Dear List, I will thank you in advance for letting me share some thoughts about our performances this week. It is good to have a community with whom I feel that I can share this... It has been quite an experience - performing on Thu (the first show after Tue) was as difficult a performance as I can remember giving. It became especially hard because the first work in the program, a duet inspired by Dawn's consideration of her own mortality after getting Type-1 Diabetes two years ago, suddenly had an absolutely new meaning in light of the attack. She starts, in the voice of a preacher almost, by saying "I'm feeling totally confused, disconnected, afraid about the future..." Later, the other dancer exclaims, as a contrast, "I'm feeling totally content" - you can imagine how hard that was to perform. The piece ends with the other dancer asking, "Are you ready for the end?" and Dawn answering, "Yes.". Blackout. And then, Dawn's new solo piece: performed totally in silence and accompanied only by a large television swinging on a 12 foot cable, showing the images of clouds in the sky, she makes a gesture that might imply that she was holding a globe - or the world - in her hands, examining it, and then suddenly her fingers flex in way that indicate that the object has crumbled. It was so eerie how seemed as if all these pieces must have been created after rather than before the horrors of earlier in the week. I suppose it is a testament to the work that it can speak to the moment in which it was performed in such a powerful way. On the other hand, perhaps it is only that everything can be seen only through the lens of this horrible attack. The other hard moment in the concert came in the set of dances we created set to the music of 80s pop band Devo. These were supposed to be unabashedly fun, and a little campy. We'd literally never done anything like that - we're always awfully serious as some of you know. In one of the sections, I was playing video created with a little rig I made to record stereo video, the kind that requires the audience to don the old fashioned blue-red glasses to watch it. That video consisted primarily of shots, taken with the camera pointed straight up into the sky, of skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. Thankfully, the WTC was not among them. Still, these images seemed to be too much. I spent several hours on Wed. recutting a new video without the buildings. We showed that video on Thu, but because I had precious little other material, the piece seemed very empty. On Fri, we reinstated the old video, and talked to the audience about it beforehand. Luckily, the response after the concert was that people felt it was OK to use this video. The part about this that was really hard was that the particular piece to which this video was attached was "It's a Beautiful World". The song itself is ironic, because the point is that it is indeed _not_ a beautiful world. The combination of the somewhat campy dancing, the words of the song, and the video of these 3D skyscrapers was a strange, unsettling combination. For those of you who responded so enthusiastically to my email of last week announcing that we would perform, I give my thanks. Dawn and I were very unsure of our decision. In retrospect, it was totally right to do, and served as our own way of defying those who would terrorize us. It struck me that, as the 18 people who showed up on Thu night gathered in the theater, that this was our community, and that this is how we gathered together to console and comfort one another. I am very glad that those 18 people had the courage to come out of their homes and be with us, so that we could have the lovely feeling of being able to give them something beautiful when all around seems so ugly. With Warm Wishes, Mark -- ================================================================ Mark Coniglio, Artistic Co-Director | troika@panix.com Troika Ranch Dance Theater | http://www.troikaranch.org ================================================================
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