Meet the 2013 ChoreoFest Participants: Meghan McCaffrey/IMPACT Dance

In just one week (ONE! really!) we will be rushing about amidst last minute preparations for a long twenty-four hours of creation.  We anticipate about 45 wonderful people simultaneously making new work in the building aided by caffeine, camaraderie, and hitting a second/third/fourth wind.  As we are incredibly excited for this week to speed by, here is a second interview with a 2013 24-Hour ChoreoFest Participant...  meet Meghan McCaffrey!

Meghan McCaffrey is the Founder and Artistic Director of IMPACT Dance Company, a Contemporary Dance Company that focuses on bringing REAL LIFE to dance, raising awareness through movement and volunteering in multiple communities. She has taught all over Massachusetts at dance studios, public and private schools, dance programs, dance teacher's clubs and colleges. Meghan's choreography has been presented at dance festivals in Massachusetts and in New York. She has choreographed for numerous organizations including Dean College's dance department and most recently the Boston Arts Academy Summer Dance Program. 

LDC: How do you feel in advance of ChoreoFest?  What do you hope to accomplish, personally and choreographically?

MM: I am BEYOND ecstatic. I have wanted to participate in this fest since I found out about it last year! I hope to accomplish two things personally. The first being to truly not do ANYTHING before hand. I am a planner in regards to everything. I want to know the who, what, where and how. So it is going to be a  challenge to not plan any choreography, music or costumes... but I can do it ! Secondly I want to not rush while I am in rehearsal. I always feel I have to rush while in the studio. With this festival I am challenging myself to relax, fully develop my movement and choreography, let it breathe and transform itself into a beautiful end result. Basically I want to live in the process and just let everything fall into place. 

LDC: Describe your typical creative process.

MM: Usually I listen to the piece of music I am going to choreograph to five billion times, on repeat and then add some. I like to let the music tell me what to do and to learn all the nooks and crannies of each bar and or lyric. I then usually create three or four phrases. Which I then manipulate while in rehearsal with the dancers. I tend to come up with movement in the strangest places and I will name that phrase after the place where it was created. (There is a Dunkin Donuts phrase. Where I had to stand in what felt like the longest line ever and I created one of my favorite phrases!) I rarely sit in a studio by myself and choreograph. Every day life experiences inspire my movement as well as driving in my car. Very dangerous but most of my choreography comes from my head, while I am driving. 

LDC: What is your current greatest fear about the festival?

MM: That I will fall asleep while dancing or speaking!! ;) 

LDC: What's the longest amount of time you've been awake for?  How do you plan to cope with a lack of sleep and an excess of things to do?

MM: I believe the longest time I have been awake for is probably 20 hours. I plan on coffee, music and movement to keep me going. I do well under pressure, I sometimes tend to be a procrastinator.. so I believe this whole process will resemble my typical process when I am home. (Whether it's finishing an application an hour before the deadline, or finding a song 30minutes before rehearsal.) Fingers crossed! 

LDC: Anything else you'd like to share?

MM: I am so mad I didn't come up with this idea first!!! LOL But I am very excited to be participating in it this year. Can't wait to meet all of you and the other companies! 

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Make sure YOU come see Meghan/IMPACT dance (with all 11+ of their dancers, wow!) and the other ChoreoFest participants next Saturday, August 17, at either 2pm of 4pm.  Buy tickets at www.LuminariumDance.org/e-store, or email tickets@luminariumdance.org.  

Meet the 2013 ChoreoFest Participants: Nicole Harris/Monkeyhouse

With just 10 days to go before we lock ourselves into a building to create dance (yes, this is fun), we would like to introduce the first of our 2013 24-Hour ChoreoFest participants.  

Meet Nicole Harris (via biography), followed by a Luminarium Q&A.  Enjoy!

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Nicole Harris, Monkeyhouse's Community Engagement Coordinator, grew up studying with Karen Krolak who quickly became her mentor.  When Nicole was nineteen years old Karen presented her with the opportunity to perform her well loved piece What’s Next? in Philadelphia in the fall of 2000 and went on to become one of the founding members of Monkeyhouse, a non-profit organization dedicated to connecting communities to choreography under Karen's direction.  With Monkeyhouse Nicole presented her own choreography in New York City for the first time at age nineteen, toured the country numerous times performing both her own work and that of other company choreographers, premiered over a dozen pieces of choreography and worked with an extensive list of students of all ages.  In 2007 Nicole moved to New York City where she studied extensively with Derick K. Grant and Lynn Schwab.  While there Nicole was invited to perform at the TAP CITY Main Event in choreography by Lynn Schwab in 2009 & 2010 at Symphony Space; presented work at the Cool New York Dance Festival in 2009 & 2010 and was asked to perform at the 2008 Edmonton Fringe Festival.  Since moving back to Boston in 2012 Nicole has been dedicating her time to Monkeyhouse and the Natick High School Drama program, where she has been working with an amazing group of students since 2002.  After recovering from a series of strokes in 2011, Nicole has continued searching for new ways her art could help people.  Monkeyhouse's Against the Odds:  Imperfect{vie} Experiments, a festival that looks at artists who look at how to overcome obstacles, is very much inspired by the medical misadventures of Nicole and other members of the company.  She returned to the Monkeyhouse stage in March for the first time since getting out of the hospital and since then has been busy developing new and exciting adventures for Monkeyhouse.  http://www.MonkeyhouseLovesMe.com

