Have I been kissing or just engaging in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?

Musing
about the bizarre character that showed up to head my crew
I often sync up with the rooster
surrogate spousing the one who commands the army
I'm never surprised by their interest in me

the fierce femme who can speak their manspeak

Load capacities, deck mis-alignment, height discrepancies

calling them out on bullshit in their own language

I was distracted suddenly by the shape of his hands,
the dusting of freckles on his forearms
as he screwed a pin into its shackle
the pattern of his curly salt and pepper hair falling
from the crown of his head in glossy once-dark ribbons
to dance around his shoulders
when he leaned down to tighten a bolt
and felt like I had trespassed
witnessed some intimate thing that was not mine
that filled me with a private heat
not like the one building in the space between us

I can't explain why it affected me so much
have I not really seen the people I've flirted with?
what was I looking for, what did I even notice or respond to
when I've been caught up in other people?
What do these little nuances mean to me, this deeper expression
of his selfness underneath his comically curled mustache
the true things beyond the performance
and why do they suddenly touch me so deeply?

What has changed in me, to give me access to this new lens?

What do I do with it?

a wave that could straddle a galaxy

stream of consciousness response to 'untitled work for voice' at danspace projects 2/24/18




pace rhythm cadence implies something sacred
sheets of metal shaken to make thunder,
leaving a newborn thing in the middle of the floor, alone

uncomfortable swallow of old man next to me as the singular performer in front of us rippled and unfolded slowly

watching someone caress the floor with such reverence makes me want to do the same
voice as resonant as her body is subtle
I notice the desire for purpose, meaning, intentions, to be illuminated
maybe because I am watching bodies make shapes and images and words, rather than purely instrumental music
maybe that is what I am witnessing exactly, how the body is an instrument

sounds eventually string together to form words
to be like a chant, an incantation, a skipping record
a confusion between spiritual and mundane/broken
like a flash of potential light words layer together into recognizable fragments
I can feel more specific feelings about
playing with reach/texture/shape of sounds-that-become-words

how are the performers supported/nourished by each other's movements, focus, sounds?
words and movements seem unrelated - what is made available
by breaking them free from each other?
words become a series of absurd sounds, same as the movements they make with their bodies
performed with ritual focus, solemn

what is the relationship between force and meaning?
are the sounds and movements trapped by something? struggling to get out of their bodies?
Pathological?
Stripped of their original meaning?
Given new ones?
How are their movements helping generate the sounds they make?
what happens when you explore that relationship?

Why is synchronized movement so moving, impactful?
slow motion dagger dance
like samurai, a dance of paranoia, precision, protection, threatening

A dancer flails and shakes like she is filled with rage, pain
while someone tries to dress her patiently

as she struggles to communicate, she lets it wrack her body violently
equal parts traumatic and cathartic it feels to me
both powerful and exhausting to feel so much
her movements shape the song fragment she sings
sharp intakes of breath, her feet on the floor like a drum
punctuating the spaces between wordsounds

she didn't remove her engagement ring for this performance
its sparkle distracts me in her sudden stillness
winking

they are silhouetted suddenly
every intimate detail of the outskirts of the performer's bodies
nuances of their individual forms highlighted

moving in and out of tandem shapes and gestures is oddly breathtaking
why does it move me so much
especially when chaos seamlessly becomes a rhythm
the moment when formlessness becomes organized into form
alchemized
the individuality of their bodies is sharply highlighted
but through the mirror of similar movements now

the old man next to me watches offstage
the female performer he swallowed hard at in the beginning

What is it about something with the patina of pathology
touches a weird emotional spot in me for some reason
I notice discomfort sometimes, space for the expression to take the path it takes at other points
is that called patience?
benevolence?
maybe it reminds me of a man I love dearly with a stutter that strangles his whole body
almost constantly

humming in short bursts like a clock
metronomic
the rhythm changes, becomes subtly erratic
it feels like she is bending time
time emanates from her body
is subject to her whims
and when she eventually runs out of breath

Shapes from earlier reappear
foreshadowing vs laying a foundation - are they different?
drawing a line through time like a bread crumb trail in our memory
to make something familiar that wasn't before

Are the sentences from old movies?
is there some recently forgotten memory being excavated?
layers of familiar, pulled a part
stacked up again in a different way

unafraid to make ugly or uncomfortable sounds
exploring the shapes of syllables that form words with meanings attached
that live outside, beyond the performers as they chew and choke and push them out
with their entire bodies

this one sounds like play
like exploring the sound and volume and physical shapes
of this particular performer's potential to fill the room
it feels liberating
it feels like joy

