Rear Window | City Arts Festival Reflections

Here are some notes I wrote in the immediate aftermath of being installed in a storefront window (5' x 15') for seven hours with Jody Keuhner while Adam Sekuler was simultaneously installed in another window making a film.  The idea was for us all to "perform" the creative process, or put in in a fish tank rather.  We had no agenda except to learn about and document our rehearsal process and filmmaking process.  We were fed material from a steady stream of crowd-sourced videos, audio and photos documenting the "mundane, " the every day. 
 
Now the notes:

-Time cut offs force you to make crucial decisions

-Videos and photographs require a lot of distilling to get something meaningful and readable in the body.

-Why work with the mundane?  To create something mundane?  To see the mundane as extraordinary?

-What does collage look like in dance?  Is it possible with one body?

-Is it possible to to be in the process of making something without an agenda?

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IF I HAD TO GIVE TITLES TO THE CONVERSATIONS WE HAD THROUGHOUT THE DAY:

1. “Wasting Time”

2. I need these gadgets, even if they are crutches.

3. What are we looking at?  What are we looking for?

4. NOW IT MEANS SOMETHING – How documentation creates the opportunity to read more into something than it has undocumented.

5. Rigor, Interrupting yourself, breaking the rules, sticking with it

6. WHAT I MAKE | WHAT I WANT
How do I mesh the desire to dance around with the commitment to make thoroughly considered work--to go somewhere with a concept or material in my body that may or not look like “dance,” all the while still really loving and wanting to just fucking dance.   The answer in another question. . . Why does watching “just fucking dance” bore me so? Okay, that is definitely NOT always the case.  I love the masters.  I do love straight up codified modern dance. . . but generally from the 40s-60s.

7. Is it possible to remove the performance of “being watched?”

8. THE MAGIC THAT DISSIPATES QUICKLY

9. This is no time to be a wimp/safe/think too hard/do to much/try to prove something aka
If we had to walk into a theater right now, what would we perform?

10. STICK WITH THE THING


Here is what Jody and I made in our performance of a rehearsal:
If we were ever to perform this part of the performance again, it would have to be in a 5 x 15 foot glass box.


Here is part of Adam's performance of filmmaking: