Of Disco Balls and Human Beings

I can’t remember if I told you this already but I’m interested in people dancing not dancers moving and I am really working on that with a new dance, "Theater in the Head."  Created during the one-year creative residency at VPL in collaboration with composer Josh Quillen, the work starts as a spectacle for six performers, and as the dance progresses the spectacle becomes stripped away revealing more personable connections between the audience and the performers. 

But really, we are all just human beings (audience and performers) in the same room even if it is a theater and I want to acknowledge that.  I like human beings on the stage that I can get to know or at least know more about.  I wish I could make a play with a dance.  A plance?  But words have limits for me as does movement, so sometimes I use words where movement can’t express something specifically enough for me.

I don’t like it when dancers seem mute, or actors paralyzed.  Humans move and make sound.  I use words sparingly in my dances to conjure for example an image of a dress that I can’t actually find for this dance. In the last section of “Theater in the Head” I tell the audience “I like to imagine I have on a shiny silver dress…”  That way you and I get to imagine the dress.  The truth is I really could not find the silver dress I had in my mind so I chose to keep it in mind instead of limiting our imaginations.  Much like reading the book instead of seeing the movie. That was an aside. 

Back to humans.  I am intrigued by human fallibility as that which distinguishes us from one another.  It is exquisite to me when someone admits and embraces what they think is their flaw.  To me, it makes me want to know them all the more. I am trying to put that on the stage and my hope is then that you (audience/human) and I (performer/human) will feel closer to one another.

Disco balls on the other hand simply remind me of when I was a child in the seventies. I was born in 1969. You know, halter tops, missing the two top front teeth, a grape soda mustache from a Nugrape, scabbed knees, cut off jeans and dirty feet because I refused to wear shoes.  I probably cut my bangs too short out of boredom so I look super awkward, but happy.  Disco balls remind me of that time when things were swell and awkward, for the most part, though there was also a looming seriousness at the edges at times because it was life after all. 

I also loved the thrill of motion.  I used to stand on top of these huge red (empty) oil drums turned on their side and race my friends (also on a red oil drums) down the wide dirt path.  So the thrill of motion is in there too, being in control of being out of control.  So, disco balls and human beings, and the thrill of motion are the essence of what is going on for me these days in dance making.  

I think “Theater in the Head” is going to end with a homemade spectacle with a battery operated disco ball that is presently on a shelf in the closet where the pink shag carpet is and the pink leather boots and the bag of shiny pink confetti.  It is not all swell though.  There are dark edges to ‘Theater in the Head” sweet-creepy, and yet it is also dear.  It is all part of Theater in the Head” as is my favorite old grey t-shirt from 1992 that says “Girls Boxing” in faded prnt. 

Sorry that I keep straying from the point.  

In closing, I am exploring how to capture and illuminate all shades of human fallibility and the uncensored experience I had as a child, but now as performer, without faking it---really believing and getting you to believe and feel it too.  Whatever “it” is.  Maybe that will bring us closer to one another.

The four pictures are taken by company member Rebecca Woods are from a rehearsal of  "Theater in the Head" in NYC on March 14th, 2011.