LDC: How do you feel in advance of ChoreoFest?  What do you hope to accomplish, personally and choreographically?

NH: I am incredibly excited to participate in ChoreoFest.   Everyone at Monkeyhouse is a huge fan of Luminarium and we're honored to have been chosen to be part of this choreographic adventure two years in a row!  Personally, I am not known for building pieces in a short amount of time, so the overnight time limit is going to be an interesting structure for me.  Luckily, I am being locked in with the amazing Shannon Sullivan.  Shannon and I have known each other for a number of years, although this will be the first time we've created something together.  I am looking forward to seeing what all the crazy parameters of time, topic, lack of sleep and a new collaborator bring out in both of us!  I'm hoping to expand how I think about creating work and perhaps find new processes for myself, no matter what the end result.

LDC: Describe your typical creative process.

NH: Oh dear.  I didn't know people have typical creative processes.  I tend to tackle each project individually.  Look at the parameters of the project and see what happens.  I don't think there's much "typical" about it, for me.  I can't wait to see how other people answer this question!

LDC: What is your current greatest fear about the festival?

NH: I find I'm actually kind of nervous!  I haven't made many tap pieces based solely on a topic. When it comes to modern pieces I tend to be much better about taking a topic and making a piece that says something.  One of my biggest challenges as a tap dancer/choreographer is being able to replicate that process with my shoes on.  So I figured I'd apply to something where I have no choice but to tackle that challenge.  So I'm nervous but excited!

LDC: What's the longest amount of time you've been awake for?  How do you plan to cope with a lack of sleep and an excess of things to do?

NH: I'm not going to lie, I like my sleep.  I'm not sure what the longest amount of time is but as a young person I certainly did more than my share of staying up until all hours doing who knows what.  But those days are long gone!  I don't drink coffee, so I might need to have a secret stash of chocolate ice cream in our studio.... 

Honestly, besides sleeping a lot during the day before I arrive, I'm not terribly worried about the stress of it all.  We are excited to participate and we want to have fun with the challenge.  If fun involves a brief nap, I'm okay with that.  :)

LDC: Anything else you'd like to share?

NH: I'd like to thank everyone at Luminarium for creating this opportunity.  I love the new voice you have brought to the Boston dance community over the last three years.  I am incredibly excited to have an excuse to work with you guys again as well as a first time to create a piece with Shannon.  And there are a few possibilities of other VERY exciting collaborators who just might show up as part of Monkeyhouse's ChoreoFest adventure too!  I can't wait!

Collaboration Chronicles Round 2: Threading Motion at the NE Quilt Museum!

Since words and original music were the perfect accompaniment to our experimental mobius show, I decided to keep Jenn and Christos on as active participants in my new work (the 'live' component to Luminarium's Threading Motion Project), with Rose, Katie and Leslie dancing as a trio.  

Preface; I had minimal knowledge of anything to do with quilts!  Merli, and her previous interest in quilting, was the one driving the connection to the NE Quilt Museum in Lowell in her quest to create the beautiful Quilt Vignettes (on film), and I was glad to contribute work performed live amidst the museum's collections.  

I approached my work from a very broad standpoint.  Quilts are comfort, they are art, they are hard work.  As art, quilts too must be conceived through creative process, which can be flattened into the ideas of preparation, process, product.  While I often don't work methodically, any artist has at least a bit of personal process, so in that manner I related to quilting.  I remember my grandmother teaching me how to sew buttons onto scraps of fabric, and later turn scraps of fabric into larger items; her motto was constantly "measure twice, cut once"and this along with ideas of blueprint, trace, and steadiness were inspiration behind the first phase of the piece.  The second phase, process, attempted to stretch and weave our 60ft aerial silk throughout the performance space.  The dancers became thread, became fingers in control of thread.  They were thoughts and ideas, put into action or discarded.  Each of the three was constantly in contact with the silk.  It supported their weight and movements, it was a thin barrier between two partnering dancers, it was a constant. Finally, our final portion of the work demonstrated the permanentness of a product, whether tangible, visual or auditory, and the ultimate goal of sharing it with others.  

