Michaela Dwyer

performing arts worker, critic, educator

[mcdwyer]

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A post shared by Michaela Dwyer (@michaeladwy) on Mar 19, 2020 at 9:12pm PDT

I love every photo I see of Ellen Fullman playing music, young to old. (I do not know who took this one, where the grainy strands throughout make infinite her Long String Instrument.) Her album In the Sea was released recently by @superiorviaduct. To me it sounds like infrastructure waking up; the sweet stingy thrum that enables demand-making; the soft altered feeling & landscape of a burnt thumb nine days later. (She plays her instrument with rosin-coated fingers. In the studio, ballet dancers coat their shoes with the same material.) Sound making distance & vice versa. All is distance lately. I need cradles to confine my uncertainty & this could be one. Thank you composers!

[mcdwyer]

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A post shared by Michaela Dwyer (@michaeladwy) on Feb 20, 2020 at 7:59pm PST

in the cross-light outside the Ark, a space whose orbit holds all my hyperreal dreams of late: a flag hung outside a poorly ventilated rowhouse entryway, branches ensnarling a car suspended off a hill behind my office, a dance series co-programmed with a movie star, a flooded family vacation, not showing up to class, and in each dream: men apologizing to me, men apologizing to me, men apologizing to me.

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A post shared by Michaela Dwyer (@michaeladwy) on Feb 12, 2020 at 12:18pm PST

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A post shared by Michaela Dwyer (@michaeladwy) on Feb 5, 2020 at 10:24am PST

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A post shared by Michaela Dwyer (@michaeladwy) on Dec 18, 2019 at 12:56pm PST

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A post shared by Michaela Dwyer (@michaeladwy) on Jun 6, 2019 at 6:29pm PDT

[mcdwyer]

it was a pleasure to talk with improvisational movement + sound trio Paideia (@caitlynswett @end_breed @heyblakeney) ahead of their @DIDAseason work staged at @scrapexchange this weekend, which invites in multiple collaborators to contemplate belonging. Hearing Paideia talk about the interweaving of emotional & kinesthetic presence & accountability — particularly in the context of work that makes space for the processing of trauma — reminded me of one reason why I write about dance & performance: to explore and train myself to sit (and move) with what can feel unwordable — to try to do justice to its fullness, to contemplate the hierarchies of representation & my ways of reproducing or disrupting them. It came to mind, too, watching Shayla-Vie Jenkins dancing Cunningham last night in the 100 Solos celebration, beamed in via livestream to my living room in North Carolina — unwordable.

[mcdwyer]

Finally watched Barbara Loden’s WANDA — there’s a bootleg Portuguese-subtitled version on YouTube, if you’re interested. I get it, which is to say, I get the intactness of my pull toward Loden’s construction of this world & this woman (same same?) that leaves open all these little grainy holes to dial in & cling to — for me it wasn’t an active, intentional thing; I found myself already clinging, kinda zombie-like, since the first frame. (I had to get clothes out of the washer some minutes in, & couldn’t rid myself of the image of the car with all the kids in the backseat — not that interesting, but I was stuck, you know?) Maybe it’s partly the film’s hovering conversation and adoration — I liked Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden and geez I’d write a book on it all too — but something in the movement, the literal pacing, Loden’s slumped shoulders & shrugged hair, her waterfalling way of talking, her not glancing at the children in the courtroom, her North Carolina accent almost spiking through “I’m just no good, I’m just no good” — but I’m doing that thing some writers do (on this movie, on art “dealing with” women) where I’m cataloguing, and what I want is to convey the full thrall of the propulsion, which goes right up through the final shot: the gradual blackout, her face sinking into itself.

[mcdwyer]

ADF Review: Bill Young and Colleen Thomas & Co.'s Interleaving Is a Book We Want to Read Again and Again

Young's seminal dance piece was revived at ADF to great effect last week, paired with a promising but more mixed local production.

[stephenpetroniocompany]

YVONNE RAINER + TRIO A WITH FLAG (1966)

CHOREOGRAPHER: Yvonne Rainer MUSIC: “In the Midnight Hour”, The Chamber Brothers “[I was invited] to do something at the opening of the “People’s Flag Show,” an exhibition at Judson Church mounted to protest the government’s prosecution of gallery owner Stephen Radich for showing the work of sculptor Mark Morrell, which alleged by the prosecutor to be a ‘desecration of the flag.’  It was a huge show, open to anyone who contributed an art work using an American flag or its image. Jasper Johns, Leon Golub, Faith Ringgold, and Kate Millet were among those who submitted work. I invited five dancers who knew Trio A to perform it with me nude, with five-foot flags tired around our necks.”

[Text excerpt from Yvonne Rainer’s memoir, Feelings Are Facts]

[Photo of Trio A with Flags at the opening of the People’s Flag Show, Judson Church, 1970. Photo by Peter Moore]

[mcdwyer]

Saturday

Two women—one older, one young—walk down my street with different haircuts every time.

[mcdwyer]

dance-sculpture-sculpture-dance

The lines of the grid, and of the proscenium, frame and propel the human figure; the figure, in turn, threatens to escape quadrilateral geometry.

(me on Sol LeWitt’s dancing sculptures and Lucinda Childs’ sculptural dance)

[audrelawwd-deactivated20171206]

[mcdwyer]

on Tommy Noonan’s ‘John’:

I don’t say so to the man beside me, but I agree that I never want to hear the Bee Gees song again. I’m unlucky; it drifts out of a bar on Main Street as I drive by, post-show:

She's juicy and she's trouble/ She gets it to me good/ My woman gives me power/ Goes right down to my blood./ What you doin' on your back?/ You should be dancing.

I never want to hear it again, in the same way that I never again want to see Donald Trump paw the empty air and tell us what women should or should not do with their bodies. But I cannot not watch. It goes right down to my blood. The visceral witnessing is part of my protest.

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Read more in Indy Week here. 

[durgapolashi]

via Haley who gets it

[womanhouse]

[mcdwyer]