I wish someone would look at me the way she looked at the bottom of her foot
piercing
fleeting
its already the distant past by now but I will remember it for a long time

wordsounds ring through the church like a choir
childish chaps swirl around a performer's legs like the religious dress of a whirling dervish
sound of footsteps like a drumbeat slowly recedes in the sudden symbolic darkness
that lives at the end

bits of light from outside catching the stained glass windows all around us
the building's final statement

A sirocco of foam

Stream of consciousness response during Repons, a French orchestral piece @Park Avenue Armory 10/6/17


Watching the lighting designer construct volumes, cages, waterfalls, geometries with light fixtures and haze, my mind is blown that anyone could conceive of containing light this way.

The Audio Engineer moving his hands across the sound board as he listens, I am struck by how clearly he trusts his ability to hear subtleties, to know as sound lands in his body what his hands must do to tune the white noise output. There is no part of me that I trust so much. This is not any different than any other audio engineer, but I am just now able to see the relationship between what needs to be done and its extreme reliance on a sensory function.

The Orchestra breathes together, riding the same roller coaster of feeling and internalized metronome, creating a baseline tension so other sounds can ripple in and out. It is a story. Building and falling, it has an arc, instrumental music may be a more pure, elemental version of a story even. I think as I listen how dance may be an attempt to tell the story of the music through the responses in their bodies, but that seems too simple for the richness of the interactions between instruments taking place.

it feels like a lot of magic and waiting, like waking up and individual moments layered together, with a few places where all of the soloists come to a similar melodic conclusion. Its almost impossible not to attach images in my head to the music - does that distract or enhance my relationship to it?

How do the soloist's voices help tell the story? what are they saying?

This is more dynamic than watching a movie, since we can experience multiple individual stories/reactions unfolding around us all at the same time - true complexity is available here. And suddenly the places where they are tied together melodically become striking, pronounced.

What happens if I let my whole body be available to perceive this experience?
What if I give myself over to the moment, the way I let movies embrace my awareness?
Watching musicians handling their instruments to make the sound caressing my body, at what point is it like there is no air between us, and they are caressing me directly?
Do I hold on to the sounds? Do they accumulate in my body like food or semen?
Do they get metabolized?
Do I bond with or defend against them?
If sound is touch at a distance, how am I allowing myself to be handled?

How is hearing just the beginning of listening? Am I even in the labyrinth, or just lost at the entrance? Maybe, like heisenberg's principle, making a choice about where I am negates the ability to be both places at once.

Fabric of light, fabric of sound waves stitched together. Noticing how it touches me distracts from my ability to discern or make up a story. The light framing the space shifts our sense of where the sounds emanate from and how those sounds respond to the cavernous space around us.

How rare is it that our audiences possess the intimate knowledge of what we are shaping to be able to tell our stories in whatever medium. How does that potentially limit our ability to communicate/be heard/seen/witnessed/understood/validated?

Rhythm of bodies and bows drawn across violins, in tandem, together.

Movies can imply complexity. But they can't give me what I am currently experiencing. Like waves,  currents, creatures moving underwater and rain on the surface, everything shifting and swirling and deeply related - opening myself up to my potential capacity to receive in all directions is to perceive all of the movements of the ocean at once with perfect clarity. To feel its various pulls and pushes as it wraps around and through me, I am a bit of flotsam, feeling a million tiny notes/touches without feeling any particular emotions. Or motivations, rather. No frames telling me what to feel or notice.

A sculpture of sounds
Light woven like actual threads
full of circumstances, interactions

if they were composing a drawing, it sounds like thick and thin lines, like a base wash and erratic scribbles, faint touches, soloists like highlights, a singular shocking color, or a perfect patch of light adding dimension, a subtle difference in shadow shapes that rise up to create depth in a form.

How do symbols on a page get translated into motions by the musician's bodies and manifest as sound and rhythm? How many languages do we all translate constantly, in every single subtle moment? How intimate a relationship they must have with their instruments. What if I knew myself intimately enough to trust my tools to express whatever story I am trying to tell?

Like when I was working with machines in a steel shop - at what point does the artist/musician become servants to the medium? Does a violinist wield her violin, or does the violin use the violinist's skill to be heard?