Hopefully soon we will share some video, so you can experience and weigh in on our final product.  With subtle/intricate music providing support to the movement, and the following poems spoken throughout the 15 minute piece, many audience members raved about the work's multiple layers providing a fullness to the viewing experience.

Check out the brilliant poems that follow, and if YOU attended this weekend's showing, please send us your thoughts.

Many thanks to Jenn Allen, Christos Zevos, Rose, Leslie, Katie and everyone that made this project possible!

-Kim

 WRITTEN MATERIAL COPYRIGHT C. ZEVOS

Collaboration Chronicles... Threading Motion Round 1

As a artist (especially a former college dance major), we often find ourselves in forced or chance collaborations.  To be completely honest, besides working with Merli in constant Luminarium endeavors, I had never really collaborated with someone I knew on a personal level.  

We were accepted to mobius' Tinderbox series for April.  Having the Threading Motion Project approaching and not a lot of time, I decided to present the broken-down version of my live trio, done as a solo.  I suppose in retrospect this is typical for me, present the introspective exploration on a work that hadn't been created or performed yet.  Backwards, as usual!  

Anyways, in order to fill out the sensory experience, I approached my lovely jazz-composer/trumpet-playing sister, Jenn Allen, to provide some of her new musical sketches to add more life to the work.  With Jenn on trumpet, and Christos Zevos, bassist extraordinaire, we had an awesome thing going!  

60 ft- of teal silk, the movement talents of Leslie Armstrong (our newest Luminarium dancer)... the art exploration was visually interesting, but since I am a backwards worker and the world knew nothing of this piece, I felt audiences needed a tiny bit more context.  We had sections exploring unravelling, emerging, distributing/scattering, a section based on an ostinato, and another unravel.  I was going to write some amateur poetry myself... when Christos casually offered to take a turn at it during one of our two rehearsals.  Just under two hours later, at the end of rehearsal, I am certainly glad we had agreed to give it a go.  

Even if you are lucky enough to have wonderfully talented people in your life, you can still be rendered speechless by new creations...  Please enjoy the following poetry, which accompanied our mobius/Tinderbox performance!

-Kim

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Emerge 

rises from water: 

fathoms deep, cold 

and round 

the world held their 

breath- 

and exhaled. 

---

Scatter 

sunlight through window 

hand-clap, dust constell 

-ations 

each particle 

              spread, 

even drift 

to new homes 

---

ostinato 

a  shopping cart 

with a  stubborn 

wheel squeaks a 

stubborn    hand 

cracks  knuckles 

with    shopping 

bags  in  hand  a 

car  door  creaks 

a  window  with 

small   cracks   a 

strong        hand 

squeaks  chalk a 

hand  bag with a 

stubborn    clasp 

shopping     cart 

sound  over time 

---

unravel 

unslip, 

tight wound 

and wind 

-no sag 

sound of 

hands brushing 

on walls, 

oceans of 

smooth cloth 

sky made 

solid, balled 

up 

and released. 

ALL MATERIAL COPYRIGHT C. ZEVOS

Sketchbook: Light vs. Dark

This Luminarium "Sketchbook" entry brought to you by Merli.

From approximately 10am to 11pm, Kim and I spent our President's Day communicating back and forth about grants, research, connections, scheduling, planning, rehearsing, etc. The nitty-gritty aspects of running a company. But from 11pm to 1am, the conversation shifted to the creative process, and what a meaty conversation it was!

We covered several directions this topic could take us, but I thought it might be interesting for our viewers to see a little sneak peek behind the creative process of one of our current works, Spinal.

For those who have been following all the recent images of my Quilt Vignettes for our Threading Motion Project with the New England Quilt Museum, you might remember a digital sketch of Spinal, in which a white spine-like quilt would be projected across a dancer's back. Spinal quickly became a favorite among these digital sketches, not only for myself, but for my viewers, and the dancer I cast!

Little did we know how tricky this vignette would secretly prove to be...

Jess Chang, rehearsing Spinal.
Quilt by Sonya Lee Barrington
(Photo enhanced to show shadow...otherwise difficult to capture on film)

My original concept was to project the image onto Jess's spine, seating her on an angle to allow us to play with her shadow. However in reality, Jess was so dark in comparison to her surroundings, and the beam of light was so bright, that my eye continuously wandered to the projection. Only to the projection.

