Some photos...

From our this year's collective show at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange...stills from my piece, "remember those quiet evenings," with myself, Emily Bock & Emily Giovine performing.

SHOWS.

Hello Friends!

In case you needed the reminder, I'm showing a new work in progress, tentatively called Refrain, at Movement Research at the Judson Church THIS MONDAY...If you can't come to that, or need your fix of flirty stewing and slow motion emotion RIGHT NOW, come have a beer and see us do some snippets between 8 and 11pm at AUNTSregular SATURDAY night. Info for both is below:

Movement Research at the Judson Church

December 19
Rebecca Warner, Tara Aisha Willis, Ryutaro Mishima, Yve Laris Cohen

Monday at 8pm
doors open at 7:45pm

Location: Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South

NO RESERVATIONS and ADMISSION IS FREE
seating is limited, so arrive early

Selection Committee for Fall/Winter 2011-12:
Monstah Black, Tei Blow, Hilary Clark, Mariangela Lopez, Kayvon Pourazar, Pam Tanowitz

AUNTS regular

December 17, 2011 at 8pm
Secret Works Loft
59 Jefferson Street #301

Admission is a Contribution to the Free Bar or Boutique where everyone shops and drinks for free all night long!
Bring anything, like beer, soda, juice, the shirt in the back of your closet that you never wear anymore, etc.

AUNTS regular is the *classic* one night only AUNTS evening with multiple performers, overlapping performances, open dance parties, multi-disciplinary, body/non-body based, time oriented, finished/experimental/unfinished/process art.

Featuring:

· Mikel Ochoteco and Leire San Martin

· Effie Bowen

· Megan Byrne / Jessica Ray

· Local Obscure

· Ethan Knechel

· Cody, Karl and Ally

· Tara Aisha Willis

· Benjamin Kimitch

· Luke George

· Stacy Grossfield

· saifan shmerer | SASSON

· Elizabeth Ward

· The Bureau for the Future of Choreography

· Shantell Martin

· Katy Pyle and Hedia Maron

· Sari Nordman and Inka Juslin

· niv Acosta

· and more!

Oh, and if you are a working artist in NYC get your portrait taken for this project by Marc Landas

Save the Date!

this year's collective
new and reassembled work by Emily Bock, Hadley Smith & Tara Aisha Willis

November 4th and 5th, 8pm
BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange

tickets $12
email thisyearscollective@gmail.com for reservations and inquiries

visit us on facebook and on twitter @thsyrscollectiv

This production is being presented through BAX's Visitors Program, a subsidized performance package rental program, and is a self-production by this year's collective.

BodyPoem is BACK...

After an absentee summer, I'm back with updates and announcements that will definitely make this a good year for BodyPoem blogging...

RoofTop Performance Series was ridiculously fun in May, and my trio, remember those quiet evenings, got lots of wonderful comments despite the threat of returning rain, chilly breezes for audience members, and a waterlogged stage floor that turned our running into cautious tiptoes and had the crew sliding around frantically with a towel between each piece. I've included some beautiful pictures here, but you'll have another chance to see it in November, along with my solo from last year, Slight Rupture, so don't worry if you missed it! That'll be announced in the next posting. Mark Nov. 4th and 5th in your calendars!

Save the Date: RoofTop is coming!

My yet-to-be-titled new trio, featuring Emily Bock, Emily Giovine and myself, and some sound swung together by Ricky Mungaray, will be premiering (or in some such state of performability) on May 21st! That's very soon! Follow the link below to get to the official RoofTop website (they are lovely folks, those producers, and would love your webtraffic!).

http://www.rooftopdance.com/

Put May 21st at 7pm in your calendar. Plan to be on a rooftop drinking beer and sangria in Bushwick. Look out for two Emily's and a Tara doing some small and big things to some small and big sounds. Should be detailed, lush, and occasionally awkward. Plan to almost recognize things. I'll put up some rehearsal footage soon!

Two cities, Two days!

I'm performing this Friday the 29th in Chicago and this Saturday the 30th in D.C.!

A new solo I've made, "tell me repeatedly I am unbearable," will be performed in the old Chi-town homestead, on the stage where I first fell in love with performance spaces, the Wrigley Theater at my high school alma mater, The Latin School of Chicago (59 W. North Blvd), Fri. 29th, 7pm. Tickets $5 for students, $10 for adults, with a reception to follow.

And the photo posted here with sponges is for a very new, very wet solo by Sarah A. O. Rosner for the A. O. Movement collective, which I'll be performing at Joe's Movement Emporium in D.C. as part of the Late Night Expressions series, co-produced by Mason/Rhynes Productions. Here's the link for further info! http://www.mason-rhynes.org/events.php

REHEARSAL video!

