A Better Container from Adam Sekuler on Vimeo.

Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards | Mainstage June 18th & 19th, 8pm

TITLE: A BETTER CONTAINER
Direction: Shannon Stewart & Adam Sekuler
Movement Creation and Performance: Mary Margaret Moore, Marissa Niederhauser, Shannon Stewart
Guest Performer: Lenore Waldron
Composer/Performer: Sam Mickens
Video: Adam Sekuler
Lighting: Jessica Trundy
Costumes: Jenine Fisher



I'm honored to share a showcase on the mainstage June 18th & 19th with aluminum siding & mattisonthemove (Dance), Haruko Nishimura (Dance), The Blank Department (Music), and to participate in this festival with many amazing artists.

NW New Works Festival 2011 Jun 10-Jun 19

http://ontheboards.org/performances/nw-new-works-festival-2011

$14 • On the Boards 8:00PM • Mainstage & Studio Theater

Call the to get discounts on multiple tickets:
$14 for 1 showcase | $20 for 2 showcases
$24 for 3 showcases | $30 for all 4 showcase

Photos by Adam Sekuler

Teacups, sisters, ellen stewart, banana cream pie, 5 beautiful dances. Photos here.

Adopt a memory, replace a memory, replay a memory.

1/1/11 we stumbled upon the movie set of dreams for A Better Container. 1/2/11 we returned, set up, put on costumes and were stopped during the first take by SPD.

Some pop inspiration unearthed from Sam in response to being asked to cover Elvis.



The song and stage of Elvis that feels closest to my experience of growing up in an exported southern debutante pageant culture.

The idea: A writing, movement, music memory salon.

It has been a fortunate fall for A Better Container. The project has been chosen for a residency at Studio Current as well as for the Northwest New Works Festival in 2011.

And this weekend, I get to spend three days learning about tuning scores from Karen Nelson.

Armed with these fortunes, A Better Container moves forward.

To kick off it's next phase, I'm hosting a series of memory salons for anyone interested in exploring and grappling with memory/forgetting/identity. Please get in touch for more information. shannon k stewart at gmail dot com.

A work in progress excerpt of A Better Container will be part of MOVE! in Tacoma this weekend!
Joining Mimi and I will be Neil Coffey and Yuki Enomoto. We'll miss Allie and Sam.

October 1st 7pm October 2nd 2&7pm

Performers of MOVE! #17 include: The MOVE!NG Company, Tacoma City Ballet, Coriolis Dance Collective, Mia Monteabaro, Shannon K Stewart

MOVE! is coming faster and fiercer every time, don't miss out. Performers joining us from Seattle and Tacoma and if you're not a dance fan MOVE! will make you one.

Proceeds from the show benefit the tuition-free ballet program at MLKBallet

Click here to:
Get your MOVE! tickets today

www.brownpapertickets.com

A Better Container. On location in Brooklyn. On a roof. With graffiti.

I know it's never been done before.

Artist Bios for A Better Container:

Allie Hankins has yet to give me a bio. Things I know. . . She moved to Seattle from New Mexico. She spent the month of July choreographing a dance every day. She is almost unnervingly clear and exacting in her movement.

Sam Mickens has, since his teen years, recorded and toured the world
extensively in groups The Dead Science, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Xiu
Xiu, and Parenthetical Girls. At present, among other projects, Sam is
leading his NYC-based Ecstatic Showband & Revue, a large hardcore soul
ensemble. He is also presently making preparations for "Kayfabe: Game
of Death," a large-scale performance work to be staged in Brooklyn
November 2010.

Mary Margaret Moore came to Seattle nearly five months ago from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She holds a BA from Cornell University in Art History and Visual Culture, completed in 2003. Those college years were also marked by competitive sports and intense physical training—MM was captain of the women’s volleyball program. Following university, she moved to Paris, France and placed herself amongst the throngs of Parisian dancers, awkwardly barefoot and muscle-bound…the study of dancing ensued… Most recently, her movement investigation led her into improvisation, which eventually led her to the heavy door of the Grande Salle at physical theatre school, Jacques Lecoq (2007). MM is now working on a solo adaptation of Deborah Hay’s 2009 Solo Project choreopgraphy, At Once.

