entropy. redress.

My friend and collaborator Rhonda Soikowski, who works on the edge of performance practice, embodied research, and pedagogical innovation, recently asked me to participate in her current project titled entropy. redress.

Rhonda invited collaborators to create short video pieces incorporating a single red dress that criss-crossed the globe. Shortly before I got my hot little hands on it, the dress was ripped untimely from the land and disappeared into the Mediterranean. Our small constraint reduced to none, myself and my collaborators Joe Moore and Beth Hersh took to the beach to try to reach towards the lost object.

Click on the image below to see the results of our work. How Rhonda will incorporate it into her piece is still unknown, but it was a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of the journey.

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

Towns Like Ours End in Fire

Please enjoy Towns Like Ours End in Fire.

This piece was directed by me with sound design by Beth Hersh (in collaboration with Sigur Ros) and video by Joe Moore (in collaboration with San Francisco weather).

It was shot on location at 84 Athens Street.

It is dedicated to Emmanuelle.

The video is six minutes long and starts with twenty seconds of black. Keep watching! It's paced more like a modern dance piece than like a Youtube video. Thanks for viewing.

"Be Friends!" Or, love and collaboration

Beckett's radio play Words and Music concerns the collaboration between the titular characters, who work together to satisfy the musical desires of their lord. Commissioned by the BBC in 1962, it was a collaboration between Beckett and his cousin, the composer John Beckett. The project was apparently somewhat fraught, and after the original recording, John withdrew his score.

My girlfriend, who also happens to be one of my closest artistic collaborators, spent eight hours today remixing excerpts from Holst's "The Planets" into 33 distinct sound cues for our version of Words and Music. Sometimes I count the number of hours she spends designing and wonder why the director gets top billing. At 10pm, we tech'd through the cues. Despite the late hour and our limited vocabulary discussing symphonic music, we fell into a productive and pleasurable rhythm: "I think it should cut off after the 'dum dum dum!'" "The first 'dum dum dum' or the second one?" "Well, definitely before that xylophone comes in," "Yeah, there's no xylophone in Beckett."

For me, love and collaboration go hand in hand. Finding someone I click with creatively is like finding a new lover. When I feel that spark lit, I start fantasizing about when we can next work together and on what source text. Like with a romantic relationship, you can't fake a good collaboration. Trust and communication can be built over time, but it all starts with a recognition and a pull, the thrill of similarity glimpsed across difference.

Words says to Music at the top of the play: "How much longer cooped up here in the dark? With you!" But by the middle of the piece they are singing together, breathing meaning into sound, improvising a new path through the dark space between them.