CONTENTS:
Men Listening to Women
Fall Work
The Dad Joke at the End of the World
DO CAPITALS A TITLE MAKE?
Of Limb and Language
Stop/Walk/Sit/Lie
Say Something, Lavinia!
Monstehead: songs to stay home to
ismene’s(a)wake
United Nations Dance Jeopardy
Aliens on ICE: bordeline dreaming in America
Macbeth
“Men Listening To Women”
December 7-9, 8PM
Dance Mission Theater
choreography & direction: Miriam Wolodarski
performance: Megan Lowe & Rosemary Hannon
presented by Scott Wells & Dancers as part of the “Consent Forms” Evening
“The ear hears, the brain listens, the body senses vibrations.” —Pauline Oliveros
Listening is emotional labor, gendered labor, uncompensated labor. Listening is female. Is listening female? Hillary Clinton is universally considered by those who know her to be a good listener, one who is able to absorb vast amounts of detailed information. This trait becomes a liability when running for public office because we conceive of executives as doers, and doing as firm, and firmness as masculine, and women as soft, and listening as soft. Is listening soft? This piece, made at the invitation of Scott Wells, famous for dances for men, listens to a number of extraordinary women, plus a couple of horrible ones for good measure, to plumb the depths and shallows of what listening might be, of what a woman might be.
FALL WORK
"Fall Work" was developed with the support of TragantDansa and Centre Cívic Barceloneta, in fall 2013/ winter 2014.
It had its San Francisco premiere at ODC as part of SPF7 2015.
It has since been variously performed as a solo, a solo with a cameo by Daniel Bear Davis, and as a duet with Kevin Dockery.
From the artist:
" A contemporary performance, concerned with immediacy and reality. We turned all the lights on, but you can’t see us. You don’t see us. You see the light that’s reflected off us. We are not the light that you see. I wish we could be. I wish we could explode into rainbows. But if we approached the speed of light, from your frame of reference we would shorten in the direction we were going until we would basically disappear. And then what would be the point of having a performance? "
From the press:
"...a wild woman whose anarchy is meticulously timed as she works her way toward a gradual revealing of herself as a mount of raw flesh. "
— Rita Felciano, SF Bay Guardian
The Dad Joke at the End of the World
Performance by Miriam, Andy, (& Frida) Wolodarski Lundberg
Choreography, Music & Textiles by Miriam
A couple of contemporary citizen dancers contemplate the complexities of bringing a little human into the world in 2018.
DO CAPITALS A TITLE MAKE?
A rumbling of the body politic.
An experiment in politicized performance.
A dance for six people attempting to rage mindfully against the way capitalism mangles democracy.
Created by Miriam Wolodarski in collaboration with the performers:
Leslie Castellano, Kevin Dockery, Rosemary Hannon, Emily Leap, Andrew Lundberg, and Phoenicia Pettyjohn.
"The challenge is to get America to see and then act. Again and again I have been told by friends, “If you’re going to do this, the story needs drama. There has to be good versus evil. You must tell story after story about venal corruption. Rod Blagojevich, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Jack Abramoff— these are the figures who will rally America to respond.” Maybe. But what if the problem is not Blagojevich? What if Washington is not filled with evil souls trying to steal from the republic? What if the absolutely debilitating corruption that we face is a corruption caused by decent souls, not crooks? Could America rally to respond then? Can we get angry enough about small but systemic distortions that block the ability of democracy to work, if those distortions are the product of good people working in a corrupted system?" — Lawrence Lessig
++ Read my apropos article in inDance: http://dancersgroup.org/2015/05/speak-money-changes-everything/
OF LIMB & LANGUAGE
Of Limb & Language was created in 2012/2013 as part of the Artist in Residence commissioning program at CounterPULSE.
Excerpts were also performed at Performance Mix Festival in NYC and at Synapsis in Eureka.
The full on video is online.
Concept and Direction: Miriam Wolodarski
Performers & Collaborators: Leslie Castellano, Kevin Dockery, Rosemary Hannon, Andrew Lundberg, and Miriam Wolodarski
Caution Tape: Gabrielle Wolodarski
“Verbal false limb: an expression that is artificially inflated to be longer and more important-sounding than it actually is.”
This performance description will fail;
our hearts are at the tips of our tongues.
We read the papers, parsing the sanitization and distancing of tragedy, the rationalization of terror and injustice through euphemism and legal jargon, wading through the heaps of absurd propaganda, the politesse, the vulgar images of violence and eroticism. We are powerful and helpless, words under our fingernails and grammar stuck between our teeth.
