http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/12/02/367766230/a-brief-history-of-racial-protest-in-sports

I had a baby.

Blogging has made way for wondrous moments of non-mediated experiences with the most beautiful creature I have ever seen.

We are in the just-about-to-turn-into-Fall-time in Wisconsin.

I am enveloped by my home state and so unbelievably glad I moved back here.

a trusted friend and visionary of an artistic advisor told me that artistry is an affliction. something you do despite all odds. not so much a compulsion but more of something you carry with you, almost a burden. in moments of lightness in my process i don’t feel this burden. i feel liberated, excited, capable. but most of the time it is a weight. a relationship you can’t let go of because it is you. you are inside the desire to make something.

at the age of 33, i understand this will not cease. i will more than likely continue to do this. but the moments of asking myself why i do/will venture forward are the burden. the possibility is always there, like the basement of a house you could fall into and not leave. the moments of frustration leading me to the voice that says why don’t you just stop?

sometimes it is a freeing idea — there are no resources so i can do whatever i want. i can make anything. there is no structure i need to adhere to.

but the small hurdles within this marathon sometimes feel like crossing a mountain. a schedule change. a space conflict. a pissy collaborator. an unreliable collaborator. a busted speaker i just carried up 2 flights of stairs.

but the ideas must be good. that’s the motivator. that is also the affliction. the ideas. the new. the making sense somehow through my body as an expressive tool. the something to say. despite the often times overwhelming urge to fold myself inside the security of silence. here we are. me and my affliction. years later and carrying it forward.

Donna Haraway

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.”

http://madehereproject.org/gender/women-in-the-arts/

I moved to New York City in June of 2002, less than a year after 9/11. The city was suspended in sadness underneath two invisible shadows. A resilient, loud, dirty and beautiful urban recovery zone. When I would ride the local N/R train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, the train would fall silent as the conductor slowed down to pass the closed Cortland Street stop. I thought about my childhood friend from Wisconsin who was headed uptown at the Wall Street stop in the moments right after the first plane hit. He explained how confused he was about the huge group of people who rushed onto the train, fleeing downtown onto what must have been the last train to make that stop.

Fall makes me miss New York. And the season always starts in such a reflective time as the names of the victims of that tragic day are read aloud during the televised memorial. New York is such a goliath. A place that can not be conquered. Can not be overcome by the extraordinary or by familiarity — it is always changing and there is always a new corner, a new store, a new exhibit you have not seen no matter how long you have lived there, it seems. I always felt simultaneously swept up within the flow of pedestrians while strangely an outsider to the city’s inner-workings. People would often ask me if I loved living in New York. I could never answer the question, I couldn’t look objectively at myself in relationship to the behemoth that was that city. It was work. I was learning. I often wondered what would have happened had I moved to New York in June of 2001.

Becoming a young artist there at the time always felt like I was chasing something that no longer existed or that was way beyond my reach. Generations older than I talked about walking out of their apartments in one of the villages to see their friends show. We were on the subway for an hour to see our each other’s performances. But we did. And we were caught without knowing it.

Caught between eras. Well after the Judsons, the NEA wars, and just before youtube. In a city many of the elders called homogenized but before the Nets stadium went up on Flatbush. Perhaps it was just that, after the fall but before the next. I still had a landline.

I babysat for an incredible family during that time. She was a heartbreakingly talented painter and her husband was an uber eccentric film maker. Their child was a wondrous little kid, a total genius and is now, so I’ve seen online, a voice of the young generation of LGBT as a transgender male. They were so kind to me. They taught me so much about art and New York, she told me to be an actress instead of a dancer. I took a class. I had no idea at the time what a bad ass apartment they had. I loved that family.

Despite their  creative cores their kid wanted to take Hockey lessons (and, I should add,  watch Some Like It Hot and Annie Get Your Gun every afternoon). So we would gear up and head to Chelsea Piers. Often times I was with the whole family for the Hockey outings. I was not the only babysitter to be tagging along with both parents.

One of the other babysitter + parent teams was Cyndi Lauper and Co. My midwesternly earnest self of course did not even notice it was her until it was pointed out to me. Every Tuesday afternoon I sat on the bleachers with Cyndi, her babysitter, and my employers watching our two charges in the crew of 7 year olds on ice.

To me, no one is more New York than Cyndi Lauper. When I hear her music or her Queens accent I think of those afternoons in that cold indoor rink as I babysat — wondering if I was  going to survive let alone actually make anything as an artist. Waiting for an opportunity; the afternoons between taking a dance class, an acting class, not taking class because I was hungover, going to a rehearsal and not getting paid, going to the audition, blowing off the audition. The months and years as I struggled to know who I was as an artist in the in-between time, in an in-between era where we didn’t belong to the past but the future was just on the precipice of the new.  She is the *old* New York of Studio 54 and seedy letter Avenues, and the *new* mega Broadway productions and Williamsburg Condos. She is timeless. The real deal. The artist who remakes herself and responds to the world around her. She is not overcome by the goliath in its rise or fall. She is simply alongside, within and becoming.  

