So Much to Write, So little Time

So, I am getting a computer!!! Woohoo, Finally!!

As soon as I do, I will write about:

• my recent involvement with the SITELINES Festival production of Yoshiko Chuma/The School of Hard Knocks ACEone, a site-specific dance performance to take place July 7-8. I am serving as their Production Assistant. lmcc.net, http://yoshikochuma.org/
  
• working with the East Village Dance Project for the upcoming performances at LaMama, http://www.eastvillagedanceproject.com/
  
• Olsi Gjeci takes over the LaMama Moves! Dance Festival 2010, 8.00pm June 18 + 20 at the 1st Floor Theater, http://lamama.org/
  
• The Movement Research Spring Festival, http://movementresearch.org/performancesevents/festival/
  
• The Trisha Brown final lecture in the Talking About the Work Series, in which Stephen Petronio talked about being 19 and being a new dancer, meeting Steve Paxton and seeing Trisha's work for the first time!
  
• a series of articles I am currently thinking about dealing with dance, money, being young, american dreams falling apart, and more! (haha this post is like a commercial for my blog-to-be)
  
• Seeing the Marina Abromovic retrospective at MoMa
  
• my rehearsals with Kat and Olsi and updates about our growingly successful Saturday Dance Jams!!
  
• My upcoming performance of They Taste Good to Her at Triskelion Arts Center, June 27 at 7.00pm: 118 North 11th Street, 3rd Floor.

All this + more during the next month here at the independent mover shaker!

In the meantime, read this: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/sitting-with-marina/?hp 

very best,

m

vimeo killed the radio star

http://vimeo.com/indemovershaker 

check out my new vimeo account... well, don't-- yet (i have no vidz since i do not have the resources) but keep it in the back of your mind for the near future.

vimeo. the new youtube?




-liss
 

downtown dance bliss

after coming home at 2.00am from the movement research 2010 gala the other night, a few things are apparent:

• i am part of a super cool dance community where the people i aspire to be like (ie, vicky schick, levi gonzales, lucinda childs, etc.) mix and mingle with fresh kids straight out of university (cough:: me!). the sense of heirarchy known in the dance community is not overwhelming here. everyone was on each other's level.
  
• celebrating DANCENOISE, those amazing 80's punk punk chicks creating dance and pioneering dance videos . they totally rock. and like to get naked when accepting awards.
  
• dance party!!!!!!!!! at judson!!! talk about awesome!
  
• realizing that i am a part of history, being in a room surrounded by movers i have read about, thought about, and hope to one day perform on that very floor for realz.

-m

monster

listening to verdi's requiem thinking
of you as the world turns
fast like a spinning top
the stucco wall bears weight
of warm summer air
the cooling down
the winding---
the sweet serendipitous you
holding me, the cooling

like oedipus through the cracked earth
half blind with splitting tongues
i struggle toward the moment
where the water meets the sand

reaching for your hands, those
that i see in my dreams
reaching for mine

the poems of bedsleep and wine
of your eyes in the darkness of the room
i wake up sweating with an absence upon me

you're not here.

melissa west makes things ii.


So, this is the way the world (universe, multiverse) must work: everything is transient, constantly in transition, and therefore nothing is ever solid. Not even you or i. I read in the God Delusion (I must find the exact passage to cite it,) that one physicist theorizes we are not the beings we were in the past because our atoms and particles are not the same as they were even a moment ago (because they are constantly changing). I am not presenting this theory as complexly or accurately but I found it absolutely fascinating that me as a child, sitting on a chair or eating my mother’s supper was a completely different (physically) being than the girl (woman) who stands here today, writing this blog while she should be working (though there is nothing to do). So, the transience. now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though one who fears change (as I do) can construe it as such.


I miss my grandmother. She passed last year. I just had a fleeting memory of eating hamburgers in their backyard during the summer months—having a barbeque. Her birthday was in the summer, I remember the cake. The warm summer air, the firecrackers in the distance. They grew tomatoes and cucumbers. The smell of the garden. My grandfather still grows things; he was in the local paper for having the best homegrown vegetables in all of Staten Island. My father told stories of farms scattered throughout the island when he was a child. They had chickens, even. A rooster crowed at dawn.


