Working Class Runner

With the end of Sideshow, an experience that has led me to fundamentally rethink my approach to theatre and what I want to do artistically, I have made some changes and am slowly assembling a battle plan for the summer and beyond.

Things I have discovered:
– Stage plays bore me: Theatre by and large isn’t evolving as it can and should.
– There are a handful of exceptions but they are seen by the theatre community as novelties rather than catalysts by the rest of the community.
– The theatre scene is full of exciting performers doing boring work.
– Dance doesn’t nearly go far enough theatrically.
– Dance theatre doesn’t even go as far as it could.
– Sideshow is the closest I’ve ever seen dance theatre come to what it can become.
– Even that, beautiful as it was, only got ankle deep into the sea of possibilities.
– I think the dance community has the same approach to Sideshow as theatre has to its own evolutionary possibilities, which is to see the show as a novelty rather than inspirational catalyst.
– Improv of course isn’t as creatively fundamentally static as the preceding forms, but this community too is afraid of jumping beyond the threshold with testing the limits.
– Randy Dixon has some great ideas on this front but I notice they tend to go into one ear and out the other with most of his pupils and proteges.
– Many of my peers, even many of the community’s best improvisers, are struggling too much with the basic ability to make improv to really test these limits.
– I love dancing and need to develop my ability to perform it.

Things I want to learn:
– Modern dance
– Contra/line dance
– Beast skills (e.g. handstands and the like)
– Playing the violin (I played in junior high but haven’t since)
– Blues dance
– Ballroom dance (e.g. swing, Tango)

Things I have done but want to develop my chops/skills in:
– Yoga
– Pilates
– Slam poetry
– Bodyweight fitness (in line with Beast Skills above)
– Freestyle rap lyricism
– Ability with foreign languages (e.g. Spanish, German, French, Japanese)
– Running (I could manage 2.5 uninterrupted miles before I stopped)
– Dance improvisation (and I’ll get to work on this at SFDI)

Artistic performance things I want to produce:
– Dance pieces (short ones of course, and we’ll see about longer pieces)
– Solo (and possibly duo) clown pieces
– Full length experimental improv formats
– Full length fusion theatre pieces (weaving dance theatre, clown, music, etc., into a single cohesive piece).