whoa to april

I had no idea that it had been this long since I've updated this blog. Since the last posting, the main event for The Moving Architects and I has been a two-week teaching/performance tour in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan- an experience that I am continuing to unfold/uncover/unhinge/unwind from as I start spring quarter at Ohio State. We continue our Skyped rehearsals, the mediums becoming more familiar to me as I become more familiar with the technology and particularly ways of seeing. I am very intrigued by how this new work PLUCK is unfolding. I feel that the work is defined in my mind as pre-Central Asia, and is now living in the post-Central Asia mindspace. And I have come to embrace the differences in the original vision, and how the vision has reshaped to fit the realities of its making. The main theme I was very intrigued by when embarking on the project was Power. We see the struggles in politics, social dynamics, work places, acadamia, etc etc etc. A fairly broad topic seeable and feelable I should think to everyone. It works us up, makes us indifferent, pushes us, or makes us complacent. But since our trip to Central Asia, I feel like this topic has opened up for me with new images, attitudes, and accepting realities as best as possible. In Tajikistan, the architecture felt glued to my eyes. Dushanbe in particular (the capital) still largely a city of Soviet architecture. The metal fences still surrounding buildings from Soviet times, visible on the street and as exteriors of balconies and buildings at every turn, looked at first decorative and then like rows of bars/barbed wire. A quietness in the streets, with all men wearing suits in public, and women dressed in color and scarves, a contrast of daily life I have never experienced. Wide sidewalks, huge buildings again a contrast to the lovely hospitality and giving nature of the people. The great divide of city versus outside the city in both countries - hardworking people doing there best in their country. Countries that have only had their independence from the Soviet Union for about 20 years. This is just a taste of the present and historical Power I felt buzzing on a grandious scale through the landscape and the people, raw and not made into a 30 second news clip. No commercials or a pop-ups or a single chain store. None of it was in my LonelyPlanet travel book, and likely no foreseeable history book.

I was interviewed by BBC Persia while we were in Tajikistan, and WAS asked if I was going to take any of their famous Tajik Dance and put it into my dances. Besides my high sensitivity to appropriatation, my first internal reaction was "no". For what I realized as I spoke, is that I am taking the line and form of the architecture, the tones of these countries, the knowing that everything is not going to resolve, everything is not going to deconstruct. I find in this work that we have worked on piles of small ideas that I try to weave together. On paper they weave, in rehearsal, no weaving. What I am finding is a comment I received from our first showing in February, it is interruption. It is a work of interruptions, a reality of my (and likely your) everyday life, yes, but also the world that has been opened up before me. I have these amazing experiences - with dance, our company as a community, those who were with us everyday and their stories and ways, those we taught and performed for - and throw in lots of dance acadamia on more levels than I have patience to type, and the business that is life with technology connecting these things together at a clipped place - and the processing of the knowledge is only through interruptions. That is what this work is. It is a new set of realities I am experiencing, and it lives in the work.