Love,
The Framers

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What Should I Tell You?

by Neil Ellis Orts

What should I tell you about working on Frameworks’s Productions Framing Bodies: Love Me?

I can tell you it’s scoop, carve, lift, choke, shake it off, shake it off, reach, slap, rebound rebound.

Et cetera.

But I suppose that tells you very little.

There’s a lot to tell. There’s process and improvisation. There’s a plan with escape routes. There’s choices made with room for other choices to be made. There’s trust and ambiguity in the concrete abstracts.

To speak in generalities.

For me, in specificity, there is “ouch” at the word “relationships” and there is “hmm” at the writing prompts. There is clumsiness in movement and joy in movement. There is endorphin and lactic acid. There are memories of adult naivete and of childhood shame. There is the internal editor arguing with the internal artist, fighting over which will get to have final external say. There is the fiction writer confronting all the things that made him a fiction writer and not a memoir writer.

Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to the fact that my story is not only my story. Revealing some things about my love life (whether familial love, romantic love, friendship) reveals some things about those I would love or who would love me. I’m overly sensitive to how unfair it is for me to have a forum for telling my side while their side remains untold.

But it’s not the destination but the journey, right? Except in art making, it’s a little of both.

So I go to rehearsal, I do my best to look at the places that I’d rather you didn’t see, and somehow translate that into a fraction of this project. Making art, I was once told, was mostly learning how to look. In this case, Lydia is asking us to look at ourselves, at our relationships, at the “ouch” the “hmm” and “oh!”

Two weeks before we shoot, it appears we have a good shot at making something beautiful.

But I really don’t know what to tell you about it right now.

Except that it’s scoop, carve, lift, choke, shake it off, shake it off, reach, slap, rebound rebound.

Et cetera.

Get your tickets at framedance.org/boxoffice.

Lydia Hance is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Frame Dance Productions’ Framing Bodies is  funded in part by the Puffin Foundation.  Frame Dance Productions is a recipient of a Rice University Dance Program Space Grant.

Lift arm, pull hip, touch shoulder, push ankle. Actions and body parts. Words of common understanding suddenly require new analysis, especially when the task is to apply them to another person. Lift her arm. Touch his shoulder. But how? With what? Faced with the choices, they can seem either impossibly vast or stiflingly limiting.

Dancers become well-practiced at these kinds of ‘assignments’. So the analysis is short, committing doesn’t feel as final. The choices are still vast or limiting but, oh well. We know it will all work out. If not, it’ll be changed, cut, rearranged. No “right” path, just decision. No moment but this one. Dancer Zen.

For this particular exercise, the choices we make with our partner aren’t even lasting (though they are filed away for possible use). Lydia asks us to take what once was a partnership and without changing it (much), let it be a solo. But not for long…

Cut and paste. A new partner. Two solos become a duet. More choices. A new energy. Different points of contact. A fresh addition to the file.

The choreography file fattens. Each week, variations and options multiply before our eyes. Words on the page add to the realm of possibilities.

I’ve been on the choreographer side. Zen can be much harder to achieve when sitting in the director’s chair, whether for the stage or for film. I’m feeling glad not to be responsible for the final slice, dice, mix, and stir, though all that possibility is as much a rush as it is daunting.

I get to just enjoy the process. Be surprised. Be fascinated. Be present.

But I look forward to the finish, to seeing the choices Lydia makes. What she creates from all the puzzle pieces.

I look forward to looking back. To how these pieces were carved and created. To remember the spark, the inspiration, the task, and to marvel how each and every time, magically, things travel from Point A to Point B. To the memory even of a moment in time before my child (still within) becomes an individual, a reality, a relationship I can’t live without.

Get your tickets at framedance.org/boxoffice.

Lydia Hance is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Frame Dance Productions’ Framing Bodies is  funded in part by the Puffin Foundation.  Frame Dance Productions is a recipient of a Rice University Dance Program Space Grant.

Last week’s session began with a brief sit down chat with Lydia outlining where the process currently stands and where it’s headed.  Next came our usual warm-up, then on to a review of what we’ve been steadily working on, i.e. our own words morphed into motion.  After we took some time to run through our words and movement individually Lydia began to sort us into different groups.

This has been one of the most enjoyable parts of this project – the opportunity to work and create with everyone in the group.  Personally, I’ve much enjoyed getting to know and spark off the fun and interesting people in this group.  Unfortunately due to my poor hearing and the not so good acoustics in the studio I’m often at a loss as to what it is we’re supposed to be doing.  So I hang back and watch a bit to catch on.  This also gives me the chance to see how enthused everyone is about what they’re doing and pretty quickly I join in.  It’s impossible not to!  Lydia creates such a warm and positive atmosphere everyone just relaxes and creates.  It’s very rewarding to watch each other’s efforts and to see the progress being made.  Each session the time flies by.  The only downer of the project is the overhead announcement calling an end to our time in the studio.  A universal groan goes up, we all wind down, slowly meander down the stairs, and exit into the warmth of a Houston summer evening.

Get your tickets at framedance.org/boxoffice.

Lydia Hance is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Frame Dance Productions’ Framing Bodies is  funded in part by the Puffin Foundation.  Frame Dance Productions is a recipient of a Rice University Dance Program Space Grant.

Check it out here!  And join us on Sept. 16 and 17 at the Rice University Cinema.  It’s free!!

Step. Step.  Turn.  Lift. Recover.

Repeat.

Step.  Step.  Turn.  Lift.  Recover.

Repeat.

Step.  Turn.  Recover.  Step.  Lift.

