Tag: choreographing

M is for May and Matryoshka (tattoo)

MatroyskaTattooProgress_AngieFey

May has been epically busy, and in addition to my usual exploits, I got inked! Yes, tattooed, me. I always wanted one when I was a teen. However, being a practical creature and an obedient dance student, I thought I might regret it and also piss a bunch of teachers and choreographers off. But actually, I regret not doing it. And since there’s no time like the present, I researched artists last year, found Angie Fey at Archive Tattoo in Toronto and fell in love with her work. You should check it out. Extraordinary. Whimsical. Colourful. Charming. I wanted 4 Matryoshka dolls; I love them, their secret stacking, their folk-arty-ness, all the symbolism potential.

MaytryoshkaProgressView1_AngieFey

And it has been started, my left forearm is officially hardcore. The outline is done and June brings colour. I am in love with my little dolls, representative of family, carrying images of things precious to me. Wearable art — and a great conversation piece I’m discovering already! Does the moustache not charm your pants right off?! And the flowers. And the variation in grey. The little cheeks. The pleats in the scarf knots. Sigh of contentment.

Other adventures this month included a bunch of dance work with Simcoe Contemporary Dancers for their show Departure. And, you know, I managed to choreographed a work, costumed a few pieces, do lighting design and assistant stage manage some shows. I love love love me a dance show, but honestly! Over-commitment is my middle name me thinks. Truly soul filling work though.

I’m also getting prepped for sewing commissions, which include: costuming the New Actors’ Colony Theatre company in Bala, ON this summer, a couple of dance shows in Toronto, and 2 wedding dresses! Plus my own sewing work (ha ha). And the usual mothering. Ahem. Working from home with an one-and-a-half-year-old is insane. I constantly over-estimate how much I can get done, but this period shall pass, I know. So I mostly put aside my own work and just hang and nap and do things that don’t involve pointy objects during the daytime! My shop can happen any time, the little man will grow past needing me like this very soon, never to return to this magical/overwhelming time.

Rearview Friday: Costume Dolls

I was talking about dolls with a friend last night and my mind wandered in it’s dusty reaches to recall some of the dolls I’ve made in the past. I think it’s time to share these little ladies for today’s Rearview Friday!

I made them, wee versions of us, as a gift for my co-choreographer Lindsay Zier-Vogel on the premiere of our dance work Edith and Eliza in the spring of 2006. The dolls are based on Waldorf dolls (that’s right I was a Waldorf kid! And I have a deep sentimental fondness for these little dolls with the simple faces). If you want to know more about Waldorf dolls, I found a lovely how-to here by Amber Dusick, who also happens to be the brilliant lady behind Parenting. Illustrated with Crappy Pictures. I am a big fan. You probably should be too.

Anyhoooo, back to the dolls: in addition to sort of looking like Lindsay and me, the dolls are dressed in tiny versions of costumes from 2 of our collaborative dance projects, seen in full size and context below. As you can see they each have an envelope. This is because part of our creative process for Edith and Eliza was to actually write and post letters to each other as “Edith” and “Eliza”, fictitious war brides we created to develop a story behind the dance. Some of the text from these letters was woven into the soundscore as a narration. Each letter snaps onto the dolls hand and actually has a wee letter in it. Because I am awesome. And obviously humble. But seriously, it was a really fulfilling creative process. The the doll making was a cherry-on-top project in the fun department.

The dances that the doll’s costumes were made to honour:

Susanne Chui and Jennifer Dallas in Whistling Matilda, a dance film by Rhys Brisbin, Susan Kendal and Lindsay Zier-Vogel, 2004. Photo: Linsday Zier-Vogel.
Susan Kendal in Edith and Eliza by Susan Kendal and Lindsay Zier-Vogel, 2006. Photo: Ted Zier-Vogel.

And lastly, our lovely selves with the dollies. Just before we went into the theatre for the premiere. Edith and Eliza and the costume dolls were the last major dance and crafty-sewing projects I worked on before becoming pregnant and a mommy. Feels like a lifetime ago, but not in a bad way. Just a “huh” way. Life was so utterly different then!

Susan Kendal and Lindsay Zier-Vogel outside the Winchester Street Theatre, Toronto. Showing off the costume dolls just before the premiere of our work Edith and Eliza, part of the Series 8:08 Season Finale, May 2006. Photo: Andrea Roberts.

Cheers to art, all kinds of it, making our lives so full. Happy Friday folks.

Dancing Semaphore

A late afternoon session at my sewing machine, buried in piles of netting, finishing the costume for my current dance project Semaphore:

I’m excited to be presenting this new wee solo Semaphore tonight and tomorrow, at a coffee house presentation put on by students of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre (my Alma mater). I’m friends with Megumi Kokuba, one of the current graduating students there, and we decided it would be fun to work on something together for her last student coffee house. We settled on Semaphore Flag systems — in both English and Japanese — as an inspiration point.We choreographed together, Megumi is performing and I’ve made the costume and set, comprised of giant paper airplanes (it was fun learning how to fold them online. I was never a big on making paper airplanes as a kid, so I had to look ’em up, now I’m hooked).

