score is Peri and i’s ongoing movement project. from what i remember, this started as an idea in the winter/ealry spring of 2024. at the time, Peri and i were living together in Pickle House, in Tivoli, New York. we had this shared idea of going into the mountains, into the snow, and making a score with our bodies into the fresh snow. we imagined us dancing through this sort-of improvisationally pre-designed pattern and continuing to use that as a basis of movement creation. of course this was inspired by the slew of musical friends we were surrounded by.
increasing slowness and attention is a major theme of this process. as is repetition and the isolation of the essence of a movement through slow, intentional exploration via repetition. its also really about listening and co-creation.
it may have really started years before, just a season freshly into our friendship, when we were both in a peer’s dance moderation piece. from there, that group of five moved into another one of our peer’s pieces--a three hour performance movement piece. that work was performed in a gallery, on a multi-layered platform Nicole had built of steel and wood. at its heighest, the platfrom reached about fifteen feet, high enough to touch the tall ceiling. betweent he five of us, we had developed such a shared sense of movement and language--an unspoken, deep and gritty, fast and slow, soft, solid, supportive. the platform was covered in clay Nicole had harvested from the marshes of Tivoli Bays, grass, and sand. the clay had been churned, and we used five gallon buckets to spread it over the platforms, softening the hard plywood we had been rehearsing on for weeks.
in that piece, Peri and i developed a partnering language rooted in a grittiness of potential loss and mutual supporting, shared balance. our bodies entangled and peri climbing over mine, we acsended the platforms in slow strength.
although the essence of score feels vastly different from that piece, i know it is informed by that initiation.
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in mid december 2024, i returned to the Hudson Valley to visit Peri. we made our journey into the Catskills, into the cold, white snow.
in the snow, we followed the pattern that we each were making, carving into frozenness. we did another improvisation on the frozen mud of the river bank before I caught my train to leave.
as we keep on, we realize that the environments we inhabit beg our attention to their sounds, textures, layers. river felt sky and bird-like, wide arms. feet planted. crunch, break, soften. cold wind. look down, close in. look up, widen, mountain. attuning to one another.
the project now is continuing to use score as a practice of attuenment to the breath, body, grass, sky, air, branches, toes, fingers, eachother. a desire to study past movements and continue building langauge and motif; to be in and out of the lens of the camera. pace and timing mimic the pace of mind and place. contact.
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field score,, july :
notes from watching snow score 1; movement motifs to repeat. noticing that each could be opened up, a landscape within each movement; many planes. working on july assignment: study past scores and build phrasework to exchange. there are two moments in snow score 1 where i rest my forehead on the snow. at the time, it felt so gentle, that contact with such a small surface of the body, the face. mimicking that here with the forehead on the forearms, bent. i see us doing this as partnerwork, partner filling the space and support of the snow. like the heal of the palm touching meeting the other’s forehead. feeling the depth and resistance of the snow and trying to recreate that in the body. its this plane, part of the vertical, that some part of the body is always moving through.
building visual “paper” score language // motifs