DanceLandDayDreams: Notes toward a new series of site-responsive offerings

Carnets des répétitions / Rehearsal diaries

4 February 2023

Clues:
duet, plural, sited series, dialogue

Constellation:
DanceLandDayDream(s), a sited & iterative way of working

Today, the title DanceLandDayDream became DanceLandDayDream(s). As I prepare for work, travel, transit, and encounter through 2023, I understand that this creation

is not a solo, it’s a duet.

will come with me wherever I am as long as I bring my rehearsal methodology & sited & iterative way of working,

is a series,

is a context for dialogue & exchange.

Carnets des répétitions / Rehearsal diaries

16 December 2022

Clues:
artistic dossier, written/spoken poem

Constellation:
now every day we’re dancing section, animal dying section, wolves section, sun salutation section

I am writing the artistic dossier & project description to develop this solo dance project thru 2023. It feels important to include an excerpt of this poem – of what I voice out loud – to lend a sense of THEMES and CONTENT and METAPHOR and WHAT’S AT STAKE. The poem, an excerpt:

Now every day we’re dancing

We are staggering a little

A meeting of desire with gravity

Moving in a cloudy meander 

We hope to be remembered as full of dance moves 

that we pulled out  

at exactly the right moment on the dance floor

Full of wild conviction

and at the same time the sense to listen, adapt, respond.

/

Have you ever seen how an animal dies?

First she slinks away

She hides in the shadow places

But we’re not there yet

We’re exhausted but we’re full of joy

We put our hands on the ground and we wait

We listen and experiment a response

/

We carry on

we carry on

through day and through night

howling with the wolves who also travel in packs

offering us waylines to ramble down

stumble towards as we dance, staggering

Healing our bodies from underneath our skin,

passing around rapture

along with a bucket full of rain water to drink

Water and rapture and heat

repeat

Water and rapture and heat

repeat

Sinking down on our knees and springing back up, we keep time

We take in all the oxygen we need if only not to stop

Because here we are, dancing again in impossible conditions

In order to sustain

to arrive in our bodies over and over and over

our dancing unraveling our selves

our dancing

this place where we go when we never want to leave

like children on sleepover with heavy eyes

refusing sleep to elaborate their dreams

sharing silent congratulations when the sun rises finally.

Carnets des répétitions /

Rehearsal diaries

27 October 2022

Clues:
erotic listening, live dancing poem

Constellation:
reference bundle

this poem I’m (re)writing & rehearsing & performing is taking shape and takes shapes. here is a ‘reference bundle’, carrying clues of all that might appear:

Carnets des répétitions /

Rehearsal diaries

Rehearsal

18 October 2022

Clues:
morning class dates

Constellation:
tools for rest & recovery

Hi hi hi!

Just a quick announcement of save-the-dates as my one month residency experience at Lake Studios in Friedrichshagen unfolds.

I write to you from the garden and it is SUNNY! Site-responsiveness (responsivity?), today, is a joy. (No I mean even in the rain it’s a joy come on.)

Please save these dates to join me at Lake : I want to share with you some goings on, & we can have coffee-in-garden time after the morning classes ~~~*~

21 october (this friday)
morning practice
9h30 – 11h
each of the residents take turns leading a morning practice monday, wednesday, and fridays. mine will be “tools for rest & recovery”, and is less about flowing into an embodied state or a full comprehensive warm up, and more about me kind of demonstrating and downloading some tools from different somatic/sensing modalities that I find very helpful for a) arrival into the studio, b) a warm up, c) injury prevention/recovery. some comfort in a studio and movement context is a good idea but i wouldn’t say this is for Dancers only.
Please register or tell me you’re coming, I love preparation.

26 october (next wednesday)
morning practice
9h30 – 11h
same idea as above!

28 october (next friday)
“Unfinished Fridays” shared work in progress performances
19h30 –
~please stay after if you can to chat, I’ll share 15-20 minutes of material, it’s free, reservations required!

2 november (last wednesday that i am in Berlin before I start knocking on New York’s door!)
morning practice
9h30 – 11h
same idea!

Carnets des répétitions /

Rehearsal Diaries

17 October 2022

Clues:
site-responsiveness, preparation

Constellation:
Lake Studios, Exit Thru the Kitchen, Advisory/Care Circle, Morning Class

This month at Lake Studios, marion storm is doing two things at once – researching site-responsivity as a method for dancing + re-working a long poem called “Exit Thru the Kitchen” – which feels risky but somehow they feel like kindred endeavors.

storm will test, to the furthest possible limits, her embodied understandings of “site-responsivity” while at Lake. Place-based movement research characterizes all her dance projects since 2018 – most recently The Apparitions Method (gathering practices for 3+) with daniel luhmann and Alex Viteri Arturo in Europe, and iterative ongoing dances and classes with The Hungry Mothers collective in the United States. What that looks like during a work day: lingering along the edge spaces, taking the indoors somehow outdoors and the inverse, dancing and being danced by what’s already moving like the spiders on the River Leie or the Halophiles in the New York City subway, composing-with terrain and terra’s many cues & potentialities, like, where do human-made pathways begin and end. Still, site-responsiveness brings up all kinds of questions and problems for her like, where is the role of preparation especially in the realm of sound(ing)(s), light(ing)s, and choreograph(ies)(ing)? Responsiveness to which elements of the site, and which temporality? And how is it that highly attuned movement, attached to & produced with a place, can open portals into other place-spaces, fiction, or memory?

“Exit Thru the Kitchen” is a long poem storm wrote after each day of rehearsal at the master exerce in Montpellier (2020), which contours some ways & why’s of gathering together to dance. The poem is deeply personal and wildly fictional, full of embodied figures like crones, crows, and kronos haunting between the lines.

storm is observing what happens when the poem and the place-based dancing meet (!), and will share an excerpt of this hybrid inquiry at the Unfinished Fridays of 28 october.