YOUR MOTHER DANCES AND... RANTS

I haven’t blogged in a long time and I really don’t even have the time to do it now.  What I have been doing is constructing a file for my place of employment. I submit, they assess, and if I am unlucky or lucky (whichever could apply), I pass and get job security to teach as I have been doing indefinitely.  Currently, I am “probationary” and I am striving to be “indefinite.” None of this sounds the least bit actually stable in the verbiage…This process is arduous but also very helpful organizationally. I have had to write narratives for 17 different syllabi/courses I have taught since 2005 as well as organize all my personal materials from hand written thank you notes from students to all my professional performance programs and press. Going back into past thought processes and patterns of organization helps me to remember some very simple things.

1.     I have done an awful lot of stuff in the past 7-ish years....

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Two Words: Expressive and Inclusive.

Expressive: What we do in Dance is so specific to a set of values that many people never consider or experience daily. We discipline and train our bodies and minds in concert to convey and express thoughts, stories, concepts, emotions: art. Ed regularly expressed his gratitude for his own path in Dance to students and others saying that this dancer-life gave him such clear discipline and direction when he was young and not-so-directed. When I think of missing Ed, the things I grieve the most are not the possibilities of his leadership or his future artistic or community contributions (though they will certainly be missed). It will be Ed embodied--that beautiful, lithe, muscular, expressive body on which he spent so much care--that now feels so hard to live without. His presence, his voice, his gestures and gesticulations, his bodily, facial, and speech idiosyncrasies, his robust humor, the curiosity and generous life emitting from this person so trained and so born for expression. All of us who spent daily time with Ed as students, coworkers and colleagues can at the drop of a hat rattle off the precious ticks and manifestations of the joyful...

Tags: ed burgess

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I try to keep up with what is happening in Dance with a capital “D” right now and as I look around, I keep coming back more and more to choreographers of my generation and age. I am curious to know what they are doing and how they see things in this moment. I am curious to know what kind of work they are making now as opposed to say 10 years ago. If they are writing, I want to know how they are articulating their thoughts.

I became passionate about and was trained in dance during a golden era. Currently, the NEA and NEH are being barbarically hacked apart and touted as “frivolous” by the Sarah Palin tea bagger ilk (in solidarity to Bill Maher, I agree that I will stop calling them tea baggers when they stop calling healthcare reform Obamacare…). During my childhood and adolescence, our culture and government were supporting American concert dance and helping to disseminate it around the world (see previous blogs). How are those in the New York “trenches” talking about this steady strip mining approach to the arts and humanities? How are they writing and making work in response? More and more,...

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So we are home a few days before the Minnesota Fringe ends (tomorrow) and have all gone our separate ways. I think it is common to have some post show sadness depending on one’s role and the intensity of experience. Since I had very little time and very spotty access to our server, I didn’t get to do a daily recounting of our shows and our time there. So let me just say: it was great. It was great in so many ways. The following are arranged in a kind of non-linear order (but generally, modern dance is kind of like that) but are the reasons going to Minneapolis was a triumph for Your Mother Dances.

One: We made it through a very rough pre-show patch prior to even getting to Minneapolis. There was some drama real and imagined--my own personal drama was severely spraining my ankle 2 weeks before our first performance. It was bad and the punctuation on a hard week that included our Milwaukee area's overwhelming flash flooding (read my basement). I took myself out of the new piece, adapted a bunch of other stuff, began hardcore icing and rehabbing the ankle and we made it...

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For those of you trying to check our blog for information on the Fringe: I am so sorry! Our server has been giving us trouble and I have only now been able to connect. 

 Nutshell report: 

8 company members and I hit the road on Wednesday the 4th and opened at The Southern Theatre on Thursday the 5th. We have been told that our numbers are respectable for a first Fringe run and our audience reviews have been excellent. We have a rating of 5 kitties out of 5!! To check out our reviews, go to www.fringefestival.org, click on the reviews tab and scroll down to find us!

 We are about to hit the halfway mark tonight after our 3rd show and hope that word continues to spread.  

Minneapolis is a great town--arts friendly, efficient public light rail, beautiful public areas--and the weather is surprisingly HOT.  I am sure I will rant more about the vibe here because it certainly has us thinking and wistful. We are dancing at a beautiful theatre that is commonly rented for groups our size and small contemporary dance is possible in many friendly venues all over the city. What?!

With hardly any press...

