the final 7 minutes

23 December

Good Evening everyone and happy holidays!
I've just added some video. I've finally begun to look at some of the footage of the 7 hour marathon I did at Skidmore College to raise money for the Commissioning Project. I've selected only the first 5 minutes or so. I think I'll try to add some of the later footage when I am dog tired just for fun.
I am inspired to do this and, well, just to think about it because our lovely Fiona from the August Project Workshop just performed her solo in Australia. I'm so curious to know how it all went. I think she did 4 or 5 days of performances along with one of her own creations. Good On Ya Fiona! Let us know. It makes me wonder how many others have performed so far or whether she is the first to show I'LL CRANE FOR YOU.

So here's something to watch and enjoy.

The practice for me is continuing apace. So much work in the meantime and finding time and space to practice has been a challenge. I haven't resorted to dropping my bags and simply doing 25 minutes in Hyde Park, or in the mall while Christmas shopping, or anything like that. I've been working between classes on the lunch break at Skidmore and finding studios and using the stage while touring St. Cloud, MN and Calgary, and the Court Theater in Chicago. But I'm making progress no question and looking forward to setting a date and a location.

What I've learned recently:

1. "Get what you need and nothing less" has everything to do with Time.
2. "I need the lab" has everything to do with focus and remaining in the moment so as not otherwise to go into a visual trance. Which is to say that it is easy to let the eyes fix and glaze over so that one is consequently inwardly seeing an designing one's movement. IT'S NOT THAT.
3. There is nothing to reach for.
4. I now understand better the admonition "just see what you are doing as (fill in the prompt/proposition/direction from Deborah's score).
5. It helps to actually let the score go and not try to do it at all. Once the sequence is familiar, just dance, and now and again remember what the sequence is.
6. It helps for me to dance for 20 to 30 minutes before practicing the performance with shape so that I can burn off or get rid of my "dancing ideas" vocabulary. It's better for me to work all that off with exhaustion and then dance what is left.
7. Spend 1/2 an hour on the floor and just deal with it. Try to get up. Humbling.
8. Remember again and again and again, "It's no big deal."
9. Remember again and again and again, "You can't do it."
10. I love Pina Bausch (just saw Bamboo Blues and enjoyed it).

Very best holiday wishes to all of you. More later. And thank you again for your support.

Bondo

1st minutes of the 2/10/07 7 hour marathon ....

November 22, 2008

Good Morning Everyone.
I haven't written in some time now. I've been healing as I said earlier. And, well, the days have been full and time has been short. And so finally recently I've been carving out moments to work and practice again. It is a good feeling to get back to it. And like anything else, time away can certainly impact positively how something is progressing. I think of listening to a scientist talk about how learning something is assisted by going to sleep. And later you realize that you know the thing you learned, a musical notation, a movement sequence, a memorized text much better - because in the "down time" or sleep or "away from ness" the mind has cleared away the extra chatter that is accumulated during the day which tends to cloud or impede one's ability to concentrate and learn. But actually, the brain is learning even when you are not consciously TRYING to learn something.
All by way of saying or forgiving myself for having taken time off to heal. Brother.

And so now I am in Chicago with SITI company performing RADIO MACBETH for the month of November at the Court Theater in Hyde Park on the south side. You ALL know Hyde Park now because it is the home of Barack Obama and his family. It is a lovely neighborhood full of really HAPPY people right now. We (the company) arrived the day before the election and witnessed and continue to experience the hangover bliss of that Tuesday night. One I will not forget to be certain.

And now we are well into the run and audiences have been fun and lovely. The theater has been incredibly supportive. We've (SITI) been workshopping at the same time a new adaptation of THE SEAGULL by our friend and playwright Michael West who came over from his home in Dublin to be with us for 10 days. So it has been very busy here.

I just received this link from one of the '08 commissioning project dancers Tania Soubry. It is an interview with Layard Thompson who has done 4 solo adaptations it seems. Here he is being interviewed about the work and about Deborah.

http://dancetech.ning.com/video/video/show?id=1462368%3AVideo%3A23958

I don't know Layard Thompson but I imagine many of you do. Perhaps this will be interesting to you.