OPEN FLIGHT STUDIO
PRESS RELEASE

PRESS CONTACT: Paige Barnes – Co-founder/Resident Artist, Open Flight Studio
E-MAIL: barnes.paige@gmail.com
TELEPHONE: (206) 419-5481
KILL DATE: August 23, 2010

Event: FLIGHT DECK
When: Saturday August 21 at 7:00pm / Sunday, August 22 at 4:00pm
Who: Flight Deck recipient SHANNON STEWART with invited guests KRISTIN HAPKE (tin dance) and MARISA HAGA.
Where: Open Flight Studio /4205 University Way NE/University District
Tickets: $8 suggested donation
Info: info@openflightstudio.org / www.openflightstudio.org

Open Flight Studio is thrilled to announce the eighth annual installation of Flight Deck, a residency program that awards studio time to Seattle dance artists from May to August and culminates in a performance. This year’s performance will show the work created by Flight Deck recipient SHANNON STEWART with invited guests artists KRISTIN HAPKE (tindance) and MARISA HAGA at Open Flight Studio on August 21 at 7pm & August 22 at 4pm.

Where do we begin?

We are about to begin.

Memory - where our stories lie. Where smell is a vehicle that shuttles us to a familiar feeling and trauma seeds itself in a shoulder blade or sacrum or large intestine.

Memory - a cage of identifiers: girl, pretty, poor, educated, lacking a deep plie, introverted, good at multi-tasking, gets dates easily but doesn't keep them.

This book on dementia that I bought talks about the liberation from painful memories as one thing to celebrate when looking for reasons to appreciate memory loss. I wonder about what this means for my grandmother who doesn't seem to know how old she is or even that she is confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home. Does she feel freedom from not being cognizant of these limitations? what memories do I want to lose?

Anne Michaels offered another sentence where I have to pause and breathe at every word to ponder the weight of its choice.

In particular, these eleven:

". . . the distress evoked by the futility of objects that outlast us."

Yesterday (the fourth of july) I went to the alter/installation that Monica Mata Gilliam and Vanessa DeWolf have created. Monica is reconstructing memories carefully, piece by piece, photo by photo and trying to ease the heartbreak of losing her mother with the copper in pennies minted before 1982. Vanessa, on the other hand is focused on "trying to remember" periods of her life that she has very little recollection of, memories that are documented but don't feel like hers.

December - San Francisco Yerba Buena, no holidays, press through to...

January - APAP in New York - American Realness Festival, on to. . .

. . Some bottom in me fell out or maybe rose up and things had to shift for me and dance.

I switched to writing more personal journal style in this blog with an unfortunate name that I haven't changed: http://pntnopnt.blogspot.com/

Though my grandmother's transition out of her house and into dementia is propelling me forward in making some. . . "thing" about memory, I hesitate to go so personal narrative here. This new piece A Better Container is coming from my grandmother's mind and I want to protect her from my selfish wish to put it on a stage and have people look at it as art. The line is so fine that it is almost inevitable to cross, and arbitrary.

Memory. . . these are things I have read about memory in the last four days:

"In dementia, what is unknown encompasses not just the future (what will happen tomorrow) but what is the present (what is that thing? why am i feeling this way). . . "

"shifting sands"

"We have come to see our memories as things we have, collect, and build on to to create a unique sense of self. . . "

"Memory is a story, and storytelling is a process through which we know and grow ourselves and communities."

"I imagined that if each owner of each pair of shoes could be named, then they would be brought back to life. A cloning from intimate belongings, a mystical pangram."

"How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand? how can they be sanctified each?"

"Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be scooped up, lives reconstituted."

Tomorrow Night - Not rotated from The Real Shannon Stewart on Vimeo.

