This story is to be continued, you need to know that right from the start.

The day we met. The day things changed. The day things changed again. The day I wasn't sure where to put my hands. The day a friend emerged from the water and said take me with you but you can't keep me forever.

Moments of connecting deeply with a place can look weird and certainly to be witnessed is a vulnerable thing.

I'm currently leading a group of creative practitioners through self-guided practices at the intersection of place and creative body-mind. The arts we are cultivating defy contemporary middle class capitalistic culture on a number of levels. In fact, I can perhaps thank that culture for the fuel of lift-off that seems to burn hot behind my thrall. I run to my Place to create and hold a more nutritive space than I ever thought possible between myself and the world. 

Where and exactly how do you belong? What are the forces that give shape to your face, the sounds that echo in your voice, the forces that weather your hands into soft pebbles?

Dears, it has been a little while since I wrote. Grad school has taken up much of my energy. As I draw close to completion there, (graduation in August!), the larger tides of my life are begging to be tended to, and that means dance making, dance sharing, dance thinking, and lately... dance doodling. Doodling the personage of the beating heart behind my latest work.

Meet GrandMammal.

Grandmammal is a beasty presence that has been with me since late high school in one form or another. She recently returned as I've been working on my one woman show (the same I presented last April and worked on at Crosstown Arts last summer). Suffice it to say that she represents simultaneously the origin and the culmination of our evolution as mammals--a species whose future is as uncertain as the rest, but uniquely positioned to impact that future for better or worse. I see her coming and I see her going. I see her calling us forward from a long way off. I see her as a liability and an aspiration at the same time. The heart of the matter of why this species exists at all, which is to bond. We are about bonding. And yet, for me, she is always seen in a kind of in-looking solitude.

As I've done since last spring, I go to the Crosstown Arts public space and work a few times a week, but this time with no 'soft bouncer.' What I'm doing looks like idiosyncratic pedestrianism some days, tourism others, gymnastic exercises sometimes, or the musings of a mad woman. Sometimes it's an amoebic ode or a matter of rest. Either way, it fills me with evident joy to show up and do my ordinary extraordinary dailies and then go on with my life, letting the work accumulate in my subconscious.

I am inspired by people who work when no one is looking. I really love the awkwardness, though, of committing to personal and spatial research on a small platform with others noodling past, pausing or not. It's like an encouragement to become aware that our behavior itself is a canvas. Dance is behavior, too, not just display. It can be doing something in civic space that's as communicative or not as another body walking and eyeballing, or pushing a broom, or playing with their phone as they lean on a crumbling column.

And yet it is also a shy experience I am tenderly eager to share with you.

Working in public isn't a new thing. We all work in public to greater or lesser degrees. Yet there has been something poignant and bizarre about committing to a naked creative process--well, an exposed one anyway--by working at the Performance Stairs at the Concourse. That's why for each rehearsal I have been graced by the willingness of a fellow artist friend to hold space, to be what I call a "soft bouncer:' someone willing to give, if not the boot, a strong side-eye to anyone who tries to stop me from doing what I need to do there.

Which is what?

Wrestle gravity. Tangle with invisible partners. And keep homing in, here, on the central corps of movement material by looping through it, out of it, and back in.

Carol Sams took this (and added the slow mo, lordy!) Thanks to her for her keen bouncer-ship.

Thank you SO much for reading and caring.

DATES have been announced for my show. Friday April 13 9pm, Saturday same deal, Sunday 1:30pm. 1000 S. Cooper St. Memphis TN 38104.TheatreSouth.

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When you make work that is deeply personal, it can be hard to revisit. I am in the midst of dusting off Lauren & Bethany​, a work I made for an emerging choreographer's showcase in Indianapolis, to present at RAD Fest in Kalamazoo, Michigan next weekend. Sarah says this piece is a kind of child of ROSA: A Dance That Might Be About Roses, a work in progress conceived and directed by Sarah, and I wholeheartedly agree. Without ROSA and without Sarah, there would be no Lauren & Bethany.

I am having to step back into feelings of utter emptiness and it is HARD. To allow my body to remember what it felt like to walk into my house in Memphis and find it laid bare. That house and I had taken care of each other for seven years. On our last day together, I lovingly swept and washed her floors and polished the woodwork, and when I was done, we danced. In the months leading up to my move, Sarah and I spent so many delicious hours in the pagoda/studio in the construction zone for ROSA: A Dance That Might Be About Roses. ​​Words can not adequately express how achingly lovely that time together was: creating, laughing, crying, screaming... wanting so desperately to stop time from marching forward.

Have you ever felt as if a layer of your skin was missing??? That is what it means to step back into this work. To feel completely raw... To push against the emptiness, trying to be brave but failing miserably. To devour every last drop, SPEND IT ALL, and then slowly put one foot in front of the other. 
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For the past six months, I have spent my Wednesday nights learning Solo Vernacular Jazz dances from local Lindy Hop dancer, Danny Beyrer. These routines are rooted in the drive and pulse of Swing music and have wonderfully absurd names like: Big Apple, Mama Stew, Shim Sham, and the Tranky Doo. Within the routines are codified steps: Fall Off the Log, Suzie Q, Apple Jacks, and the list goes on and on, I can not believe I have been on this earth for 39 years and did not know that these dances existed!!!!!!! Rhythm is like food to me and I have been starved for it since I arrived in Indianapolis two years ago. Learning these routines has made me feel at home in my body again and has done so much for my dancing. These dances have helped me to bring a sense of ease and coolness to movement, which goes against my natural instinct to be BIG and BOLD. 

