This project has been made possible by a grant from the Creative Arts Council of Brown University.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

process/product

As rehearsals at the Arcade happen more frequently, I am constantly reminded of how blurry the line between process and product is in this undertaking. As far as passers-by are concerned, these "rehearsals" could be performances. Every time we are down there we are intervening in the same way that the performance is designed to; our rehearsals are really a series of performances.

We now have a series of ways in which the vignettes connect, and the challenge is to now get used to those relationships so that the dancers can really feel comfortable in remembering how they relate to one another, and start to really play with the performance of them. The dancers have come up with so much interesting material at the site, and my challenge is to now bring our and highlight in the piece as a whole those moments that make the individual sequences so powerful.

In a sort of similar experience to what happened a week and a half ago (although this was less surreal for me), we were again on the Weybosset portico when a man standing in front of the doors observed, in a somewhat surprised manner, that the Arcade was closed. He said that it had been such an icon in his childhood, and when I asked, he said that had been in the 1980s shortly after its re-opening. He said that he had worked in the pizza shop at some point (or perhaps I misheard him and he said he went to that pizza place a lot). Unfortunately, I can't accurately remember the details he was telling me, and did not ask him if I could document his words in any way.

Today was the first really cold day that we were down there (~45F), but it was a beautiful crisp, clear and sunny day:

Sunlight on the railing of the second floor balcony, Weybosset side. Photo by Timothy Simonds, 28th October 2011.

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