Some time later. . . some photos from Z | J's show at Trafo in Budapest.
"A Crack in Everything" - Photos by Kővágó Nagy.

From that Friday, the next five days were crammed so full that, looking back on it two weeks later, I can hardly fathom how to adequately capture it all.

Saturday we slept in a bit and planned on meandering to the rehearsal studio, stopping at another big market and the gay pride march along the way. The first sign of trouble was that our train didn’t stop at our stop. Meanwhile, announcements were being made in Hungarian cluing Hungarians in as to what was going on. A fellow passenger partially translated the announcement explaining that the train wasn’t stopping because of the gay demonstration. In my unknowing brain, I rationalized that this meant the gathering was so crowded aboveground that public transportation was being re-routed.

As we came out of the station in Hero Square, police clad in clothing to face an exploding bomb created a human barrier in front of the chain link fence barrier that went as far as the eye could see.

A crowd was forming in this strange reservoir; it’s source the spring of human traffic coming out of the subway and bumping up against the cage surrounding us. Zoe was really unnerved and wanting to get out. For a lot of reasons, I didn't want to be be anywhere but where we were. ( At this point, I think I had embraced soaking in everything, saying yes to whatever was happening). There was no techno music and oily, naked bodies writhing on corporate sponsored floats, I mean of course there was one big truck that was pumping out bad dance music, but other than the scene was very mellow--just people flagging their flags, tying on arm bands, and unfolding a huge rainbow flag. It was clear, that this was a march and not a parade.




The march had not officially started. What we gathered in the next hour of trying to figure out was going on was that, because in years past there had been hate attacks on people in and around the march by right-wingers (a movement that is gaining momentum in Hungary), they had created a blockade two blocks deep around Andrassy and closed down on all train stops. No one could be a spectator of this pride march. You were either in it or you were blocks away from it. From 1 to 6pm the police would be escorting the march and at its end, ostensibly escort people safely to whatever public transportation they needed to take. Technically we could leave, but we were advised not to because the counter demonstration was happening just a few blocks away and we might not be safe. We could actually hear voices in the air coming from some far off PA.

“We have a show in 3 days,” Zoe reiterated, debating our next move. We had to make it to the studio. Both of us were perplexed by how real the threat was of violence was. There was a sense that anything could happen, but still that couldn’t override the psyche of untouchableness that two rather privileged white American women carry with them as they move through the world. This, coupled with the sense that the threat was perhaps a bit overblown (e.g. walking through budapest at night alone is nothing like walking through a major american city) made us decide to exit the March before we were locked in for the next 4 hours.



It was just a brief moment, seemingly inconsequential, but things slowed down for me as we stepped through the tiny opening in the fence and the riot cops strode bow-leggedly passed us in two unending lines. On the other side of the fence we both looked at each other through tears, feeling like ultimate traitors or failures or something, I'm not sure but I was completely deflated.

We didn’t even make it to Florian that day. We couldn’t find a train station anywhere where that was open and we were on the other side of town/river from where we needed to be. Even walking home would have been a serious hike. We wandered around aimlessly, in the life-as-usual vibe of the city park.


A few other people looked stranded, but aside from that it was as if the demonstration was part of an alternate universe.

After another hour had passed and the trains still weren’t open, we paid 3000 Forint to go to the Szechenyi Baths. I paid another 1000 Forint to rent an oversized bathing suit that was coming apart at the seams. Zoe and I lost each other in the labrynth of indoor/outdoor pools and I retreated to a cavernous sauna—the hottest one I have ever been in, where I was surrounded by middle aged men. Trying to continually strategically hold my towel in place to cover up the disintegrating swimsuit proved difficult and at some point I gave up.

It's really hard to explain what the scene was like. In every room, there were more pools, steam rooms, cold plunges, and saunas to choose from, not to mention two enormous outdoor thermal baths with fountains spewing hot water in an giant semi-circular fan. Thinking about it now as I sit in a café watching northwesterners coming and going in their muted synthetic fiber fashions and one Subaru after another drives by the early 20th century homes on capitol hill, I can’t really reconcile the two places. Can you imagine it? Tan, half-naked Hungarians smoking and drinking in the golden light of sunset and partially submerged in hot water.


