Below are images from past shows, rehearsals and films. I’ve tried to stump you. Name the piece that the picture came from. For the final image, name the location of its premiere. First person to do this correctly will be entered to win a pair of tickets to Framing Bodies: LOVE ME and an enthusiastic cheer as you enter the building. The drawing will happen the week before the show.

Last night we filmed. It was like learning to drive a standard shift automobile, except better than that. It was like learning to drive your big brother’s standard Mustang on a hot summer day with the windows down and loud boy music playing. Not that we had music last night. We were music. The way we were music when we learned to drive, and we could get into the car and turn on the radio and drive off a long way from home being free. Not that we were free. Lydia was in charge of us and she kept saying things I couldn’t understand, and I kept asking the nearest trained dancer to translate it. “We rehearsed it. Remember? I did this. You did that.” Oh yeah. It was fun. It was a game. It was play. After I got home all sweaty I didn’t want to take a shower the way you don’t want to take a shower after really fun lovemaking. You want to leave your sweat on because it’s sweet. When I got up today I put on my old hippie music and danced some more, and sweated, and thought about people dancing at Woodstock and how they wanted to change the world. I thought about Woodstock because I’m old enough to be Lydia’s mom, and the thing is; it’s not the music that never gets old: it’s the dancer, because there is an inevitable joy in the body. It’s what the body knows about what you really want to do: dance like nobody’s watching. Right?

This is what Lydia taught me last night. In rehearsals she taught me that a gesture is older than a word; the way a smile is truer than what is said. She would give a writing prompt and then ask us to isolate the parts the jumped off the page at us and then walk around the room softly saying those words until our bodies knew what movements were in our words. Doing that is profound. It drove my voice down deep into my body and gave me goose bumps. Then she took the words away, and I was left with only the gestures, and then the gestures told me another story than the one I began with. If my original gestures were for shame then eventually my body would lead me towards gestures for release. Not that my body wanted a happy ending. It was just that my body knows what to do with shame, and my words don’t really know how to undo shame with an idea. It was a healing process. It is something very old.

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.

Not to worry…it’s anonymous. And what’s so wrong about having an opinion, anyway? Check back next week for the results.

recommends Third Coast Dance Film Festival! Check it out here.  And check it out tonight!  or tomorrow…7pm, free, Rice University Cinema.

The project…
Framing Bodies: LOVE ME
I remember reading the title in Lydia’s first email, and I didn’t really linger there long on what the name was because I wanted to get to what the project was actually about. I wanted to find out what the meat of the project was going to be about. As I kept reading Lydia’s description of the project, little preconceptions just started popping up here and there in my mind about love, trust, openness, love, loving, vulnerability, my twin, love, twin-love…..all these thoughts about love…

And all these little thoughts stemming from that LOVE ME title that I tried to read over so quickly in the beginning.

They were not well rounded thoughts one way or another, per say, on these split second thought interruptions as I was reading Lydia’s email. However, these interruptions just kept rolling forward and building and peaking my interest more and more. I was so “in” the project before I even finished reading the whole email, and in my mind I had already signed my twin Cassie up for it too! (Cassie didn’t even know that yet!)

With no other better way of putting it…It just felt right to do this project right now. It was right, and it was right now. Now was the time. This time in life. And with these people.

Throughout our rehearsal process, the project has me journaling on several topics, questions, and personal theories that tend to fascinate me…and in some instances tire me out. The tiring out part comes from an overload of thought or focus on a question I propose. And I have a lot of questions in life. The fascination part comes from my inclination to think. I really tend to keep my mind working, whether I’m trying to or not. So when Lydia then asks us to share all these personal thoughts about certain writing prompts, it really felt like a lot was being asked of me. I felt mentally exhausted a couple of times after rehearsal. Nothing too dramatic, but it was definitely utilizing all of my being to engage in this project. The mind is such a powerful tool. It really is one of our greatest gifts as individuals. And this project put together all these unique minds, and bodies, in one space at the same time…and I’m most interested in what the next step reveals.

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.

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.