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

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Vignettes, emerging

As I continue to work with the dancers, material is developing and the first vignettes are starting to emerge. The piece will be constructed of a series of movement vignettes that do not exist in a strict serial relationship to one another. There is certainly a logistical advantage to this approach; it is easier to coordinate two or three people's schedules on a regular basis than it is to get everyone together for every rehearsal. However the primary motivation for the vignette structure is its potential for realising in performance some of the theoretical underpinnings of this project.

There are many narratives that can be created about this site, many stories that can be told. My intention in undertaking archival research and talking to people about their experiences at the Arcade was to share some of these. But as far as the dance goes, I am not interested in forming logical progressions from one section to another where the result is a sequence of independent events from which a narrative can be formed. Rather, I am interested in creating an ecclectic collection of vignettes that overlap, echo, repeat, contradict, digress from and relate to one another-- a reflection of the research materials that were the starting point for their creation. The relationships between the vignettes will, inherently, always be both spatial and temporal, creating places within the place, and existing in a temporal dialogue with one another. These spatial and temporal dialogues are intended to highlight and realise some of the ideas I have laid out previously concerning the ways in which we conceive of and experience places; where places are always in flux, our experience of time is not linear, and we experience the intersection of time and place in fragmentary and shifting ways.

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