“How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?” Blog 7

I was writing furiously. Carol thought I was playing a game on my phone. No one has service on subways. But I was not playing a game, nor was I texting with miraculous service. I was writing my initial stream of thought and reactions to the Ralph Lemon piece that we were on our way back from. I really had so many thoughts in my head that had developed over the course of the production. I was trying to save them all throughout the night so I could write them down. The result is a little incoherent, but it is pure and true. The result is a breakdown of a formal review. It is a stream of consciousness. This is my writing with out thinking. It is my unintentional breakdown of a normal blog post.

“Start with BAM!

The end erased all my intense feelings from the beginning. I got it though. It was deconstruction of life. Of everything that has order and everything we believe to be true. Like the reader said, life is science fiction. It is where we are now.

When she cried it was like back to the beginning. It was birth. Primitive, yet completely open.

The entire show was really form equals content. It was completely chaotic and random. Just like the point the dancers were trying to get across.

You know when you’re little and you’re alone and your dreams of being a ballerina can be let loose? But you don’t actually know how to dance, so you flail your body around. But you like what you’re doing and you feel like you are doing something right. There is some order in your brain, some beauty. Someone on the outside would just laugh.

The beginning video was so raw it hurt. It made all these thoughts swarm around in my head.  The concept of children almost cleansing the earth with their dance, and the idea of absence and emptiness having mass and substance, you could feel it.

What intrigued me about me about the dance part was the questions is made me ask myself. Why is this wrong? What makes a ballet more valid and more enjoyable than this? Ballet  is structured and ordered and something we are conditioned to see as beautiful.

By the end though I did not care about this thought. I felt like I was going to throw up. I appreciated it, but it was so challenging it hurt to sit there. Maybe that is what the title meant. Almost a challenge in itself, how can you sit there and do nothing?”

When Katherine Profeta came to speak to us I was excited to hear what she had to say. (I was even more excited when she gave out the film text! During the performance I literally tried to hold on to certain words and ideas. I would, sadly, watch them slip away a few moments later.) She had been behind the scenes. She knew the place this piece was coming from, while I only speculated. I found the brainstorming and the experimental part of the process of creating this piece very interesting. When I watched the dance, it didn’t cross my mind that someone had actually thought about this “style” for a very long time before experimenting with it.  Ralph Lemon and his fellow performers posed many questions, such as, “How do you make a dance that disappears?” Even their questions and their processes were poetic to me.

Though she had answers, Katherine Profeta definitely did not intend to simplify the performance. The performance was not intended to be straightforward. She said they understood that the performance was extreme and challenging and that people would have to change the way they usually watched dance or really any performance. But could they do it?