It's Sunday today, and we all have the day off after ending the first week of the residency.

Dawn and the dancers have been working furiously to make to materials. The best thing about this process has been the way it opened up in the previous few days. Typically, as creators, Dawn and I are both tend to plan and think about what we're making before we make it. But in some ways this stands in stark contrast to our heavy interest in improvisation, especially in light of the way we use the techniques we learned from the late Scott Kelman -- techniques which will figure heavily in this performance. (For more on Scott, see http://www.kelmangroup.com/)

In this regard, I think she had a couple of powerful insights this week which are going to be very important to this work.

First, she started talking about "making material like I improvise". Everyone who has seen Dawn's improvisations knows that shes marvelous at it... but it was quite impressive to see her take that same moment-to-moment thinking into the process of creating movement, going from one scenario to the next scenario, acting/reacting to each wicked acuity to the implications of what had just come before. In the end, this led to the creation of a _lot_ of material. Good or bad -- that's to be decided later. But the volume of stuff we have to investigate is tremendous.

Second, she (and with her, all of us) have really agreed that the notion of making choreography in the traiditional manner is simply not going to work for this piece. With the looping process starting to come into focus (record an improve, impose the looping structure using Isadora, dancers learn the looped material) it simply has become clear that "steps" are not what is important. Instead, the movements that are most compelling when looped are far more offhand than that.

A couple of days ago, we were recording (with the intention of looping) an improv with all of the dancers where they chose some movement to perform. Lucia chose to simply remove her t-shirt. I keyed into this, and asked the dancers to form a straight line in front of the camera, to remove their t-shirt and drop it to the floor. We then took this video and made a very simple shifting loop -- one of the loop forms where a loop of fixed length moves through the videotaped material, slowly revealing the entire movement. Everyone in the group recognized that the result was quite powerful, requiring patience to experience, and recontextualizing this simple act into something much much more. (We're going to get this video posted on the myspace page soon so that you can better see what this actually looks like.)

This moment was a kind of tipping point, because it's set into motion an investigation of very simple and pedestrian gestures as the source material for this piece. And that will be quite a departure for Dawn movement wise; one that I personally am very eager to experience.

So we start week two with a load of material, and a lot of nasty complicated loops for the dancers to actually learn. They're really such a great bunch, because the process of learning this material is crazy hard. But when they execute it really well, it looks just incredible.

One last thing: last night Peter, myself, and two of our interns (Jennifer & Beth) built an interactive installation in the 3LD window. (The main theater space is on the street level, and you can open the curtains to reveal the space.) Mostly this was just for fun, but it was also because this theater is so new, nobody in the neighborhood really seems to know it exists. We thought if put this up it would be a nice way to "introduce ourselves" to the locals... anyway, we're going to start running this every night. I've uploaded a couple of pictures on the myspace page so you can have a look. If you're in lower Manhattan, I invite you to come down and have a look.

Ciao for now,
Mark