FTR: A Note on Notes & Places to Start (Notes 1)

The program notes from Double Bill #1 - For the record.

A Note on Notes
As an audience member, I have a complicated relationship with program notes.

I want to like them. But sometimes it’s hard. I want them to tell me some things but not others – to open doors, but allow for the space of personal interpretation that I so treasure in contemporary art. I want some context for the work I’m about to see or just saw (sometimes I like to leave the reading until after), some sense of how we all arrived here and maybe some things to think about in relation to my experience.
With these notes, I’ve tried to do that by providing three of the ways that I relate to the works in tonight’s show: first, starting places, then how we got here, and finally five not unrelated thoughts that I’ve had while working on this project.
I hope that these notes might be useful to you – but please, don’t feel obligated. You are more than qualified to write your own.

Any thoughts on the notes or the work are more than welcome - jacob@dancemakers.org

I hope you enjoy your evening.
– Jacob

Places to start
It Was a Nice Party.
Ame Henderson wants to reconstruct a chaotic event by sampling and covering. To reinvent and replay sources, to find a surprising authenticity in the face of the constructed image. She is interested in finding out what happens when cinema’s edits and angles are translated onto the body.

It started with bank robberies and attacking birds – but it was a party that stuck.

In a room that is itself a cover, the dancers don’t move until the film does.

And The Rest.
Michael Trent wonders about tyranny – the large and the small, the self-imposed, the political and the rest. Addressed with moving, breathing bodies, the work questions affinities, methods of control and the dynamics of making choices.

Starting with a huge roll of paper, the company writes tyrannies, alphabetically. There are hundreds. They aren’t necessarily all so bad. Except when they can’t change.

So they work on difference and change.