Anna Brody
Anna Brody explores the complexities of all kinds of love: romantic, friendship, familial. The love we don’t realize that’s always on our minds.
Welcome! Can you tell us about yourself?
AB: Hi thank you! I’m a neurodivergent and optimistic Aries living in Tucson, sliding through my last year in the Photo|Video|Imaging program at the University of Arizona. I make work about love because it is the only thing I care about, and I feel lucky and grateful to have finally figured that out. I use cameras to make art with extreme sentimentality and painstaking sincerity. I take myself too seriously, but have really funny friends who help me with that. My love languages are making food (is that acts of service? Gift giving? Both?) and physical touch. I’m good at working really hard in concentrated bursts and then relaxing and doing absolutely nothing for probably way too
long :)
Thank you for sharing your films :) Can you talk about the relationship between them? Them as a suite? Are more still coming?
AB: it's absolutely my pleasure! I have always been so happy to make art that is easily and arguably ideally shared and viewed online. I believe them to be very much in relation to one another, and to be considered together - the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the relationships in my life almost always guide me towards this level of inclusion and multiplicity. Most important to me is the abundance mentality - as long as I can reasonably maintain that, I feel in direct combatants with capitalism, which manufactures false scarcity. Relationships can affect one another negatively, neutrally, and positively, but I feel certain that most often the negative effects of one relationship on another stems from a scarcity mentality. SO, in that frame of reference, yes there is and will be more of this work! I'm so excited about the next two that I have nearly finished as they address friend love super directly, which is the most prevalent, transformational, and honest love I have in my life.
tell me everything you know is such an intimate portrayal of mother and daughter. It’s striking to see your mother dress you in a wedding gown as she speaks about her own marriage and how her idea of romance has changed over time. There is both a verbal and material transfer of knowledge.
AB: This transfer is of forever interest to me - how constructs of love and intimacy and fulfillment get transferred to us as we are parented, socialized, and drenched in media. How can we pick out what of these constructs work for us and which ones actually aren’t serving us at all? How can we lay it all out and look at the things we didn’t even realize we learned and say, ‘ok, this is good and helps me stand up for myself and maintain healthy boundaries, but this thing over here is actually just a completely irrelevant standard/requirement/expectation that ended up in my head and my heart and isn’t useful so now would be a good time to exorcise it.’
That material/tangible transfer of intimate connection is again visualized in tiny lightening. What questions do you lead with while you are working on these films?
AB: I ask myself questions about how love can be seen. How it can be enacted, manhandled, embodied, and practiced. One of my primary goals is to create a muscle memory within myself for how love is actioned - what, as bell hooks says, the verbs of love entail. And then get really really good at them. I use time, repetition and endurance to ask questions about faith and trust - about whether, even though watching these videos might end up feel like a waste of time, might trigger pain or feel alienating or irrelevant, the fact that you're still willing to sit down and try anyway means that you have used your trust muscled just enough to remind yourself that it's there if you forgot. And does that in itself make it worth it? Do you have to have learned something or is exercising resilience and non-logical curiosity enough of a payout? The line I tread when I edit is figuring out when it stops being a learning experience and starts being boring, confusing, painful, unresolved, or redundant. That is the line that relationships must tread as well, and I have to approach it just as intuitively.
Maybe even non-human relationships and involved here - because it does take trust and faith to get back in the ocean after being dunked, or to sleep outside after a snake crawled in your sleeping bag last time. This is possibly an absurd train of thought but here we are :)
The very sporadic and unpredictable movement of rotating around one another in worth it coupled with the sonic presence of breath, laughter, contact, and rest keeps the viewer on edge. We wait in anticipation for the final collision of both bodies.
AB: That anticipation is exactly what I hope to squeeze out of this video. worth it is a very simple allegory for falling in love, which Slavoj Žižek describes as "a permanent state of emergency," It is breathless, hilarious, terrifying, insular, there is no safety net, and you feel like the other person is suddenly very much in control of whether or not you feel happiness or pain. Then everything slows down, maybe you find a rhythm, maybe repetition creates a greater sense of security, maybe it eventually creates monotony - either way endurance is tested, and sometimes it is rewarded.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Mom’s Minestrone Soup
Once again, this is not a casserole. But it is all made in one pot. It’s getting cold and I’m craving my mom’s Minestrone Soup. The thing with mom recipes is sometimes they don’t come with steps or directions. So this is for you to figure out. When you do, you’ll never forget. xx
Silvia Rigozzi
Silvia Rigozzi shares her study on life, death and what follows.
Hi! Welcome to The Casserole Series :)
SR: Hi! My name is Silvia. I was born and grew up in Milan and have lived and traveled in the US on and off for the past 13 years. I have a training in literature and linguistics but later choose to follow a path more suited to my inclination towards artistic expression. While getting my MA in Art Education at RISD three years ago I began my journey with clay, expanding from my other 2D practices of wood-cut printmaking and film photography. I am currently based in Milan, traveling to other cities to make and fire ceramics. The pandemic for me marked a more conscious commitment to art making and a reinforcement of the findings of my graduate school thesis on art as something that wants to be born through the artist. This renewed vow to art making, since clay wasn’t an option, has included writing, drawing, painting, and making inks and paper with dead plants and flowers.