Repeat.

For Martha Graham the solar plexus was the center of dance, of movement.  She challenged her dancers to reach and stretch from the solar plexus and take that risk of falling and learning how to recover, only to do the same once again.   Being on the edge, reaching to the next place, and recovering only to begin the process anew are so much an aspect of engaging, challenging dance.  Dance that engages the heart and challenges the mind.  These are also key characteristics of life.

The past few weeks as I’ve worked with Houston area dancers of all ages and abilities, the challenges to reach, lift, and recover are ever present.  I have not danced for decades!  I am not as sure of my balance, my strength, my flexibility as I once was.  And, yet, I am relishing the physical, mental, and emotional challenge of this process. I am relearning the physical act of lifting and recovering.

My heart is also in the process.  As we are challenged to reflect on the ever elusive ideal of love, my emotions are following the same pattern of risk, lift, recover.  Some of the falls are old, never fully explored before putting them away.  Those old falls still inform my new risks, my newer loves.

Each step in this amazing process is a bit surer than the one before.  I gain a bit more strength and balance as I practice and repeat the physical reflections of the written words on my pages.  Each repetition of the movements scaffolds the peeling of my emotions, allowing me the existential faith to lift and stretch to the next place.

I don’t think the tasks, the steps, are that important.  Rather it is the lifting of the solar plexus or the heart, knowing I open myself to the possibility of falling.  In dance and in everyday life, it happens.  How do I recover as I keep dancing, keep loving, keep living?

Denise Livings Wilborn

Get your tickets at framedance.org/boxoffice.

Lydia Hance is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Frame Dance Productions’ Framing Bodies is  funded in part by the Puffin Foundation.  Frame Dance Productions is a recipient of a Rice University Dance Program Space Grant.

It is one of our goals– well, technically it’s in our mission statement– to connect to audiences through the internet.  I am thrilled that we are living up to it.  Check out this article by Nancy Wozny in Culture Map about artists with strong internet presences and the importance of up-to-date websites, blogs, social media.  We’re one of the savvy ones.

This week we wrote on ‘privacy becoming isolation’ and dissected the material to identify short passages that were challenging to read.  We then took those small chunks of text and began moving as we spoke them, walking at first, but then letting mico-gestures and movements erupt out of the rhythm of repeating the words.  In short, letting the movement impulses of the body, articulate alongside the spoken words.

What I really liked about this exercise was how easy it was for me, once we began moving, to transport myself right back to the time, place and mindset I was in during the time I had written about.  I could see myself standing where I stood back then, asking the same questions I asked. I could see so perfectly the colors in the room and the objects around me, despite the occurrence happening nearly five years ago.  It was all so suddenly vibrant and at the tip of my muscle memory.

Get your tickets at framedance.org/boxoffice.

Lydia Hance is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Frame Dance Productions’ Framing Bodies is  funded in part by the Puffin Foundation.  Frame Dance Productions is a recipient of a Rice University Dance Program Space Grant.

Our eyes were watching each other as our bodies were moving
We are in our third rehearsal for Framing Bodies: Love Me and something amazing just happened – I saw people discovering dance and falling in love with it.

It’s been an interesting process thus far. Aside from enjoying collaborating with Lydia as a regular member of Frame Dance, what attracted me to this project were the possibilities it presented by mixing a cast of dancers and “non-dancers” and the vulnerability that this afforded the project. It’d allow it to be imbedded with feeling and humanity, a warm quality that is often stripped from professional works due to the technical focus of professional dancers and the endless, intricate rehearsal process.

I choose to put the term non-dancers inside quotations because I believe we are all dancers. We all have not studied dance and chosen it as a profession, but we all have our own personal rhythm, our own idiosyncrasies, our every day movement that is all unique to us. The way we walk, the way we open a bottle, leap over a puddle, arrange the dinner table, shower, fold the laundry. It is all dance.

The opportunity to be part of this discovery process with new dancers was one that I could not pass up and one that is starting to blossom for several of them as we approach our first month of rehearsals.

Something in that regard happened in our last rehearsal that made me realize what a privilege it is to be around dance in my everyday. We were working in groups – me and two other dancers who were new to this process. Our assignment was to modify a phrase that we had created previously so that all three of us could start and finish our individual movements together, while traveling through the space and adding level changes. After demonstrating our phrase to each other and taking a few moments to add the tempo and levels, it was time to do it together. It was worth a shot, we thought. No review or making sure it all matched up. Let’s just do it. And so we did, trying to maintain eye contact and awareness of your partners, but a cold run altogether. To our surprise, we finished almost at the same time, our final movements almost completing, echoing each other.

A final pause holding that last pose and then… Wow! The three of us looked at each other. My partners smiling, with eyes wide open in excitement. “Wow! That was so cool! We’re making art,” they say. “Yes, we are!” I say as we high five each other. For that moment alone, my experience with Framing Bodies is worth it, regardless of the final product – although I am pretty excited to see what we’ll create. It’s that singular sensation of inception, of an idea brought to reality that makes your cells vibrate with excitement; for a performer, only comparable to the feeling of performing the finalized work, sometimes even grander.  And to be sharing it with someone who may have not experienced dance or art in this way before is a true honor and privilege. “Let’s do it again” we said, eager to duplicate what had just happened.

Get your tickets at framedance.org/boxoffice.

Lydia Hance is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant Award. This grant is funded by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.  Frame Dance Productions’ Framing Bodies is  funded in part by the Puffin Foundation.  Frame Dance Productions is a recipient of a Rice University Dance Program Space Grant.