This year I’ve turned to everything, and dancing. Dancing in the studio alone in January of 2022, and dancing in the studio with people, again, for the first time since 2019. I did not think it would take us three years to get here. If there’s a tagline (for me at least) regarding the pandemic era we’re not quite out of, it’s “everything takes so much more time than you think.”
Short term projects became long term projects, like the zine series I’ve made about Viewpoints. I’ve never studied Viewpoints, the series is a pedagogical practice of imagining what something is before you meet it, letting all your personal assumptions about big categories spill out. I’m glad this series took so much patience, it allowed me to share it with Nico Norena of The Million Underscores before I push it out into the world. Nico learned from and worked with Mary Overlie for a long time and sharing this project with him helped me to be sure that its playful nature isn’t at odds with the seriousness of her work.
I got surprised by a number of little projects this year too, movement coaching, making flyers for AUNTS (thanks Jess Pretty). When you’re alone in a studio re-examining the entire archive of movement compiled over a pandemic - dancing in the woods in Georgia, dancing on your rooftop, alone in a studio, alone in your living room - these projects kept me tethered to the here and now.
Currently I’m working with my favorite choreographic element - time. Looking at the past (what I made with no outside eye) and the idea of the past. Ruins, monuments, memory. More updates on this process to come, and of course, the attendant fundraising cycle.