Your horse teaches you to drink the ghost of its water

From the booth I sat in at the Columbus Circle Holiday Market, I watched the eddies and flows of the bodies moving past. Eyes flicked and scanned, individuals glossed over the variety of potential gifts with something or someone in mind. Often the gaze stopped on the wares displayed in my particular booth, a weird double vision, where it was clear that they were looking at objects for sale, but saw someone very specific while taking that object in. This time I was selling someone else's handcrafted items, instead of my own, and in the lack of fear about my own value as an artist, I was able to participate in the gift buying business in a completely different way. All of the emotional space I might have held for things I gave birth to was instead available to hold the customers needs and desire as they considered their loved one's needs and desires. It was no less intimate than having my own things handled, but I was invited into their sense of love or care for an individual, I was a way to express that in the future ritual of gift giving. I felt like a Sphinx, like my job was to ask the kinds of questions that gave me clues to this invisible person, to guide me as I offered different items to my audience. Oracular in my booth, the days I worked ended up being big money days for my friend who had hired me, as I took in mirrored gestures and matching laugh lines suggesting the similarity of structure gifted genetically, as I witnessed mothers and daughters confer, the unsure and the confident gift givers, as I silently showed children the inner structures of the hand built Book Clocks, while their parents perused the selection surrounding me.

In the booths around me were mostly mass produced home goods and jewelry, much farther along in their transition from handmade art-thing to full fledged capitalist venture. My friend's process by necessity gets more streamlined, when faced with the kind of volume that the market's proximity to Times Square had to offer, but his particular product still lived in the space of being novel and somehow familiar, being crafted from books that so many grandmas paused to consider because they recognized titles from their youth. I've come across Craigslist ads during slow season that are explicitly asking for skilled fabricators to work in shops that create the things that famous artists are known for. People like Jeff Koons send their specs in and teams of highly skilled, underpaid craftsmen build the things that sell for so much money, with that man's name on it, that 'artist'. There are entire towns in Italy filled with mold makers and bronze masters that spend their whole lives reproducing other people's work, but it is Rodin's name that is spoken in hushed tones in the antique show booth I just finished constructing, for a tiny copy of a copy of a copy that will sell for $45,000.

What is the difference between being an artist and a slave? Between being a Subject and an Object? What does Ownership really mean? When you buy a reproduction, or something fabricated by individuals being paid to produce someone else's ideas, what now belongs to you? The sweat and sensitivities of those unknown hands? The shape of an experience born out of a context of which you may know nothing? A feeling you had when you first looked at that thing? Part of me wonders if antique shows aren't a product of age trying to prove it still has value.

I watched an ancient man spew unkind words and an attitude of such superiority towards me as I sat in a scissor lift waiting for my crew to get back from their union specified break. 'You are going to move this 'contraption'.' he informed me. I explained that we needed to finish building the wall it was parked under, to which he replied 'Not right now, you are not.' He was an appraiser of antiques, there were about 50 of them let in before the build was complete. I finally stopped working for Fashion Week events, the divide between 'worker' and the Production team is so clearly delineated by those who touch things and those who don't, and Designers won't even respond to you if they have seen you lay hands on something. The last Alexander Wang gig that I worked I received excited comments from someone I went to grade school with, who still lives in my home town. I didn't mean to dump my darkness on her romantic associations of the fashion world, but this divide between people with ideas and money, and those who actually have the skills to craft it but are paid to make someone else's art are held in the kind of regard we might associate servants and slaves with. I have found this attitude to be pervasive. And no one seems to know that we treat the builders of our physical and cultural reality this way. There is only so much of ourselves that we can give away in obscurity before we are merely selling the effort of our bodies for money, and they too become simply objects to be filled with other people's desires, and we in turn become numb to our own cravings and creative impulses.

When I had the pleasure of working on a massive project with Marina Abramovich, we all were participants in the creation of what was essentially a piece of art. When I asked her how she felt about the way the director had translated her life, she responded with 'I don't know, I give him my story and he make slapstick.' Its impossible to describe the herculean effort of constructing the space for this performance, and I worked on almost every crew that installed and then ran the show, I was backstage surrounded by performance artists from all over the world who have devoted their lives and physical bodies to becoming an object of expression to be consumed by an audience. And when I rode the train home every night, I was surrounded by that audience, most of them the older wealthy patrons of the Armory. All I heard was one vicious dismissal after another. They didn't care how hard any of us worked to give that experience to them.

