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.
