Finally, after weeks of Reside/Generate residency work, I get to see the creators of the residency do their "thang." I thought i would put the blog to use and share a few thoughts about my experience while in Inhabit.
Getting right down to it, there was something genuinely irrestible about the whole evening. You are greeted, taken inside, given a few perameters, or "boundaries," and then its as if you were thrown down the rabbit hole where cocktail hour meets racing track meets support group meets kindergarten meets celebration meets love! The room had begun to spin, as the lingo performers were not only conversing with us, they were having dance conversations with us. Afterwards, I was like a wee-little fiddlehead fern; I unfurled out of my inner shell, and onto the streets, to see even just walking with night had completely changed. Re-sensitized, both environmentally and internally. The best kind of art does this; changes your perspective, changes your internal state.
At distinct points, I wasn't even sure what the boundaries were (not that it was important anyway, I felt somehow safe with these performers) as far as touching the performers,or having them touch me, or following or refusing to follow their directions.....it was joyful chaos and the structure felt simultaneously held and unravelled. We were all there together losing our safety as witnesses, and gaining momentum as participants, or at least feeling as if we could. Whatever it was that held us back, or propelled us forward, that was something for us to look at in ourselves. Inhabit gave me a place to play with my cowardice, courage, and openness,not merely as an audience member, but also as a human being, how I am inhabiting the world outside the theater. Inhabiting with what intention, avarice or delight, at what is here and who I share it with?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
john/anna's reside/create first/last blogblog
this has been brewing for, oh, about a month now. sorry if i reach 9.7 on the blahblah richter scale!
on artpatch, lingo and chac - thank you thank you thank you exclamation points at a bus passing.
on the space - wood is grain is good is gone is gold and smelly and dank and dear and floor and floor and floor and floor and cringing and crouching and resting and warm and how long it took long and longer to warm then did and was easy and warm, of course, and the room, the light, the leaking breath of yesterday, the churchlike aftershocks of deadless goth parades, the needle core accuracy of opening up the door within, the stupidity of rigidity and sleepless wanting for more time than did we could. truth be told, we were there in the inside (never left) and lost as much as we gained. and more, at least 60 pieces of us are hanging sideways there behind the unopened air for a later child to bear but we take home more than 60 and find balance in the closing up of that downlying time, that most moist regret, that jesusmell of rising up and up and up just by stopping and being there, in that spacious space, a liquid home for this thirsty pair of sneakers.
on rehearsing - great. fabulous. amazing work. fascinating explorations. generous unfolding of interest and development. unbelievable generosity in time. delicious dancing spread out and out and out. and yet, on one level, the question rears it's ugly head - why was it so HARD? not the rehearsing really, but life's constant barrage of boundaries and last minute explosions and supercharged challenges and inner bubbles bursting and... such a cliche really, but anna and i noticed rather quickly that when you/we get/got a lugubriously rich quantity of what you desperately want (space, time, support to do the work you REALLY want to do...) the rest of your world goes into double time to make ALL the issues that you face on a daily basis exponentially more demanding. just making in to rehearse sometimes became a keystone cops routine. why just yesterday, on our final day, we got up extra early so that we could arrive at the space early and have a great last rehearsal, only to get to the car and have our battery/electrical system go on the fritz. like so many times, laughing and crying were not so strange bedfellows. i guess it just drives home that thing of how making "art" puts you smack dab in the path of the wildest, most dangerous and feral creature on the planet - your self/Self/SELF! in dealing with the marauding ferocity of our inner kittens, we came to the conclusion that all of that crap/challenge/difficulty was really just part of the gift of this residency. that we were/are, in fact, just using this time to do the real work so that we can be strong enough to continue on into the rest of our lives with as much generosity and depth of exploration as we had during these four weeks. the art is, as always for us, just an artifact of that process - the "rehearsal" process. so now that it's over, we're ready to begin.