Okay, going to get this body going and find time to do some work before the 2 RADIO MACBETH performances today. I'll practice either before, or in between the matinee and the evening show.

Best wishes to all of you and gratitude for your good wishes to me.

Bondo

pain

Hello Everyone,
In case you are looking and wondering, I've hurt my back and have forced myself not to train, or yoga, or PRACTICE in order to heal. It's driving me mental, but there it is. I hope all of you are safe and healthy, thriving and productive.

Very Best,

wb

10.10.08

"I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands."  Louise Bourgeois, sculptor

That's what I have today.  It seems appropriate ( I don't know about the hands part, but if you stop after the word "do" ...)

a blur in practice

October 8th

Okay so I made the comment about the floor. To be more clear and more honest, I rarely go to the floor. Now DH has said that she doesn't see this going to the floor really, and by "this" I mean I'LL CRANE FOR YOU. But what else? She has also suggested (humorously in part) that the problem with going to the floor is that you have to get back off the floor and there aren't many people who can do this in a very interesting way. (The gauntlet is down!) The audience knows you are getting up at some point and will (this is me now) anticipate it and there is a kind of "prove it" attitude suggested here. Unless you are (as one friend noted to me) a great butoh artist and are spending the entire dance on the floor and what we watch is the enormous dilemma of trying to get up - and that IS the dance. But that is not our dance. And, at the same time, I feel like I have to spend a lot of time on the floor in order to understand this fully. But I'll wait until my back is not in SPASM. For today, upright and dealing with the questions is just fine.

One thing I cannot let get me down is that I realize that in light of DH's statement, "I recognize my choreography when I see a dancer’s self-regulated transcendence of his/her choreographed body," that not only are we choreograhed bodies created by our environment, our nature/nourture, our stings and our succeses, but that we are choreographing ourselves all the time every moment. It's like habit I suppose. We acquire habit the first part of our lives as a survival mechanism and then spend the second half of our lives shaking off these habits to be finally free. And so dancing, or creating in any form, must be a way of countering this constant and unconscious and relentless "choreographing" that is going on all the time.

What's the word? Ah, "surrender." Good choice of words. Surrender the moment and there's no time for anything to cling because there is no time to assess how it's going nor indulge nor process the moment.

Okay, good.

Good night dear ones.

WB

So's you know

Posted By bondo to Bondo's Mobile Blog at 10/07/2008 09:50:00 PM

October 7th

Question: What's my relationship to the floor? Good question. And I can't shake it. It's clearly based on the inevitability of getting Off the floor.

Observation: Invite being seen, Get what you need, Surrender the pattern of fixing on a singular direction, idea, feeling, object, Invite being seen, again.

The human brain we know can do only one thing at a time. However, it does it extremely quickly - so quickly that it seems that everything is happening at once and in a coherent way. But this is a fiction. So as I practice I keep changing or reminding myself of each of these prompts. Brother. As DH says, it's impossible. "What if ..." you could? Isn't that fun? It is. And impossible. It's mind boggling to have all this going on at the same time, and then clearly have no choice but to experience the dance that is happening. It's happening because you entered. That's all I have for now.

My friend Julie Lockett has posted some photos on Flickr. Check them out if you like.

Very best to you all,

wb

another entry

Read this one at your own peril.

http://bondo-mymobileblog.blogspot.com/

September 28

Hello Everyone.

I've just arrived home after a week with SITI in Calgary performing
RADIO MACBETH and a week before that in St. Cloud, MN.
In all that time, as I've told you, I've found time on stage before or
after the company training to either do a performance practice of I'LL
CRANE FOR YOU, or simply do a performance practice without the shapes
of that dance.

I felt at one moment this week like I'd had some sort of breakthrough,
but then just wondered whether I'd formulated yet another question/
obsession with the work. I'm hyper aware of what I might call a
"style." What it looks like. I imagine a time will come that my own
patterning will dissolve and the essential shape of the piece as I do
it will begin to emerge. Maybe I'm still too self conscious about how
I move and am not really interested in that, but how this body REALLY
works vis-a-vis this dance. It has to do with Bondo's own learned, or
life choreographed patterning, and what I have seen and love in what I
see on stage. Two strong influences which I fear get in the way. And
now I've taken to simply moving for as long as I can or have the
time. Move until the moving is strange again. Move until the
patterns become discernible and then keep moving until that
discernibility breaks down. "Remove the sequencing from the sequence
of movement directions" as Deborah directs. And so as the company was
saying that they were watching me on the green room monitor doing my
dance, I said, No I was just moving. I seem to have to do this for a
long time. Move every day. And then flip the switch in my head and
turn that movement into performance practice.