On our way home, we stopped by the Godor Klub, an indoor/outdoor club with a stage built into the ground like a mini-ampitheater, and watched the beginning of a dance performance. (So much more dance happening everywhere in Budapest!). The dancers were gorgeous, as is to be expected with the highly trained Europeans, but the content fell flat. Zoe and I left with our heavy bags of groceries and finally made it home to eat bread, cheese, salad, stir fry, tuna, the usual whatever-we-could-get-our-hands-on and we-waited-too-long-to-eat kind of meal.


(Sunday was a long day of rehearsing and then teaching a master class as part of a weekend long dance marathon (see, so much dance).



I almost cried watching the sunset that night outside of Trafo before the class started. It is such a quiet corner, with just the sound of the little fountain and soft speaking Hungarians walking their dogs. A bloated red moon made its way up into the sky behind the buildings. I didn’t get to see it, but I heard it was incredible.



Monday morning we met Judit at Trafo and took a bus to the outskirts of town where the day’s rehearsal space was. We walked through a strange complex of old auto shops and abandoned sewing factories until we arrived at the space. We spent four low energy hours rehearsing in a tiny white box with red concentric circles taped on the ground. Then we rode the overcrowded bus back into town stuffed between hoards of teenagers clutching their trapper keepers (yes, trapper keepers!) and purposefully bumping into us. I felt sick and like I wanted to sleep for days. It was the first time I had the possibility of getting souvenirs or stopping by the post office during its open hours to mail postcards, but I bee-lined for home and got in the bath.

Tech was supposed to start that night at 9pm but I ended up having the night off, getting dinner and going out to an incredible old bar called Szimpla. From the entrance, it seemed like everything you could possibly dream up and romanticize about a eastern European punk bar in an old squatted apartment building courtyard, with its nondescript entrance and bike parking room. In reality, you could see how the local charm had gone the way of communist hard rock café. It was full of Australians, Canadians, and Americans getting really drunk on overpriced shots. I did my part. I learned how to order a vicehazmester (2 parts wine, 3 parts soda), the spritzer of the vice master or something.

The next day was tech, dress, and our opening night. I should have gone home at least an hour earlier than I did, but I was getting used to this overly-active sleep-deprived schedule and wanting to savor every possible moment left.

For the next two days, sleep continued to decrease and the moments were even more pregnant, to use a phrase I kind of hate. All of it was too precious, the sort of stuff that I knew I would cling to as the miles between me and Budapest increased. It's not fair really to think about it all as some sort of plausible life--to have a beautiful, spacious apartment on Krudy Utca, a full-time job dancing and access to multiple rehearsal studios, built-in friends and tour guides to take care of you. (Quite perfectly, Leonard Cohen comes on in the café I write this in, the mascot of this trip. He had a concert while we were there that I'm still kicking myself for not going to. Then, of course, there is the shared title of “A Crack in Everything”).

I can't remember now exactly what was happening before we ran the show. It is always the same--I'm sort of roving around in circles backstage-- bobby pins, strectching, hairspray, trying to find white thong, remembering steps, trying to think about what the piece means to me, tyring to act like it's no big deal and a big deal at the same time, and then trying to imagine sitting in the audience, waiting for the lights and music and performers, wanting to be transported somewhere.

And so the show happened. Zoe, Juniper and I filed out and watched the next piece after intermission with the poker faced crowd. Then there was a q & a. And then we left Trafo and went a bar and drank vicehazmeesters.

We sat around a table at a bar and Judit wrote out a hungarian language cheat sheet (which of course will be wrong since my keyboard doesn't have all the appropriate umlauts and whatnot). I also can't really read the handwriting. . .



ninscenek nemi betegsegeim - i don't have any venereal diseases

buss (or kuss?) - shut up

fasz kivan - (she didn't write the translattion to this one because we had already properly learned it. . . "the dick is out" which is like "enough already!")

