Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Dance workshop for Relay - being as one in the future
I have, in the past, regretted my lack of foresight. The truth is that sometimes a little consideration about what the future might bring can save us a great deal of trouble - but how can we know the future.
Probably we never can, in any absolute sense - but we do sometimes make very good guesses. And if we know ourselves, and each other, we can guess together, and perhaps stumble into some undiscovered moment of surprising unison - each of us from our own unique position.
Or maybe what's more interesting isn't that mythical moment of harmony but the questioning and struggle en route to an unattainable goal.
Not sure if I'm talking about movement anymore, but that's where I started with this.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
3 days of art-making in Montreal
it's fun, it's unnatural, it's beautiful, it's the future.
Thursday, October 08, 2009
blowing kisses
A month ago Bea and I attended a country wedding in Prince Edward County, on the edge of a lake in late summer. It was a single blissful day of celebration with friends in an otherwise relentless month of competing demands. I look at that picture and it feels like I took it 6 months ago.
We've just had a couple of slower days, but not by design: as soon as Bea finished her last project (playing a Chilean revolutionary in exile circa 1974 in "Refugee Hotel") - and a couple of things wrapped up for me (2 nuit blanche gigs) - we both got sick. I guess this bug is going around, perhaps you've had it yourself? Feels like a stomach flu, chills, slow digestion, bloated belly, etc... It's forcing us to get lots of sleep at least. It's my belief that we are both, in fact, errant children in need of parenting and becoming ill is the only form of discipline we respond to.
So hooray for time off, with or without bloating.
Now Bea is preparing to travel to Colombia to hold a workshop for former Child Soldiers, and I remain here working on a couple of dance projects-in-the-making and drawing preliminary sketches for theatre stuff down the road.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
when you can't stand the view, look up
I took this picture of the sky over St.Clair west - if you stand where I stood in that moment, and look anywhere else, all you see is construction. Who isn't sick of construction around here. This street has been in pieces for over two years, so it feels like we're all camping out in the neighbourhood, waiting for mom and dad to bring us home to a real city where traffic actually moves and stores are full of viable businesses.
St.Clair west Refugee camp.
We left town for a day over the long weekend to attend a country wedding - it was our first escape from the city in months. It was intoxicating. And on our return, Bea gets sick. This is bad timing, but there is no good timing for us on this point. Perhaps it is its own gift in disguise. Last month I pulled some ligaments in my foot, forcing me to stay home for a few days. It gave me a good excuse to stay off my feet, which was (sadly) glorious. I hope she can take a day to get some rest. She yells at me to slow down, but she's a bull herself when it comes to her own craft.
Monday, July 13, 2009
There are two seasons in Toronto:
winter, and construction.
This week our strip of St.Clair west has been getting new sidewalks. Buses hardly move, dry days are tinted with blowing dust, and when the workers go home the street looks like it's been bombed. huge piles of garbage here and there don't help.
Frankly, passing improvised dumps in the city parks, detouring around construction on every other street, and waiting 30 minutes at improvised busstops INSIDE of subway stations make it feel like the city is falling apart. An ode to a broken metropolis to follow.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
trying to hit the thing we all know at once and together
Lots of things in the air this month, one of the most intriguing being a dance workshop that has been both deeply mysterious and hilariously up front. Which is nice.
Last week the skateboards came out, this week we had a day in the Enwave theatre, where the show will premiere next spring. Through it all the challenge was to remember past work in the body - I'm not going to explain anything right, I'm not a dancer and I don't have a useful "body memory" to get me through anything beyond how to balance up my own front steps when staggering home after a bender - and bring the memory out - and when memory fails to try to find the impulse driving the other dancers and match it.
It turned into - in my limited sense of things - an attempt to reinvent how people connect through movement. I felt that I was watching people try to read each other's minds, or find some intangible sympatico in the midst of group movement. Not following each other, but both reading and reacting in synch - you can't teach this stuff.
And I wish more of us tried it every day or two in all the other things we have to do in our lives. Wouldn't it be great to prove your identity, not with a password or a bunch of stupid numbers, but by demonstrating that you can connect with another human being?
Yeah well. Until that happens. Other stuff:
Our experiment in video and movement, Nohayquiensepa is going up at the SummerWorks Festival this August, and Bea and I are also working on her script of La Communion, a play about girl soldiers in Colombia, and we got through taxes again and our house is a mess with the basement torn up and us in limbo awaiting some bureaucrat to stamp a permit so we can get on with it, and we are looking to get back to Colombia with a couple of different initiatives, and my mom was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.
The other night, at the Harold Awards, Kirsten Johnson said that she and the other founders of the award realized that they took a lot of things for granted. A lot of amazing acheivements, a lot of hardworking, dedicated people. They saw the award as a reminder to appreciate that... which is the thought I'm hanging on to this week.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
A cold day at the Brampton courthouse
If I told you specifically what I was there to see (on my only "day off" in the last month and a half), I would be in violation of a publication ban.
Well I can tell you why my personal life led me there: a new play in the works based on an event that took place 3 years ago involving a number of young men doing something that looked like a legally unfashionable form of rebellion. I wanted to see why they are still in pretrial, these now 11, not so young, brown men.
I got to listen to a polished and powerful man run rhetorical rings around a defense lawyer who was struggling to get an answer to a complicated question. I almost nodded off a few times. I've forgotten how even intense, charged language can be deadly boring - which is one aspect of strong rhetoric (i.e, words with power).
Friday, February 06, 2009
more of the good stuff
(The song is "Beggar's Prayer" by Emiliana Torinni)
And this:
