I am here, but not for long. I have not caught up on anyone's lives, either via facebook, eljay, twitter, vox, etc. And I won't until probably late next week. But hello for now?
It's been insane. Since I last wrote, we opened & closed the show, my parents have all come & gone (my sister is still here!), I've been to the Boundary Waters & back, etc. So much awesome that I don't have time to properly document. My sister leaves Friday and once I'm done crying under the covers about how much I miss my family, I'll probably start sorting & uploading pictures of our trip and maybe even write something about the overwhelming awesomeness of the past two weeks. I hope everybody out there is doing well! Enjoying the summer! Etc.!
I am a wreck right now. Physically tired, emotionally wrung out, over-caffeinated, under-rested. YOU KNOW. Making performance work is SO DUMB. You shun all your friends for six months straight so you can make a show for them to enjoy, you work yourself into a frenzy to make sure it doesn't suck, and then you stand around drinking wine and pretend like you were just Making Art For Yourself. God. Seriously. WTF. WHO DOES THIS.
In any case, make my year by showing up at MAYBE tonight:
MAYBE
Dances by HIJACK & Mad King Thomas
Thursday, June 18 (TONIGHT!), 8 pm, pay-what-you-can
Friday, June 19, 8 pm, $15
Saturday, June 20, 8 pm, $15
Sunday, June 21, 7 pm, $12
RedEye, 15 W. 14th St., Minneapolis
Mad
King Thomas has been working with HIJACK for over a year now, and it
has changed my brain, changed my relationship to dance, changed a lot
of things. Now we've got an evening of work to show you: Two halves
that go best together. I've been busting my butt to make this show as
awesome as possible and I hope you can spare an hour to check it out. Seriously--it's only an hour AND there is a reception after every single show. Free wine, beer & food! What's not to love!?
Here's a video on the show: Obviously the video below is too ginormous, so here's a link.
I had 8 hours of rehearsal on Thursday, Friday AND Saturday. Each. So, if you haven't heard back from me, that's why.
I have been somewhat beside myself with ...okay, I don't know how to talk about this. Prepare yourselves for some hippy-dippy dancer crap. But, here's the deal: I am rediscovering the joy of dancing lately, just letting all the tension and the bullshit run away in the face of my body's intelligence and energy. As clumsy as I am, as poor as my balance is, as tight as my muscles are, my body knows things. It catches me when I (inevitably) trip (let's ignore for the moment the body/mind dichotomy I'm rocking today). I love feeling myself get better at things, and I love remembering what it's like to really push for one specific thing--a long balance, a solid turn, a good deep knee bend, etc. Some of this manifests as a strong desire to take all my old classes (jazz, tap, hip-hop, etc.) and some of it manifests as a desire to take contact improv constantly.
It boils down to this: It feels awesome to move around, and it feels crappy to sit at a desk for 8 hours. As I danced less and less, I seemed to feel less antsyness, but as I am dancing more, I feel more urge to get up and move around. If we hadn't had people over last night, I probably would have danced my way through the Godfather II, whatever that even MEANS (I think it means rolling around on the floor like a nerd). So that's great, except for how it has made me more sensitive to the hours of sitting at a desk, to the slouching, to the carpal tunnel, et cetera. I'm getting desperate.
ANYWAY.
My family is coming to see our show! Have I mentioned this? I never get to see them as much as I want to. Plus we are taking a trip to the Boundary Waters when the show closes. Hooray for The Nature! Any suggestions for awesome things to do in the Cities are welcome. I have a big list but I like hearing other folks' favorites.
Okay, back to work. If you're waiting on a call/email from me, please know that I'm trying and failing to keep up.
I took my only night off in June to file some papers, weed the garden and sew a bag for my cell phone:
I'm kind of ridiculously happy with it. I used a sleeve off an old t-shirt I had altered and some ribbon I had lying around. It fits perfectly and protects the screen from getting all scratched. My first drawstring bag? A success! Plus it counts as one of the languishing craft projects for 101in1001. Yes!
