Landing - performance at green space

Click to Play

Here's our tech run for the Green Space Blooms festival, enjoy!

talking walls that sing

Working on These Walls Sing is for lack of a better word, surprising. I'm learning quickly how little I know about music and "built space." My perspective on everything (just about) is from within the moving/still body - and my solo work is designed to structure that experience, hopefully bringing others into it on their own terms.

These Walls Sing has not yet been about those things (but wait! the project is still young). What we as a group have discovered is that we are not quite yet on the same page as to what we're trying to create. Even among artists on the same project, clarity of idea and its description is difficult and essential.

But, as we laughed about at last week's meeting, if any of us wanted to work out our ideas in the written word, we wouldn't need to be making them into a performance. And some ideas simply do not translate, which is why we DO NEED to create in the medium of the idea/concept/inspiration.

-esther

Upcoming Performances

The slinkys have landed!

Landing performs its debut on Saturday, May 2nd @ 8pm as part of the Green Space Blooms Festival. David will be performing along with three of our talented guest dancers, Lydia Bell, Christie Newman, and Angela Salvetti.

Green Space Blooms is an annual festival of contemporary dance (most of it from local companies and choreographers) produced by Valerie Green/Dance Entropy at the company's studio Green Space. Festival details and advance tickets are available here.

Green Space is at 37-24 24th Street in LIC, and you can get directions here.

We will be performing Landing again on June 5 at 8pm as part of the Queens Academy of Arts and Dance ([QuAAD]) Marathon at Queens Theatre in the Park (oi, that's a mouthful), so mark your calendars and keep an eye out for details next month.

And then on June 20 at 4pm, on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing takes over Socrates Sculpture Park. It will be a whole new experience from our previous showings of other side, so don't miss it!

Seen at Composer's Voice

We're venturing out of Astoria into the big city... do join us!

Seen Performance is performing this Sunday, March 29, in Vox Novus's "Composer's Voice" concert, a series for contemporary composers to express the musical, aesthetic, and personal "voice" created in their compositions.

Our own David Morneau curated the March program and included Box Shy, the first work in our Party Project series, which takes performance out of the black box and into party environments, challenging where and how we see performance. This short work considers the dual function of frames to shape and contain.

So come visit with us and enjoy a great hour of contemporary music + performance!

Sunday, March 29 @ 1pm (it's free!)
Jan Hus Church - 351 E 74th St

FOH ladies rehearsal

Click to Play

The famed FOH ladies from on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing! We're finally getting this role realized.

The lovely dancers are Meredith Blouin, Chelsea Retzloff, and Anna Wueller.

seen open a success!

Friends!
David, Shana, and I want to thank you for coming out to celebrate seen performance's first year! We were so excited to bring new and old friends alike into our performance, and were rewarded by everyone's ready questions and your readiness to share them. Some of you were asking about the original video from Box Shy -- you can see the original "complete" version that includes Shana's animation and David's composition, here.

The evening garnered a little bit of press attention, and you can read about us in the LIC Journal "On the Record" and on LiQ City.

Thank you the generous donations, which mean so very much to our budding performance collective. When our new website is up and running (soon!), we'll be thanking all our donors publicly and into perpetuity!

Most importantly, we had a blast and are looking forward to another great year with you!

Yours,
seenperformance

photo by the lovely lindsey wolkowicz

Seen Open - celebrate one year with us!

March 2009 will mark the one-year anniversary of Seen Performance's first performance together and our beginnings as a performance collective.

To celebrate, we will be gathering at Rèst Âü Ránt, a local favorite in Astoria, for drinks and cheer (which we could all use more of these days!). We'll perform a work from The Party Project (it is a party after all) and be open for questions about Seen Performance, our work and visions. We'll also be selling some artwork to help raise funds for our project These Walls Sing.

Please save the date and join us when it comes around!

Seen Open - Annual Anniversary + Benefit Party
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 7-10p
Rèst Âü Ránt
30-01 35th Ave in Astoria
Free with donations to support the creation of new work warmly accepted.



Rèst Âü Ránt has a rich wine and beer menu, and their food is fantastic. They'll be doing beer flights for us, so come ready to try 'em all!

We're looking forward to celebrating with you - see you March 10!

Seen Open is, you guessed it, open to all and free with donations warmly accepted. All donations support the creation of new work. Not in town? Show your love for Seen Performance with a donation of any size, here.

Seen Performance is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Seen Performance may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Landing - rehearsal 2

Tonight we had a small Landing rehearsal, with Lydia, Angela, Danita, and myself.

Rehearsing with David's music is always a truer experience for the dancers (and me), but we did our best to work with the howling wind and some ambient Aphex Twin.

