October 17th: BRUSSELS TO BASEL
I jumped in a car with my new friends Ilse, Sirah, and Julien for a six-hour drive from Brussels to Basel. We had been invited to participate in a one-week workshop with Swiss-based choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis. She was auditioning performers for a project in early 2012 and for a large group project for the following year. The workshop started out great with a lot of freestyle dancing, like how you would dance alone at home in the mirror. We created our own solos to present, based on our individual virtuosities, the things that make us special. I ended up getting to stay with a really amazing host family. At first we shared an expectation that I’d be Belgian and they’d be Swiss, but quickly discovered that I’m American and they’re Serbian, and we immediately bonded over our shared love for NYC and the joys of international life!
Over the course of the week in Basel the workshop ran a bit askew as Alexandra struggled to audition for two very different pieces at the same time. Eventually she had to split the group up to focus on the people she had specific interest in. She was entirely gracious about it, bless her heart, but essentially left the majority of participants out in the hallway to work on an ambiguous task for several hours at time. Many found the situation and the lack of direction distressing, but for Ilse and me it turned out to be a great opportunity to get crazy and get to know one another as we worked on reinterpreting a seen from the movie Closer, improvisationally transforming the text while combining it with an absurdly misogynistic physicality inspired by other sex scenes Alexandra had selected for us to view.
In the end my duet exploration with Ilse did not match up with the interests of Alexandra and I was beginning to get a sense that we were not really connecting. Meanwhile a sort of crisis emerged halfway through the workshop where a few participants began to feel taken advantage of and uncared for. I identified with some of their views, but I also felt they were misguided and overly dramatic. However, the minority that spoke out to initiate the crisis intervention actually resulted in Alexandra granting us per diems and providing lunch for the remainder of the workshop, something we could all rejoice in! More importantly this conversation gave us a chance to voice our preference that Alexandra go ahead and make a cut later that day to release us from the audition if she already knew we weren’t right for the work.
To no surprise of my own I was released that evening. Afterwards Alexandra took the time to give each of us personal feedback and we had an interesting conversation. I expressed my overall interest in her work but that I didn’t feel we were connecting artistically and she agreed. While she greatly appreciated my energy, she felt that I have a very strong personal style that represents a specific tradition of culture that is not what she is interested in. She strongly encouraged me to focus on making my own work, and suggested that I try to observe regular people in regular life to be able to make different choices about my movement style. Taking all of this in, along with her earlier feedback regarding my duet exploration with Ilse – that my desire for her wasn’t believable enough, and given the overall hetero-normative nature of the work I’ve seen from her, I couldn’t help but feel that this was the most constructive way possible for someone to say I’m just too gay to dance for them. Moreover, I couldn’t help but respect her for her forthright constructiveness in what amounted all-in-all to a truly generous exchange.
Overall, the Basel workshop reminded me how much I have to be thankful for. Without seeing it so clearly before I realize now how fortuitous it was that in New York almost all of my work as a performer, with companies such as Big Art Group, Faye Driscoll, robbinschilds, RoseAnne Spradlin, and Daniel Linehan, among others, the work we created was always coming from a very queer aesthetic, and how the aesthetic of the queer brilliantly dances with the queerness of my own very personal gendered sexualized self expression. Of course, without this previous professional experience to inform me, it could prove difficult to feel grounded as I navigate the strangely hetero-normative face of the European dance scene/market. Furthermore, it might have also become easy to doubt that my personal style was more of an asset than a liability if, however, my performance calendar wasn’t already close to 100% booked through 2012. Indeed I have a lot to celebrate!
October 22nd: BASEL TO BERN
The Basel workshop ended with a wonderful party hosted by all of the families that housed the dancers. Through the course of the week many friends had been made and there are many fond farewells exchanged. Eventually all the dancers left and I found myself on a warehouse rooftop beat-boxing with Alexandra’s musicians and my new Serbian-Swiss host family, something I never would have expected. The next day our original car group evolved as Sirah traded Anne for her train ticket and Anne joined Ilse, Julien and me for an impromptu trip to Bern. Just one hour further into Switzerland Rosas was performing their newest work Cesena and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to crash their hotel and see more of the country. With the workshop in our rearview mirror we entertained ourselves on a beautiful road trip through the mountains, passing through earth clouds (AKA fog) and amusing ourselves with the never-ending antics of Bird-Muffin-Horse.