In a circle of conversation the other day, there arose a distinction between heart and intellect that someone was seeing as important, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. I tried to explain how my crews and I communicate in and around a spatial plane that involves a bodily understanding that supersedes that distinction, and she quickly blew me off  'that's an object. I'm talking about an idea.' she said, flipping her hand vaguely in my direction without making eye contact. I thought about one of my best friends, from the first shop I worked in. He had almost a superstitious reaction to drawings, and had really intense fears of feeling stupid, something that was beat into him in the public education system. He wouldn't even come near the drawings at first, it took me months to make him feel comfortable enough to be confused or unsure in my presence to finally talk him through the symbols we use to indicate shapes in space and relate that to the time of building a thing and the organization of what comes first and how abstract numbers relate to physical markings in the room. And in the midst of this conversation with these educated women, I suddenly felt, for the first time like I shouldn't be there. There was no space for my reality in her dismissive gesture, in the words she was trying to find to describe some specific internal feeling about having an Idea. Like objects aren't inherently a manifestation of ideas, like material and immaterial aren't deeply intertwined expressions of each other. Like these men aren't having ideas while they discuss how to build something.

Objects are often things that we fill, with memories, with symbolic weight, with fear or desire, but not as much with their own sense of history, of being born, of being filled with something before or outside of our interactions with it. I wonder how a baby experiences an object, as they grapple with organizing and coordinating their own seemingly disparate parts. Do they feel that object possessing its own selfness the way they themselves do? Is having that little bit of dominion in an alien landscape that they are initially helpless in an important piece in distinguishing themselves from other things? Is it something to wrap the sense of experiencing around, a container of sorts for their growing awareness? How does the way we handle objects when engaging with a baby help define the way in which they will handle objects or other people later?

I wonder if I lost my mother in a sense, when she met my stepfather. I was 3 and suddenly she was pregnant and in love, when they eventually married she asked him to dress in the same white tux with a red rose in the pocket, like her favorite potential option from the board game Mystery Date. I'm sure in some fractured vacuum in myself, there was a desire for some animal affection that I saw in the face and the soft triangular body of a stuffed bear I found at a garage sale with my Grandmother. Digging through other people's things was a regular weekend event, whether it was driving around looking for handwritten poster board signs with arrows, or riding from one thrift store to another to another. My Grandmother was born in the middle of the great depression, and grew up during a war time era, a rationed society, so store bought gifts and school clothes were a once or twice a year kind of event for us when I was growing up. I don't know anything about that bear's previous name or life, but I cried so many tears into Brownie's fake fur over the years. When I was 11, I knew it was time, that I was too old for stuffed animals and tucked him away in a box in my closet. In the 7th grade our Labrador puppy dug him out and chewed off his nose, so I moved him to a high shelf in the closet. When I came home from college every once in awhile, I would apologize, not with words, but the feelings in my body when I saw his dark eyes up there in a forgotten cardboard box.

Once when I was a tarot reader for an event, I asked that payment be some form of exchange, whatever the receiver of the reading chose to give in return for my energetic focus on their question. People laughed and cried, there were intense pauses, and furtive glances towards partners who were out of earshot, and I was an anonymous vessel, to be filled with their burning questions about a looming decision, about something they were second guessing, things they didn't even want to admit they hoped for, things they admitted to me but wouldn't even admit to their spouse. I took it all, wrapping them in my steady presence, listening without judgement, paying attention to what rose to the surface in them during our session. Things that went into my cup included a lock of hair, a poem written in lipstick on a piece of trash, two small silver rings that the girl told me later had been made with someone who had died, the person who ended up being a major part of her reading.

Out of respect, I wore those rings on my pinky finger, every day for an entire year. I still have them. It seems strange to me now, that I would treat someone else's memory filled objects with such reverence, when I have vehemently refused to keep pieces of my own history.




"Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns."

the thickness and thingyness of knowledge

linoleum block prints that I carved by hand

stencils cut from cardstock

posters designed for 2 very different choreographers

stock exchange building I designed to look like it came from

a child's inner landscape (for a narrative short film)

I've seen her glance at a particular place a number of times, a tucked in area underneath my ribs that I've always had. It showed up in the drawings by students when I was a figure model, I ignore it in the mirror. In a movement class, allowing myself to consider what it means to grow wide but stay fluid at the same time, she asked if she could touch me along the front of my ribcage, just above my belly. Her hand slid over that place where I fold in, held tight by my own sinew, and she asked me to soften underneath her fingers as I initiated a roll from my side onto my back. For just a moment I could feel my spine free, twisting on its own in the jelly of my being. I can't stop thinking about that sensation. That my body might stay together even if I didn't constantly try to keep it from falling apart. That there may lie underneath my skin an entire bodily experience that I have never had access to because of holding myself back. Up. In.