​I have been filling Sarah in on my rhythm journey and desperately wishing she was swinging right next to me every Wednesday night. In January I texted her a video of me practicing the Tranky Doo in my kitchen.

​Bethany: A kitchen Tranky Doo pour vous!
​Sarah: Oh snap. Bucklin my seatbelt. I simply don't believe you.
​Bethany: If you'd like to learn it, I'll break it down to the nitty gritty details via video and send them to you to learn along at your leisure.
Sarah: Please! Now, some of that had to be your invention.
​Bethany: Definitely added my own flavor but the steps area all Tranky Doo Choreo and almost each move has a name: Fall Off the Log, Apple Jacks, Boogie Forwards, Boogie Backs, Shorty George, Suzy Q
​Sarah: Jesus. That is so damn sweet.


So slowly but surely, I have been recording pieces of the Tranky Doo in my kitchen and sending it off to Sarah in Memphis. As some of you know, Sarah is working on The Feeling is Mutual, a prelude to a One Woman Show she has begun developing, that she will be presenting in Memphis' first ever Fringe Festival. During our weekly phone pow-wow last week, she asked if I could, in my own unique way, begin to transcribe the Tranky Doo onto paper. She has plans for the doodles as she begins to research movement material for The Feeling is Mutual. So, I'm off to my kitchen to continue to record pieces of the Tranky Doo and doodle it on paper and let it all ride the radio waves to Sarah's phone and smile knowing she is somewhere in Memphis making magic with it. 

Today I have my first rehearsal for THE FEELING IS MUTUAL. Since this work is that odd thing--a one woman show that explores relationship--it seemed only fitting that I rehearse not quite alone, maybe a little bit alone--like, when you and someone else at the airport are both alone, in the same quiet red-eye wing of the airport. it matters that there's another heartbeat in the waiting room. You might even trust someone enough to go to sleep.

So I've asked a friend to come sit and "hold space' for me on the performance stairs at the Crosstown Concourse today at 4pm. I said, hey, bring some work you can get done. She's going to have her laptop, basically ignoring me. But it makes all the difference in the world.

So it turns out there is an unexpected parallel between workshop this month and my one woman show: both explore the force that astrophysicists lovingly call "Big G." Yep, you guessed it. Gravity.

Talking with ecologist friend Will last night, he explained to me the movement patterns of mushrooms, larger members of the fungi kingdom (a kingdom which is more than three times as prolific in its output of diverse species as our Animal kingdom is,) Turns out mushrooms are--wait for it--negatively gravotropic. What the f does that mean? It means they develop against gravity. Not unlike our own trend, since we entered bipedal locomotion. We know why we started going "against the grain" as it were. But why do our friends, the mushrooms? We can speculate, or... we can dance. Why? Because as Neil Degrass Tyson so eloquently points out, we are not the top of the chain of life bur participants. Getting to know the more-than-human world is a profound and delicious way of getting to know ourselves. Be on the dance floor with me next Saturday February 17 from 3-5 to find out more. Theatreworks 2085 Monroe Ave Memphis, TN 38104. $20 or preferred.

BREAKING NEWS: I'm going to be presented in Memphis' FIRST EVER FRINGE FESTIVAL. If you are new to that word, a Fringe Festival is an opportunity for diverse performance makers to come together and present original work without any other affiliation, much like a film festival. It is often the start of something, a place to discover and to experiment. I am pleased to be coming "home" to interdisciplinary performance work, For this. I'll be presenting the prelude to a One Woman Show I have just begun developing. In no small way, this work is an ode to gravity and other inevitable (if sometimes uneasy) attractions. It is called The Feeling is Mutual.  Dates are between April 13-22 at  Voices of the South's Theatre South in Cooper Young. Stay tuned, loved ones. And for fun, please meet my mascot and muse, Frog the Rooster.

Yes, this is a true story. Why else would we bother?

Love, 
​Sarah

During Soft Animals in Motion in January, in which we explored the buoyancy and motivity of single cell organisms using a variety of movement in solo and group structures, an idea was suggested to explore the world of the Fungi in February. I'll be talking with an expert in fungi to learn more about how these specimens communicate important news to one another, and the history of their emergence in the grand spectacle of evolution. As always, I am curious about how dance is itself an act of evolution, which of course means that examining our evolution--if you choose to believe it--from particles into microorganisms and outwards through a series of morphologies into bipedalism and tool- and toy-making, can be fruitful as a means of creative, interpersonal, and personal inquiry.

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February 17 from 3-5pm at Theatreworks, we will be expanding and deepening our capacities to imagine, to extend, flex, curl, and unfurl, and to relay messages through the air. Join us! See the Current Offerings tab for more info, or email me at [email protected].

Yesterday diverse movers came together for a two hour session aimed at exploring diverse unison, the evolution of mammalian movement patterns, (what??), and interspecies duets. we had a ball. Looking to make this a monthly offering, so please stay tuned, and bring your single cell boogie, your spiraling giraffe meanderings, and your tadpole gyration to the next round.