Koszonom - Thank you

szeretem (?) a limonadet - I like lemonade

Bocsanate (bocs) - Sorry/pardon

Keren - please

rizi bizi - rice with peas (sounds like really busy)

csirke - chicken

kis froccs - small spritzer (one wine, one soda)

nagy froccs - big spritzer (two wines, one soda)

hazmester - 3 wines, 2 soda

vicehazmester - 2 wines, 3 sodas

sportsfroccs - 1 wine, 4 sodas

beszelek magyarul - I speak hungarian

csokolade - chocolate

dugnam - I'd hit it

ovszer/gummi - condom

bugyi - panties

..you know, just the basics.

Wednesday after eating brunch at an old socialist cafe and accidentally ordering an omlet with hot dog chunks in it, I walked along the danube on the buda side of the city and felt my body was somebody else's. My feet retraced all the steps to and from train stations, on escalators that move too fast, past chairs spaced too far from each other for people to sit and talk to one another, past the gypsy store in Kalvin Ter and past Zoe and Juniper at Lumen Cafe, into our apartment and into the bath. As it turns out, bathing was my favorite thing to do in Budapest.

9.16.09

Quick, quick, before the memories leak out, replaced by routine - 457 bicycle wheel rotations between my house and work, 36 stairs to climb, 4 desks squared off in a small room and endless amounts of keystrokes for five to six hours. If I'm lucky--90 minutes of yoga, 90 minutes of dance and several endearing down-the-hallway glimpses of hallie and allison practicing their salsa routines before they teach class.

Viktor, my hungarian friend, this is precisely why at least some of life must be documented.

The first person I talked to upon returning to Seattle was the barista that works at the coffee shop 25 steps from my house. This person lived in Budapest when he was a kid. It made wonder what web hungary will weave for me here in the PNW.

hold it! the past, the past, that is the focus of this entry.



At Florian, the studio that we rehearsed at for the second half of the residency we met Kati, a beautiful woman who was in charge of organizing several festivals including Tanc Kommando (Dance Commando) a weekend of outdoor dance actions all over the city. On Friday 9/4, we took a short break to watch a group of local dancers perform in front of a schoool in the obuda square. Frist act – middles school girls dressed in sort of naughty sailor outfits doing rhythmic gymnastic tricks to Missy Elliot’s ‘Everybody Lose Control.” It was confusingly provocative.



Second act – about 8 college-aged dancers in sweats strutted out and started doing what we assumed was a traditional Hungarian folk inspired dance that kind of reminded me of Riverdance. The tension between the outpouring high school students and the dancers exposing their vulnerable contemporary selves was building and I left to go to my favorite place to get espresso in a plastic cup that I could take back to the studio.




We ran the rough draft of “A Crack in Everything” for the first time later that day for Judit and György, the founder of Trafo. Nervous sweat poured through every inch of fabric on my body underneath Florian's weird florescent lights. At one point in the piece when our solos overlap, I make my way off stage in concrete slow motion for several minutes and I felt was if I was a spunge wringing myself to dry from the inside out. Though I'm sure there are things that improved in the dress rehearsal and shows, to date that run feels like it was the best to me. Judit said she would send feedback and Gyorgy said almost nothing about the piece. I may be totally off base, but culturally it seems like there is no bullshitting in Hungary, no compliment comes undeserved, or congratulations on how hard you've worked or how much you have put yourself out on a limb.

this blog is in need of more pictures. . .

today my I got a split on my left foot and had my first day of bleeding feet. I'm surprised I made it this long. I have a picture, but I don't think I'll put it up.

we talked for hours about economics with the director of trafo at the end of our 7 hour rehearsal and jumped over puddles and dodged lightning to get home in the thunderstorm.

no palinka on a beautiful terrace with charming hungarians tonight.

three days until show time.