I believe that music acts as a partner to dance. In The Grass is Always Greener… one finds an overlapping of layers so that dance, music, and the poetry of the lyrics intertwine to create the multifaceted and profoundly human characters you see on stage.  However, even without understanding the lyrics the audience can still connect to the rhythm and melody of the music. The musical accompaniment for The Grass… helps to create the dynamic characters and vivid scenes that…

Masters in Dance vs Professional Experience

By Anabella Lenzu

Titles are titles, papers are papers, but if you truly know your field, you know it.

It doesn’t matter what title you have.

Artists feel obligated to pay approximately $40,000 dollars to enroll in a master’s in dance degree program, because they need to find stability, a home, time to research,  and learn the tools to be…

Part I: Passion and Ignorance

We talk, in this country at least, about following one’s passion, but I think we don’t mean it. Or rather we mean it only insofar as our passion comes with a 401(k) or can lead to a…

In her Practice Manual for the Six Viewpoints, Mary Overlie describes the practice of Doing the Unnecessary as “a movement exploration that should be extended to breaking logic of all kinds…performers are permitted to be obstructive, non-cooperative, or minimally cooperative.”

My favorite memory of Mary providing an example of the Unnecessary was at the dinner table in Basin, Montana. We had cooked up some steak and asparagus and potatoes and onions. The sun was setting…

Brink, photo courtesy Lorene Bouboushian and Laura Bartczak.

I would feel remiss were I not to offer a PSA in service of Dixon Place--a delightful space founded by Ellie Coven, now occupying a small albeit noteworthy segment of the Lower East Side. One enters through an old door which opens without the expected wooden heft or squeak of hinges. If the floorboards don't creak in reality, my memory has assigned the…

Polina Klimovitskaya, master teacher and theater director, has for years been beset by requests that she write about acting. Having started studying with her in January of 2004 and joined her Terra Incognita Theater in 2005, I have been the recipient of a rare kind of apprenticeship. Among my duties has been penning the majority of the…

Janine Antoni Lick and Lather (1993). sculptures installed at the New Museum.

The Performativity in Everyday Life. Identity and the Presentation of the…

"The first step of technique is separation."

"The slower you go the deeper you get."

SHAPE:



A moment into our journey as we travel further within Mary Overlie's Six Viewpoints Practice Manual.

Of the six materials (space, shape, time, emotion, movement, story), we have documented a foray into…

I am making a dance called Still Left On This Rock.

Still Left On This Rock looks to unearth experiences of irreconcilable loss. Inspired partly by the subterranean limestone caverns of Virginia and the cathedral-like caves of Myanmar, the work excavates perceptions of timelessness. Internal landscapes emerge as three women…

The Ten Minute Exercise

It is the actor’s job to be an acrobat of the human condition.  They must access the limits of themselves, consistently coming to a full emotional life.  It is…

Still of special request: CP by Rebecca Brooks …

This past October, I was hired as a performer at New York City's Museum of Modern Art for a three week exhibition by the French choreographer, Boris Charmatz. During my last week at the museum, I was standing and watching a group of performers in motion surrounded by hundreds of museum goers.

A woman in her early…

According to David Deutsch, the transformation that the Enlightenment brought to modern scientific thinking was not scientific tests (any dumb theory is testable), nor philosophical empiricism (the senses lie), nor a challenge to authority (it had been challenged before), but a tradition of critical investigation. Enlightenment thinkers and scientists finally began “seeking…

 Having somewhat familiarity with Karen Finley's work, most recently to note, having seen her perform at the Pussy Riot defense team…

 Photo by Charlie Winter

You Will Make A Difference is a theatrical work that performed eleven times between October 19 and November 11, 2012. An ambulatory performance staged progressively through several spaces in the West-Park Presbyterian Church, where the audience moved together through a prescribed path following the…

VIDEO #6: "Open Work"

VIDEO #6: "Open Work" with audio commentary

 …

this series of articles will focus on our experience of the six viewpoints, frame by frame, as we experiment in rehearsals with material from mary overlie’s…

VIDEO #5: "Isolations/Impulses"

This is the fifth of six new video documents of Massimiliano Balduzzi's solo physical training for performers. These videos document a research in solo physical training developed by Massimiliano Balduzzi…

photo by John Dransfield

Tahina Spectabilis, otherwise known as dimaka, is a rare and endangered kind of palm that flowers itself to its own death in northwest…