Relay was a three-year dance poetry project, initiated in late 2011, that produced a series of experimental performative events in the Bay Area. First a purely a self-directed solo (sparked by my utter joy in reading Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge’s collaborative poem with artist Kiki Smith, Concordance) Relay called in inspiration, feedback, and dramaturgical counsel and conversation from others. Margit developed a approach for transduction, translating lived experiences into visual art and dance. Margit took walks with twenty-five artists, with whom we mapped out adventures, all recorded, and used the content and tones of these walks to transduce into movement experiments.
Language, song, and poetry skills came from Jessika Kenney; artistic counsel from Violet Juno and James Kidd; social experiments and expansion actions were made with with Matt Shyka, Brianna Skellie, Mara Poliak, Sarah Pritchard, Gretchen Till, Harold Burns, and Beth Ahlstrand; sounds came in from Kadet Kuhne; performance collaborations with Justin Desmangles, Violet, and Denise Leto, and writing encounters took place with Eleni Stecopoulos, mara poliak, Amber DiPietra, and Jen Hofer. Many artists intersected with the work through the workshops and embodied language encounters. More photos here.
Through Relay, we investigated the facets of meaning in the phrase dance poetry, learning by doing. Absorbing the language through memorization, Margit found transductions of tones and phrases into movement, watched the images of the performance grow in imagination and space. Margit came to know the poem Concordance and to embody it, through speaking, singing, drawing, writing, wordplay, conversation, and exegesis.
This piece for a time being intersected with some fascinations in studies of Chinese cosmology, particularly around the nature of the elements of the trigrams, the bagua, and personal and intimate understanding of the energetics of language used for the Fire element - fire’s language, from the perspective of the meridians, sexual organs of the body, and yin essence.
Performances took place at the Garage, SF in July 2012, then through Showbox LA at Bootleg Theater, that August; then later, it journeyed for events to places such as Joshua Tree, Riverside CA, Berkeley Art Museum, Starline Social Club Oakland, Ellen Webb Studio Emeryville, n/a Oakland through SALTA, Taoist Center Seattle, and Brooklyn, NY. This piece traveled far and wide.
Final performances in Bay Area included the following artists: Violet Ace Juno, Denise Leto (performances); Abby Crain, Eleni Stecopoulos (Readers); Aarian + Armaan Chacko-Whiting, Asia Wong, Frances Rosario, Kathleen Keogh, mara poliak, Maureen Whiting, nicholas andre sung (Tuning the Space); Chani Bockwinkel, Sarah Pritchard, Mara Poliak, May Tulin, Pat Reed (Group Excursion); Sarah Pritchard, Kathleen Keogh, Cathie Caraker, Katarina Eriksson, Qilo Matzen, Renee Rhodes, Jennifer Marie Hoff, Marcia Scott, Maureen Whiting, Catharine Brook Anderson, and Chane Gilbert (Group Informance, Tuning at BAM).
All Photos by Chani Bockwinkel unless otherwise noted.
Over the three years I embodied and performed segments of the poem through traditional and experimental tactics, wrote a poetry chapbook (Relay transduxions), exchanged with artists in various disciplines, lay fallow and integrated, and came with terms to meet new regions of practice such as transductions to describe the process of taking material from one medium into others, and anchoring to deal directly with counteracting with confusion and adrenaline in performing. I tend to take long periods of time to investigate material when I work, so the art is deeply embedded in with my intellectual, physical, cultural, imaginal, and aesthetic fascinations over time, and they cross and exchange with others.The experiential process of art always interacts in some way with larger, cultural questions. At every step of this project, I have been extending what it means to be in solo through multiple forms of conversation. Actually, this piece is an early step in defining the term and field Movement Culture, which is coming to be defined like this: embodied action has deep meaning and is mutually affected by the people and situation of which it is part. This work as well as the term continues to be redefined through the people from which is springs and conversations that grow over time.
Just as the poem Concordance shifted my body and has affected my life, so too I hope to honor the power of the artistic voice by developing a unique dance poetics and furthering the field of embodied research. With the richness and collaborative nature of making, this one voice indeed will cross with many others; what it creates, we can only imagine.
Winter 2011 - 2012: The project emerged from my absolute joy in reading Mei-mei Bersenbrugge’s collaborative visual poem Concordance with artist Kiki Smith. Also came out of one month of daily early morning art practice with no agenda. Over that period, I moved through artistic forms in the home space: reading, writing, drawing, moving, etc. North Oakland.
Summer of 2012: I presented Relay: Living Things Shine On as series of performances in San Francisco and Los Angeles (at The Garage SF and Bootleg Theater, produced by Showbox / LA). It was a project in which I pushed the term to its limit, in conversation through disciplines and amongst people. I asked: how can embodied language grow through performance? How to develop translations that create novelty, enhancing the tones of the poem? From this, I made a chapbook, transduxions, a set of poems for a single viewer. Some of the most notable aspects of these performances were the interactions and conversations I had with poets, specifically Eleni Stecopoulos, Amber DiPietra, and Jen Hofer. In one of the performances, I invited Jen on stage and we lay down and asked each other questions with the mike. Satisfying.
Then, after some time of fallow,
Summer from 2013: I spent the full season of in conversation with twenty-five practitioners from different disciplines. We walked and talked around a particular zone of the East Bay, Oakland and South Berkeley, which is the valley space between three local mountains: Mount Tamalpais, Mount Bruno, and Mount Diablo. With these talks, we wandered and conversed, each with a wildly different tone, and I recorded the conversation, and then we ended by mapping what had happened. This chapter was called Relay: Encounters.
Fall 2013 - Spring 2014: Relay: Discovering New Species is the current chapter of the Relay dance poetry project. It is a three-part dance poetry performance working with material that ranges from embodying poetry, transducing conversations into practice-actions in space, and studying energetics with swords. The piece is a composition experimentally-based on materials of the summers Encounters; while the piece does not immediately address all of the interactions nor encompass them, the conversations provided multiple layers of communication which became both direct and indirect material for the piece. This piece is touring in Southern California (informal), then will travel to Seattle, NYC, and finally the home territory of the Bay Area. It interacts with different artists where it is performed, and in that way, felts through the different places and mutually affected by the different places.
Violet Juno: Art-Life Exchange
Maureen Whiting: Choreographic Mentor
Avery Hudson: Archival and Technical Support
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Abby Crain
Amber DiPietra
Beth Ahlstrand
Brianna Skellie
Cara Judea Alhadeff + Zazu
Carol Swann
Daria Fain + Robert Kocik / The Prosodic Body
Denise Leto
Eleni Stecopoulos
Elise Baldwin
Elizabeth Harvey
Flavia Cymbalista
Gretchen Till
Harmony Wolfe / Char Salon
Harold Burns
James Kidd / Pieter Performance
Jen Hofer
Jessika Kenney
Joan Hanna
Julie Tolentino + Stosh Fila / FERAL * studio.house
Justin Desmangles
Kadet + Haven Kuhne
Keith Hennessy
K.J. Holmes
Krista DeNio
Laura Wald
Mara Poliak
Marcia Scott
Marissa Perel
Mary Armentrout
Maryanna Lachman
Matthew Shyka,
Meg Wolfe / Show Box L.A.
Melanie Maar / The Loft
Nan Estap / B. Spoke Tailor
Neil and Roger Marcus
Nicholas Andre Sung
Nicole Piesl + Anna
Olive Blackburn
Petra Kuppers
Philip Huang
Rosemary Hannon
Sarah Pritchard
Seth Eisen
Sri Louise
Tessa Wills
Wendy Rogers / UCRiverside Collaboration students