Reflection on the Retreat

I thoroughly enjoyed the retreat. It was so great being able to have the time and the space to focus on one task instead of trying to multitask, Job, Life, Family Friends, Roomates, and the multiple other projects we are all working on. We could all pour our energy and creativity into souly being dancers for leimay. It was also awesome to have the time to consistantly train and challenge our bodies. I noticed a vast change in myself physically…

Our time at Mount Tremper was an artists' utopia. Creating and rehearsing for 12 hours a day, eating fresh fruits and vegetables from the land, engaging in constant conversation and drifting off into a deep sleep from total exhaustion. …

This fits. This feels right. 



Is it the shape of things that determine what fits, or do we shape things to make them fit? When shaping ones own body there are always limits. The mannequin in the window will always wear it better. Creativity is bound within the walls of your figure. My shapes are often made to not fit everyone. They fit me and only me and even then they sometimes escape my control. And yet I can be fitted to. But only if I let you. No, only if I fit…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_junction

So I basically just wanted to mention how awesome and complicated and important cell communication was. That a billions of individual cells have to find a way to be self contained and yet still have lucid communication with eachother near and far. Which allows muscles to contract, electricity to go through our neurons, hormones to regulate our bodies, cells to…

When confronting the concept of BORDERS there is a relationship that I feel is necessary to investigate before defining the term. That relationship is the dichotomy of natural and unnatural borders, the difference between them, and how they interact with each other to divide the world we live in.



A great mountain range is a perfect example of a natural border. It is a collection of pillars created by the movement of the earth. These pillars control the weather that we experience,…

Paige Fredlund, Kaia Gilje, SELF PORTRAIT

The work that the magical duo Kaia Gilje and Paige Fredlund practice and perform can be put into a hybrid of non-literal descriptions that match their qualities, intentions, and curiosities: that of archeologist, avid collector, ecologist, fascinating organizer, object fascinator, superb listener, focused baker,…

In this photo: Michael Abbatiello and Bre Short. Photo by…

Jo-Ha-Kyu and the Discordant Aesthetic

As a young man in my early twenties I spent a year living in Japan. What brought me to live there was my determination to deepen my training in a Zen sword discipline called Iaido. At the time my Japanese language was quite poor, only surviving with rudimentary phrases. Luckily, the philosophy of Japanese martial art training was observation and practice. Hardly anything was explained, its theory, philosophy and execution…

I was going to write this article on the use of Viewpoints in the creation of performance. For those of you who may not be familiar with the technique, the Viewpoints is an improvisational performance tool, which evolved from postmodern dance. Its founder, Mary Overlie, took the two main elements used in stage performance, - time and space -…

Border are created for organization, for protection, for control, to simplify understanding. Borders are indicative in how people create identity, for example this is where I end and YOU begin. Borders can create something like barriers they can be indicative of a beginning and an ending, they can be an illusion. People create borders based on a myriad of different reasons. It's almost a human instinct. Borders can even be created within oneself, for everyone is made of a…

Borders are a symbol of consciousness.  Of our attempts to understand.  To draw a border is to define something, by clearly delineating it from what its not.…

Kaia Gilje, Lorene Bouboushian, Photo by Laura Bartczak

{“BRACKETING OUT” - a term created by Esther Neff; see below: paragraph 9}

Lorene Bouboushian is one of the most engaging, raging, and wild artists in Brooklyn and NYC pushing the limits of the cross-breeding genre of dance and…

Photo of: Bre Short and David Glista, by Catherine Jaeger

Community Is The New Kale

by Kate Ladenheim

“Community is about as buzzy as kale,” says my best friend Bre Short, who also dances…

This is a test.

The Female Body in Conflict

 The body is where identity coexists with gender. Exploring the concept of ‘the female’, feminist artists used the body as a locus of both imposed and inherent womanhood. Postmodern feministS confronted the idea of an essential female nature and instead argued for femininity as masquerade. The female body is rooted in the sexual.…

Eleanor Antin uses the body as material for her art piece Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1973). This work of art comprises 148 black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s loss of 10 pounds over 37 days. Every morning she was photographed naked in the same four stances to record her barely perceptible self-induced weight loss. Antin’s performance purposely toyed with the traditional process of Greek sculptors, who were said to find their ideal form by chipping…

Performativity and the Body: Physicality, Materiality, and Trace

Chris Burden. Trans-fixed (1974)

Going further in the study of the symbolic action in Contemporary Art, I encounter a…

While re-staging The Grass is Always Greener… during my fellowship at CAVE this year, I found myself fascinated again by use of quotidian gestures—the gestures that make up our daily lives and influence our interactions with the people around us.  Throughout The Grass… you will see gestures plucked from the ordinary events that help make life meaningful.  The dance is also filled with gestures that exist outside of particular events and have acquired meaningful…