The show I was in all month closed last night. We sold out every show, and thus I have completed my longest run ever (12 shows total).
I'm having a bike crisis, because Lysander is in the shop and they are full of bad news about braking surfaces and chain cassettes and other things. I've been thinking about getting another bike because every time I'm riding lately, it's not the usual, "GOD MY LIFE IS AWESOME" feeling. It's more the, "God, my back hurts. My butt hurts. My knees hurt. Did I mention that my wrists hurt? Wow, is my neck stiff" feeling. It seems like I could use a more casual riding position (and a wider seat, dang). Totally struggling on the anti-consumerism vs. comfort question. I haven't talked to the bike shop about it yet and I'm frustrated that they're talking about $400 worth of work on a bike that cost $350 in the first place. I am anxious and worried. It's great. I'm tired of feeling both suspicious and frustrated by bike shops. I have FIVE bike shops within walking distance of my apartment, and somehow I can't seem to find one that will take the time to get things right.
Paul and I decided we wanted to keep some of our herbs indoors, so in the last month, we've gone from one plant (a kind of ill-looking palm) to twelve plants: A small bamboo, a bay tree, basil, parsley, spearmint, cat grass, dill, oregano, 3 giant bamboos, and an aloe vera. I'm suddenly addicted to house plants, although we saw what happened to the fern I tried to grow (let us not speak of the ivy my mom bought me, or the cacti, or the flowering things...). The outside garden is also thriving. Plants are good and TOTALLY entertaining. I spend a lot of time rotating them and looking at their new leaves growing.
My family is coming for the show. This inspires excitement (HOORAY they are visiting Minnesota! I get to show them around!) and fear (OHGOD our show is crap what the hell they're all flying out to see the worst show yet). We did a showing yesterday that was oof rough! The feedback was great but dang the showing itself was hard. We only have a little bit of time to work on it and I'm....panicked would be a good word.
I'm still busy. Last week, in addition to a full work week, I had 4 performances, 8 rehearsals and 2 meetings. This week is only marginally less busy. I spent my only night off (last night) with Paul in the garden, busting our butts to get the seedlings in the ground. We did a good job, but I'm pretty sure my cold was peaking right about the time I was planting the red onions. It was awesome. I'd show you pictures of the wee plants, but I can't find anything, including my camera's memory card. The house is skipping merrily along to a state of chaos.
If you live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, you should come see the play I'm in all month long. It's called "He Woke Up In A Strange Place Called Home And Although Looking For Bed He Kept Finding Death Instead," and it's a Skewed Visions production by Charles Campbell. It's been great to work on. There's a review here, if you're interested. Shows are Fri-Sat-Sun all through May, at 8:30 and only cost $10-18. Limited seating means you have to reserve your ticket. Also, it's a play. I don't know wtf I'm doing in a PLAY but there you have it. See it now while it lasts, because after this no one will make the mistake of casting me in a play again!
God, I rule at marketing.
I fell off the 8 Days of Happiness wagon, and I'm three shows behind. Quickly, then! To the reviews!
Show #11: The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success), Cynthia Hopkins, Walker Art Center.
I left the theater in a pretty weird mood and then wrote some trippy space-time, life-death, faith-knowledge stuff that I am too shy to post (plus, I don't have to! This isn't some kind of writing workshop! Ha!) The second half of the show is raw. She is honest and there's rebellion in her. Watching someone enumerate their failings for you in clear, judgmental, but accepting tones is going to make you feel a little crazy and dangerous afterward. I'm not sure I liked it. I'm not sure I didn't.
Show #12: My Never Being Loneliness. Two works by Melissa Birch & Molly Van Avery, Open Eye Figure Theater
I hate to compare shows to one another, but these three all bear the comparison, since they are meta-autobiography-fiction (you know it when you see it?). It was great to see that genre done in three different ways--the extreme fiction/truth spectrum of Cynthia Hopkins, the poetic work of Melissa Birch, and the funny, surreal writing of Molly Van Avery. I am proud to live in a community that supports these two (and their collaborators, Maren Ward and Arwen Wilder).
