the Kickstarter Project

My brain and time and ability to focus is being devoured, in great, rending gulps by the business of putting on a show. I am excited to the point of being unable to remember simple things like where I've left my tea cup five minutes ago. I am also slightly terrified. And I have two pages of text to memorize tonight.

This is my excuse for copying the following straight from the Sharp & Fine blog and putting it here, in case anyone who might still check this poorly neglected blog might feel like reading it.
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Somewhere between last Friday night and Saturday morning, we launched a Kickstarter project for A Thousand Natural Shocks. By the end of Saturday, we had already raised over half of our goal. We are now 92% funded and have 64 backers.

Kat and I did an interview about the project for Fantasy Matters. And another one for Geekstarter.

We are astonished. Delighted, of course, but astonished. And very, very grateful. So many people have helped us spread the word. It’s a strange and wonderful thing to have not only friends, but also friends of friends of friends and even complete strangers stepping out from somewhere in the shimmery expanse of the internet and being excited about this project we have been working on for so long. It feels a little like the beginning of a gathering of people, friendly and varied and slightly raucous, who are going to accompany us as we trot off into the night in search of adventure.

It makes me hope that we can do brave and daring things to be worthy of our new companions.

Our Kickstarter video is below… We filmed excerpts from the piece in some picturesque places around San Francisco. Mostly, we danced around and looked like crazy people. It was fun.

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.

technical desires

Sometimes I just like reading the specifics of things that I don't quite understand. It seems poetic in its impenetrability, somehow.

Single color Front light, 9 areas
Two color Back light, 4 areas
Single color High-sides, 6 areas
One (8') head-high and (2') shin Side lights, on four booms per side (16 circuits)
Three color top cyc strips
Nine center (Down light) specials, up-stage to downstage, (8 circuits)
9 extra circuits.

sunday movie: Kissing (1900)

An article on Brainpickings sent me to this video. It makes me happy. It breaks down, in 37 seconds, the barrier that missives from the past must often shout through, the sense that those people in grainy black-and-white are not actually real.

birthday parties

When I was a kid, I had epic birthday parties.

I think that word, in the context of birthday parties, has a whiff of terror about it now. The birthday parties that my sister and I had in childhood were not grossly extravagant or populated by hordes of schoolmates, but they were epic. Things I remember: decorating a table full of small white cakes with friends, each of us armed with colored frosting and plastic dinosaurs (I was in love with dinosaurs); a jungle themed carnival in the backyard, of which I distinctly remember a long sheet of paper painted to look like the Limpopo River; our panda bear puppet in a cowboy hat perched on a pile of straw bales; riding ponies with a (very) few of my friends across a scrubby California hill; drinking tea out of flowered cups while wearing a flowered dress and a flowered hat.

I'm sure that for our parents, the parties were stressful occasions, but for me (as far as I can remember), they were sheer pleasure.

On Tuesday, I had a birthday party that was just that. Pleasure all the way through. I went with some friends to the Verdi Club in San Francisco, where they have swing dancing and a live band every Tuesday night. The space is clean and large. The music is fantastic. The people, for the most part, are both polite and bracingly enthusiastic. They are there to dance (not to stand morose in corners or leer or wobble around in too high heels and too short skirts) and it doesn't strike them as odd that a group of young-ish people who don't know the proper steps, are nevertheless stomping and hopping and flinging themselves about however their fancy hits them. I got to hold hands with strangers, and look them in the eye, and dance with them. I got to hold hands with friends, and look them in the eye, and dance with them. We had conversations. We sat in corners and listened to music that called up all those magical, old movies where shadows and light feel more important because they're the only things there are. I felt very grown up. I felt very young. At no time did I find myself regarding a passing moment and thinking that it might be better.

It was wonderful.

quotes from a museum night

"What is she doing to that bird?"
"I think she's taking its skin off."
"Is it alive?"

***

"OH MY GOD, I love those purple puff things!"

***

"It's like Mars. In a fish."
"Are jellyfish fish?"

***

"This is so much time. It's so intense. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be anything like this. I assumed it would be crazy--of course--but, this... This is something else. I mean, all these people... Can I have some of your water?"

***

"And it shoots water out of that hole there, so it moves backwards."
"And that thing, that part, is that shell or is that flesh?"
"That's flesh. But it hangs over the shell, there. And those are its eyes."
"Really?"
"Yep."

***

sunday movie: "Arrow" by Bobbi Jene Smith

Bobbi Jene Smith is one of my favorite dancers in the world to watch. Seeing Bobbi perform is like seeing, apart from you and in the flesh, all these things that you both recognize and never knew about how it feels to be a human being.

Creators: Bobbi Jene Smith & Tom Weinberger
Performers: Bobbi Jene Smith & Christian Burns
Music: Efrim Manuel Menuck