The poem Jasmine is really striking. You wrote it during quarantine in Milan, Italy. Italy had much stricter regulations than the US. What is so beautiful about the poem is that it engages with all the senses so accurately and intimately. Something I missed while in quarantine was the freedom in experiencing the richness of the world through my senses.
SR: In a way quarantine didn’t change my lifestyle very much, other than I couldn’t go for walks. I kept doing what I usually do, with the comfort of knowing that it was the only thing I was supposed to be doing. It was a sort of long spiritual and creative retreat. I would write, read, draw, garden. There was a lot of listening to birds, tuning in to nature and contemplation of my plants. Of being with them and myself as Spring was approaching. The sweet smell of the jasmine flowers I have on my patio invited me to sit outside. Living in an urban setting it was a blessing to have an outdoor patio. The scent was constant, no matter where my mind wondered, at some point I would be yet again embraced by it and brought back to the calmness of the present moment.
I was very aware of atmospheric events and nature changes around me and welcomed them as kind gifts that came to visit me because I couldn’t go anywhere. The wind, the breeze, the sand from the Sahara Desert, the flooding of my patio, the warm sun, all brought intense sensory experiences that I cherished.
In this exercise I wanted to recreate a sense of getting lost in thoughts, representing the free flow of memories that have molded me together. It became a photo album of snapshots, a summary of my past, the way I see it, and that no one else knows.
The jasmine scent is a sort of portal that allows me to travel to other places in time and also leads me back. I am intrigued by identity as a sum of perceived eroded memories, so I wanted to draw a recollection as a self-portrait of my consciousness through the random surge of thoughts and emotions. An exercise in vulnerability.
You are a trained potter and expert gardener. The ink prints have a strong structure, almost like a photograph of a piece of pottery. How does your study of pottery and gardening speak to your other art practices.
SR: I am fascinated by the ephemeral and have a desire to prolong the existence of things. I am blown away by the beauty and delicate perfection of flowers and wish to save every inch of existence. What do things (and humans) have to say after they are beautiful and full of life? What richness and new beauty can they bring? This stays true in everything I do, whether it is composting, or gathering wild clay, or eventually making ceramic glazes with ashes of dead plants I am collecting.
This project was about trying to find out what the flowers had to say after their life as flowers. What was left unsaid in the beauty of their death and wilting? Their fleetingness is captured in the prints that draw vague figures that often resemble dancing humans or faces. I wanted to give them another chance to whisper something, beyond what is expected, in a quiet way that welcomes interpretation.
My work speaks of the importance of scraps, dead stuff, what is considered waste, or useless. Even on a human scale. I would like my work to invite people to change perspective and unhinge those assumptions society and the culture of waste and commodity have created for us and are too often not questioned but built upon and reinforced. In this project there is an intimacy that comes with the size and the content of the prints. They are images that open themselves to a dialogue, without the preconceived notion of what they are. How often do I have this openness of not thinking I already know what is in front of me?
This project is a metaphor of the elusiveness of essence and its perception. It speaks about the gap between what we are as humans and how we are perceived by others. It visually reveals the incongruence between how we are and how we are read. In relationships, it’s not about who we are, but how we are seen.
The ink prints also remind me of pressed flowers. I live in North Carolina and the first thing I noticed when I moved to the south was the lush vegetation. I have spent many afternoons plucking flowers and pressing them in books. The pressed flower is so delicate. It freezes the natural cycle of the flower, preserving lifelike forever.
SR: Exactly. That is one beautiful way of preserving them. The prints are in fact pressed flowers, in a way. It’s their voice, the mark they make. The trace they want to leave behind. I think of this a lot.
The photographs are haunting. Also made during quarantine. Can you speak about what was inspiring you, keeping you company during this time?
SR: It was the beginning of quarantine in Italy, and Tarkovsky’s films, polaroids, and writings were keeping me company together with films by Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Leonora Carrington’s haunting and beautiful paintings, the work and life of Henri Rousseau, Louise Bourgeois’ prints and drawings, Van Gogh’s letters.
Through Tarkovsky’s powerful work I remember experiencing feeling my body more whole, as if I were an entity in his films. As if he was giving myself back to myself. He and all the other inspiring companions awakened in me a feeling of hope for a life dedicated to art.
