Introducing GrandMammal

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.