Earlier in the week I had innocently called someone a total Triple Horse, forgetting that not everyone in the world plays Bird-Muffin-Horse, a social conversation game where you collectively assign three attributes from within the choices Bird, Muffin, and Horse to describe any given person. It’s abstract, it’s concrete, it’s physical, it’s spiritual, it’s whatever you want it to be and it’s fun as long as you don’t think too hard about it. So whereas I might consider myself to be a Bird-Horse-Muffin, someone else might see me as more of a Muffin-Horse-Bird, or perhaps a Muffin-Double Horse or even a Double Horse-Muffin, so we have to talk it out and hope to find consensus. (Like this picture is so obviously a trio portrayal of Muffin-Bird-Horse from left to right?) I thought this was something everyone did, but alas it was new to the car gang, but we dove in headfirst and by the time we reached Bern the game had evolved to include new attributes like Lizard and Shirelle. Shirelle was originally just the color of Anne’s red nail polish but quickly came to represent everything fabulous and desirable. I’ll never forget coming across our first Triple Lizard in Bern and all of our joys as we continued our quest to become Triple Shirelles.
October 23d: BERN TO BRUSSELS
By the time we headed on our way back to Brussels everything was 100% Shirelle. We took tons of Shirelle photos and ate, drank, and breathed Shirelle, and we even stopped to Shirelle in Shirelle locations on our way home to Shirelle our Shirelles. We discovered from our birthdates we each astrologically represented a pure cardinal value of Shirelle: Anne is Earth Shirelle, I am Air Shirelle, Ilse is Fire Shirelle, and Julien is Water Shirelle. With this we were able to combine our powers to call the corners and invoke the spirit of Heart Shirelle! Unfortunately all the Shirelle in the world couldn’t stop us from coming down with a collective cold. I woke up at home the next day with a triple lizard in my throat and was totally unshirelled! Regardless I was able to pull through for rehearsals with Daniel and was able to hop over to Leuven for the show of Cecilia.
Earlier that summer I had visited Ceclia in the studio as she set out to make her first full evening-length work. She faced a lot of struggle in the process; with the material, with the performers, and with herself. Struggle was part of the initial topical content for the work, it was represented in the physical exercises they did, and indeed it took over the piece in many unexpected ways. I was honored to be invited to come lead some workshops for them and sought to help deepen their work together and relieve some of the stress they were experiencing, both mental and physical. And in the end I was so proud to see the work fully realized and was totally impressed by the show. It was a pleasure to encourage a fellow artist as they confronted the common anxiety that comes along with dance-making, and as such to be able to identify with their struggle and see it as my own, but with a new sense of objectivity I hope to bring back to my own work.
October 27th: BRUSSELS TO SAARBRUCKEN
After a few nights rest in Brussels I was off to Saarbrücken, Germany, to assist Ivo Dimchev with a performance of Lili Handel, his first most popular solo from 2004. I had started working as his assistant this past spring with the show Som Faves and then most recently was helping with the premiere of X-On at Kaaitheater in October. In X-On the character Lili Handel plays a large part, making a cameo appearance in the first scene and eventually taking over the entire piece as the three other performers attempt to become copies of Lili Handel as they work with the sculptures of Franz West. I had only ever heard legends and seen photos of Lili Handel and seen her through the framework of X-On, so I was especially looking forward to getting back to this infamous source and seeing who she really was.
And she did not disappoint! This strange and bizarre creature truly is a work of art herself and I can see why she has been presented more than 500 times in theaters around the world, as she loves to proclaim in X-On. Moreover, it was cool to add the viewing of this piece to everything else I’ve seen from Ivo. Over the past two years I’ve seen at least five shows from him, how rare to see such a body of work from one artist in such a short period of time. Especially interesting is how Lili Handel, as a predecessor to the later works, is so much more technically simple, with much less text and sound, but nonetheless complex. In an archival sense it demonstrates how before we can financially afford to work with a collaborative composer and lighting designer these are things we make due without, and in the case of Lili Handel they aren’t missed. Plus how much more relaxing for me to run sound for a show with just a handful of cues, as compared to a beast like X-On with like 50-plus!