All of this has certainly altered my thinking about being on stage in
ANY medium. Acting for example. What is acting? "Acting is the
reality of doing?" as a celebrated mid-century acting teacher from the
actors' studio has said. Well, so yes, but so is dancing and painting
and playing an instrument. What the hell does that mean? Doing what?
Okay, so there is the surface score of what an observer would SEE. Is
this what the actor is doing? This is a sequence of events. And what
is the consciousness that ties this sequence of events together to
make it worthy of the stage?

I'd thought of the metaphor of a pearl necklace. A string of pearls
held together by a silken thread. When did it become a necklace?
What makes it a necklace? What makes it a "pearl" necklace? "Pearl"
would be the local, or folk, or specific cultural / tribal signifier.
"Necklace" would be the meta understanding of the thread and pearls.
The "thread" is hardly noticed, but could be the consciousness that
strings together the unrelated, independent events - the pearls. The
movements of a dance. The events of speaking, moving, singing,
dancing of a "play."

Text is the problem because it brings with it feeling and emotion and
psychology. Emotion is what we call feeling after the fact. Feeling
comes first, then emotion, and then psychology which seems to me our
reaction to the emotion as it drags with it the weight of the past and
the anxiety over the future.

Now in life we are unconscious much or most of the time. Virginia
Woolf speaks of moments of Being and Non Being that make up the fabric
of a life. But this is life, not art. Is it true that dance is
simply conscious movement? What changes a sequence of movement into a
dance, or a sequence of events in a "play" into a performance?

Let's go back to the pearl necklace metaphor.
- question: What are you doing?
answer: pearl, pearl, pearl, pearl, pearl, pearl, pearl (that's
like the game of saying a word over and over until it has no meaning)

- question: What are you called?
answer: Necklace.
another question then: Show me the necklace. Where is it really?
What is it? It doesn't really exist does it?

- question: What do we not see?
answer: The thread holding it all together.

I'm looking for the implication that there is a kind of "concentration"
running through the dance / performance. A string of moments of
being. Something to do with Attention.

Remember: "What if my choice to surrender the pattern of fixing on a
singularly coherent idea, feeling, or object, when I am dancing is a
way of remembering to see where I am in order to surrender where I
am? What if how I see while I am dancing is a means by which movement
arises without looking for it?" Deborah Hay

So I'm mixing things up here. I'm working on the "dance" and thinking
about my work in the "theater" and it is clearly more and more
impossible to separate the two.

In the dance, I'LL CRANE FOR YOU, there is the score underneath that
holds it all together remember. The movement is just the local and
temporal way of addressing the score. "Use of Time is the creative
act, not the movement."

It is certainly true that when we are working on a new piece in SITI
or reworking a created piece that we speak frequently of the TIME and
how it functions. Surely an artist who works in time must ultimately
deal with this element primarily in order for the What (the movement
of the dance, or the text of a play, or the "story" as it were) of
the piece and the Space of the piece to be visible.

And how do we deal with Time? Well, DH suggests that the
proposition: "Get what you need" is translated as Time.

Okay, enough of this heady stuff for now. You'd think that I'd simply
try to get my body moving every day. Work out the kinks and stiffness
and pain of the body. That's enough isn't it? Much less this
THINKING about it. But this is the formative work that one must do.
Ultimately "the body is the teacher" and I have the gift of working on
that. It is true that the body knows before the brain and this
blogging requires language which just tangles it all up.

