Conversation with Sarah #1

I found Sarah by chance. She wrote me a rather long email in response to my This Dance is a Cliché project, and I found her ideas so insightful and enthusiastic that I asked her if she would like to join me for a new project. At the time, I thought she was still at Sarah Lawrence, but it turns out not only had she recently graduated — she had moved to my neighborhood! We currently remain strangers, preserving my initial intentions with the collaborators in this project, but I have a feeling that won’t last long.

I began our initial conversation with a short intro:

I feel I’m approaching this differently with each person, based on what I know (or don’t know) about them prior to beginning. I created your video on a whim when in the studio putting together material for a totally different project. It’s improv, and I used the theme “Welcome to the Neighborhood” as a jumping off point. The fact you can’t always see my face was actually on purpose. Since we live in the same neighborhood, I was trying to hold onto some form of anonymity for now.

I wanted this first video to a) be one continuous piece of movement and b) be improvised because I equate it to letter writing — how often do you write and revise a letter, especially to a stranger? “Not often,” is my answer.

As I fractured my left arm about a month ago, and although it wasn’t serious enough to cast, many movements are difficult or painful. When I made this video, I had just regained quite a bit of range of motion (and had stopped wearing the sling), but it’s interesting how it inhibits you. You think the left arm, especially as a right-handed person, is the least important part of the body, but it’s essentially impossible to simply ignore it and use the rest of your body to dance. As a result, that arm seems foreign to me right now. I am relearning some of my muscle memory now. Such an interesting experiment/experience.

Anyway, here it is:

She responded:

I improvised this response to you – i tried to respond to a few certain things in your “letter” while at the same time delivering a general “hey this is me”. I thought about making a sling for my arm (okay…attempted via plastic bag…) but opted for “breaking” and gravity driven movement. I also liked your idea of not showing the face, and since i was in the close quarters of my parent’s kitchen, filming off a mac, that was the general effect anyway. Other things on my mind: head banging, rockstars, wondering what the implications of a hip hop background were in the NY dance world, and my lack of thinking in wearing jeans.

My exchange with Sarah is very akin to YouTube dancing-in-your-bedroom culture, which I find funny/ironic because we’re both actual degree-holding dancers. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of us sent over a home video of the “Single Ladies” dance — live from a bathroom in Ft. Greene.

Conversation with Natasha #1

My first video exchange occurred with Natasha, who I’ve found to be a very eclectic artist with a penchant for collaboration. Before we created videos, we emailed back and forth a bit, and she revealed that she is currently practicing Butoh dance, which I knew would set the tone for a totally different “conversation” than I will have with my other contemporary/modern dance collaborators.

She sent the first video and worked it around text from her poem titled “After Skin, After Stone,” which is part of a “multivalent collaborative project involving artists from all over the world,” according to Ms. Marin. What was born is the following:

Natasha hit me with a video that was dually impressive and unexpected. I wasn’t anticipating so many effects and fewer full movement phrases, so upon viewing, I had to step outside my box a bit to create what I thought was a “proper” response. I wrote to her:

So, I decided that because my conversation will naturally be different with each collaborator, the best way to respond to your video would be to approach it like a show and tell session. You showed me the medium in which you currently work, and in response, I’ve incorporated a couple of different concepts I’ve been exploring. On my own, I’ve been working a lot with perspective. And with Jigsaw Soul, another collaboration where I work, we’ve been doing a lot of filming focusing on specific body parts and their unique movements, which we will be incorporating into our live show. The result is the following:

I find it interesting that I felt the need to change the way I would “speak” to Natasha, based on the way she began a conversation with me. Was I afraid she wouldn’t understand me if I simply choreographed or improvised a full movement phrase as I had originally planned? Was I afraid she wouldn’t fully accept me as an artist if I didn’t prove I was capable of making my projects multimedia? As a real-life example, this reminded me of a friend’s story about changing the way he speaks to his Muslim friends, as he’s afraid they will judge him negatively if he, a former Muslim, divulges the details of his now-atheist lifestyle. It seems to be human nature to constantly find commonality with strangers in order to form bonds and avoid risking rejection.

I’m curious to see how my conversation with Natasha progresses and if I we will both continue to approach it similarly as the weeks go on. Will we continue to reach for common ground or simply speak in our own movement languages? Can we properly react to each other if we simply use our own respective movement vocabulary?

Until then, I eagerly await my next video …

Welcome

Thanks for visiting. We’re glad you’re here.

We’re still getting prepped to begin posting videos of our collaboration. In the meantime, please visit the About page to learn more about we’re going to be doing here.

Stay tuned …