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?

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

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.

Right up my alley...

Recently I've joined the delectable process of Sarah A.O. Rosner and the A.O. Movement Collective as we research and move around some things I happen to love thinking about: bodies in interaction, the different language we use to describe similar actions (one example, pornography versus intimacy), and the effects of specific spaces on the bodies in question (i.e. a bed versus a studio).

I'm attaching a link to the latest newsletter, in hopes that you will not only enjoy seeing my name in fancy blue letters, but also reading about the work and the Collective itself!

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Happy-Thanksgiving---New-Work-.html?soid=1101693655818&aid=Yp1DuN5v9ik

"Slight Rupture"

Some questions that I am tackling in my solo piece (finally) that has a title (finally) thanks to the Schomburg Library uptown. If you haven't visited their Photographs and Prints archive, please do. But come prepared with a random time period or theme you'd like to research (all with the basic premise of "black people," of course), and they will hook you up...

Like the iconic photograph of Gordon, the escaped Mississippi slave who displays his raised whipping scars, his back to the camera, face partially obscured by shadow, the visual image gives us the power to point to our bodies and force the viewer to bear witness. But do we become anonymous by making ourselves into visual symbols of a lived experience? Do we come to harbor in our bodies the stereotypes, assumptions, and interpretations that visual images carry with them? What narratives are lost when only one moment in time is recorded in a photograph? What do we neglect to see and witness when only one part of a body, or a history, is pointed out? In an 1859 slave auction advertisement, a 25 year old woman is described as being “slightly ruptured,” coded language for a body burnt out by repeated childbirth. Do echoes of these “slight ruptures” still remain embedded in our bodies generations later?