Hello everyone!
I hope that everyone is doing well and that the New Years is working out for you.
This month im gonna be back in NYC with a couple different projects that i would love for you to come out to. I can promise you a fun filled evening with some new innovative work.
April 16th will be the world premiere of a new dance film titled “Burrowed Brow” otherwise known as the “Squirrel Dance” at Dance Theater Workshop. The process of the film is pretty awesome if i would say so myself. And here we go:
Alex before getting into costume
The film was a Twitter collaboration with myself Dance Theater Workshop and @common_squirrel. A little background info for you is that Dance Theater does something called “community choreography” on twitter where they ask they’re followers to tweet them any dance move like “right elbow up” and then they have a dancer make sense of all of the replies and film it. Super cool concept, I always thought as it being very inclusive for the followers to be part of the creative process. I was too busy during the time with Sketch comedy shows ghost choreographing and other projects but always kept a close tab on Twitter. One day Dance Theater posted another challenge where they wanted someone to take the tweets of @common_squirrel and make a dance out of that. My scheduled had freed so I decided to take on the task. After looking at the tweets of “run run scratch scratch sniff sniff TREE acorn”, I had to ask myself what did I get myself into? I contacted my dancer Alex Jenkins whom was born for the part and we started to work on the movement in Studio G. I knew that it would be tres easy to make it cheesy ( ahh that rhymes) so I added some meat to the bones and gave the movement a back story or a reason to exist. However working in my studio I was constantly laughing at what we were coming up with because C’mon, how seriously can you make a squirrel dance? After finishing the choreography I contacted my new fantabolous costume designer to get involved. I sketched her out a drawing that was inspired by Where The Wild Things Are meets Japanime and slapped with punk. From that point I contacted my videographer and long time collaborator Dr.Bacon about shooting the dance on location in DC. He was telling me about some new ideas that he had and all of the new tech equipment that he wanted to shoot it on so this dance was ago! Through the generosity of David Benaym co-founder of Movmnt Magazine (along with Danny Tidwell) we had our tickets to DC to film the thing! The shoot was crazy because my dancer and I both were not feeling well and we both had an 11 hour day of shooting other dances before Burrowed Brow. Needless to say after dancing in a super hot Squirrel costume being sick will make a person vomit off the side of the road like Alex did after the shoot. Now that pre-production was completed we flew back to San Francisco where I had my new award winning music producer David Molina score the film with my sound instructions. Dance Theater Workshop will be premiering the film at they’re space on the 16 along with other community choreographies and older dance films by us with artist such as Jacoby & Pronk dancers from SFB and others. Here is the NYT article on dancers using Twitter with Ashley Bouder on the cover. The Winger and Kristin Sloan got a shout out too:) More info about tickets which are limited click here. I will also be posting the film up somewhere on the web that day for one day only so id check my blog for more details.
April 22-24th will be my 1st ever 20min work titled “A Study Of Things Gone Wrong” being presented in New York as part of the Chronos Project with fellow Winger and show producer Benny Royce Royon. Costumes provided by the San Francisco based clothing brand HUF. Other choreographers include Nilas Martins and Monique Meunier. I’m very excited to be part of this project because its also marks the 1st time my work has been presented in NYC ever since I was a student so I have to be sure not to suck!!!! I was in NY last month setting the piece on the dancers whom were all great to work with and could handle my sound effects. In the evenings after my work day I would watch Bennys rehearsal. His work was soo inspiring. His movement vocab is exciting to watch along along with the choices that he makes its easy to see that this is something that he is meant for. His dancers are something to talk about as well. Not too mention him being one hell of a mover. I told him every time I watched his work I would go home and think to myself “damn! what am I doing? I need to step my game up”. Anywho, we will be having performance at the University Settlement and i would like to invite everyone whom is in town to come out and support some great work. more info here.
I posted this video years ago on the site. I finally got around to using the movement in one of the sections of my new dance. Try and see if you are able to recognize it:)
B