One day at the beginning of March, my urban garden was offering me three daffodils. I cut them because it was raining, and they would have lasted longer out of the rain. I had intended them as an offering to Mary and St. Joseph. I found myself holding these proud yet humble and elegant flowers and had a sort of sacred reverence towards them, as they were almost too beautiful to look at. I wanted to do them justice. Their elusive beauty almost shook me. I was outside on the patio, the rain falling, my feet in the water, the bright daffodils in my hands. I felt like I was the Russian poet at the baths in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, the bearer of light, with a candle in his hands. It all felt so real. I felt so alive in the act of capturing that moment. An idea that had been vaguely meandering through my soul for months crystallized in that moment, in those photos.
Silvia Rigozzi is a ceramist, poet, photographer and gardener based in Milan.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Italian Inspired Casserole
I mean who doesn’t like a noodle dish??
Ingredients:
1-1/2 lb bulk Italian sausage
1-1/2 lb ground beef
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped green pepper
2 cans (15 ounce each) tomato sauce
2 cans (6 ounces each) tomato paste
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
2 cans (8-3/4 ounces each) whole kernel corn, drained
2 cans (2-1/4 ounces each) sliced ripe olives, drained
1 package (16 ounces) wide noodles, cooked and drained
8 ounces cheddar cheese, cut into strips
Directions:
In a Dutch oven over medium heat, cook sausage, beef, onion and green pepper until meat is no longer pink; drain. Add the tomato sauce, tomato paste, water and seasonings; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Add corn and olives. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Stir in noodles.
Pour into two greased 13-in. x 9-in. baking dishes. Top with cheese. Cover and bake at 350° for 25-30 minutes or until heated through.
(from Taste of Home)
Mivan Makia
Mivan Makia shares with us her short film, a place of others, anothers, a further more. A haunting dreamlike journey through mirrors and reflections with a final gathering at the sea.
a place of others, anothers, a further more
Hi! Welcome to The Casserole Series. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?
MM: My name is Mivan. I was born in Canada but grew up in Dubai. I am back in Canada, for now. I finished my BFA in Film here. My work focuses more on filmmaking specifically analog film. I really enjoy working with Super8mm and 16mm film. I also really enjoy printmaking, photography, performance art, etc. Subconsciously I am always working towards exploring more in those other mediums and start to somehow incorporate the different ones together. I would hate to only make films for the rest of my life.
The mirrors and reflections leave you questioning: Who is looking? What is looking back? Is it a portal? The same sort of questions movies evoke.
MM: You can think of the mirrors and reflections, I suppose as a metaphor to express more layers of meaning or relationships than what immediately meets the eye. I say that because to really try and simplify it, the film is a purposeful manipulation of memories in a heterotopic universe. Essentially what the mirror represents is the idea that a mirror is a utopia because the image reflected is a 'placeless place', an unreal virtual place that allows one to see one's own visibility. However, the mirror is also a heterotopia, in that it is a real object. The heterotopia of the mirror is at once absolutely real, relating with the real space surrounding it, and absolutely unreal, creating a virtual image. Just like the memories.
The narrator, in both text and sound, calls to mind components of sci fi. Like the mirrors, there is a lingering question about time.
MM: I suppose I was mostly trying to tell this piece through image and sound, so I didn’t want to say too much through the narrator but still say something that would add value to the piece. Time definitely whether consciously or not is a factor of the film. The nostalgia of memories, but also the romanticization of what could’ve been. I don't usually care to label my films, they can be whatever the viewer wants it to be. Some people might see this as a really personal sentimental piece or some will see it as this computer lady trying to go through and organize an overload of an individual’s data, and she's having these lags happen where the sound and image has cut to some other sound and image.
The dead fish being returned to the sea wrapped in plastic is haunting. What is your relationship to the sea?
MM: I grew up and lived by the sea all my life, I don’t think I will ever stop making projects by the ocean. I suppose it says something about the whole idea of why fish are and have been so important to me. This idea that I went to the fish market and had to bargain to buy these fish for cheaper, only to wrap them up in plastic and take them back "home" to the ocean. At some points the fish felt like me and I felt like the fish. This idea of going back home where you expect to be happy and then you go back and you realized so much has changed and you are feeling very disassociated. In the fish's case, dead. However, it's also the ocean. The place you went to a lot growing up and a place you share many fond memories with many kinds of different people. I guess that's how the shots of the fish market in the ocean came from.
The film has a very rhythmic editing. You mentioned that the score was created for the film. Can you speak about the sound / image relationship?
MM: The entire score was done by my very talented and good friend Alan. He did the score to my last film as well. It was important to really set a “mood” for each part of the film. First piece being creepy, confusing and explorative to the second one being bubbly, campy, and fun, and the last being the more peaceful, nostalgic, genuine and really just an accumulation of all the highs and the lows. A big part of the film is the abruptness of it. First it was visually through the edit so of course the music had to be as well. For both of us, throughout the whole process of editing this film I think we were both working towards a switch that had to be very abrupt but also rhythmic to one’s ear. It was important throughout the whole process for it to just build more and more from start to finish, like an orchestra.