Megumi models the costume in studio B (I have spent many hours of my life in this room, taking class, rehearsing, teaching class, choreographing, sigh):

The work literally uses Semaphore Flag positions to spell out the words “remember” and “solitaire” in English and Japanese. We created choreography using the flag symbols as a starting point, tracing their lines through the space. We also walked the points used in semaphore flagging across the floor. Megumi and I worked fast (we spent just 3 hours in the studio together, yikes!) due to mad schedules for both of us and I’m really pleased with the result. The music we used is by Buck 65, a fantastic Canadian artist. Both his music and lyrics in the song Paper Airplane speak to me of longing and reaching across space and time. A beautiful, lilting song, it felt like the right fit for this dance.

Check out a 3 minute clip of Semaphore I’ve compiled on vimeo. It was filmed during the tech run, first time under lights and with the “living set” of 3 dancers that walk with paper airplanes across the space and around the dancer throughout the work.

Rudi and Gene (3 1/2 years and 6 months respectively) both came to some of our rehearsals and also sat through the technical and dress rehearsals — they are superstars with focus and patience that belie their years and months. They actually enjoyed sitting in the dark theatre (for the most part, Rudi was a bit freaked by the super-dark between dances and the cheering from the fellow performers attending rehearsal) and watching the magic unfold under the theatrical lighting. Rudi’s quiet little wonderings were so charming, “Where’s the music?” (a legit question, oh contemporary dance in silence!), and “I see ghost shadows!” (oh massive shadows thrown by theatre lights!). As a mom it’s so rewarding to still be able to practice my craft and involve my wee kids in what I do. I love that they won’t remember the first time they attended a theatre event, it’s just part of their lives.

Well, as we say in dance before the show, merde (instead of break a leg, that’s for the theatre folk) and may your weekend be gorgeous.

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Click here for details on the show Coffee House: Dark Roast.

An Earthy Day

I am starting today with 2 things I love: soup making and contemporary dance. Food from the ground and feet on the ground — with consciousness and artistic purpose. A lovely way to enter the week.

I’ve got a pile of beautiful organic root veg (here they are enjoying the March sunshine!) begging to be made into soup. I shall oblige …

… and a deadline to have a wee solo completed for a performance this weekend. I’m working on a dance for Megumi Kokuba, a graduating student from The School of Toronto Dance Theatre‘s Professional Training Program. We’re collaborating on this solo for her, using both English and Japanese Flag Semaphore as a starting point for choreography. A dress is in the making and there are 3 huge paper airplanes as the set. I hope to share some video of the work later this week. In the meantime, feet-at-the-ready for final choreographic touches, which may or may not get settled on in the kitchen while soup making, just sayin’:

As per my post last Monday, I’ve spent the past week working on being conscious and present in the task at hand. Embracing or finding the simplicity of a job, a moment in time. And while soup-making and dance-making may seem disparate partners and dividers of attention, I think the cooking will provide some contemplation space for choreographic editing since the dance really is done, I just need to consider finishing touches, the editing of the movement and structure. And I think it’s working, this being present business; I seem to be a happier, more satisfied, less yell-y/cranky, exhausted and sad version of myself both as a momma and simply(!) as a being human. Happy week to all!

Rearview Fridays: Paint Sample Art

Today’s Rearview Friday is my paint sample art — a piece I made to brighten our bedroom wall last year. I’d found a stash of leftover paint samples from another project (which I describe below) and the muse woke up!

It’s an quick and dirty way to make a beautiful (if I do say so myself!) piece of art. I think I’ll make a how-to for it soon, so stay tuned!

Now why did I have a stack of paint samples tucked away? Press on …

When I present my dance work, I like to make unique program inserts, something to treasure, a little piece of art that supports the dance. In the spring of 2008, I created a dance about Achromatopsia (colour blindness). I used paint samples as my program inserts and put a quote from Dr. Oliver Sacks on the backs of them, a teaser to whet the audience’s curiosity. I’ll eventually include a Rearview Friday post about the dance, a piece called A|Chromatic.

The quote is awesome, I’ve gotta share it too:

“What, I wondered, would the visual world be like for those born totally colour-blind? Would they, perhaps, lacking any sense of something missing, have a world no less dense and vibrant than our own? Might they even have developed heightened perceptions of visual tone and texture and movement and depth, and live in a world in some ways more intense than our own, a world of heightened reality – one that we can only glimpse echoes of in the work of the great black-and-white photographers? Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence? I could only guess, as I had never met anyone completely colour-blind.”

Dr. Sacks wrote about Achromatopsia in his book Island of the Colorblind, a fascinating read. I was drawn to explore the idea of colourblindness — black and white vision — in my dance project because my mother and aunt were both born with Achromatopsia. And in spite of literally growing up alongside someone so close to me whose eyes see so differently than mine, I was/am hard-pressed to imagine what the world is like through a constant black and white lense.