There was a baby the other day, in one of those classes, born sooner than expected and so small, and I imagine all of his systems were struggling to catch up to the amount of stimulation the world provides. When he got overwhelmed, this tiny human cried and cried, and I suspect every adult in that room felt a deep, primal response to the heart-wrenching sound of this little being declaring his existence with all the power of his developing lungs. So we listened while his mother rocked him, as we continued our individual actions. Maybe he cried out for the safety of the womb, we can't ever really know, but I felt his cries all the way down in my bones. Maybe there is a particular note being sung, that most animals can still recognize - a language we have forgotten - but his voice called it out of us, I could see it in the other women's faces. I tried to stifle the flashbacks of being trapped in the bathroom by my stepfather when I cried. His constant denial of my truth while I was growing up would burst out of me helplessly. Uncontrollably painful sobs led to hitched, repetitive breathing like hiccups trapped in a pathological loop, they would last forever. His hand holding the doorknob from the other side until I could breath normally, had control over myself. My mother's vicious words any time I tried to communicate to her when I was in distress. That I existed. That I had feelings and that they were being crushed. That I was being crushed.

I had to step outside to regain control over my face.

Since I was assisting, providing support to Facilitators and Caregivers with infants, this was not the place for me to be swimming in my own pain. But as I considered where my response was coming from, I realized for the first time that maybe it wasn't just Art School priorities that got in the way of me learning how to develop my self expression. Maybe I had already learned everyone else's needs and opinions were more valuable than my own. Maybe it isn't the men who have talked their way into my bedroom who robbed me of the ability to defend myself, perhaps it was always me, robbing myself of my voice. I am the one suppressing my ability to communicate how I feel. Since I never had a safe place to express it, I have no idea what could possibly come out of me - I am terrified that telling people how I feel means I will lose them or myself. Listening to the cries from those tiny lungs, I realized how long I've been moving through the world like I had that horrible man breathing in my face, like my mom's defensive, cutting words were true. That I brought them with me into my sexual encounters and my friendships. Their physical presence has long since evaporated from my life, but I've been reacting as though they have always been there. How have I not known I was free?

Later that evening I was one of 30 dancers in a performance art piece. The piece had no cues, just a sequence of scenarios that were equal parts choreography and improvisation. As we stormed and stomped through the tiny gallery space, we welcomed in 3 guests/audience members and randomly ignored them and focused on them as we also responded to each other. It took a specific kind of openness, where you could almost feel the energy of the room shift as bodies morphed into a new shape, a different pattern of movements. One of the transitions went from a fast, low to the ground stomping shuffle to locking arms and legs with any body close enough to grasp, anchoring to them and freezing. The 3 audience members watched a roiling sea of bodies suddenly coalesce around them into a sculpture, a coral reef, a gently breathing aquifer that air and space moved through, that they were held inside of.

Inside of the anchor, the kinetic landscape of our connected bodies, it is evident when the mass begins to shift because there is a subtle releasing of weight - the force moving through our points of contact with each other pours back into our feet - and slowly, we all find ourselves standing face to face with another body that becomes our Mirror. There is such a strange deep resonance in the mirroring, a silent exchange through our eye contact and a physical responsiveness that passes the role of leader and follower between us, that gives my limbs permission to be drawn into the rhythms and gestural nuances of another being with a consciousness that lives underneath the patterns I typically move within. We did 15 repeat performances in 3 hours, and almost every time I moved from Anchor into Mirror I was looking into a completely different face, open and hyper aware of a different heartbeat. Once I looked into the tremulous, watery blue eyes of a much older woman and felt something powerful soften inside of me as I let her lead my body in space. Another time my focus was tuned to a man who looked like he might have walked out of a Dostoyevsky novel, but with laughing eyes that I was helpless against. He slowly covered his face with his hands to give me the space to regain my composure as my hands followed, and we took a deep inhale together before the next wave of synchronized movement rippled through the collective. A few times, audience members folded themselves in with the performers, pulled in by a deep desire to be a part of us, and I ended up Anchored with one of them during the course of the evening. She became the partner I mirrored, my body responsive to this curious outsider, extending the fearless support and trust of the other performers by including her in the co-creation of this experience.

I started to understand how the body of performers was tapping into an ancient, primal awareness, and the presence of the audience members allowed them to feel the edge of that collective fabric, sometimes enfolding, other times shutting them out completely, like a wave pulling back from shore after it had reached out and engulfed you. What I discovered in that room was this potential that we all still possess - a primordial capacity to be connected to each other.

Maybe we have misunderstood our inheritance.