From Ain Gordon – Presence of the Past
How to research the sensorial fallout of a rote task two hundred and eight years ago?
I admit I could not frame that question till halfway through the research. I knew I was pulled toward an activity of no historic consequence (I often am). I knew I was interested in a moment and location that was daily and transitory, the task rather than the artifact of that task. (I often am interested in the moment before “the moment.”) Also yanking at my consciousness was the giant silence of one imagined cloudy morning in pre-industrial rural early America (facing the empty virtual page on a cold gray Wednesday knowing I should write is my version). Girdling these tangents was a question about historical reenactment. (I’m not sure where I got that – it appeared.)
Choreographing Puppets
At the end of their first day of rehearsals at the Broad Brook Grange, Dan Hurlin said to me "we choreographed our first etude today!" I loved hearing how Dan thinks about puppetry in choreographic terms. Rachael Lincoln, Sheetl Ghandi, Darius Mannino and Zachary Tolchinsky are dancers as much as they are puppeteers. It has been fantastic to observe them in the studio as they build the work bring Dan Hurlin's objects and Dan Froot's stories to life.
Salmon Brings us Together
This has been happening my whole life. Salmon brings me to harvest with my family, brings me across Kachemak Bay in Alaska to learn fish-skin sewing from Audrey Armstrong, brings me to awe as I watch them swim upstream, brings people to my table again and again, and brings me here, to Vermont Performance Lab. Of course, in this case, we had to arrange for the wild salmon to be here.
Candice Salyers
Lying between the white brick walls of the alley, I keep my eyes closed. Moving slowly amidst the everyday pedestrian bustle and rumble of tucks on Main Street, I hear people ask (with varying degrees of proximity to me), “What is she doing?” I smile because I asked myself the same question earlier this morning.
Last year while leading some students through an improvisation exercise, I heard myself tell them something that I am trying to learn: “You are an important part of this picture, even though you are not the whole picture.” This idea is one reason why I am drawn to working in spaces that locate human scale as a small but significant component of a larger landscape. For me, this performance work includes a practice of exploring what it means to belong—to recognize how my body and actions affect and are affected by dynamic ecologies that I inhabit.
After two hours in that alley space, I sweep away the residue of my performance including some text chalked on the pavement. A man standing on the river terrace asks me about the words I had written there: “Every heart break is a little opening.” I tell him I am learning that heartbreak can be an opportunity to grow rather than form a rigid scar. He tells me that notion reminds him of the Japanese word for “crisis” which involves characters that can connote “danger” and “opportunity.” I smile as I consider how both love and performance offer us dangerous opportunities.
The Solo
He played the score and I did the task. I did it with all of my might, not as an emotional act but as a nearly impossible physical task. It is a slow and minimalist solo that begins on the balls of the feet with both legs criss-crossed with the ankles touching and heels as high off the ground as possible. Then you roll down real slow with the arms dangling and the neck released and the head dropped and you scoop like mad from the muscles in your belly as you roll down very very slow until your knuckles touch the floor and try not to fall.
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.
Adele Myers
I make theatrical narrative non-fiction dance told from a female perspective - usually with a sense of humor. These dances originate from personal experience, I then explore how that experience intersects with popular culture as part of the collective unconscious. These intersections are conveyed through a chunky non-linear collage format combining energetic robust athleticism, everyday gestures and text. I tend toward a social commentary that often asks, why aren’t we being more honest about this?