Joe's Pub

Look out for future posts about great music and other stuff at Joe's Pub...I'll be working there starting this week, and will keep my eyes out for interesting artists. If you haven't ever been, you should go: it's a very neat place, and I hear, with a delightful Italian menu as well as great acts.

Look it up: http://www.joespub.com/

"Dancing for the Deity" - Dance Thesis Research Project

My written dance thesis completed for Barnard College last fall can be found in its entirety online at http://www.barnard.edu/dance/senior_theses.html, under my name, Tara Willis.

The full title is "Dancing for the Deity: Remapping the Black Female Body through Spiritual Movement in Brazil and the United States."

Quick (a collection of poems)

Just finished my final chapbook of poems, entitled "Quick," created for the Creative Writing Concentration in the Barnard College English major, with the advice of Professor Saskia Hamilton. It consists of 23 poems divided into three sections, "The Bit of Her," "The Middle," and "But First:". One of the poems, "Just Outside of Buenos Aires and a Dream," was a finalist in the Hollins University Literary Festival Contest this past Spring. A selection of these same poems won Barnard's Helene Searcy Poetry Prize and 2nd place in the Lenore Marshall Barnard Prize for Poetry this year. I will be continuing to submit poems from the chapbook (as well as the chapbook entire) to literary magazines and contests, and developing it into a larger, book-length collection.

Please just ask if you'd like to take a look!

The Barnard Project at DTW covered in NY Times

In my third and final time performing in The Barnard Project at Dance Theater Workshop this past April, I danced in the premieres of Susan Rethorst's "Hover," and Nora Chipaumire's "Bismillah." The bottom picture here appeared in the New York Times! I am standing on the left in the red shirt and grey leggings. 

Please check out the article online at

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/arts/dance/25barn.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=barnard%20project&st=cse.

Also, another lovely review and picture is on Dance View Times: 

http://www.danceviewtimes.com/2009/04/the-barnard-project.html.  

Buenos Aires, tango danza, desubicación

With the help of my Centennial Scholars grant, in January of 2009 I returned to Buenos Aires to study with tango teacher Oscar Oubel, visit old friends from my 6 months living there previously, and do more work on my project. Here are two videos of some of the work Oscar and I did, which were both also used in the multimedia dance piece I finally created. I wanted to work with Oscar because I had taken a short evening workshop with him and another teacher when I was first in Buenos Aires and I saw some similarities between the alternative way he approaches tango and the ideas of contact improvisation, which I've studied as a modern dancer here in NYC. You can see the ideas of distance, space, and proximity examined in my Centennial Scholars project in action in these videos.

Please look up Oscar Oubel at http://www.oscaroubel.blogspot.com/ or for more video footage of our workshop visit http://www.vimeo.com/3997448.

"the distance between: position/parts"

the distance between: position/parts

a dance/text exploration of disjunct, dialogue, and finding space for self elsewhere

The performance of my final Centennial Scholars project was on April 9th & 10th in Sulzberger Tower at Barnard College.

I can't post the actual card here, but below is the text from it. I hope it gives you a good idea.

a centennial scholars project by Tara A. Willis  examining the possibilities of dislocation, incongruity and miscommunication – and the renewal they can bring – based on travels and living in el cono sur of south america.  our bodies are the first landscape on which the jarring and delightful experience of being elsewhere or out of context enacts itself.  it is there that we often literally crash up against opposite elements, unknowns, and strangers on a busy street or in a packed nightclub.  the sense of loss and distance is also first felt on that terrain: even before it can be put into words.  language is the way in which we share these experiences with others, verbally bridging physical, cultural, linguistic, racial, and experiential gaps.  using tango, contact improvisation, contemporary dance, and both original and south american writings, this project seeks to examine those spaces between bodies and worlds where the light shines through.

features dancers Jules Bakshi, Emily Bock, Hadley Thomas Smith & Tara A. Willis 

Centennial Scholars Project

In Spring of 2006, my freshman year of college, I was selected to join the Centennial Scholars Program at Barnard College: it is a grant and mentorship program through which several students in each year receive a budget and support to develop an independent project of their choosing, to be presented in the senior year in an alternative manner to what is traditionally done in the student's thesis work. 

Using grant funds from the program, I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina for 6 months in the Spring and Summer of 2008, and travelled to Valparaiso, Chile and Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. My original intention was to study magical realist literature in Latin America, and develop a creative writing/research project based on my reading and travels: what is it that has made so many writers and artists from different countries use such a similar type of logic in their writing, I asked? Magical realism is a logic in which ghosts and past generations populate the same spaces as people, time flows as slow as eternity or jumps and skips decades; in which a well cooked meal can cause anything from spontaneous tears, to unstoppable laughter; in which a house can begin to take over the lives of its inhabitants; in which two people can occupy the same body at different times in history. How would I, by placing myself in a South American country for half a year, be effected by a culture and landscape that has produced so much magical realist writing? 