I failed to capture any video because I was wrapped up in watching -- and considering which nuances to take hold of and shape. The choreography component in this work is surprisingly fragile. It tinkers precariously between thoughtful and elegant and just a big ol' mess. While performing, the dancers make several choices within the parameters I've set up, and in rehearsal we get to see what works and what doesn't. They continually reinvestigate the movement for themselves, and I stay on the outside making notes on how things "read."

Today, for example, the dancers's choices kept spreading them out in space, which dilutes the effect of the cannon (they perform the base choreography in cannon) and makes the space feel alienating. Not to mention that they would have been falling out of the edges of the slinky "forest". We got the piece back to a tight, intimate spacing. The dancers start in the same triangle with roughly three-foot spacing, but with the focus on the small space, they navigate through each other as much as they do through the slinkys and this draws the eye into little moments of unison, intimacy, and solitude. It is delightful to see the choreography shape up in this way. There are definitely choices that work and choices that don't, nonetheless, we will continue to play with the choreography existing only as a structure to explore in performance, rather than a strictly set piece.

Landing - rehearsal

Click to Play

Here's our first full rehearsal with the dancers - Lydia Bell, Christie Newman, and Angela Salvetti. The noise of the heater in the space was so horrible, you couldn't hear David's playing on the video, so I put in a recorded sketch to accompanying the visual. In performance, he'll play live.

We'll be performing Landing on May 2nd as part of the Green Space Blooms Festival, produced by Dance Entropy to highlight Queens artists alongside the company. More info to follow in Spring!

Thanks for watching!

Box Shy - feedback

Click to Play

The choreography for Box Shy is new, so I asked David and Shana for some feedback. This short clip shows you a little bit of that. We also talked about how it can be challenging to jump into performing a work like Box Shy - our run-throughs felt gradually more authentic and refined each time. It will be difficult to find the right mood and energy when performing this at a party where we've been mingling and chatting rather than introspective. David suggested that I take a few minutes to listen to the music before hand, but then we both learned that it is in the performance of it that his music really starts to have that transformative experience, rather than just sitting and listening.

That's an aspect to performance work that excites us, me in particular. Performance asks for a different kind of paying attention (I am intrigued by what that different kind is and why it's useful to our interaction with the greater world around us). For example, other side is only worth watching if the viewer commits to it, meaning that you have to give over to the state of observation that it brings you into.

We'll keep bringing you notes from the field as we investigate how we watch, observe, and see differently.

Landing - performance at green space

Click to Play

Here's our tech run for the Green Space Blooms festival, enjoy!

talking walls that sing

Working on These Walls Sing is for lack of a better word, surprising. I'm learning quickly how little I know about music and "built space." My perspective on everything (just about) is from within the moving/still body - and my solo work is designed to structure that experience, hopefully bringing others into it on their own terms.

These Walls Sing has not yet been about those things (but wait! the project is still young). What we as a group have discovered is that we are not quite yet on the same page as to what we're trying to create. Even among artists on the same project, clarity of idea and its description is difficult and essential.

But, as we laughed about at last week's meeting, if any of us wanted to work out our ideas in the written word, we wouldn't need to be making them into a performance. And some ideas simply do not translate, which is why we DO NEED to create in the medium of the idea/concept/inspiration.

-esther

Upcoming Performances

The slinkys have landed!

Landing performs its debut on Saturday, May 2nd @ 8pm as part of the Green Space Blooms Festival. David will be performing along with three of our talented guest dancers, Lydia Bell, Christie Newman, and Angela Salvetti.

Green Space Blooms is an annual festival of contemporary dance (most of it from local companies and choreographers) produced by Valerie Green/Dance Entropy at the company's studio Green Space. Festival details and advance tickets are available here.

Green Space is at 37-24 24th Street in LIC, and you can get directions here.

We will be performing Landing again on June 5 at 8pm as part of the Queens Academy of Arts and Dance ([QuAAD]) Marathon at Queens Theatre in the Park (oi, that's a mouthful), so mark your calendars and keep an eye out for details next month.

And then on June 20 at 4pm, on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing takes over Socrates Sculpture Park. It will be a whole new experience from our previous showings of other side, so don't miss it!

Seen at Composer's Voice

We're venturing out of Astoria into the big city... do join us!

Seen Performance is performing this Sunday, March 29, in Vox Novus's "Composer's Voice" concert, a series for contemporary composers to express the musical, aesthetic, and personal "voice" created in their compositions.

Our own David Morneau curated the March program and included Box Shy, the first work in our Party Project series, which takes performance out of the black box and into party environments, challenging where and how we see performance. This short work considers the dual function of frames to shape and contain.

So come visit with us and enjoy a great hour of contemporary music + performance!

Sunday, March 29 @ 1pm (it's free!)
Jan Hus Church - 351 E 74th St

FOH ladies rehearsal

Click to Play

The famed FOH ladies from on the other side of the glass plate, she wore nothing! We're finally getting this role realized.