Mivan Makia is a Canadian based artist from Dubai working with film.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Wake-Up Casserole w/ Canadian Bacon
I could eat eggs and bacon for every meal. You’re welcome.
Ingredients:
8 frozen hash brown patties
2 (6 ounce) packages Canadian bacon, quartered
4 cups shredded Cheddar-Monterey Jack cheese blend
1 & 3/4 cups egg substitute
1 cup 2% milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground mustard
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9x13 inch baking dish
Arrange hash brown patties in a single layer in the prepared baking dish; top with Canadian bacon. Sprinkle Cheddar-Monterey Jack cheese over Canadian bacon.
Whisk egg substitute, milk, salt, and mustard together in a bowl; pour over cheese layer. Cover dish with aluminum foil.
Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour. Remove aluminum foil and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean and edges are golden brown (about 15 min)
(from allrecipes)
Justin Clifford Rhody
Vernacular Visions was a public slideshow series of found 35mm photo slides, curated and presented by Justin Rhody 2013-2018. Each distinctive program is accompanied by a unique audio mix of related (and unrelated) sounds & musics. And now,Vernacular Visions makes its online debut! Check out the video below for a special Vernacular Visions slideshow.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
JCR: My name is Justin Clifford Rhody and I currently live in New Mexico (via Oakland CA, via the Midwest). Recently I began fishing. I never catch anything, but it works well as an excuse to wake up at dawn and sit silently in one place. I actually have no idea what I would do if a fish did bite down. For me, it’s more of a scenic byway leading to god knows where.
I was struck by the similar moods of Vernacular Visions and The Casserole Series. From my understanding, both work to provide open and inclusive space for a shared experience. For The Casserole Series you have transferred Vernacular Visions from an event to an art piece. Can you speak about how Vernacular Visions originally operated?
JCR: While living in Oakland I began buying thousands of slide photos from local junk stores, just to project them at home and study a form of photography that wasn’t as accessible through the profit-driven canon of galleries and books. These were all amateur snapshots with most being terribly mundane, but every once in a while a gem would poke through and overshadow the time spent digging. As these greatest hits began to accumulate and I had enough for an hour-long program, I decided to try for a public presentation. I found an electrical outlet in the park surrounding Lake Merritt, made a few flyers and just plugged in. People seemed to really enjoy it and it attracted a cross-section from different scenes/interests, which was nice to see. So I decided to do it again… and again and again. All in all I put together over 30 unique programs from 2013-2018. The program expanded to occasionally offer a platform for a local photographer or filmmaker to present their work as half of the night’s program. The illegal outdoor location on Lake Merritt was great, but eventually “they” seemed to catch on and placed a cover over the outlet (which many homeless people also used to charge cellphones, flashlights, etc. - another gross example of how obnoxiously the streets are policed in the US.) Fortunately there was a thriving underground network in the Bay Area at that time and it was a seamless transition to move the show into a series of warehouses, artist-run spaces, backyards, microcinemas, etc. That community and its commitment to art as an act, not as a commodity, is what fostered and allowed the project to become what it did. Without those people involved I doubt I would have even wanted to do it.
I love the found images. They all seem to be about a second off: a scene of the mountains with someone’s profile accidentally sneaking in at the corner of the frame, a mother and daughter sitting in the glow of magic hour caught in mid blink. They show the awkwardness of life which I read as incredibly honest and tender. The music choices to accompany the images also unite them in an interesting way. I almost feel like I am sitting among my cousins looking through family slides. Can you speak about the relationship between the images and sound?
JCR: Like most things, it’s a mix of random circumstances being lassoed by intention. Occasionally I would include songs because the lyrics mentioned something related to photography, but mostly I’m just juggling variety, the mood and what records or tapes I had on hand. The majority of the time it would honestly just seem to fall into place if I stressed about it enough (Cosmic Pressure™). The image/sound relationship can be tricky though, same as the photo/caption relationship, with one determining the effect of the other in a parasitic draw. It seems to take effort for things to co-exist.
How has your work changed in the last five months?
JCR: For the most part my whole lifestyle feels the same, which I like; dinner at home, local camping trips, reading, the endless self-directed art project… But without the time wasted hustling for cash, I have been able to dig a little deeper and expand on a few things. Sometimes that one extra night of sleeping in the woods can be all it takes - transformative to the point that my “real life” feels like a distant memory and returning home feels like visiting an alien landscape. That disassociation to the routines and the objects I’ve fallen into can feel almost aimlessly liberating - not because it’s hinting at abandonment, but because the recoil is like a personal forensics case. It’s difficult to imagine life in this country returning to customer service.
Casserole of the Week:
Michigan Beans and Sausage Casserole
Another church cookbook favorite (via Taste of Home). A recipe to store away for the upcoming winter months.
