SECRETS AND SEAWALLS - Program notes...

We are heading into a first-look showing for Secrets and Seawalls today at TheaterLab to wrap up the Hotel New Work Series and get our grounding before residencies over the summer.

I'm excited, and a bit scared - the work has gone in a very different direction than I had originally thought - but, this...this too is perfectly fine and really exciting.

Andrew Broaddus, Callie Ritter, Michelle Micca and Katie Brennan

Here are the program notes for today....

Secrets and Seawalls

a collaboration of dancers, an architect and vulnerability.

Friday April 25, 2014
Theaterlab 357 W 36th St NYC

Dancers: Callie Ritter, Michelle Micca, Katie Brennan, Andrew Broaddus
Choreographer: Melissa Riker
Collaborating Architect: Lee Skolnick

Dramatugy: Pele Bausch

I am honored to be working with so many brave & beautiful dancing souls.

This work began in 2013 with dancers Benjamin Oyzon, Hilary Brown, Jun Lee and Zoe Levine.

Thank you Lee, Callie, Katie Andrew and Michelle for your commitment, creativity and honesty

as we continue to find out what this work is becoming.

Secrets and Seawalls is made possible by

generous individual donations, The KP Leadership Circle

 a residency at TheaterLab via Hotel New Work and

an upcoming Residency at Adelphi University

Performances at Adelphi are on Sept 12^th and 13^th, 2014.

About the work

What is a secret?

Where does it hide in you?

How might it move through you?

Where would it reveal itself?

How would you reveal it to another person?

These are the questions with which I entered the rehearsal process of this piece.

Over all, Secrets and Seawalls is an exploration of structure and vulnerability –

The initial inspiration for the work was a combination of two major NYC events.

Sept 11, 2001 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

After 9/11, there was a murmur that NYC’s seawalls had been fractured. 

Teams of architects and engineers were brought in as a task force to discover the extent of damage.

As a busy New Yorker, I never learned the outcome.  And I didn’t really think about it again until Oct. 29^th, 2012,

as Hurricane Sandy, the full moon, and a Nor’Easter slammed the East coast all at once, I thought of the walls – the possibility of fracture – and what keeps this powerful city safe and our amazing subway system intact….

I also thought of our human reality: We think we are quite powerful; We have all of the structures in place…

But once we lose electricity, NYC is just an island, and our homes at the beach are constantly facing off with

something so much more powerful than us….

So where is power? Is it in the open, honest vulnerability? Or is it in the mortar, the structures we build?

Is it about retaining our information or about releasing it so that others might learn as well?

Thank you for joining this journey of questions with us.

~Melissa and Kinesis Project dance theatre

Mapping:Home and Continuing on

we spent time with the talented and flexible Mollye Asher and Ed Barnes two weeks ago - filming segments of Mapping Home that had been borne out of our first Group Interviews.

Most of you know about Mapping Home (I'm playing with it looking like this "Mapping:HOME" thoughts?) our incredibly ambitious project of interviewing as many people from as many places/walks of life as possible about ideas of Home and creating work that is performed in sites that replicate/express/enhance those conversations......  We've interviewed 28 people so far: 30-somethings, retirees, grandparents, teenagers, nomadic artists.... more coming!!

Anyway - all of that to say - here's a little meta video enjoyment for you: we took video of Mollye and Ed actually filming our dances....

From theory to feet

Next week begins rehearsal of Mapping Home.
...and I wonder - when will I walk into a dance studio with an idea that HASN'T been wandering in my mind for YEARS?
Maybe it will always be this way -

About 10 years ago a friend told me a I have an emotional "simmering" time. 
Say something to me, walk away, let it move around, perhaps hit all the right synapses, come back and THEN I react.
But that was ten years ago....
I'd venture to say that my "brain to mouth filter" is in a mostly off position these days... thanks to that same friend and extremely significant relationships - expression is good, clear expression is great - clear expression with a strong dose of generosity is best.

However - with dances...it seems to still be true - an image appears and three, four sometimes ten (!) years later, a dance appears.

I'm a little slow, I guess.

But the timing needs to be right - in me, and in life to make the dance make sense...


So here comes Mapping Home - slowly down the pike - years of thinking about what feels like home to me - wondering why I don't need a house to plan for or why I've never really felt at home inside walls...........picking up speed to find myself in a place emotionally where home is an independent choice, and a neighborhood that though far from many things I call comforts, feels freeing and more like a place I could stay for a long time than most other spots I've lived...... and finally running downhill as I realize thanks to the internet that my need bring the audience into the work - into the process and having a voice in how it happens at all can be actualized ....... to this point... walking into the studio to see where we are starting.....we are picking up momentum and reality...all good things so far -

Tuesday: we will start with the dancers in the room, our thoughts of Home, and move outward-

Currently the only way to be interviewed is to be part of our Kickstarter Campaign - once that is successful, we will move on to the next community and volunteer options -

So spread the word and let people know this is beginning -

dancers Jun Lee and M.Riker / photo by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Like an onion paired with chocolate cake

Living in this funny place of two pieces in my mind at the same time (actually there are more than that...but let's call it two for simplicity sake) I have Pressing Empty and the new work MAPPING HOME wandering through and bumping into one another regularly.

Again I am struck with my reasons for making dances. Pressing Empty uncovers the minute moments of decision making that get us to where we are (and whether it is where we want to be...), Mapping Home is, so far, based on who we are and how that is expressed in our world around us....or not.

Mapping Home looks for the place of "safe" and "home" that we don't often get to visit - the spaces on this earth that you'd rather sit in, the place that gives you a release and sense that you are exactly who you are, partially because of this spot, or spots like this.



Folding Chair by Regina Spektor. fabulous summery and playful...
("I've got a perfect body, though sometimes I forget; I have a perfect body, because my eyelashes catch my sweat...")

And in the joy of finding out where we feel most ourselves...there is always a little time spent looking back at how we became.
Recently I have been thinking about who has helped build me, and what we are all doing now...in love, married, gone, still searching... and as I have before, what part of those building blocks get discarded, and what is still essential.  What is it about these places we feel at home that express both who we are in our purest form, and how we have arrived at who we are.

So much more to discover...and just as the cake is layered with sweetness, the onion's peels bring tears.
More soon...

Naive Melodies and Thoughts

Sitting in these thoughts of home and letting Shawn Colvin sooth the more jagged edges.
I'll be performing a brand new solo to this version on June 8th in Syracuse.

This is the springboard. New piece, new thoughts...gotta start somewhere.


Shawn Colvin covers The Talking Heads' "Naive Melody (this must be the place)"