work. Choreography by Malinda LaVelle.


"The Speaking Bone" Kat Howard, who has, just this week, saved my sanity when I thought I had tumbled down the rabbit-hole of a non-existent story (never underestimate the power of friends who can help you shine flashlights at dark and scary first drafts), has a story in the current issue of Apex Magazine. I am continually astonished by how Kat makes her stories bigger on the inside than their length would seem to merit. They unpack themselves inside your head as you read them and often leave an unexpected bruise.


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One of my favorite people in the whole world is coming back to California. I am so happy about this that if I think too hard about it, I might burst.

For Coco. I can't wait til our clocks have the same face.