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.