October 30th: SAARBRUCKEN TO PARIS
Next I made a trophy husband appearance in Paris. Daniel was there presenting Zombie Aporia at Théatre de la Bastille and I also knew Anne was there performing with Alexandra – as she is the friend who had originally recommended me for the Basel workshop described above. It was a total gift of a week! As I walked the streets of Paris I realized that I actually had a sense that I knew where I was going for once. It was perhaps my fifth visit, I was beginning to lose count, a welcome sign of feeling more at home in Europe. Besides the pleasure of seeing Liz Santoro, the highlight of the trip was discovering the work of Ryan Trecartin at the Musée d’Art Moderne. OMGoodness!!!
One of my favorite things to do in any city is sign up for the ever affordable Bikram yoga introductory special. Since my initial obsession in Seattle circa 2000 I only ever practice occasionally, but I love Bikram and simply wouldn’t be the dancer I am today without it. The OCD part of me comes to the forefront and I’m usually obsessed about following the commands of the instructor, never anticipating and never being late, just perfect. But in Paris it was the first time I practiced in French, and I’m not good enough yet to follow the text so closely, so I just had to follow the movement. What an amazing and unexpected release. It forced me to practice in a new way, and instead of blocking everyone out to go deeper into myself, I had to share my practice with the room, which strangely allowed me to do the practice more for myself; not for the ideal, not for the instructor, and certainly not for Bikram. What a treat, a hot sweaty delicious treat!
November 4th: PARIS TO RENNES
But Paris was actually just an inserted adventure on my way to Rennes to participate in a week of research with Tino Seghal at the Musée de la Danse. I joined him with his composer friend Ari Meyers and eight performers from Berlin who will also be participating in the project next summer at Documenta. I was excited to meet some of my future colleagues, as we will be spending 100 days together in Kassel. And since getting a taste of the materials we would be working with in the workshop I had done a few weeks prior in Brussels, I was looking forward to digging in deeper to my new beat-boxing talents!
I don’t want to say too much about the process, because it’s all super top-secret. Well maybe not officially, but I want to keep it a surprise. One interested part of the experience was learning that people seem to think of me as being soft spoken, and that this has become a bit of a limitation for me in terms of projecting my voice. A big note for me was to be louder in everything I was doing, so loud I felt like I was being obnoxious. But this is what worked. It’s blowing my mind a bit because I’m realizing that I’ve actually worked to quiet myself down a bit over the years, but now I need to change it up. One member of the group was shocked to learn that I was American because I spoke so gently and didn’t cut other people off. Anyway, it’s time for me to speak up, find a deeper sense of resonance for my voice, and stop being afraid to impose myself.
November 8th: RENNES TO MONTREAL
Last but not least to round out a month of travels was a 10-day adventure assisting Ivo Dimchev with Som Faves at La Chapelle in Montréal. Being back in North America was a fun idea in itself, even if I was still a world away from Seattle and New York, it felt closer to home. The shows were great and the best part is that we were done within the first three days, leaving me with a whole extra week of unstructured time. Instead of going straight to the local Bikram studio I took a friend’s recommendation and went to Moksha instead, it was like a gentle form of Bikram for babies. Just kidding, it was totally refreshing and awesome to do a hot form of yoga that was more dynamic and less devastating, and still a great challenge.
I also used this time as a bit of a mini-retreat to help prepare for an upcoming project with Eleanor Bauer. Our work for Tentative Assembly, to premiere next spring at Kaaitheater, begins with some deep philosophical readings into alternative governments/economies and the hopes and pitfalls of a Utopian world order. Upon return to Brussels we begin a two-week workshop to unpack some of these texts and other issues surrounding our current post-Fordist/post-Capitalistic/post-Apocalyptic permanent crisis situation. We will also be sharing our fantasies about the piece and proposing physical practices to share with the group, alongside learning to create complex string figures from a renowned string and bubble master…oh what a teaser, stay tuned for more information on that!
