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summary
Performance — Anicka Austin, Laura Briggs, Clara Guyton, MaryGrace Phillips + Nicholas Surbey
Choreography — MaryGrace Phillips in collaboration with dancers
Sound —Jared Kelley + Erin Palovick
Costumes — Anicka + Marian Austin
Video — Jonathan Bouknight
September 29 - October 2, 2016
at The B Complex
Presented by MaryGrace Phillips
Produced by MaryGrace Phillips with Danny Davis + Protect Awesome
in partnership Fulton County Arts Council
As part of this performance, we also did a free, live performance during regular school hours for two of our local public schools. This particular performance was followed by Q&A.
In this full-length work, the dancers and I contemplated how love pulls us in and out of Time. How relationship begs the questions of how we are truly connected and what that means outside of the day-to-day and inside of the dreaming. Once we are outside of time, how will I know you and how will you recognize me? Perhaps we only feel our weightiness and weightlessness once we are bound by love. We explored how the exchange of bearing one another, asking forgiveness and moving through love’s diverse distances leaves us changed and more whole, even (or especially) when we’ve been broken.
poems
“That was the first night
(I was fifteen)
I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him
in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things
and avowals
of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid
before it,
watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves
like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.”
— Anne Carson, V. Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin
“My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Love to lover, the greenness
of love.”
— Anne Carson, Decreation
Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.
— Maxine Kuhn, “After Love”
If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant’s tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.
— Mary Ruefle, “Kiss of the Sun”
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of blue
green leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
— Margaret Atwood, “Variation on the Word Sleep”
selected process notes
“i want to be unbearable.” weight bearing. take turns… at the same time. “like peacocks stepping out of cages and into the kitchen of God.”
what if every time you knelt, your heart got newer?
i am above you. i am beneath you. i am not side by side.
take out the affectation.
insular — assuming everyone is having the same experience as you because everything you are doing is self-referential.
2 wolves. at the end of time. there is salt + an orange. the end of time is salt + a kitchen. we are peacocks/wolves in the heart kitchen of God at the end of time there is so much space. i throw an orange so you can know where i am. gradually see our bodies back. seeing makes us real. unbearable things, we. it’s dark but salt is light and blue is the sun. stairs to get to you who gets to me.
not every moment is equally precious
it’s like you pick up an orbit.
i belong where i’m not sad.
“i always think art is a tool to set up new questions.” — Ai Wei Wei
throw the orange. then go dark.
