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While you are here, you may think about these ephemera as the bricks of an abandoned, half-finished house that have fallen away and scattered in the yard.
Wondering what's inside?
Click on the notebook to open it!
As you scroll on this page, you will find more ephemera.
Feel free to click at any time to view more.
the notebook
And you may imagine that after stumbling upon this house, you find some kind of larger meaning in it. So now, you are shuffling around the yard picking up bricks, pulling weeds, and planning what color to paint the walls. You want to make it the home it's supposed to be.
Notes on building things:
1.
There is the thing you want to make
and
the thing you actually make.
While I was working on this dance, I was curious about the relationship between dance archives and the language of movement. This interest led me to use archival practices as a method for creating movement. The ephemera you see here come from the archiving I did throughout, and of, my creative process.
The video you see now is footage of a rehearsal from March 2, 2020.
Keep scrolling to find the video log, then click for more ephemera like this one.
video log
2.
Sometimes the bones are good.
Keep them.
I wanted to know what would happen when I tried to capture movement which is intangible and evanescent within these materials which are concrete and lasting. Would the movement be properly be preserved?
From the beginning, it was only through this materialization of movement that I could come into proximity with the dance I wanted to create.
To develop the dance, I needed an archive.
So I entered a circular process. I generated movement and then captured it in writing, video, and photography. Then I used those documentations to inspire the movement that would go into the dance.
3.
You will question your designs and plans
Eventually, I had so much documented movement that I didn’t know what to keep in the dance and what to leave behind.
As I made choices about structure, music, and costumes, I became nostalgic for all the dances I could have made. So, I began to see these ephemera a little differently.
I said to myself, “maybe it’s okay that this phrase won’t make it into the dance.”
I think I’ve made peace with that kind of letting go. The choreography note I still have in my notebook describing the phrase when “the dancer reaches with fingers pressed as if picking a cherry out of a tree,” at least reminds me that at one point that movement existed and it was a part of a dance I could have made.
choreographic processes
4.
There are projects you will never finish
I never finished that dance or any of its other versions.
Now, as I look back on this archive of ephemera, I wonder if I’m still in some way “choreographing” it.
Sometimes I catch myself asking, “If I read that note and do the movement it describes, am I dancing the same dance it recorded?"
This is the same as asking if, once you lay the fallen bricks and paint the walls, the house is the home you fantasized it to be.
collaborators
5.
Sometimes others will finish the projects you leave behind
Now, I like to think that the dance is both unfinished and complete.
Which is to say, I'm not too concerned about whether or not this archive of the unfinished dance equals the one I desired to make. Because in the end—after all of this documenting and collecting—something of the dance comes across to you, and maybe that's enough.