Tags: elizabeth johnson, minnesota fringe festival, your mother dances

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This summer, my eldest son went on a school-organized trip to Germany with his oh-so-extraordinary German teacher and classmates. He is slated to be home tomorrow accompanied by same said teacher and classmates but also all the ambivalent feelings that arise upon returning to one’s home; if you have ever been away from “home” for a while, you know the mixed feelings of relief and disappointment that returning entails. Home is familiar. Home can be comfortable. Home is predictable. That other place you went was “special” and all your experiences and senses were heightened by its foreign-ness or perhaps your lack of “real life” and responsibility. While you were there, that is ALL there was and you could be “the you” you wanted to represent in that place and time, isolated in space, seemingly not related to your daily humdrum existence. 

How wonderful. No. Really. How. Wonderful. Everyone should have this respite, this recuperation and change from whatever his or her daily grind might be. My son temporarily escaped his obligation to schoolwork, his relationship to siblings and our family, his daily chores, and all the other unavoidable signifiers that remind him of his limited existence and choices....

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Wow. Has it really been a year since I posted a blog on this site? Sadly, I can believe it. Glady, I am now under happy obligation to update the Your Mother Dances supporters who have generously helped us meet a financial goal that will enable us to perform at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in Minneapolis August 5-11. The Fringe is an amazingly organized and vibrant festival; here is easy access to checking out what is happening and who will be performing all over Minneapolis from August 5-15: www.fringefestival.org. The online calendar is up and you can find us if you search under Dance in the various genres.

If this is your first time at my blog, maybe take some time to read a few older posts. I do generally rant--thus the blog’s name--and veer from topic to belief to observations political, familial, and artistic. No holds barred. I am very opinionated, sometimes very outspoken, sometimes very angry or sad about the state of my country, culture, or the arts.

I can’t believe I haven’t had anything more to say for a whole year but that year reflects a necessary time I needed to reflect both on...

Tags: elizabeth johnson, ymd, your mother dances at minnesota fringe festival

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Normally dancing is my metaphor, my way of expressing deep emotions and mysteries. Dancing can be my guru but it also often reveals to me my general sadness and dissatisfaction with the world and my relationship to things outside myself. And then I write. I write because I am driven to communicate and when one complex and abstract vehicle leaves my innards roiling, I need another, more direct way to express things. That’s why we all love Facebook and Twitter; we can get to how we feel in ten words or less and our readers and friends kind of know “where we are” immediately.

Generally, I love sleep--I rarely can get enough of it. But I am up uncommonly early this morning with my noisy thoughts and my melancholy.  My muscles are aching with that good-bad soreness from working in performance, whatever adrenaline or strain accompanies such, and my mind feels kind of the same.

My most recent joy was to dance a dance of Molly Rabinowitz’s called “Joy.”  It is one of the most physical works I have undertaken and simultaneously electrified and terrified me in performance. All the elements of this dance just worked...

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There are dances, there are good dances and then there are works of art.  In my experience, the life-changing performances I have been privileged to witness are precious and rare. Most of them have been performed live; some have been on video.  All of them are works of depth and surprise and iconoclasm of some kind--that raging against the machine moment when despite all gravity and natural law, some isolated period of time becomes elevated, isolated, elongated, and transcendent. Four of these said experiences have been performances of The Rite of Spring.

I bear a general awe concerning the history of this work, from the socio-cultural underpinnings of Nijinsky’s seminal version to one I witnessed recently, Marie Chouinard’s unremitting and mysterious treatment.  To see Rite of Spring with no historical context must make the uninitiated heads spin.  Stravinsky’s jagged, pounding rhythms and dissonance are challenging and terrifying still nearly a century from its premiere. The elements of ritual, human sacrifice, the power of the greater group singling out the sacrifice/victim, and the sheer exhaustion and repetition of the death dance all swirl in this unrelenting confrontation between the performers’ embodiment and the audience as...

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It has been a while. 

Wow, there are so many contexts in which this statement could be true--personal or professional. It’s been a while since I had time to ruminate, to sit, to ponder. All the rest has been the speeding train of my over-committed schedule intertwined with so many others’ schedules and needs. It’s been a while since I didn’t feel too overloaded or despondent to believe I had anything to write. It’s been a while since I told that nagging, prodding little guilt demon in my head to just shut up and that I intend to indulge in doing very little occasionally (including just writing for the hell of it).

It hasn’t been a while since anything I felt about dance and dancing has changed. Our world has continued spinning drunkenly around its tilted axis. Financial markets crashed, a new president was elected, certain peoples’ hopes for civil equality were dashed, high level executives got bailed out and kept their salaries, benefits and private jets, and regular folks lost their jobs and homes at record rates. Well, nothing much ever changes if you can see the pendulum from a wider angle--one other than the slow...

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