I want to make a dance. A duet to the song Moon River for sentimental reasons. This summer I will be spending a large portion of time at The Yard, a dance colony on Martha’s Vineyard. Having never danced away from NYC, this will be an experience I am dying to uncover. Of course, I am terrified: of living away from this city, of traveling alone, of not seeing my friends or family for two months, of missing things here.


My heart is melancholy, dear reader, for a number of reasons. I miss being a child, I miss people who have came and passed, I miss Staten Island in the summer and the docks and tranquility, I miss being special (to you), miss writing poetry, having bangs, miss having pretty clothes and miss dancing every day.

The other day I told Mary Ellen that I hate this city, I am frustrated and cannot wait to leave. The truth is, I don’t hate NYC. I love it, perhaps too much. I think I feel such love for NYC, I don’t want anyone else to have it. No one. No hipsters, tourists, people who move here and have it easy, no one. Just me. I am sure many native New Yorkers (particularly those with strong emotional and creative ties to this place) feel similarly at times, so that is why I am posting my feelings here. I suppose the same goes with dancing or making dances; I want to make them. No one else but me.


Now, I realize how selfish, irrational, and ridiculous these feelings may sound and I by no means feel them all the time. I am just going through a heightened sensitivity where I am realizing how possessive of things I can be. I do not mean it to be a bad thing and am working to figure out why I am like this. I think I can love something so dearly that it becomes so intensified (glorified, even) and have pains of separation. Perhaps these are things everyone (or most) feel at times.


I am feeling just so sad and creative and just want to use it. so, I’ll be making things. Stay tuned.


-m

knowing you is complicated
a video by mary ellen carafice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_TPkK0Iz2s&feature=player_embedded 

this video surrounds moments captured during the creation and performances of Knowing You is Complicated choreographed by Mary Ellen Carafice and performed at the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse this past March.


Enjoy! :)

Pictures from They Taste Good to Her

These are some of the photographs taken by Walter Jalbert of my piece, They Taste Good to Her, performed April 8-9 2010 at Hunter College and scheduled to be restaged at the WAXworks series, Triskelion Arts Center- June 27 2010.

These were just some of the photographs. I will post video as soon as I have the resources.

Some people to formally thank regarding the creation of this piece: Barbara Mahler, Jeff Collier- the lighting designer, the Hunter College Dance Company, Sarah Melot, and Walter Jalbert.

More to come!! :) It was a beautifully staged piece. Let's hope the next time is just as great.

photographs from dance jam 1, may 1 2010 
photos taken by Anjola Toro

a day at the races
upper east side socialites take over hunter college

I had the utmost pleasure of house managing an event today at Hunter College. It was a music recital for local, manhattan (and london... and occasionally jersey city) bred youngsters playing the piano as virtuoso-like as they possibly could.

What I could not get over was how grown up these children were; they had i-phones and do-dad's, make-up, and designer outfits. The boys were looking sharp in their argyle. They all emulated their socialite/wealthy musician/upper east-west-greenwich- parents.

I was in awe of what it must be like to be born into privilege; of what it must be like to wake up in the morning and already be in manhattan; of what it must be like to take a cab instead of the god-awful underground railroad.

These kids, some of them talented, some of the divas, some of them who should not quit their day job, kept it real. They got up there and remained calm, breezed through mistakes, did not cry or fuss. 

I did find it expected that many of the parents, obviously, were musicians or stage-mom's who unsecretely wanted to be performers. The latter never cease to ignite my deepest loathing. They are the most obnoxious, gucci bearing, unattractive creatures to ever be spawned out of the arts. 

happy mother's day,
m

melissa west makes things
a brief entry

so, everything i learned in college i am quickly tossing out the window. this is because experiential learning, i feel, is the most effective guide to formulating one's criteria for living and creating.

so all of those textbooks and rules and rules for rules sake turn out to all be a hoax. i read more books in the past year than i ever did in college and i'll say, i did alright.

the god delusion by richard dawkins was a radical experience for me. i recommend that book to everyone. it took me two years and nights of staying up and contemplating but it is a brilliant treatise on why organized religion is at the root of our hatred.  

the taoh of pooh, i read this on the lawn at union square park during the late summer of last year. letting go of inhibitions and perceiving the moment as the fluid motion it is... sipping tea with the sunshine. diggin' that.
childhood was a complete wave that ebbed and changed. one day my daddy fished with us, the next he threw things at us.

i did not dance until i was 19. i used to play music but the music always moved more than it played.

-m