Show #13: The Infinite Multiverse, by Chris Yon, Bryant Lake Bowl
Man, Chris does not shy away from precision. Daring to hit sound cues so perfectly. It sounds ridiculous but it's true--there didn't seem to be room for error, but it didn't matter because everything in the Ballad of Angry Dad seemed to click together perfectly. In I've Got the Heebie Jeebies, there was a long sequence of unison movement and I couldn't figure out if I was more astounded by the perfect unison of the performers or the shadings of difference that flared up because they were all doing the same thing. It was a trip, and uh, need I mention that his dancers (Justin Jones, Kristin Van Loon, Taryn Griggs) are crazy good at what they do?
(Pardon me for stealing my title from Trent Reznor's first tweet of today: "trent_reznor: HAPPY!" which I just find so hilarious and adorable.)
First, it started off with great news! Mad King Thomas was chosen for the best dance performance in the Twin Cities! By voters! People who vote! I don't know who they are, as I didn't know the awards were to be given, but whoever you are: what an excellent start to the day! Thank you!
Best Dance Performance in the Past 12 Months
Mad King ThomasIt's good to worry a bit when you go to a Mad King Thomas show—not about whether the artists might get hurt or what the critics will say, but how close you should get to the action onstage. During a Mad King Thomas program, the fourth wall is broken down with a sledgehammer, and everybody in the audience bears witness, at close range, to the glorious mayhem unleashed by the Sage Award-winning trio of Tara King, Theresa Madaus, and Monica Thomas. In January's Love Me, Love My Questionable Art at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, MKT shared the stage with dancers Sally Rousse, Hijack, and Galen Treuer. The evening's high jinks ran the gamut from high art to low, from twisted family stories to a doughnut auction—plus a post-feminist fashion show for good measure. King, Madaus, and Thomas owe their aesthetic to performance art icons like Karen Finley and Dancenoise, but they certainly have their own voices, and right now these women are using them to roar.
YES AWESOME HOORAY DELIGHT
Then...THEN I was in contact improv class and I got to start off with a warm up with KVL and EDL and we all giggled and it turns out I like giggling in the morning. And then some other fantastic dancing and flying and rolling around and sweating (augh, I love the pure, clean sweat of an early morning, post-shower work-out). We did handstands and cartwheels and I accidentally did a backbend but I feel GREAT! And then I meant to take the bus to work, but I accidentally just biked the whole way because the weather is unbelievably perfect!
Also, for yesterday's day of happiness, I saw my first daffodil AND it was Mad King Thomas' anniversary of being official! Even though I didn't see my other two, it was a good day to celebrate and be happy about.
My cell phone has a radio tuner and lately I sit at my desk and listen to the Current, and it thrills me. Yesterday they played the Old 97s and Pulp and I just can't get over how awesome it is. Even though I already knew that, it will be yesterday's Day of Happiness.
Sunday started off dreary and awful, but by about 6 pm, the sun was coming through the clouds and I had the cheesy revelation I always do, which is that the sun is even better after the clouds, when the world is all wet and cool.
I had a little bit of time before I needed to scurry to rehearsal, so I sat myself down for some timed writing. And I thought, Hey, I bought that secretary over there specifically because it seemed well-suited to typing AND hand-writing. (Let us avoid, for now, the subject of having the same job title as a piece of furniture, because it's Monday and I don't have the stamina to survive flying into a rage on a Monday).
Anyway, I sat and wrote a bunch of gibberish, but it was perfect. I have this mental image of a clean desk-space near a window where the sun could shine on me, and I achieved it. Plus, since it's a secretary, I CAN'T cover it with stuff, because it folds away and therefore must remain clean and shining and pure.
Desk love!
