Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry.

Next week I will be debuting my latest piece of choreography, "What the Flock?"  The overarching theme of Flatland Dance Theatre's upcoming concert, "LOL: An Evening of Humor and Dance" is...... oh wait, it's on the tip of my tongue. Don't tell me.....So a mushroom walks into a bar and the bartender says 'we don't serve your kind in here.' And the mushroom says 'Why not? I'm a Fungi!'  nyuk nyuk nyuk. You get the idea. But choreographing a funny dance? That's hard. Dramatic dance may be more up my alley. A bit of angst a bit of yearning, the right lovely music, a lot of beauty in line and form. Presto! Well, maybe not that easy, but it flows more easily when it comes from that little spot in my brain that likes to wallow in whatever that term is for pleasurable sadness. Just go ask a Romantic poet. Or Radiohead.
 My personal favorite angsty dance that I ever created was done in 1994 and was called "This Portrait". I used the music of Pearl Jam and a Kronos Quartet version of Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" to create a concept piece about the disintegration of a family. I am still proud of that work and it was created using high school students, plus my own two children, aged 6 and 9. I had a wonderful, expressive student named Mitch in the lead role (with my son, at age 9 playing his younger self) and the whole work just fell into place inside my head and poured out, Mozart-like, in a sudden gush of creativity. I have it on video (courtesy of good friend, Jim Goodlett and his clever filming) but have yet to get it up on the internet (I presume that entails a YouTube account). But I did take some stills from the film, frozen in pause on the TV set, old school style. Remember this is pre-digital so lots of grain. It's like looking at the Zapruder film.

This was basically a prodigal son story beginning with a stiff family portrait upstage left. My daughter is the tiny girl far right, but more about her later. A family of five dressed in black and white, including the lead dancer as a boy sit very still, as if waiting for the camera to flash. Downstage right our protagonist is estranged from the family. Cue music: "Indifference" by Pearl Jam. As he dances the family begin to break apart, Dad leaving first, slowly departing the stage until only the younger boy is left. They have a brief duet, older and younger self. I was proud of my son for being so heartfelt at age nine. The family is replaced in the chairs by a ragged looking bunch of female ballet dancers.

 Cue the inner demons (on pointe) to screeching Hendrix music played on violins, like a surreal Hitchcock sound track:

At the end, the prodigal crawls backwards on his hands and knees to the family, who have reappeared in their original pose, and gently lays his head on his mother's lap, like a pieta, but it's only an illusion. Cue "hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away...."

I think I nailed it on that dance and it doesn't happen often. People did cry. Yes!!!

Jump to 2012 and now I'm trying to make people laugh by turning dancers into sheep. I was happy in 1994 to make people miserable. Now I want to hear that reassuring chuckle, titter, giggle, snicker, or guffaw when my little sheep start to perform. Is that Ba-a-a-a-a-a-d of me? And my little tiny six year old daughter? Well, she took the following pictures at my rehearsal of "What the Flock?" two weeks ago. Super digital clear.

I will also be making a brief appearance in my own dance, a la Hitchcock, as a sheepdog, because you're never too old to publicly humiliate yourself.

WTF, Val?

T is for......

.......the indestructible T-shirt. I recently went through some dresser drawers because they were a tad stuffed and chaotic. Most of what was taking up all that room were collections of old T-shirts. And as I pulled them out, most of which were now abandoned or turned into night shirts (hence my tendency to only buy pajama bottoms) I realized that most of us don't really set out to collect T-shirts, as opposed to say ceramic kitties or thimbles, but somehow there they are, dozens of them taking up space.  Most of them were bought to commemorate or advertize an event. In my case, dance concerts or art shows. Sometimes it was a souvenir of a place I had visited or a rock concert I had been to. And that's not including all the freebies that various organizations sent, usually to entice me to save an endangered species. As I pulled and sorted, and sadly let some sail into the trash bin, it became a short sweet trip down memory lane. The oldest memory being THIS hideous specimen, and yet one so full of love and friendship: my 1973 Sweathog shirt worn by our little clique of dancers at TTU, Luke, Diann, Larry, Steve, Roxanne, and myself. We were the college edition of all those cute ensemble shows on TV complete with all the drama. Lots of drama.

Here are Steve, Larry, Diann, and Luke in an alley near First Baptist Church on Broadway in 1973.

The rest of my T-shirts seemed to be from the late Eighties and through the Nineties and beyond. I collected many many (can I say many?) Lubbock High dance T-shirts over the years, usually because we were using them as fundraisers and promotion tools. Not that we ever raised much money or got much promotion. So it always is in the arts. I designed this particular one. It's still a comfy night shirt:

Rock concerts or a new record album release usually entailed a purchase:

A trip somewhere:

 This was a good memory of my time as a dance counselor at a summer youth camp in Healdsburg, northern California. Beautiful wine country scenery and a chance to hang with my friend, Julie. Yes, Juliana, I still have this shirt and it's nearly transparent now. Soft as butter:

Sometimes a T-shirt becomes the ultimate example of wabi sabi. This one was 'borrowed' from me (I bought it in 1994) by my daughter in 2006 when she went to college. This is what four years of art classes does to clothing:

And even when the original T-shirts are tattered and torn and soft as gauze from hundreds of washings they can still have another life.  They can be cut and torn and then quilted, crocheted or knitted back together. Or they can simply become a scarf:

Did I throw that Sweathog shirt away? No, I did not.

Death and Art

Yes, I still actually have a blog here even though I haven't written in awhile. Well,  I've written some really great things in my head but now they are lost to the universe so what's left is a bit sparse. It's deadline time. I have a fluctuating deadline for my commissioned quilt so it's by the wayside this week as I get ready for two Day of the Dead exhibits coming up that have FIXED deadlines. Oh October. The season of the Skull. I'm not even sure I like what I've done but since I'm committed they'll have to be ready, varnish dry, by this Friday. If someone didn't set those deadlines for me I might never finish anything, because, in truth, I either get bored or dissatisfied by most of my work. And then once it is turned in, once it is to appear in public, I then get anxious and want to tear it off the wall and cover it with gesso. "Don't look! Turn away!"
  With that in mind, here are a few deathly images:

Death and the Maiden....just a small section of a larger painting.

A Catrina that I keep changing the colours on.

Some falling leaves on a canvas that has yet to be completed.

I don't care what anyone says. Art is hard. And sometimes, no matter how many hours of sweat you put into it, and how many dollars in supplies you waste, it fails.