Performance Pix

Aeric shot these at dress. Check out more by him at aericmg.com.  Enjoy…

Time to Reflect

Well, the first (and we are determined that this is but the first) performance run of lie, lay, laid is history. We are very happy with the realization of the work. Onward and upward.

Just after the weekend, I had to run off and teach, while Lynn Marie taught our two marvelous interns Brighid and Melissa the duet material originally performed in Chicago last month. They performed as special guests for our friend Alison Russell, who runs a MARVELOUS school on Long Island. Anyway, that’s why follow up has been slow, but here we go, in an effort to capture and document the experience. We will begin with the following photos of our lovely set, with special thanks to Jay Ryan our lighting designer, Illya Azaroff our set designer and our third WONDERFUL intern Dave.

Show info one more time

Remaining performances are:

friday, june 13 @ 8 pm

saturday, june 14 @ 4 pm

saturday, june 14 @ 8 pm

sunday, june 15 @ 2 pm

Tickets are $15 for students/artists…$20 for everyone else

46 Walker Street between Church and B’way in lovely Tribeca

Great post about show

We invited  Steve Luber to our dress rehearsal on Wed night, and he wrote a really great thoughtful piece on the work.  You can link to it at :

http://obscenejester.typepad.com/home/2008/06/we-spend-a-thir.html

We’re off and running!!! Come see the show!

Liminal State

I’m in a liminal state. 4 days in the theater. Arranging, painting, choosing, oh yeah, dancing. Putting the pieces together, in a space that bore no trace of our presence before we started.

Build some platforms, paint the floor. Hang lights, focus lights, cue lights. Space the dance. Mop the floor. Rehang the house lights. Choose a color, go buy the paint. Paint the floor again. Oh yeah, dance. Whats the focus on that move? And that? How about that?

How can we add the slide? Should Carlton’s costume change? How about Lynn Marie’s and Uta’s costume? What is the action for the final light cue? Can we do that again? Time to dance….musicians are here, some seeing the piece for the first time. What can we say to convey the days, weeks, months of decision making on the physical construction. Ljova (our composer) is pretty fluent in the piece. But performers have questions. What are we thinking? Good question.

What color should the platforms be? Is that light cue a 10 count or 5 count? Wow…I just made a connection to that transition. Want to do it again so I can hardwire it…but there’s no time. Photographer here…here to help, as is the lighting designer, our interns, our set designer, our dancers, what do we want them to do?

Run over. Second of the night. Didn’t know last week if I could run it once. Just did it twice. Back is tight. Calfs are tight. Knees are stisff. Still some problems, some concerns, some decisions to make. What looks best? What’s in the way? Can we get what’s in the way out of the way in order to make it look good? Who’s on the complimentary ticket list? Who’s coming? How is the program? Are we forgetting to thank any of the marvelous people who have helped make this happen very step of the way?

Time to paint the floor. Third time. Bit now it looks VERY good.

It isn’t just about making movement. We have stretched, revisited, and been engaged in a process that demands care and attention to EVERY detail, and I love it. I’m in that state right now when nothing matters more than recognizing the thousands, if not the millions, of choices we have made that have led us to this place.

Tomorrow we hand it over to an audience, for just 5 performances, and it kind of makes me sad. They are going to judge it (as they should), they are going to accept it or reject it (as they should) and then it will be gone. As of 11:30 pm on the night before opening it’s still all ours. That changes tomorrow, and while its energizing to share it, there is a part of me that wants to hang onto the choice of colors, line, material, quality, arrangement, sound, experience just for ourselves. I’m invested in every detail. And its over in five days, existing only (we hope) in the memories of our audience. A new show comes in, we leave, and there will be no trace. Who said its fair?

Dancers

So, FREEFALL is pretty much a pick up company. We have a number of friends and collaborators with whom we work, in shifting constellations depending on the project. For lie, lay, laid our dancers are Carlton Ward and Uta Takemura. They are dreams as collaborators, easy to get along with and forgiving of all the rough patches we go through in rehearsals.

Digression here…They can’t be avoided I’m afraid (the rough patches). The best one can hope for is someone with whom you can struggle through it together. We are lucky enough to have two.

Lynn Marie and I met Uta back in Grad School, NYU’s Tisch Dance Program. She is simply a marvelous dancer and a wonderful woman to call a friend. She makes anything we give her to do both memorable and striking. She currently dances for a number of folks,including the large ensemble Mark Morris uses in Allegro and Hard Nut, and Pam Tanowitz. She is versatile, clear, unaffected and expressive as all hell.

Carlton we met when we shared a showcase with Jody Oberfelder (for whom I used to dance) and we loved how he moved. Sensitive, strong partner, centered and clear mover, and he can act. Well, Jody was nice enough to share him, as was Circus Amok. You see, Carlton also juggles, walks on stilts, balances things in the most unlikely of places, and generally completes physical feats I can only dream of.

We are lucky to have them.

Collaborators

FREEFALL is quite the collaborative endeavor. We were founded on collaboration, and continue that philosophy throughout our process. Next post I’m going to focus on our wonderful dancers, Carlton Ward and Uta Takemura. But today, its the rest of the team. We count ourselves lucky to have such a wonderful set of collaborators on lie, lay, laid. Where to start?

Illya Azaroff is friend, philosopher, trouble shooter and maker of things. Check out his design firm at dccstudio.com.

Ljova composes lyrical, deep and affecting music. He composes for films as well. You can get to know him better at ljova.com

Aeric Meredith Guojon is an old friend and MARVELOUS photographer. You can see what he’s about at myspace.com/aericmg.

Jay Ryan…lighting designer beyond compare. I need to find out from him how to know him better. However, he is definitely worth knowing better.

Ok…I’m trying to keep things short and sweet. More tomorrow….

Coming together

I tend to get pretty wound up about two weeks from opening. The material that we have so carefully gathered no longer makes sense to me. I forget what it was that made me really want to do the piece in the first place. Questions mount, solutions are harder to grasp, and all I see are shortcomings.

This time around, its been particularly bad. Even affected my sleep, which is pretty rare. Sleep is something I can usually rely on. Not this past week.

But its been a good week in rehearsals. We’ve been solving problem spots, addressing questions, reworking and tightening the material to reflect our deeper connections to the piece. And at the end of rehearsal today, we FINALLY have a clear, clear picture of how this work needs to wrap up. Its been particularly elusive this time around, and we have tried very hard to not stick an ending on this. The sections have come flying in from all directions, and we have been trusting that the threads that brought these sections forward were connecting to one another, and now we think we have a vision of what it leads to.

It came unexpectedly, after we had run all the material we have so far for our composer Ljova. We listened together to a song that had been suggested as an ending, and as we took it in, and discussed it, an ending that was markedly different in tone emerged. It feels more complicated in feeling, less describable in words, softer in energy and much more distilled as an image, than previous plans have felt. It feels complete, and it feels like an unexpected realization of impulses that have given rise to the emotional core of the work in rehearsals.

We discovered something today…its what this is all about, but it doesn’t always happen. It has taken a year of physical work to come to this distillation of the finished work. I’m simply ecstatic it didn’t take us a year and two weeks.

Here’s to everyone out there looking to figure something out. My hope for you is that the answer comes in time for you to implement it. Thanks.

PERFORMANCE TIME CHANGE!!!!!!!!!

Our June 15th performance of Lie, Lay, Laid will be held at 2:00 pm, not the previously advertised 8 pm.  This can be explained in part by the number of bar specials available on Sunday Evenings,  This gets us out sooner.

Hope to see ya’ there.

FLYER

Click to enlarge…hope we see ya’