on the work - YAY!!!!!!!!!!! wowza bingbong and yabbadabbadoo. anna and i have remarked so often how amazing it has been to make work that is so true and so honest to ourselves that it doesn't even feel like work/art - something 'other.' we've both made quite a lot of stuff over the years, but this is probably the first time either one of us has felt so utterly at home in the material that is occurring. the chew on it sessions have been a great litmus test of this for us, where we've shown the rawest product of our investigations and still felt clear and interested and engaged, without any of the nagging questions or inner criticisms that so often haunt such occasions. the material that is coming through us feels like a multi-prismatic refraction of how we exist - both daily and on the deepest level. no difference really and, ironically, that has made all the difference. today was a funfest as we found a whole new GOAT to milk. came from anna's playful dancering of warming up while drinking kombucha (of course). i said "set" (a score we decided upon weeks ago but didn't use until TODAY - hah!) and it put us on a course of wacky hoedown dancing with two southern-cracked characters apparently not named jeb and milo. ah, the joy of creation. such a delicious balance to the wanderlust of challenges i babblementioned earlier. we danced a bit of 'GOAT' (also known as "Subgroup 17A") while playing with text, space and rhythm in the last chewonit session today. t'was fun and funky and forgotten and remembered and a great last guffawing gasp to the wacky world of this time at CHAC.
on with/in - the performance element of our residency. three performances over three weeks with a different 'cast' of dancers each week open to audience members. free tea. a clean world. so many cathedral-like audience eyes - invested, sleepy, wondrous, bored, a luminous list of unknown visions within each of them simultaneously unfolding as ACTION in our shared dancing/music-ing bodies. this action - the action of performing the research, of sharing the questions in kinesthetic ACTIVITY instead of words...always such a challenge to this verbal culture. each week offered many amazing images, from (five month old) Kaveh's FIRST solo in week one (replayed in the end by the whole cast), through the silence and stillness accompanying jeff's twilit guitar meanderings at the end of week two, to the gravity defying flight on Scott's shoulders with my eyes closed in week three. layers of presence in action. action as RESEARCH shared with the community without editing. in the midst of 80+ hours of rehearsal by ourselves in such a vast rehearsal space, these performances were like a kind of art/food for anna and me, inspiring us and rejuvenating our daily investigations. a deep and heartfelt THANK YOU to the performers and adventurous audience members who shared the precious warmth of these moments with us.
on the question of improvisational performance - after week 2's with/in performance, the inimitable tim summers asked what i think is an important question (paraphrased here) - if the performance is functioning also as research, why have an audience? great question. i spoke briefly about how anna and i deeply believe in the value of shared process and open artistic communication. and, in our view, how all action (not just performance) is a type of homeostatic research - act, tip, stabilize, repeat. and how we're interested in making/sharing art that reveals thinking/feeling/moving humans functioning at the height of their potential, sharing choice sharing interest, weight, space, confusion, joy, stretching and redefining the boundaries between known and unknown, basting and warming the heart and hearth of our sometimes lonely human journey. and not just the "height" of gross human function - kick high, turnturn, etc. (hallelujah that, but it's only one layer) - but the height of the fullness of human function. we think a lot about all the layers in existence, and we're incredibly interested in showing/explicating/revealing the intrinsic VALUE of every layer...in the work, the art, in the ongoing moment of moving, seeing, listening, touching, performing, teaching, exploring, discovering, making, breaking, and on and on. the current model for mainstream performance tends to show a pretty thin crust on a much meatier bread. in my aesthetic world, (aka - physiological reality) there is a niagara falls of processing happening in every living moment. in this statement "process" functions as a code word for improvisation - something being made right now. from a neural perspective, your reading is the light energy entering your eyes transforming into electro-chemical energy that goes through layers upon layers of reciprocal processing to form, in the end, your conscious experience. TA-DA! however, it is incredibly important to note that just how consciousness occurs is still a MYSTERY to the scientific world. this strikes me as an incredibly juicy juxtaposition - process and mystery. improvisational performance uses that very juice as its fuel, and sharing THAT with an audience is about as interesting a project as i can find. well, that and sewing, but that's another story...
on lingo/inhabit - amazing. such a deep weaving of art and life. conflict and confluence abound - not quite unexpurgated, but brimming with juicy inner presence. and so deeply generous towards ALL the participants - from escorting the audience in, to the sharing of food, drink and conversation, through unbelievable physical to the unveiling of personal stories and investigations, to the yummiest communal nap i've ever taken. i feel just so grateful that such gorgeous it happened in our community. what a gift. thank you to kt, dustin, bianca, aaron, sarah, and all the artists involved for making this happen.
on residency partners mischa, violette, jessica, luke and kt - you have all become such important voices in our lives. thank you. we look forward to more and more.
ok.
that was clearly tooooo much.
and yet we're just getting started.
these words
the residency
love
john/anna
Post a Comment