Vienna ------> Berlin

Summer camp is over.  No more heaving the tired body out of bed to head to an immense dance filled building full of classes and workshops to work and study and think about dance for 10 hours followed by watching performances that allow you to keep studying and thinking about dance.  Video archives, bars and theaters all dedicated to contemporary dance.  Sharing all this with people from all over the world who just want to push, pull and practice dance.  Bye Vienna.  Beautiful, mysterious, idyllic, unnerving and too full of itself.

Berlin is real.  A vibrant and mottled assemblage of people and streets and buildings to navigate in a life still searching for the dance class, the fellow practitioners, the opportunity to work all day (it seems we often only get to do our work for such small parts of the day), etc, etc.

I got sick and this is not the place to be sick unless sausages, beer, pretzels, beer, coffee, cheese, sausage and crazy thriving nightlife somehow miraculously had become the cure for the common cold.  Night 3 and I'm in again.  

We made a little video yesterday.  That was fun.

Things written down during the first day at ImpulsTanz

Without the time or energy for being very eloquent, I thought I would copy some of the barely legible notes from the first day of Jonathan Burrow's Writing Dance Intensive, a mostly theoretical discussion about how we engage with making dance and  followed by exercises about how we experience the "rules" (more specifically, how visible they are and whether that is important) in a performance.

Rules about time he has borrowed -
From Steve Paxton - The body can only concentrate for three hours at a time
From Mortin Felman - Cut of the first 5 minutes of what ever you make - that was the warm up
Someone else (john cage?) - Work one week without judgment, video it, then wait a week, then watch it

Random quote:

Collaboration can be a very bad thing. . . enough time spent with your OWN stupidity is a good.

We also had to write the answers to many questions about our creative process, self and external criticism and our hopes for the future.  We had to share what success would mean for us to the group.  Since I shared it with a bunch of strangers I thought I would share the full version here:

Success to me would look like a sustained dance practice and performance schedule that I continue to be curious and fulfilled by, that (concretely) provides me with opportunities to perform outside of Seattle and the United States; that allows me to work with and around committed artists investigating material that contributes to dialogues about art, the human experience, and the world around us; and that, in the long-term addresses the question of how to listen and respond to aging while remaining a dance artist with respect and compassion for the body. 

TWIN PEAKS FEST

Featuring Mary Margaret Moore and yours truly, our short film Green Formica premiers Friday August 3rd at the Twin Peaks Festival in North Bend.


Inspired by the enigmatic appeal of David Lynch‘s cultishly adored film Fire Walk With Me, this mysterious and dark work is and haunted by subconscious fissures and the duality of light and darkness.

This film is part of a new suite of works called DAVID AND DEBORAH, exploring the influences of
filmmaker David Lynch and choreographer Deborah Hay.

Co-directed and shot by Adam Sekuler.

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