Ingredients:
1 lb smoked kielbasa or smoked Polish sausage
1 medium onion, chopped
1 cup ketchup
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons white vinegar
2 tablespoons molasses
2 tablespoons prepared mustard
3 cans (15 1/2 ounces each) great northern beans, rinsed and drained
Directions:
In a large saucepan, cook sausage and onion in boiling water for 2 minutes; drain. In a large bowl, combine the ketchup, sugars, vinegar, molasses and mustard. Stir in beans and sausage mixture.
Transfer to a greased 2-1/2 qt baking dish. Cover and bake at 350 degrees for 1-1/2 hours or until bean mixture reaches desired thickness.
Celia Eid
“Punto Agitato unfolds in a moving world where there is no definite space nor precise time. A continual energy pervades Punto Agitato throughout with a flutter of hesitant ambiguous and feverish gestures. The music is improvised and recorded directly on the video.”
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
CE: I was born in São Paulo, Brazil. At the moment, I live part of the time in France and for the other part in Brazil. I have always had a very strong relationship with the visual arts and music. I studied music at University in Brazil. That is where I discovered contemporary European music and the great 20th century composers like Boulez, Berio, Stockausen, and the American John Cage. After my studies I moved to Europe to continue studying music. I spent 2 years in France and 4 years in Germany. In Germany, I went back to visual art. There I had several exhibitions. After 6 years in Europe I returned to São Paulo where I had a career as an illustrator working with many newspapers and publishing houses. In the mid-90s I worked at a video production house where I learned digital animation techniques. In 1997, I moved back to France where I started to create animations with the music of composers, friends, which I had met when I was young in France. I also worked teaching children and teenagers how to make animations. Today beside the animations I also paint and practice lithography.
Punto Agitato is a collaboration with musician Pierre-Stéphane Meugé. How do your collaborations work? Specifically this collaboration?
CE: I met Pierre-Stéphane Meugé when I returned to France in 1997. In addition to being a composer, he is a great saxophonist. He's someone very involved in teaching. He often played with my old musician friends. I created the animation thinking about him, but he didn’t know. When I finished the video I sent it to him. We made an appointment to talk. He said that many parts of the film inspired him a lot but some parts didn't inspire him at all. I asked more details to understand what exactly inspired him and why. After that conversation, I deleted all the parts that he didn't like and I worked developing the rest. Removing the parts he didn't like was not a problem for me because I also had some doubts about them. Developing the new parts was very easy because what he said inspired me. The music is improvised, he didn't have any score, he had only a little draw as guide.
Your work is often a collaboration with a sound artist. What is your relationship to music and sound?
CE: As I said, I started making videos animation in 1997 when I moved to France and found my old good musician friends and the contemporary European music environment. Music and cinema are two arts similar because they run together in time. Doing this kind of video I’m able to fuse my visual art with music. Most of the videos have structures inspired by music. I’m very happy to have found a way to create one kind of art that encompasses both my passions.
I can't help but look at Punto Agitato through the lens of our current culture of coronavirus and protests. The animated characters mirror group dynamics: order, avoidance, hesitancy, meetings, gathering, rebellion, reinstating order. Do you see this piece differently now than when it was first created?
CE: It is very interesting your comment about Punto Agitato. Usually, when I start a new work I don’t have a plan. I have a few ideas, but they concern, in general, more the structure than the sense or the message. To do an animation takes a lot of time. One year or more. Many things happen during this time. I noticed, and this is quite new, that during this process I absorb unconsciously all the stress, the anguish, the violence of the current events of the world. And all this becomes transparent in the work.
I started to do Punto Agitato in 2018 a very difficult year in France and Brazil. In France for more than a year every Saturday there were amazing demonstrations against the government. They were very violent. In Brazil in the middle of a big governmental and an economic crisis we had elections where one of the craziest and irresponsible person in the world was elected. We were afraid to have a new dictatorship, with the Covid-19 we now have a genocide.
I agree with you when you say that today, in 2020, Punto Agitato has a lot of relation with what we are living but for me what is very important in my work is that people feel free to have their own interpretation. My website opens with the phrase: It is through other’s eyes that my gestures are revealed.
How has your practice, if at all, changed during this time of quarantine?
CE: In January 2019 I started a new animation. Until March 2020 I had done some parts but I didn’t have any idea how to put them altogether. It was difficult. I had had a blockage. But suddenly, when the Covid-19 came the blockage went away and in a very little time I got the video’s name and finished it: The Shudder flies away with open arms, Farewell. The music was composed by Sébastien Béranger, someone with whom I have done many video animations.
I finished my new video in mid-April 2020. I was in Brazil since January 2020. I wanted to fly to France but with Covid-19 it was impossible. I could fly only on June 15th. From mid-April until my departure I took out my old clarinet and I passed my days playing it. Something that I haven’t done for a very long time.
My best thanks for Francis van der Riet who kindly did the correction of this interview.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
French Onion Soup
Ok, once again not a casserole. But it is my all-time favorite soup. I’ll eat anything that is covered in cheese and topped with bread.
From Vintage Recipes
Alanna Styer
Alanna Styer’s photographic experiments from her time in quarantine.
