Fleshdream

Photographer: Peter Bazjek

When I made I am another yourself with Onome and Keisha, the process was insanely fast and with very little dedicated dance/performance space for rehearsals. Somehow we put that together in hallways, apartments, and video files. The process had an intense thought--not from the moving body--incubation that was no less close to that most honest place where the best work originates. There were dinners, walks, and reflective purgings that led to the work. Somehow the three of us hit on images, and words that we HAD TO include. We found our urgent needs together and quickly fashioned a performance out of them. We found an urgency that was just at the hot boiling place where performance can spring from the mind but the deep mind, not the one that sits behind the forehead. The kind of talk we did was the kind that comes from the body, though we didn't generate the piece moving. It happened, and I recognize the feeling now. Though I don't have a map to the region, I'm quite sure that I can use my emotional compass to find the way there again and again. It's a place I'm familiar with, and that I have created works in various relationships with. At the time we made that work, quite recently, I was coming out of an angry stupor in which I had completely disengaged from artistic practice for over a month--a very dark time in which I became estranged from my body. Perhaps I'll detail the experience in a later blog.

FLESHDREAM Now, that I'm in the process of crawling back into myself, charting the way to and from that hot real place is not enough. There's a need to use the psycho/social/spiritual/physical nexus of the living body to be in that place and to be there publicly. My departure from my body in the bulk of the making of IAAY was a necessary step because it forced me to disengage with my habits for observing, perceiving, and presenting what I found in the body.

I feel the need just now to defend the RPW ladies against my previous statement about their lack of pioneering spirit. In my estimation, which is narrow given that I've known them for less than 18 hours, a few of those women are absolutely ready to take the kernals of impetus I give them and process them though their inner systems of reactions/responses/desires to give back stark shining moments of honest communication articulated from the place where language falls short. Others just aren't. There is something not quite open in them which it would be a supremely rewarding experience to get to, but we don't have the luxury of that time. Again with the ego, because my name is on the work, there are certain semi-conscious standards that I feel it must measure up to. What I find myself doing is swinging into the place of a micro-manager who narrows the scope of possibilities in what amounts to crafting their improvisations into something human/real/visceral seeming rather than what is actually growing out of them. What I mean to do is point out the possibilities of where they can go because I don't have time to wait for them to embolden themselves to go there. But I'm realizing that sending them into the shell of a place doesn't deeply inform them of where they can go at all. So I wonder if it would have been best to forgo the idea of a "Margaret Morris" piece altogether, and simply give them the space and time to get someplace real, then frame it where it landed. It's too late to turn back now, but I can and will focus my prep time on the framing, so I can give them the whole landscape of the thing. I'm hoping that this is a way that our last week can allow them to grow into their experience within it without feeling pressed or hurried.

Borderlands

Photographer: Jerry Brown

I have had very few idols in my life. Gloria Anzuldua was one of them. She brought the magic, dangerous place of the borderland, which I have known my entire life, into marvelous articulation in Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza. This place, outside of everyplace, where you can never go home again unchanged is where I live--an educated, post lesbian, Black woman from South Shore (Chicago South side mixed income neighborhood in which people were shot in the alley behind my house on more than one occasion) who is now a contemporary dancemaker equally called by improvisation and choreography. Earlier this evening I meandered into a conversation about performance mode verses ordinary mode. I say meandered because I was busy sweeping the rosy remnants of the evening's last improvisational performance across the floor when the talk started. There were a lot of things said that dichotomized improvisation and set work, and attempted to assign them each with sets of values that don't exist, at least not like blankets. In the course of the conversation it became palpable to me that the place where I feel most at home in making dances/performances (I've started also saying "performances" because there's a set of expectations that often comes along with the word dance that I do not feel obliged to fulfill) is the place where I feel most uncertain.

It's important that I own this now, particularly given the precarious process I'm involved in with the RPW class at the Dance Center. The students have a general desire to know explicitly what is being asked of them. The investigative spirit is foreign to many of them. "Is this what you want?" has become a familiar question, a question I'm encouraging them to ask themselves instead. There is one thing of which I am certain, that I need the space of uncertainly for the experience to grow up and through. A borderland is a hungry, liminal place between societys and with no laws beyond gravity and nature. It's a desparate place where alliances are formed out of physical and spiritual needs, and where you could die if you're not careful. I'm intentionally describing it in this heightened way because that's my interest.

My interest in in what the emotional and physical bodies do once they reach their edges, their own borderlands. It's ironic that Columbia picked me to work with this bunch. How do I get to this place in an authentic way in only six more rehearsals, and have a piece to show for it? It's possible that some people will feel alienated by/in the process, and there isn't the time to take care of them an any emotionally responsible way after rehearsal because another group needs the room, and many of them have other rehearsals to run off to. The best I can do, if I can be honest with myself enough to relinquish my egos massive desire to make a "good" piece, and go there with these young women, is to encourage them to process their experiences alone and together on their time outside of the studio. Now I'm off to plan the journey of tomorrow's rehearsal, much of which I'm sure my intuition will guide me beyond once I'm actually in the room. We have to continue from somewhere.