Light and anatomy are both to blame for this lack of intrigue: Unlike my other quilt vignettes, in which the patterns cover a greater amount of space and the dancers face any number of directions, we suddenly found ourselves with a thin vertical beam of light against a flat back...good luck making it undulate, let alone move!

Now, this was by no means a shock, but when you combine a bright, stationary beam of light with the inability to see the rest of Jess in the dark, you are literally left with one of the most boring films of all time. (I'd post it here, but... I mean, it's literally just the spine quivering in the dark to the sounds of me giggling with frustration.)

Fast-forward one hour to when we threw on the lights, and suddenly the entire piece takes on a completely different feel and complexity:

I filmed it again in the light, and was struck with a sudden sense of success! It is amazing how differently this piece now read: With the focus drawn away from the projection and instead onto Jess as a whole, I found myself excited by the unexpected movements of the spine on her back. A highlight, rather than a hiccup.

So now it's less than 24 hours before my next rehearsal, and I am still struggling as an artist to determine the best move. Do I try to salvage the dark version? Do I welcome the fully-lit version? Or do I try to find a balance in between by using clamp lights to manually adjust the Jess to projection ratio?

I guess we'll find out at 9:30pm...

Kim Thoughts...

Secrets & Motion (thought into words and vice versa)

**Note!  I wrote this post about our upcoming summer/fall Secrets&Motion project awhile ago, and have been trying to keep it at arm's length, while immersing in our Lowell Quilt Project.  I am letting my thoughts out in an attempt to release them from my active brain space, and keep them simmering until later spring.**

Listening to Myrlie Evers-Williams speak at the Inauguration made me once again aware of why I've wanted to work with words for so long.

In planning the start of last year's season, or maybe end of the one before, I brought up working with diary pages in the context of the candid thoughts of youth, but it wasn't the right time for such a project.  At the tail end of Mythos:Pathos, really as fodder for grants and something to put on paper for the next year's marketing materials, I threw the idea of turning words into a full-length performance again, and it took root.  Moving forward with an equally motivated codirector, we decided we wanted to pursue text (both original and preexisting, anonymous and owned) and we would find it through community members and library books and other sources, and we would treat it with dance.  A solid assortment of text-turned-dance would be a shot to capture who exactly we are.

Words are so important, even if they never become words.  Words are progress.  Words document, propel, and provide narrative to history.  Words are birthed thought (yes, I'm still going!), opinion and communication.  Words are protection and unfortunately sometimes weapons.

An important idea to me, personally, is how often words are forgotten or dissolve from our brains. The fables, myths and cautionary tales we read as kids are so often forgotten or discredited with adolescence.  Advice from our parents, those things we never said we would do or allow again, our wedding vows- what falls by the wayside?    A wonderful side-effect of this project is the amount of time we will be granted to meditate on words we might otherwise just read through; selecting text will be a vital task.

While Merli and I will be creating and merging segments together to form a larger show, I think my own focus will be selecting historic and contemporary texts and comparing them to original and personal pieces to find both difference and universality.  This, as always, is bound to change and in need of specificity, but it's currently a nice way to think about time travel through words, thoughts and dance.

Ok... now, bring on the quilts!

-Kim

Sketchbook: Quilt Vignettes (Part II)

Casting is complete! Our filming day is being secured, and so far, I have received nothing but enthusiastic feedback from the artists behind the quilts I chose...fantastic!

Below are three more digital sketches inspiring me for this week's rehearsals. Can't wait to start working with our dancers...

This quilt is so simple, that I am actually inspired by it! Because the focus is on this framed rose image that is delicate and light, I thought it might be interesting to begin with the dancer tucked in on herself, then quickly throw herself into an unfurled position (jump? arabesque/dive?) with fabric flying about her. Just the one motion. Then I'll slow it down on my computer to make it look almost like a flower unfurling.
(Chinese Rose  by Diane Loomis)

Same quilter as Gingko. When I first saw this image, I immediately imagined it on a woman's spine, so I found it fitting when I realized the name was "Spinal." For this quilt, I'll actually black out the rest of the image so that the dancer is mostly in the shadows/dark, while only the spine is illuminated.
(Spinal by Sonya Lee Barrington)

This one is my favorite quilt. Originally I saw it as a woman standing in a long white dress with billowing sleeves. We'd turn on a fan and have her basically undulate in the wind, but her feet never move. Upper body only.
(Chasm by Judith Content)

Alternatively, I may place two white blocks inside the gaps, so that the figure can
play within the unique shape of the quilt.
(Chasm by Judith Content)

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Lowell Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.