These are questions I still may not be able to answer, but I have held on to one of the ideas that is central to magical realism as I have pursued this exploration further: unlike surrealism, magical realism takes odd occurrences and treats them as if they were natural, or which creates an unexpected, strange situation out of normal, unassuming elements. In the fiction of argentine poet Julio Cortazar, it is nearly impossible to tell exactly where you are headed until it suddenly and simply becomes clear that there is a tiger living in the house, or that the man has become a fish, or that the protagonist’s nightmare hallucinations are actually his reality, and the dream is what we thought was real. With a simple, nearly missable sentence, the situation becomes something wholly unexpected and different. 

Context and presentation are everything, I realized: In Buenos Aires, where by the end of 6 months my Spanish had become quite fluent and relatively authentic sounding, my body and identity were still anamolies, stared at and commented on constantly as I made my way each day through a city whose inhabitants are 88.9% of European descent, 7% mestizo, 2.1% asian and only 2 percent black. Upon visiting Brazil, especially Salvador da Bahia, one of the first ports of entry for African slaves and now considered the capital of Afro-Brazilian culture, the racial/ cultural make up was completely different: I felt suddenly at ease as I fit in and people assumed (as they had also done in Argentina) that I was a fellow brazilian, and yet I spoke little to no Portuguese, and communicated almost entirely in Argentine spanish. Buenos Aires had become a second home to me by then, and yet people there still assumed at first glance I was a total foreigner, while the reverse occurred in Brazil: and yet I belonged to neither place. 

I went into the experience of living abroad planning to have a 6 month extravaganza of artistic genius, to be suddenly and constantly inspired to write and create. Instead, I realized that the experience of simply being there was actually the most dynamic and fascinating aspect of living in Buenos Aires. Themes of space, place, and location versus the unavoidable sense of dislocation became my focus in pursuing this project: is dislocation the state of not being in any place, or of being in the wrong place, or of being out of your own place? Is being thrown off kilter and out of order, as the word suggests, a destructive or productive experience?

Distance was another concept that became central: space between parts and objects people and buildings, people and other people, as well as people and countries, people and their homes. Space and the parts that inhabit them are precious, to be regarded carefully and with attention, as their order and logic may be disrupted at any moment, but that chaos of displacement and dislocation is also constructive and reminds us to regard things carefully in the first place.

"circular room constellated with birds" covered in Columbia Spectator

Barnard seniors share one last dance at senior thesis performance | Columbia Spectator

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Barnard Senior Creative Dance Thesis

On April 3-4 of this spring, the Barnard Department of Dance held its Senior Creative Thesis Showing at Minor Latham Playhouse. My piece, "circular room constellated with birds" premiered there, danced by the talented and endlessly creative Jules Bakshi, Emily Bock, Anina Hewey, Hadley Thomas Smith, and myself. The piece is inspired in part by the paintings of Spanish and Mexican painter Remedios Varo and the poetry collection, entitled "Night Journey," of Argentine poet María Negroni: both of these artists maintain a certain, slightly unsettling, but intriguing quality in their works, following the self-contained, abrupt logic of dreams and strange landscapes, and focusing often on mystic, female figures within that uncertainty. The piece uses the text of Negroni's poetry - literally written on the body and deciphered there - as well as both simple, task-like interactions and "dancey dance" (as we called it in rehearsals) to create this somewhat sinister, ambiguous landscape on the proscenium stage. Hopefully more pictures and video to come. Here are the program notes:

Title: circular room, constellated with birds
Choreographer: Tara Aisha Willis and dancers
Music: Joan Jeanrenaud, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass
Cast: Jules Bakshi, Emily Bock, Anina Hewey, Hadley Thomas Smith, and Tara Aisha Willis

"I will await you in a circular room, constellated with birds, on the
threshold of that door full of night and world, which opens onto the
unalterable. Like dedicating an unfinished poem to a little girl,
giving it to her to warp when suffering no longer seems a more
authentic, spacious land. I will elongate the road to the unsayable. I
will be the act of weaving. You, the leopard of multiple horns that
has just now appeared on the green brocade and is observing it all
like a herald, enigmatically." -María Negroni

Tara Aisha Willis is from Chicago, also majors in English and Creative
Writing, and thanks her parents with her whole heart. Sometimes
movement and language, space and the page are indistinguishable to
her, a tendency she'll explore further living in NYC after graduation.
The piece is partly based on Negroni's poems and paintings by Remedios
Varo: she hopes she's created a landscape on stage for you to dream
in.

Welcome!

Welcome to my website! 

Here is where I will be chronicling all projects that I'm working on in dance, writing, editing, performance, research, and anything else, where I will post about any other exciting shows and events of other artists I admire, know, or work with, and where I'll point out random observations and discoveries that strike me (and that I hope will be striking to you as well!). A living notebook/datebook of my work and work that fascinates me, and the serendipitous details of people and places that could (and should!) come to inspire creative work. Please enjoy!

-Tara.