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.

"Unhinged"

Just found out my short short fiction piece, "Unhinged," will be published in the fall 2009 issue of Decameron, a literary magazine put out by Pen and Anvil Press, specifically devoted to stories under 1,000 words. Thank you to the magazine's editor, Sean Campbell, and to my various writing teachers at Barnard!

DTW Van Lier Fellowship!

Right after the beginning of my 22nd year of life rolls around at the end of August, I am so thrilled to have just found out that I will be starting a very exciting year with a Dance Theater Workshop Van Lier Fellowship!!! A version of their Outer/Space Creative Residency Program, which gives choreographers access to studio space in the outer Boroughs of NYC, among other things, the Van Lier Fellowship is designed for new college grads of DTW's partner colleges. With a Programming internship at DTW, 100 hours of studio time, a grant/stipend, and an amazing mentorship opportunity with an NYC choreographer in my future, year 22 is sounding ridiculously better than it's cracked up to be. Having become a fully legal adult has definitely lost its glimmer in comparison.

Thank you so much to the Barnard Dance Department and Mary Cochran for making me eligible for this program, and to the board at DTW who selected me and my project proposal for this opportunity! Looking so forward to learning a ton about arts administration and to exploring repetition and silence as results of trauma and past experiences, in terms of both movement and language. Check out DTW's website and an article about the Fellowship from when it began last year.

http://www.dancetheaterworkshop.org/blog/2008/09/09/launch-of-van-lier-fellowship/

"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 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.

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.