Tribute to Fiona Apple

Her words are elastic filled with grace

the melodies so poetically fill my ears with subtleties of soft spoken novelties

i love her for all that she does to me

Fiona, come back and sing it to my face

please

i need your words

I Flex my Foot for Africa

In a short series of happen stance meetings with the Hampshire community in New York, I prepare to rest. A visit from Bodhi in NYC, followed by a random spotting of Margaret Cerullo in the Schomburg Center leading to a nice conversation over tea at La Perle Noire Café. Sum it up with my first experience of Dance Brazil, volunteering to usher at the Joyce with short conversations in the intermission with Bodhi and Quincy. And a first interaction with Jelon Veira, who asked me to tell my capoeira instructor hello. Warmth and community amidst the anonymous winters has emerged this spring.

As I prepare to rest tonight, heal and prepare to push myself more tomorrow and follow that with a visit to Ben's show at the Bretch, where i expect the community to reconvene.

How life excites me these days. Where will it go?

I have finally admitting to falling in love with a dear friend, and I am beginning to open myself up to new connections with new folks, and allow for possibilities between friends and admirers on hold. What is in store this season? More pleasant surprises I hope.

To be continued.

Negative space between past lovers

I just saw an interesting video blurb, on harlem stage's website from their e-moves, emerging choreographers series. An aritst i love and respect named Maria Bauman describes her new work as one that explores the emotional space that grows between ex-lovers. Her concept struck me in quite an intersting way, because I am thinking and experiencing that moment right now in my life. As I part with my first true girlfriend, one that really wore the title, met my family, met some of my dearest friends, I am noticing how that experince of being so close shifts to a moment of gradually allowing space to increase between our emotional and physical bodies. I am exploring in my newest work (homebody), the concept of home as a construct by bodies. Of the people that lived in various spaces with us, and created, through performance, a sense of place. I am so interested in how the space of a relationship, without a lived location on a phycial plane, is still a site that is shifting and curving with the ending, or break of the relationship. I think about how my closest friend spoke to me last night about her concept of home, being always in relationship to the people that occupied that space with her. her words almost summed up the entire project concept in a short 10 seconds. Her words allowed me to realize, that the home we created and lived in together was a home that inspired the project I am currently creating. My observations about how physical sites shift in our memories and in physical lived experience when we return to spaces that do not have the people that we once with. College campuses are the most rapid & extreme example of such. With drastic shifts every semester, and every year, the neighborhood, the community is in constant flux by its very nature. We think about how this "change" is inevitable in all aspects of life, and the world. But, my tollerance and willingness to face change, has expanded its threshold drastically due to my experience living and returning to hampshire college. I am struggling to face the truth of how to confront some uncomfortable truths about the bodies I am most intimately connected with. And with the ending of this relationship, I am working to let in new or rekindle old friendships that were unintentionally pushed aside. I have new hope that I will reach new depths of connection with folks I admire. And that the wind will blow me in the right direction, to the people I need to know. Until this weekend arises. we shall see, what happens. i dont understand all the background. but i will find out. until until until then k