Isolated and living alone, Alanna photographed objects from her home while experimenting with new developing processes. The results are a lesson in how to spend time with an image.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
AS: A little about me: I grew up in St. Louis, MO (downtown in the city, within earshot of Busch Stadium) which has left me with a lifelong love of baseball. Since moving out of Missouri at 18 I have lived in Tennessee, California, North Carolina and now Florida.
I was wrapping up my MFA at Duke University when COVID hit and sadly my thesis show was canceled. Like most everyone else, I had to shift gears to quickly figure out how to live and create during a pandemic. Currently I’m living in Florida with my sister and taking it a day at a time.
The presentation of the photographs in triptychs is really interesting. With the number of images we consume a day, the practice of spending time with an image has been lost. In your work, as the eye moves from image to image the viewer is taught how to look closer, how to really investigate the image.
AS: The idea of a teaching the viewer how to look or creating a visual rule is something I’ve always liked. It’s a bit like a logic puzzle but also becomes an access point for a range of visual literacy levels and not just those steeped in art history.
As I was experimenting with making the polaroids the triptych came about naturally as it took three tries to get the first representational image. Instead of throwing the first two away I lined them up and this mini series on investigation and revelation emerged.
Your previous work focuses primarily on landscapes and portraits often calling you to travel. There is an intimacy and softness in this newest series. The stationary photographer is evident. Did the process of making an image change for you as the focus of the lens shifted from looking outward to looking inward on your own environment?
How has your practice changed, if at all, during this pandemic?
AS: I’m going to answer these both at one because the pandemic not only changed what I photographed but how. Early on during the pandemic I gave an artist talk and some asked me if I found myself photographing more during the pandemic; referencing the emptiness and lack of people found in my photographs as the reason why now might be the best time for me to work. But that’s not at all what happened. Instead of seeing the empty streets as an opportunity I just saw them as incredibly limiting. Before I would have to wait for people to exit the scene and in that time I would contemplate angles and light and really sit in the landscape I was photographing. With no one around I felt as if I couldn’t take this same time or maybe due to the circumstances it felt awkward to linger anywhere. I was unable to work on my current Midwest project and too anxious to be out in the world so I started photographing my own environment, even myself. This was a new way of working for me and it has been the most intuitive and experimental work I’ve made yet. I've gone back to my standard mode of working (very project/subject based) more or less but I do think I've kept some of the impulsiveness. I'm excited to see how this has changed how I present work as well.
I find the Polaroid and really compelling medium. It has the tangibility of film and the immediacy of digital. What was your experience like working with this medium?
AS: These are the exact reasons I wanted to use polaroids. I was cooped up and couldn’t get my film processed and I needed to make something that I wasn’t going to have to wait weeks or months to see the results of. I knew digital wouldn’t fix this craving because it was too fast and I needed to work with my hands at least a little bit. So I turned to my Instax Mini.
I took some traditional polaroids but it felt too much like working with a digital camera, too fast and no evidence of the human hand. I then remembered a project Lisa McCarty did where she processed the developer in expired polaroids by hand to create images. I decided to take an additional step and expose them in a camera first and then hand develop the polaroids. I did some Google searching and I came up with a process putting Instax film into my Mamiya twin lens. This process also allowed me to double expose the polaroids.
What I think is so cool about this work is that it is a process created out of limitations to document such a specific moment of time. I only made these polaroids for about a month (April-May) during the time when everything had shut down. I was living alone and I could only access what was in my house or could be shipped to me.
Casserole Recipe of the Week: Potato Casserole
I am home at my parents’ house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My mom has a cupboard full of church cookbooks. Enjoy this 1997 gem from Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Davenport, Iowa (the parish my mom and her twelve brothers and sisters grew up attending). And! The Potato Casserole is a St. Louis class (who knew?!?).
Sarah Lasley
Sarah Lasley shares her quarantine creation, How I Choose to Spend the Remainder of my Birthing Years. A recreation of a childhood fantasy. A simulated meeting with Patrick Swayze.
So happy you are part of The Casserole Series this week! Can you tell us a bit about who you are?
SL: Yea, thanks so much for having me! I’m grateful for those carving out new spaces for arts engagement during the pandemic. Having grown up in the south in the 80s, I’m also a big fan of casseroles. My dad had a cookbook called “A Man, A Can, A Plan” which was pretty much all the casseroles you could make from a can. Mmmm... So, yea who am I? I’m an artist, filmmaker, and professor of New Media at University of Texas, currently living in San Antonio with my dog, Dude. Much of my work draws a parallel between how American culture values women and how it values nature, in that both are pruned and groomed to be accessories to the male mythos. Side note, I’m also the reigning karaoke champion of the Btown Karaoke League in Bloomington, Indiana, but that’s for another time. And I guess it’s fair to say I’m an admirer of Patrick Swayze’s character in Dirty Dancing.
