Miscellaneous

Below is a slideshow of the solo I made with the ever-delightful Mica Bernas for a show last month at Dixon Place called Performance Mix. The music is NOT what played while Mica danced, but it suits the goofy spirit of her character as captured in the photographs by Matt Murphy. It turned out to be a throwaway piece - but this is how I'd like to remember it.

Last year for Dixon Place, I made the live duet NOBODY'S DARLING with Tina Vasquez and Amos Wolff, followed by a shorter video version which has been touring all around dance film festivals. In addition to the previous fests I crowed about last year, since 2011 it's been shown at Texas Women's University in Denton Texas as part of Breaking Windows, and in Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of dance-dance: a gallery of video.

Most recently, DARLING was selected for screening at the prestigious American Dance Festival International Screendance Festival, June 24-26 in Durham North Carolina. So actually it IS somebody's darling.

Submitting (the verb itself suggests some vulnerable posture below a dominant Other) to film festivals is time-consuming and a game in itself. After a recent flurry of playing that game, I'm looking forward to actually making work. On tap are two projects: a live, site-specifc dance as part of Open for Dancing, hosted by Island Moving Company in Newport Rhode Island in September. And another project that may need a bit more than the summer to gestate - something inspired by historic photos of the Group Camps in Harriman Park.

Meanwhile, there's some apple tree footage (see Mica's photo in the previous post). It might be another "throwaway" but that's part of how I keep busy: learning, failing, submitting, growing.

So it's as a lifelong learner that I join the jury committee to adjudicate the student film submissions at the Dance for Camera Festival at the University of Utah. I'm still hunting for a lively workshop to join this summer. It was in such a workshop, under the direction of teachers like Ellen Bromberg and David Hinton, that favorites like TEXAS PLATES and 3 SPEED were made.

"Throwaway" or "favorite"? Sometimes one turns into the other!