Better Late Than Never

After an extended period of missing in action, I’m back by necessity. I’ll go mad if I don’t exercise my mind. I’ll be a danger to society! Most of this can be blamed on a few roadblocks in the LA transition--I credit my Parkour group for teaching me to metaphorically hurdle them. I moved downtown after some residential fickleness, found a venue to work with, and found a soulless part-time job to keep me on my feet. I'm cheered by two of the three.

That being said, I haven’t been totally absent from classes and performances. (Only mostly absent.) BOXeight gallery on Washington Boulevard in east downtown LA has kindly agreed to let me vend their space to movers: dancers, choreographers, yoga instructors, b.boys. Anyone. (Call me?) It’s a little hurry-up-and-wait, but it’s glorious! I can’t get enough of the creative vibe and solidly local art scene that thrives at the place. The recent encore of last year’s “I Think It’s Art, I Think It’s Fashion” came to pass the Saturday past, and went off without a hitch.

Um... not true.

But the hitches were belated art labels and a little snafu with a wine company, so apart from that the event went off quite well. Great art. Live music. A hell of a performer, Aimee Zinnoni (here's her most pertinent Google result), bringing live installation to an otherwise mostly pose-oriented scene with her performance art and body canvas.

(Now I wonder: is this making sense? My thoughts get compressed when they’re withheld, but I'm not sure they ever get from coal status to diamond.)

Less satisfyingly, but in the same weekend, I biked the two or so miles of Alameda to Farm Lab! The DANCEbank Facebook group and its stalwart manager Meg Wolfe brought a workshop to my attention, one with the pillar of PoMo that is Simone Forti. The gorgeous septuagenarian brought a classic pair of workshops to 2009 from her heyday three decades ago.

That was the good and the bad of it.

There’s a lot to be said for drawing dance material from sources (texts, improvisation, and so on) alternative to traditional codes and norms. It’s created some of the best work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That being said, those are $25 I can never have back again, spent on the very most basic extrapolations of texts and improvisation for movement performance. It felt like being transported to the roots of a tree I started climbing in college! I understand that I was aiming for more revolutionary a class, taught by someone I’d assumed picked up some new tricks and re-formed the practices she formed in the first place. Expectations change everything. The workshop was a classic instead—without my prior expectations, I’m sure I’d have been tickled? I think? It was a worthy experience, sure, but only because I was using the same floor as the living, breathing topic of many an academic discussion on dance history.

So that’s that! The third and final installation of new works is coming up at REDCAT this weekend. After two weekends of making excuses for my absence, I’m finally ready to lay down the dollars for a little brain-tickling. Maybe this time my response will be more punctual?


LADB