What I love about this film is the way that it addresses the power of cinema. At the young age of five you recognized desire, even before you could name desire. Your mom edited the film by taking out the "inappropriate scenes" but the damage was done. Your curiosity was already sparked, your world became bigger.
SL: That's what great film can do, right? It gives you emotions you weren’t prepared for, didn't know you had. I think what really hit me about this scene is how sensual it is. There's little sexual content, though that bra reveal moment WRECKED ME as a child, which is partly why I cut to the green screen for that moment in my film. That, and the fact that the pulley-system I built to take my own shirt off didn't work over 8 takes. It was both the single most defining shot of my adolescence and the only shot I couldn't recreate as an adult. But this whole scene is radical! It's the main love scene and it, like most the movie, revolves around a young woman stepping into her power and taking what she wants. This was my first experience of female sexual subjectivity. Even at the age of 5, I had already absorbed so much male sexual subjectivity, so this felt different. It was for my body. I was the main character in this sensual boundary pushing dance. It introduced me to feminine sexual power, which became the subject of my work for decades.
This film struck me because it speaks specifically to this universal moment of isolation that is quarantine. Where simple human (physical) connection is almost erotic. Zoom happy hours, FacetTime, etc. are a simulation of connectedness. Very similar to the sometimes synched / sometimes out of sync way you interact with the filmed Patrick Swayze.
SL: Yes! That's so well-stated. I'm very interested in the connection of visual verisimilitude and belief, particularly in relation to simulation. What failing conditions in the image can break the connection to the viewer? And how does our desire to believe help bridge the gap created in those moments? For instance, with Zoom, is it when the signal fails or the video becomes too low-res to keep up the illusion of presence? Did the Starbucks cup in that final season of Game of Thrones kill the whole vibe for some fans? How much work does our belief have to do to overcome these moments? I've also been thinking a great deal about cognitive dissonance in the current political moment and with white folks clinging to their racism in this, hopefully, final hour. What happens when our mind alters what we see in favor of what it wants to believe?
After all these years, what is your relationship now to this scene? What made you go back to that memory?
SL: Well, I was having one of those living-my-best-life evenings at home alone, and I caught the end of Dirty Dancing on TV. Watching the final dance scene with the speech at the mic and the lift, agh... I cried almost immediately when I've Had the Time of My Life started playing. So once it ended, I dug out my DVD of the movie and watched it from the beginning. I know most of the choreography from my own memory and its persistence in pop culture, and I kept laughing at the thought of trying to recreate the dance scenes from that movie as a single woman. I was plotting the contraptions I could build to do all those backbends (most of the choreo in the film is a slow backbend in Johnny's arms), and I was thinking about how my neighbors would think I'm insane if they saw me through the windows. Anyhow, like most of my films, it begins with an image, and I couldn't get that image of my nearly-40, single self backbending while suspended from a ladder to make the most of my Patrick Swayze fantasies. I also felt empowered that as a visual effects artist I could now in my adult years make manifest that reality as a gift to my child self. So, the next morning I started meticulously removing Baby from the scene, frame by frame. It was tedious and the parts where she and he were too entangled became an opportunity to explore these ideas of how much illusion is necessary to create belief. The rest of the content in the film arose rather organically.
How has your work changed, if at all, in quarantine?
SL: For the past year, I've been in pre-production for a short film that posits the National Parks as white utopias. I created the character Blair, a well-intending white woman on a search for spiritual and personal transformation, who takes a cathartic swim in the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Ignorant that she is freely crossing the US/Mexico border, Blair co-opts this site of political tension and racial violence for her white-narrative gain. Simultaneously, I was building a 3D model of an idealized suburb in the game engine Unity. With the closing of parks, I relocated Blair into the 3D neighborhood and moved her older, more conservative sister Moni across the street, thus creating the Enclave, “a residential sanctuary for women who’ve chosen a uniquely digital lifestyle” and a chance for me to consider white utopian vision on the ‘post-racial’ Internet.
SL: PS. About a month after I released the film, a former colleague of mine told me that she is close with Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and producer of Dirty Dancing, and asked if she could share the film with her. I of course complied, and weeks later received this note from Eleanor. I think it might be my greatest review. I mean, it’s her story. She’s Baby. This unexpected connection was a great final chapter in the story of this film.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Sarah’s mom’s Johnny Mosetta Casserole
(I especially love the ‘Add cheese’ emphasis)
Colin Post
Distinctions by Colin Post is a letter to his daughter, Annot. Written in hyperlinks with Twine, the poem expands as she develops from months to years. The words mirror her stages of maturation from the gaze of a father who is changing right alongside her.
Distinctions
“In the long run, I’m writing this for Annot — something she might read, perhaps at different times in her life, and learn something about how she grew in my eyes, through the strange refractions of word play and hyperlinks. ”
First, congratulations on your recent graduation with your Ph.D. and for fatherhood. What a year! Can you tell us a little about yourself?
