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.