Introducing: Project #1
In early April, I received the following email:
Megan,
Do you mean it? Would you really be willing to try to stage a dance/story collaboration? Because, seriously, I would love to try that – I would put that sort of project on the top of my list of things to work on in a heartbeat, and even more so if it gave us the chance to work together. We should maybe talk about doing this, and what would be involved?
Excitedly yours,
Kat
Kat Howard is a writer, university professor, and generally brilliant individual who I met while attending the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2008. Her email happened to arrive in the middle of a light rehearsal schedule and the accompanying restlessness. Shannon and I had been toying with ideas for a dance about superheroes, but the sheer depth of the topic had us at a standstill, unsure of where to start, so we were at loose ends with time to burn and no direction to spend it on.
Adventures are never so appealing as when they are the first one to arrive on the horizon.
We talked. We sent each other videos. We talked about what we wanted to say. We talked about how such a collaboration might work. How do you make writing and dancing work together? How do you make them two parts of one thing instead of slapping them on top of each other like scraps of paper and bits of tape? How do you collaborate across mediums and geographic separation?
You figure it out by jumping in.
We are making a piece. It’s going to be a dance and stories. Kat is writing a story in Long Island. Shan and I take the story as it emerges and bring it into a studio in San Francisco where we examine it, jump on it, crush it and rummage around in the pieces. We’re still not sure where it’s taking us, but we hope it’s somewhere new and interesting, maybe, if we’re lucky, somewhere wonderful.
Right now, we’re thinking about: journeys to and from the land of the dead, libraries of lives, libraries of memories, hula, Buster Keaton, Russian folk dances and Danish ballet men, hot showers, musty cars, and sestinas.
As Kat puts it in one of her recent missives, “What is most important is the telling. The taking of a memory, a piece of a life… and making it tangible… Or, perhaps, not tangible.”