On April 7th I performed a new dance experiment I'm calling "Duration (black people dance better)" for Sophia Cleary's REHEARSAL showing for a small audience in one of those legendary warehouse artist studios in Gowanus. Aside from the chance to perform something I've been thinking about alot lately, I got an hour's worth of great dialogue and feedback based on the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process, as well as dumplings straight from Chinatown and some delightful wine from a giant bottle. The video of my creation for the showing is up!

Duration (black people dance better) from Tara Willis on Vimeo.

REHEARSAL performance

A week from today I'm showing something-or-other, whatchamacallit, unknown, TBD at Sophia Cleary's REHEARSAL showing series for works-in-progress. Come see me do something-I-don't-know-what-yet on Thursday April 7th, 7:30pm, at David Bernstein's studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn: 61 9th St. near the F/G stop at 9th-Smith St. BYOB!

Tentative title for my piece: "Duration: Body Experiments with Black Music." Come find out (even I don't know yet).

Add yourself to the REHEARSAL mailing list by emailing: rehearsal4you@gmail.com

REHEARSAL is twice a month works-in-progress showing of various types of performance works. At every Rehearsal 1-2 artists present with the opportunity to hear feedback from others. Loosely following the Liz Lerman Critical Response structure, moderators provide a structured space for feedback open to the audience. By creating a consistent artist-centered space for works-in-progress showings, Rehearsal aims to provide rich and respectful feedback to performing artists in all stages of work. AND it's free!!! BYOB

dancing this Saturday...

This Saturday I'm re-performing Sydnie Mosley's solo for me, "Change My Mind," at The Pearl showcase. It's right in downtown Brooklyn and there's a DJ. Can't go wrong!

Click here for all the info on Facebook, and look out for more of me dancing in other people's work in the next couple of months (a solo by Sarah A.O. Rosner and a duet by Anna Brown Massey), some out of town gigs (Chicago and Washington, D.C.), and two new pieces of my own (untitled and untitled!). An exciting spring! Updates to come.

Thoughts for new trio

I've been thinking about sound textures lately, and how certain soundscapes shape the air, create associations and sensations, and alter our awareness. While watching tv recently, I stepped out of the room during commercials and one came on that takes place partly in an airplane cabin. Whenever it switched to the space of the airplane, the aural atmosphere (the soft hum of the plane, the chatter of people, the clicking closed of overhead compartments, the polite mutter of an attendant making announcements over the speaker system, the muffled beep of the seatbelt sign) would zoom me right into the sensation of contained, forced relaxation and the dead air I associate with flights, and at the same time, the anticipation of the vast, ungrounded feeling of lift off and looking down at the ground far below. I got to thinking about the associations we have to certain textures, which could be textures themselves: the sounds of the plane cabin brings to mind the physical texture of an airplane seat, the sound of the ocean brings to mind the feel of salty water and sand drying on skin, or waves, or whatever. Sounds I am used to hearing in small spaces (coffee brewing in my kitchen, a radio) might give me a more shrunken, private spatial awareness, while the sound of the ocean or cars on a freeway might give me a more expansive awareness of the space I am in, the thinks I am looking at or sensing. Can this be done in a dance, both with literal sound textures and the textures of the bodies in motion? Can that zooming in of a small-space-sound "make bodies matter" by drawing attention to the intimate details? Vice-versa?

First mention in a publication...

It's not a review, but my show on the 13th was advertised on Time Out New York's website...My first mention in a reputable publication. Here's the link! And thanks, Mom, for finding it enjoyable to periodically Google my name!
http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/dance/731469/fertile-ground

"Change My Mind" by Sydnie Mosley footage

And here's the link to footage of the solo Sydnie L. Mosley recently choreographed on me for NACHMO, posted here on her blog. Watch for an upcoming performance of this to be announced on March 26th.

http://lovestutter.blogspot.com/2011/02/performance-footage-change-my-mind.html

Slight Rupture footage!

In case you wondered, the performance at Green Space went wonderfully, and it was amazing to see and feel the piece come together with lights and an audience in a way that was extremely necessary to the piece (the word "show" was crucial in my thinking about the work, both in the sense of a performance and performed image, and the sense of drawing attention to something). Below is the vimeo recording. I'm excited to show this again elsewhere in the future! Please check it out.

"I sell the shadow to support the substance." -Sojourner Truth

Slight Rupture from Tara Willis on Vimeo.

Slight Rupture was made possible through the generosity of Jill Sigman and the Van Lier Fellowship, a program of Dance Theater Workshop that is supported with funds from the Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust.

