Yesterday we had a great little performance at the Fourth Arts Block's FAB Festival. Outdoor stage, street fair style. Unquestionably an audience that was primarily not familiar with us, or maybe even unfamiliar with our physical vocabulary and ideas. There was a guy in the audience who seemed to be titillated by the "intimacy between women" aspect of the Head Dancing that we presented. But all in all, I think it went swimmingly. It felt good. And because of the street fair styling, I was not as bothered by the 3 minutes of this, 8 minutes of that kind of mixed bill set up that often drives me a little nutty. Because in a theater, when things sit back to back that are totally unrelated to each other, I as an audience member feel the need to either manually veer into new mindsets for each new piece, or I feel that I am unable to connect with works that are not aesthetically familiar terrain, and I am not well positioned to view each new work objectively.
Not so in this street fair/festival model. Already it is sensory overload. People are milling about, chatting, pausing to watch, and performing elsewhere down the block. Each new work is part of a chaotic collage. The Head Dance, I think, is ideally suited to this environment. It can be watched in a detailed way from start to finish, but if you pop in & out of it, you haven't necessarily lost your mooring in the meantime.
Performing the improvisation with more dancers, as well as having muddled the original text (I am For an Experience by Claes Oldenburg) with injections of Daniel Lepkoff's writing on Contact Improvisation and Virginia Woolf's writing on women served to recreate the chaotic collage within the work as well.
Video to follow soon on Vimeo.
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