Previz #62 – Dance Anywhere

TRAFALGAR SQUARE, 30 March — Vaneeesa Blaylock / Company and Gallery Xue / London City will join in Dance Anywhere’s 6 continent dance moment at Noon PDT / 20:00 BST. Global event details are available now on the Dance Anywhere website and further details of the VB/CO participation will be available here in the next days.
• VB36 Dance Anywhere – Performance Document

 
 
PREVIZ UPDATE, 27 March — I love this Beyonce video…

…it’s so inclusive, spontaneous, flashmobby… I thought about something like this for Dance Anywhere on Friday. But I’ve realized that virtual space is different from physical space. Obviously in many ways. Interestingly, I think people dance a lot more in virtual space. Of course this depends on the person. I think Monerda dances about 97% of the time. Some peeps never dance. But many do more social dancing than physical world counterparts. I’d hardly claim that people in virtual space are healthier, although amazingly I’ve heard of research suggesting this, but whatever it means, a lot of peeps here have their conversations across the dance floor instead of across the pub table.

In thinking about the spirit of Dance Anywhere… is it literally to move your body? Well, yes, it kind of is. But I think it’s also to be in your body. To pay attention to yourself as a physical presence, as an embodied, corporeal being. For me — partly because of the particular dynamics of this space, and partly through my continuing process of coming to understand the man I studied with 24 years ago as a college freshman at the University of California, San Diego, Allan Kaprow — stillness has often provided an even more intense sense of bodily awareness than motion. So many of our previous 35 performances have been tableaux vivantes, living sculptures that are presnted as frozen moments, presented directly to an audience without the mediating hand and eye of the “genius” artist.

And so for VB36 – Dance Anywhere, I have chosen to forgo the inspired movement of popular choreography like Beyonce’s or the more abstract forms of contemporary dance, and to produce a tableaux vivant in Trafalgar Square. A rather unique tableaux! 30 avatars will, we hope, join their bodies to create a living, human dodecahedron. Perhaps the most beautiful of the 5 Platonic solids, the dodecahedron is composed of 12 pentagonal faces, 20 verticies and 30 edges. 30 avatars, some from the group that has performed with us before, others that we meet in Trafalgar Square Friday evening, will form the edges and erect in the great fountain in Trafalgar Square our human dodecahedron at noon San Francisco Time or 20:00 British Summer Time.

In the photo above our gallerist Xue Faith, several friends, and I test out a portion of the configuration for Friday. I’ve been so lucky to work with many talented, dedicated, and insighftul curators in the past 3 years.

Xue has been amazing. I last worked with her on Net / Work the collaborative piece Betty Tureaud and I created in the mountains of Afghanistan. Below is a photo of Xue from that production, up as usual, before the sun…