RoofTop Dance

So I've been invited to create a piece for the delightful RoofTop Dance extravaganza (previously known as ChoreOBJECTography). I'm extra excited, having been a dancer in two of them last year, to begin looking at that space and environment that feels a bit like home now from a dance-making perspective. This year we are looking at three questions, which all the choreographers came together to decide (through a complex, highly scientific, sensory process of elimination!):

How do I make textures?

How do my linking images read?

How can bodies matter?

This blog is going to become the homebase for my thinking throughout this process. And while you wait with bated breath to hear more about this project, there are three things you can do: follow us on facebook, follow our discussion on the RoofTop website, and mark May 21st on your calendar. You are no longer available that evening. Just so you know.

Josephine Baker, 18 years old.

If there were ever a body accustomed to having images projected on it, it's hers.

And also...

"As it emerges transformed from this intellectual contact zone, American studies has addressed how collective and impersonal forms of political agency are routinely embodied in propertied, white men, whose political privilege depends on the association of other genders, races, and classes with corporealized identities. The circulation of such 'overembodied' identities as public icons and spectacle has been crucial to the protection of established political privilege." - Eva Cherniavsky, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett & Glenn Hendler, 2007

...There is something crucial in this word, "overembodied." Can one ever be too much in their body, too physical, too corporeally defined? Yes, in caricature, in exaggeration, in stereotype. And since the image (all kinds of media, "moving pictures," celebrities on pedestals, etc.) is such a driving force in society, this "overembodiment" of certain identities naturally (perhaps an unhappy choice of words) comes to be expected and assumed (in both senses of the word). As Cherniavsky writes, to reveal and perhaps alter these iconic, corporealized identities, we must examine "the physical body as a social text rather than a given form...there are no bodies without culture, since the body as a kind of material composition requires a cultural grammar of embodiment." Within that format, perhaps, the politically powerful, white men she points to can gain an embodied, socially iconic identity, and those of the marginalized identities won't be hyper-visible, overembodied, too corporeal.

And at the same time, as a mover, a dancer, and dance-maker, why is it a negative to be overembodied? I strive to become more within my body every day as a performer, but to escape stereotypes and expectations that I assume are made every day based on my body and image.

Do these conflict?

On my mind...

"...I will carve black women's bodies and heads

from reddish stone and black stone.

Some will be massive and the work will make me sweat.

The black woman's head is a massive weight.

The black woman's head holds the black woman's brain.

The black woman's body supports the black woman's head.

The black woman's work is the work of this world."

-Elizabeth Alexander

AOMC update

Exciting edited footage of the A.O. Movement Collective in rehearsal...be patient, I'm in there!

Welcome to the AOMC's New Work! from the A.O. Movement Collective on Vimeo.

Upcoming with Sydnie Mosley

See Sydnie Mosley's beautiful blog, lovestutter, for the official info about the studio showing and a radio talk show (!!??!!) that I'm taking part in with her:

January Happenings

"Slight Rupture," revisited: perhaps a "Show?"

I am performing a more finalized version of my solo project, "Slight Rupture" (title tentative), which was first presented as a study in DNA's October Works-In-Progress showcase, in Green Space Studio's Fertile Ground series in February! This project has been in development and has plagued my fascination since September of 2009 when I began working on it through Dance Theater Workshop's Van Lier Fellowship. I'm very excited to finally present a more finished version of it! I hope you'll trek to Queens to enjoy the show (there are several other choreographers), and a post-show talk with wine and snackies! Here's the info:

Fertile Ground Series

February 13th, 2011 @ 7pm

Tickets $10, includes wine and cheese!

Purchase tickets at the door or online at www.GreenSpaceStudio.org

Green Space Studio

Long Island City, Queens

37-24 24th St. (btw. 37th and 38th Aves.) Buzzer #301

National Choreography Month

Check out the blog for National Choreography Month (NACHMO)! I'll be performing a solo by fellow Barnard dance department alumna, Sydnie Mosley, dealing with womanhood, lady parts in limbo, and other things of that nature in one of their culminating studio showings:

5:45pm Saturday February 5th
PMT Dance Studio: 69 W 14th St @ 6th Ave
Tickets $10

Here's the link: http://www.nachmo2011.blogspot.com.

Fancy Freelance...

So...I have officially become a freelance copywriter/editor. It's a real thing and it's been a long time coming (I did some copyediting my senior year of college for ESL students' graduate applications, but have wanted to do it as a part time job since then). Thanks to the reinvigoration of Sarah Rosner's A.O. Pro(+ductions), a collective of freelancers who work mainly to help emerging artists with marketing materials, web design, consulting, management, etc., and Elance, an online freelancers website, I've finally got a couple of projects underway. Check out the website, http://aopro.info/, which should be getting updated for the reinvigoration soon! And my Elance profile (still under development), http://creativelanguage.elance.com.