This is a sculpture by Dennis Oppenheim (am I writing that correctly?)
which was in Calgary attained for a limited time by the entrepreneur
who owned the hotel we stayed in and the restaurant that he took us to
and who sponsored our opening night and who is a collector of
contemporary art and really a lovely man to meet and speak with. It's
called DEVICE TO ROOT OUT EVIL.

yours truly as MacDuff

Leon pre show Radio MacBeth

19 september 08

Good Morning everyone,
I'm in St. Cloud, MN this week with the SITI company performing our RADIO MACBETH. Next week in Calgary. And then we'll do a 1 month sit down at the Court Theater in Chicago, IL in November. It is a pleasure to be touring this production. I think it is something and should be seen more and more. I was saying to Anne (Bogart) last night that this is one of those pieces one feels one wants to grow old with. (I feel that with DEATH AND THE PLOUGHMAN too.) I believe in works against which one can measure oneself over a long period of time - to measure one's growth, one's progress, one's belief system, a lifetime in and with an art work. I imagine one can think this way about a painting one sits with at home every day and mark over time the changes in response, or a book one reads over and again through the years and finds new information, new and REnewed interest, and of course with a dance. And that is what this is about.

I simply wanted to note that I've had the luxury of practicing I'LL CRANE FOR YOU on the stage pre and post SITI company training before the performance of RMcB. There I am off stage right doing my practice and working through ICFY while the other actors are doing their own work: Ellen doing work she did in rehearsal with T. Suzuki this summer, some doing yoga, some working over the language, some also working on other productions in repertory at the moment, and me doing practice. It's beautiful. Everyone is very curious about the dance and the practice and anxious for me to do the dance, but I remind them that I am contracted to practice for at least 3 months before a showing. And so they watch me work out of the corner of their eyes (as I do them.) They are curious of course. We are curious about one another. I think too that curiosity is essential in any work and in any relationship. It's fantastic to be on stage with professionals like this doing one's own work. We are all growing together. We've been through the trenches together to be sure over the last 16 years and some of us for even longer than that. We have our own interests - and we make room for one another which is the really big deal. Maybe we've matured over the time together. I hope so. And so we cheer each other on (and up) in our private work as we do in our work together. It is a great source of energy to be there with them. Believe me I know how lucky I am. It doesn't come easily; it costs and has cost personally over the years; but it is sustaining and gives back in spades.
It occurs to me that any work, anything one chooses to do, is, works as, can be a kind of lens through which we see one another (and ourselves) AGAIN for the first time. Each production. Now I'm on stage with Ellen or Barney or Akiko or Kel in THIS way. How do I see them now? And what am I this time 5 or 10 or 16 years later? Which brings me to Leon. I simply want to acknowledge that Leon is taking on quite a fight. He is assaying the scottish king this week while Stephen has been doing another production. Leon hasn't had much time to rehearse, is swinging wide at it, and really moving to watch negotiate this terrain day after day. It certainly does change one. It's fun to watch him "practice" and change and make little baby steps which play out like victories in the moment. (And then I get to "kill" him in the end.)

And so "practicing." What are we all practicing?

I'm practicing with this group.
I'm practicing alone I'LL CRANE FOR YOU.
We are all practicing something. We adjust. We lose interest and energy. We find renewed interest and reasons for doing.
We win little battles and modest victories.
We keep going.

Which I'm going to do now.

Best,
Bondo

more stuff

here's an update if you're interested:

http://bondo-mymobileblog.blogspot.com

DH

9/11/08

Hello everyone far and away.
This is just to say that the daily practice is going fine. It is a
little bizarre to go into a room alone and practice after having the
support and eyes of Deborah and many fine and compassionate souls over
the past 2 weeks. But I am holding to the contract and doing the
daily practice. As DH says, if you have to, just walk into a space,
whatever space available to you, drop your bag, and do it. And then
walk away without a thought. Just doing the practice on a daily basis
will yield results. I'm counting on it. I am in no way interested or
able to do more than just practice. I have no take on the piece, no
interest in judging or choreographing (which is against the spirit of
the thing anyway) but only to get the thing as deeply into my bones as
possible and being present with it.

I have with me the heading quote from one of the chapters of Deborah
Hay's MY BODY THE BUDDHIST which is: "My body commits to practicing
Robert Wilson" -Robert Wilson. And that is just it. I can certainly
hear him saying this and recognize it in him. And in Deborah. And
now I think of it every time I go to work. Every time I practice the
DH work and I'LL CRANE FOR YOU. Every time - well you can imagine.
It is a brilliant thing to think about - solo - in a studio or any
empty available space and just running through what it is you do. It
is solitary work. It's not a matter of trust or confidence at this
point - just fun and - just work.