Kate Chopin with her children, 1877

“IF YOU AREN’T WORKING, SHOULDN’T YOU BE THE ONE TAKING CARE OF THE BABY?”

Picasso Baby

http://performa-arts.org/news/item/the-rapper-is-present

BOMBSITE

THE ARTIST’S VOICE SINCE 1981

Trisha Brown

by Yvonne Rainer

BOMB 45/Fall 1993, THEATER

Trisha Brown. Photograph by David Seidner.

Not metered time or measured time but stranger notions like the volume of time, past time, time peeling away. http://bombsite.com/issues/45/articles/1720

Trisha + Yvonne

YR Whose modern dance turns up in your rehearsals? What era?

TB Uh oh. Another kind of police will come now. Lyricism that over-extends into yearning, cliched emotion, preposterous posturing.

YR: It’s always there waiting, right?

TB: It’s in our training . . . we all know it. The torso as an expressive instrument augmented by the arms, legs, and head to spiral and arch into forms that bear emotional connotation.

YR You’re talking about certain conventions of representing emotions that we rebelled against in the early ’60s. Those conventions are hard to keep down.

TB But then the other side of this is that during Newark, I realized that the combination of two mechanically derived motions conducted at the same time—folding the arms up and rounding and dropping the head forward—if the two collide, looks like a person wailing. That fascinated me, and from then on I’ve been looking for that edge between mechanically derived motion or action and emotional affect.

YR What do you mean by “mechanically derived?”

TB When I give myself an instruction, when you’re standing there and you’re trying to figure out what to do and you give yourself an instruction . . . One arm goes up, buckle your left knee and take the fall out, see what happens, that kind of thing. Well, that’s what I mean by a mechanical instruction. And then it means something, like you’re saluting the American flag.

YR Yeah, right. You have to watch out for that one.

TB But then there’s an edge to it where it’s really interesting—to trigger a recognizable gesture and then mediate it immediately with something else.

YR Yes, well that’s what’s so fascinating, the way you use gestures and rub them out, erase them, or ride over them. A dance gesture so easily invokes both the quotidian and the symbolic.

TB Everyone knows them. You look at them and read them all day long.

YR The ones I like . . . Sometimes a foot will flex and a hand, just a hand will move. I mean these extremities that suddenly come into unison on the body. You have a couple of those inMG. Probably a lot of them.

TB There are layers of intensity in the actions cast throughout the body, so we tend to look at the larger stroke of things, but depending on that dialogue between me and my viewer’s eye, it’s a matter of where do I make them look next.

YR But it means that the rest of the body has to be so still for those small details, for the extremes to register, and that’s where the training comes in. You have to be that still on one leg in order to make these ordinary gestures visible.

TB You mentioned that I obscure, erase, ride over gestures and this is true. I retain a modicum of privacy while on full view in performance by purposely complicating an uncanny moment, feeling certain the audience can’t see it all.

YR But this brings to mind another characteristic of your dancing. It’s like starting out with a body that doesn’t know itself, and the agency of movement has to be visible. You take this to a point where one limb will actually initiate action on another limb and set up a series of events, and that happens between people as well—someone will hook someone’s leg in passing and that will precipitate a whole set of moves. And so there is often a visibility of cause and effect, and a wonderful, zany logic in these seemingly accidental, casual encounters.

TB Motivation to move is a big issue for me. What catalyzes an action. Mainly because so much of what I do comes from a physical source, so I’m always up against that question.

YR Well, all dance comes from a physical source.

TB Some choreographers take inspiration from music—both structure and temperament . . . and other sources. My sources are generally ideas and movement. Different each time out. I think the subject of abstraction generating multiple non-specific meanings is where I’m working right now.

YR What do you think of these classical references that come up in your work? It started for me in Set and Reset, the Egyptian motifs, the flattened out, twisting of the torso against hips. This gets more mythified in Foray Forêt with your entrance in the long dress. I know you never thought of that religious connotation, but how do you feel about that? I’m sure I’m not the first person to have made that observation.

TB Someone commented on the classical, formal arrangement of dancers placed in the wings like statuary. I’m not altogether comfortable with the aspect of the priestess entering, but I accept it. I accept it on the grounds that I had pretty much stopped dancing just before that and the making of that solo was my return to dancing.

YR I wasn’t aware that you had stopped.

TB I was grinding to a halt. I think I was still in pieces. Those were the years that my mother was dying, and I really was moving less and less as she moved less and less. After she died, the summer that she died, I realized that it wasn’t me that was dying, and that I perhaps could still dance and I embarked on that solo.

YR So it is like a wraith coming back.

TB It is. But also, there are a complex set of factors that determine the outcome of a new dance, a kind of negotiation between reality and imagination.