The lovely dancers are Meredith Blouin, Chelsea Retzloff, and Anna Wueller.

seen open a success!

Friends!
David, Shana, and I want to thank you for coming out to celebrate seen performance's first year! We were so excited to bring new and old friends alike into our performance, and were rewarded by everyone's ready questions and your readiness to share them. Some of you were asking about the original video from Box Shy -- you can see the original "complete" version that includes Shana's animation and David's composition, here.

The evening garnered a little bit of press attention, and you can read about us in the LIC Journal "On the Record" and on LiQ City.

Thank you the generous donations, which mean so very much to our budding performance collective. When our new website is up and running (soon!), we'll be thanking all our donors publicly and into perpetuity!

Most importantly, we had a blast and are looking forward to another great year with you!

Yours,
seenperformance

photo by the lovely lindsey wolkowicz

Seen Open - celebrate one year with us!

March 2009 will mark the one-year anniversary of Seen Performance's first performance together and our beginnings as a performance collective.

To celebrate, we will be gathering at Rèst Âü Ránt, a local favorite in Astoria, for drinks and cheer (which we could all use more of these days!). We'll perform a work from The Party Project (it is a party after all) and be open for questions about Seen Performance, our work and visions. We'll also be selling some artwork to help raise funds for our project These Walls Sing.

Please save the date and join us when it comes around!

Seen Open - Annual Anniversary + Benefit Party
Tuesday, March 10, 2009 7-10p
Rèst Âü Ránt
30-01 35th Ave in Astoria
Free with donations to support the creation of new work warmly accepted.



Rèst Âü Ránt has a rich wine and beer menu, and their food is fantastic. They'll be doing beer flights for us, so come ready to try 'em all!

We're looking forward to celebrating with you - see you March 10!

Seen Open is, you guessed it, open to all and free with donations warmly accepted. All donations support the creation of new work. Not in town? Show your love for Seen Performance with a donation of any size, here.

Seen Performance is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Seen Performance may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Landing - rehearsal 2

Tonight we had a small Landing rehearsal, with Lydia, Angela, Danita, and myself.

Rehearsing with David's music is always a truer experience for the dancers (and me), but we did our best to work with the howling wind and some ambient Aphex Twin.

I failed to capture any video because I was wrapped up in watching -- and considering which nuances to take hold of and shape. The choreography component in this work is surprisingly fragile. It tinkers precariously between thoughtful and elegant and just a big ol' mess. While performing, the dancers make several choices within the parameters I've set up, and in rehearsal we get to see what works and what doesn't. They continually reinvestigate the movement for themselves, and I stay on the outside making notes on how things "read."

Today, for example, the dancers's choices kept spreading them out in space, which dilutes the effect of the cannon (they perform the base choreography in cannon) and makes the space feel alienating. Not to mention that they would have been falling out of the edges of the slinky "forest". We got the piece back to a tight, intimate spacing. The dancers start in the same triangle with roughly three-foot spacing, but with the focus on the small space, they navigate through each other as much as they do through the slinkys and this draws the eye into little moments of unison, intimacy, and solitude. It is delightful to see the choreography shape up in this way. There are definitely choices that work and choices that don't, nonetheless, we will continue to play with the choreography existing only as a structure to explore in performance, rather than a strictly set piece.

Landing - rehearsal

Click to Play

Here's our first full rehearsal with the dancers - Lydia Bell, Christie Newman, and Angela Salvetti. The noise of the heater in the space was so horrible, you couldn't hear David's playing on the video, so I put in a recorded sketch to accompanying the visual. In performance, he'll play live.

We'll be performing Landing on May 2nd as part of the Green Space Blooms Festival, produced by Dance Entropy to highlight Queens artists alongside the company. More info to follow in Spring!

Thanks for watching!

Box Shy - feedback

Click to Play

The choreography for Box Shy is new, so I asked David and Shana for some feedback. This short clip shows you a little bit of that. We also talked about how it can be challenging to jump into performing a work like Box Shy - our run-throughs felt gradually more authentic and refined each time. It will be difficult to find the right mood and energy when performing this at a party where we've been mingling and chatting rather than introspective. David suggested that I take a few minutes to listen to the music before hand, but then we both learned that it is in the performance of it that his music really starts to have that transformative experience, rather than just sitting and listening.

That's an aspect to performance work that excites us, me in particular. Performance asks for a different kind of paying attention (I am intrigued by what that different kind is and why it's useful to our interaction with the greater world around us). For example, other side is only worth watching if the viewer commits to it, meaning that you have to give over to the state of observation that it brings you into.

We'll keep bringing you notes from the field as we investigate how we watch, observe, and see differently.