What does it mean to mean it? What’s the sense of making sense? — Let’s dance. The body never lies, until someone dares to ask what it’s all about.
Intellectual conundrum made visceral, we dance, roll, wrestle, hurl ourselves at one other. The truth is neither here nor there, in both places at once, and nowhere to be found.
Of Limb and Language is a game show, a communicational tragicomedy, a brutal love affair between semantics and somatics.
STOP/ WALK/ SIT/ LIE
I made site specific work for Yerba Buena Night several years in a row, with a particular interest in flocking and walking scores. The title is an allusion to SF's repugnant and shameful Proposition L, a 2010 "Sit-Lie" ordinance that makes it a crime to sit down on the sidewalk.
I am always interested in doing more work with scores on the street.
MONSTERHEAD: songs to stay home to
created in 2011 thanks to a residency at Danceground Keriac in San Francisco.
Concept & Direction: Miriam Wolodarski
Performance: Miriam Wolodarski & Zack Bernstein
SAY SOMETHING, LAVINIA!
Artist in Residency program at Climate Theater, 2010
..Lucky indeed is the cook with the gift of tongues. No matter from which source – beef, calf, lamb or pork – smaller tongues are usually preferable. To carve tongue, cut through at the bump parallel to the base. If the tongue is to be served hot, drain, plunge it into cold water and skin and trim it by removing the roots, small bones and gristle. It is attractive served in Aspic.
Ismene’s (a)wake
solo piece from 2010 about Ismene, sole survivor of the house of Oedipus, patron saint of apathy.
NOTES FROM THE PIECE
1.
Catherine McKinnon. I have no outside to stand on or gaze at, no inside to escape to, too much urgency to wait, no place else to go and nothing to use but the twisted tools that have been shoved down my throat. That this is not a dialectical paradox, but a methodological expression of women's situation, in which the struggle for consciousness is a struggle for world: for a sexuality, a history, a culture, a community, a form of power, an experience of the sacred.
2.
Everyone belongs to something except Ismene. Creon belongs to Thebes, Oedipus to his fate. Haemon belongs to Antigone, Antigone to the gods. Polyneices and Eteocles belong to each other. Ismene is neither here nor there. She barely belongs to herself, changing her mind all the time about what to do.
3.
"Bitch: They used to lock the door. So I escaped. The first few times they’d catch me, and Creon would ask me how I thought I’d survive on my own. I told him I thought I’d be an actress. Write a one-woman show about my fucked-up childhood. One time they didn’t catch me, but I got hungry, so I came back."
4.
But Antigone, I said, it is God who died. And if God- (check the hallway) If God is dead, does he deserve a funeral?
God is a man and all the men are dying.
God is a house.
Antigone, I said, there’s a war on, hadn’t you heard. Antigone, I said, what’s so wrong with being eaten by vultures.
They always seemed noble to me: the most ecologically minded carnivores.
I don’t know if I could stand to take a good look at carrion flesh, maggot eaten faces and rotting limbs – much less eat them.
Antigone, I said, I am so afraid.
My heart is at my throat when I think of death.
5.
They say if the functions of the pancreas are confused with that of the heart or thoracic/ thyroid bodies, then love and sexual feeling may be expressed as competitiveness and rage.
6.
But Eteocles, and Polyneices, the only trophies they took at Thebes were each others lives.
Scroll down to blank page. Rustle around the bag. Cough. Whistle good/bad/ugly. Shootout. Deaths. Laughter. Crying. Close computer. Crying. Bulb on. I’ve gotta get out of here.
7.
"We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom." — Charles S. Pierce
8.
Don’t recall; let go of what has passed: MIMNO
Don’t imagine; let go of what may come: MI BSAM
Don’t think; let go of what is happening now: MI SHES
Don’t examine; don’t try to figure anything out: MI DPYOD
Don’t control; don’t try to make anything happen: MI SGOM
Rest; Relax; right now, and rest: RAND SAR BZHAG
Aliens On ICE: borderline dreaming in America
an ensemble performance made during and about the building of the wall between the USA and Mexico.
Creation and Direction: Miriam Wolodarski
Performers: Caitlin Bargenquast, Cheryl Burns, Eliza Ladd, Paul Montgomery, Miriam Wolodarski
Naropa University, MFA in Contemporary Performance, 2007
MACBETH
2006
Shakespeare's Scottish play, featuring lots of puppets, ventriloquism, aerial dance, a violinist, and a microwave oven.
With Raphi Soifer as Macbeth, Krista Fatka as his lady, and incredible props and puppetry by Gabrielle Wolodarski.
