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Wednesday, February 20, 2019

My Afterlife

Flyer for Late Harvest, February 19, 2019
I guess you could say my first afterlife was being a choreographer, but no longer for my Project Company, and not dancing in the work myself.

My next afterlife was re-inventing myself as a filmmaker.

The current afterlife is apparently making live work again, see flyer at left for a solo made with and for Anka Sedlackova who I met 25 years ago.

Oh, I get it. It's ALL life. 

Will I ever dance in my own work again? Maybe in the real afterlife ...  
Wait, is there an afterlife?   Say good night, Gracie.

 
My many lives have been on my mind for the last 6 months or so during which I've alternated between traveling to make work in Slippery Rock University, Rhode Island College and Bratislava, and downtime at home digitizing archives of live performances from the past decades.

I occasionally feel either morbid or egotistical to be digitizing these old dances - for whom, Virginia? But spending time preserving these ancient works for the stage is balanced by creating new works for the screen. So I feel alive and kicking as I simultaneously feel my own history.

And what do I see, from this perspective? 

1. These recordings of all those shows -

Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors [1987-1992]
Central Park Summerstage [1988-2014]; 
Jacob's Pillow [1983-2014] 
Dancing in the Streets [1987-2005] -

prove what the Project Co. was known for at the time: 
a commitment to presenting work outdoors and for free. And the Inside/Out or lec-dem tapes make it clear how much I enjoy a dialog with the audience. 
Marta: This blog is proof of that too, right? 
You: ____________

2. I worked with wonderful people and usually had a grand time. Some of the wonderful people - like Anka - have continued to be in my life and work. Others, like the students at RIC or SRU, appear and disappear ... and re-appear again, as in the case of Angelica Vessella who was in a Renzi project as a RIC student in 1995, and later acted as producer of a RIC film project in 2011, 2014 ... and just a few weeks ago.

Below is the trailer for Strategic Retreat, which we shot about a year ago, and which premieres at the end of this month at 
Sehr Festival in Tehran, Iran. A tiny underground festival in a country where dancing is forbidden: now there's a dialog.

More traveling in March and then some quiet. So do let me know if you need something choreographed - or shot-and-edited. It's what I do ... have done ... don't know how to not do ... 

And so Red Dirt Dances will have its non-Brazilian premiere at Dance with Camera in Poznan, Poland followed by a screening of Her Magnum Opus in Warsaw. I'm apparently very big in Poland.

I've also posted a new Archive in the From the Vaults page of this blogspot. It's an excerpt from Not About Paris Hilton, which was choreographed at about the time this digital blog replaced my famous Newsletters.

Well, famous if you've been paying close attention to my career. Which as I just told you, I have been quite a bit lately. Which is as it should be, since I'm me.

NOW say good night, Gracie.


2 comments:

Knourjua said...
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Alfreed Siang said...
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