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@isaidnotnow

[isaidnotnowdab]

Playground was one of the pieces part of the cast of The Luna Troop collaborated on for the July 2012 show. It was wonderful to work with the other dancers, and we made an extremely playful, laid back, fun dance to mix up the more serious pieces (including the one I choreographed), on how while sitting at our office jobs what we really needed to do was run around and be merry/silly.

[isaidnotnowdab]

Three Statements on a Place is a dance piece I choreographed for The Luna Troop's summer show Places in Chicago, IL (July 19-22, 2012). Inspired by Pablo Neruda's "I Like for You to Be Still" and thinking on the ways in which we become attached and unattached from objects of desire.

[isaidnotnowdab]

ACTIVE FORGETTING: Pieces of Disappointment, Redemption, and Tenderness (2012) was a workshop and show at Paratext Books co-created and curated by Ali Feser and myself. We invited community members in Bridgeport, Chicago and friends to participate in creating a small piece of their own, based around an object that held a significant emotional charge, as "storied" object. Participants would write a short prose piece during the workshop (or otherwise), either real or fictional, that explored this emotion, and then photographer James Toftness would help them stage a photo of their object. Thus, each piece had three components: object, story, and photo. Not all the pieces were documented, unfortunately.

[isaidnotnowdab]

Nothing

I read this poem at EAR EATER #15, part of the EAR EATER series held at Paratext Books, during the bookstore's last night.

Nothing

What separates you and me and me from you What separates us from them is nothing. Nothing separates us. And that is a problem.

Because nothing is more solid. Nothing is unbreachable, unbypassable, unsurmountable. Nothing cannot be sidestepped. Everywhere, there is nothing. Thick and unbound, sliding into all mouths like syrup.

When daydreaming at work you imagine yourself furiously scribbling poetry in your notebook or on post-its. Or maybe you imagine yourself typing. Or on a sunny beach, Ray-Bans on, sun changing the color of the hair on your body and brine smelling strong, sour, and lovely. But you don’t imagine the nothing that surrounds you, in the dream. That comes on its own. It fills the spaces in the imagination. You don’t imagine the nothing, but it’s there. 

It fills the places between your fingers and between your fingers and the pencil and between you and between me and between us.

As children we are shocked to learn that 70% of the world is made of water. And that 70% of our body is made of water. But no one ever talks about nothing. Most of the world is not made of water. It is made of nothing. In living rooms, in bedrooms, in buses and trains, mostly nothing occupies most of the space. 

There is nothing in the bedrooms of the people we sleep with. And their living rooms. Or cars, where there was room and we made our bed and they made their living. Even in rooms with high beds and low hanging ceilings, nothing.

In those rooms and in your room, most of the space is nothing.

[isaidnotnowdab]

For the month of May, 2012, Ali Feser, Marian Frost, Kathryn Olson, and myself, transformed a small storefront into Paratext Books as part of VersionFest. In addition to books, Paratext featured magazines and other publications from local authors. We hosted workshops, readings (in particular, the EAR EATER series, where I read some of my work), preformances, art openings, screenings and story hours for kids, and always requested participation from the community. You can still check out the wordpress site and the facebook page.

[isaidnotnowdab]

Blog post I wrote for my former job.

[isaidnotnowdab]

Inverted Tango was part of a short film I wrote, co-directed, and starred in about a couple and their behaviors as their romance wanes. Orginally mean to be performed live, it was choreographed in 3 weeks with the assistance of a tango instructor--neither of us had ever tangoed before. Song is "Zum" by the legendary Astor Piazzolla. (full details on vimeo page)

[no-leaving-newyork]

The problem with conceptual art, he (Smithson) said, was that it made ideas into fetishes by isolating them from their material surroundings and thereby capitulating to and extending the traditional ideological function of art for the bourgeoisie: it further denied or obscured the role of the art object in the marketplace and hence further divorced art from life. The central premise of conceptual art, he argued in an unpublished text from 1972, was not art-for-art’s- sake but even worse: “production for production’s sake.” Where art-for-art’s-sake had still relied on a notion of “quality” (albeit a very mystified and abstract one) to justify itself in social terms, production-for-production’s-sake could dispense with the interests of the audience altogether and justify itself simply on the basis of the work it performed, on the basis of its own abstract productivity, “like a B. F. Skinner rat doing his ‘tough’ little tricks,” as Smithson quipped in another.

Not sure I'm 100% on board, but very compelling.

Blake Stimson in: Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, ed. Michael Corris (via no-leaving-new-york)

[isaidnotnowdab]

Vinyl for a performance of a series of gestures meant to challenge expectations of everyday interactions orchestrated by artist Rachel Ellison as part of her MFA graduation show at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts. Documentation forthcoming.

[isaidnotnowdab]

A piece I wrote in July 2011 on including artist interviews in museums, and questions surrounding its effect on visitors’ experience of the galleries. Click the link above.

[isaidnotnowdab]

As part of a performance piece by artist Anna Elise Johnson, a group of performers (myself included) forcibly occupied the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business wearing masks of a portrait she painted of Milton Friedman. February 2011.

[isaidnotnowdab]

rehearsal for Put in My Place, part of the December 2011 preview of The Luna Troop's yearly show in Chicago, IL. I'm in the shorts.

[isaidnotnowdab]

Poem from 2004

(untitled)

I

Standish sacro-saint our ponytails slit in the wind across the wood our toe-shoes shattered leaves

these, like us, were bred before Technicolor they shuffle, shift, soutenu and the landing is almost as safe as being pupilless because of it, our bow never decays.

II

I cotton you but all we wanted  was to dress like boys in the army and writhe, our hands in our thighs invisible inside the pea coats

III

Because often things hover Red Taking one to know them and

chinese-box likerussian-dolled out mirrory

a tutu can seem like a hut top from afar  or a moon

and if a gaseous spirit malingers in the wings

[isaidnotnowdab]

I helped stage manage the Cuestón de Fe performance event and assisted artist Lorena Peña on stage with her performance, La Última Cena on April 22, 2010 in Lima, Peru. I can be seen in pictures 1, 3, 6, 7, and 8 wearing a white shirt, holding a food tray and a napkin. Click the link above.

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A video I helped develop movement for and starred in as the Robot. It was screened as part of a performance piece entitled Mi Perfil: Yo, Yo, Tú, Ellos y los Otros at the Fundación Telefónica in Lima, Peru in early 2007, in collaboration with techno-art-performance-pop collective Corvina. The abject chaos and anxious silliness is intentional, not accidentally low grade.