But it is happening. It feels a little like a secret mission (which
I'm telling all of you!) that is occurring and silently changing the
way I see things and feel about things and about work in general and,
well, about myself and how I see myself fitting in to this world and
my work place within it.

Anyway this is the solitary place any choreographer understands every
morning walking into the studio before the dancers arrive I imagine,
or any solo artist, or any artist of any kind who either works alone
or with collaborators, but necessarily must spend time doing what s/he
does first before the public work. Working alone is one thing.
Training alone is an entirely other can or worms. And there is where
I feel the uniqueness of this project for the time being.

Anyway just wanted to let you know that it is happening and moving
toward the eventual and as yet unscheduled public performance date.
But so much to do before then. Lots of work at Skidmore, and lots and
lots of work with SITI before any dance will happen for me.

I think of all of you working away in your solitary moments practicing
or doing what? Finish this statement: " I commit to practicing
______________." Well done.

By the way I hope that it is okay to post this picture of Deborah. Am
I breaking any laws? Jeez.

Best,

bondo

coming home

Hello Everyone, I'm on my way back to the USA tomorrow and arrive
Sunday night late. I've been keeping up with the blog as best I can
and will continue. If you are interested:

http://bondo-mymobileblog.blogspot.com

all the best,

bondo

some thoughts on the final evening

We're about to meet at D. Hay's house for a final night party. Our
man Karl who works for BodySurf Scotland who really runs the day to
day and helps us out is bringing some of the local single malt. I am
awfully excited about that. I haven't had any yet - and some of you
will drop a jaw to hear that. But it's true.

Today we saw 6 solos. Marielle, Celine, Shelly, Brenden, Melissa,
Fiona Bryant. Couldn't be more different. And couldn't be better
examples of just how MUCH progress has been made in 10 short days. I
don't know how it's happened and I only hope that I have been able to
make such progress too. Really just impressive performances - better
yet instances of how each of the dancers has opened over the days.

Now I'm disappointed that I didn't get to go again, but we did do a
final group practice "without the shape" as Deborah H. says, meaning
not practicing I'LL CRANE FOR YOU. And then we did a practice "with
shape." As we were working she paused us and asked us to do it as a
group dance - not simply 20 people doing their own version, but that
we worked together to create a group dance. It was fantastic. All
doing the same choreography, all doing a completely different
adaptation in the moment, all at the same time. One feels finally that
when we are released to our own worlds, our own lives, our own
rhythms, our own solitary practices, we will always have the feeling
of not actually being alone in the practice, but that we have the
other 19 moving all around us to inspire the movement. It's quite
moving actually. And we'll also understand that the 19 others and
Deborah as well will be finding some moment, some time, some space,
some stolen opportunity during the day, each day, to do a practice for
1/2 hour, or 20 minutes, or 1 hour of I'LL CRANE FOR YOU. And each
will be finishing the practice sometimes mystified, sometimes
disappointed, sometimes frustrated, sometimes no doubt just elated,
and thinking about their "frame" for the piece and about when in fact
they will do their first public performance - not before 3 months time
of daily practice. It'll be a laugh to think that we'll be spread all
over the world, finding time to do the same thing. And then I think
of other Solo Performance Commissioning Project dancers living the
same rhythm with their own dances all over the world - some 140 of
them - and suddenly the world seems an even smaller and even
friendlier place.

Okay, I'm getting a little sentimental and I apologize (and I haven't
even had any of the scotch yet) but I cannot help but think about it.

Remember my friends, my patrons, and collaborators that you've made
this possible - not simply so that Bondo could go and do something
exotic and cool, but that all of the spcp'ers could go out and make
something unique, to keep Deborah Hay in the world (which is very
important) and to make art.

I'll leave you with a quote Deborah gave us early on - from where it
comes I don't remember:

"The purpose of art is to make life more interesting than art." [Deborah reminds me that this is a quote from Robert Fillou. Thank you Deborah.]

Not bad. Okay, off for a snort.

Good night and see you all very soon.

Best,

Bondo