PRE-CONVENING MATERIALS

Before the first live convening in March 2016, conversations in The Making Room had begun. 

Bebe miller, September 28, 2015:

Angie and I meet in Columbus at OSU, just the two of us. I think we have a longstanding fascination with the timbre and timing of each other’s dancing. When we work together we each feel the reference of studio days long gone by, particular attention to details that were new and worth poking at. (Why isn’t that enough? Is that enough?)

In this pre-project residency we come up with a simple structure: alternating solo passes depth-wise into the theater space. Generally, our interest comes down to the flow of disparate actions: ungainly only because of the proximity of one with another, so they’re worth absorbing at face value. We know what we mean by our dancing. The flow between us quickly loses any self- consciousness, or so it seems to me, and becomes a back-and-forth play of call and response. This form fits us; we both remember a series of studio days early in the formation of another work 13 years prior, where we alternated solos with Kathleen Fisher, quietly fascinated and mindful of the slow foraging of actions in sequence. What we gained: ways of dancing more than dances. I don’t think we kept much of anything beyond how it felt to work this deeply. We nudge our perception forward, slowly. The work is meaningful; meaning is present enough with that. Around the time we start I come across a book by Astrid Lorange: How Reading Is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein. (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2014.) From her introduction:

Stein knew that it was impossible to write without meaning; meaning happens, irrevocably. Her compositional aim was not to disrupt, dislocate, multiply, or cloud meaning, even if these things may happen for a reader when engaging with her work. What Stein’s work proposes, and what I attempt to formulate in this study, is that the compositional practices of reading and writing are constructive experiences that produce and investigate the contexts and relations of language in a specific occasion.

Nice. I substitute "dance" for "write" and get on with it.

Pre-march 2016 conversations with bebe & susan