CP: Thanks! It's been a trying but ultimately enriching year. Outside of hanging out with my daughter, wife, and cat, I spend most of my time either cycling or consumed with baseball. During the pandemic, I've been playing in an APBA baseball league online with some friends. APBA is a dice-and-cards baseball strategy game, and it's got a pretty dedicated following, myself included now.
Your poem online is an interactive experience. When reading the preface, it states that the poem is ever-growing alongside your daughter. Each month in her first year and then each year following you’re adding on to the hyperlink poem. Can you talk about your experience writing this genre of poetry? One that has no end?
CP: I've always been interested in how artists experiment with new technologies, using the capacities of some new medium to achieve novel effects and aesthetic experiences. What can a poet do writing with computational and networked technologies that they could not do with earlier writing technologies? There's a really rich history of hypertext literature, and a lot of history at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill where I've been working on my PhD. StorySpace, one of the first pieces of software specifically designed to read and write hypertext literature was developed by John B. Smith and Jay David Bolter at UNC in the late 1908s. There are still a lot of possibilities to explore with this writing technology, and that excites me. It keeps me excited about writing, thinking about how the affordances of this technology can shape the sort of poem I write. So I'm expressly embracing many of those affordances in the structure and content of the work -- one that could be updated easily over time, one that could foster webs of connections, and one that could integrate different kinds of attention, different voices.
It strikes me that the poem is alive. There is no narrative arch or projection of where it is going. It is dependent on your daughter’s decisions, preferences, interests, and how you relate to those as a father.
CP: That sense of aliveness is definitely my intent. I take a lot of inspiration from poets who play with open-ended, chance-driven procedures -- Jackson MacLow and his partner Anne Tardos are perennial favorites of mine, and also did some early, fascinating computational poetic experiments. The poem becomes a record of these undetermined interactions. In this vein, Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day is a touchstone for this present project. Mayer records the mundane occurrences of a single day -- making lunch, writing, going to the store for beer. As with MacLow and Tardos, Mayer is deconstructing the position of the lyric poet as this fount of beauty, expressively and uniquely responding to the world. Mayer is responding to the world, but oriented to it as a series of chance events that she is recording. That said, MacLow, Tardos, and Mayer all arrive at moments of incredible beauty in their poems, beauty won through grappling with the mechanics, techniques, and technologies of writing. I'm really interested in how that diary-like aspect of Midwinter Day, the marking of time but through the lens of a poem, really puts Mayer into interesting and unanticipated stances. How do you write poetically about making lunch or going to the store for beer, especially as part of a long, sequential piece? The chance-driven form of the work -- that I'm not deciding what to write, but responding to events as they occur -- makes the poem a kind of artistic stand-in for my daughter. I'm (hopefully) not trying to overdetermine her or influence her too much but fostering her growth as a curious, bright, silly individual.
In reading the poem I realized, even as an adult, how similar I feel to her. Learning to readapt, move, breathe, discover. This line read hauntingly relevant to my experience in quarantine, “Between crusted and smooth, species either crack or curl. The fourth distinction concerns connections.”
CP: I'm in awe of biological development -- that awe is what initially motivated the poem, and over the months of writing, I've increasingly integrated my personal experiences raising my daughter. Watching that development play out day-by-day is such a fantastical experience that it definitely forces me to reflect on my own habits and behaviors. It's unavoidable that parents live vicariously through their children to some extent, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. The poem gives me a space to meditate on all of those developmental stages and milestones that I'm re-experiencing by watching my daughter grow. The poem also gives me a mechanism to connect up the specific trajectories of human development with the textures and consistencies of biological development more generally. I like thinking about crusts, skins, limbs, excreta, etc.
Has your writing changed at all now that you’ve become a father?
CP: One aspect of this work that's very different from anything I've written before is how much I've let my own experience into the work. I've never really written poems about myself or my own experience, and in fact, I've actively resisted that kind of writing. In part, I think that has changed because I now have a definite sense of an audience (my daughter) who might one day be interested in reading about her father's life. I don't know if anyone else will be interested in it, but she probably will be. The structure of this work, acting almost like a poetically-refracted blog, has enabled me to tap into that in a way that still feels genuine and still feels artistically exciting.
Colin Post is a poet and scholar who explores the potential of digital technologies for writing and reading.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Shepherd’s Pie
It wasn’t until I moved to the South that I tried Shepherd’s Pie. I love a good casserole and I can eat potatoes for every meal. Shepherd’s Pie and I are a match made in heaven. Click here for the southern delight.
Michaela Dwyer
“My work this week, “Making Stop,” is composed of five or six or seven easy (prose) pieces — about David Byrne’s hips, about regaining the tactility of language through dancing, about the fiction of teenagers holding phones — interspersed with photographic abstractions by Sarah Dwyer. ”
MAKING STOP
David Byrne’s hips onstage are a wronged metronome. The beat & the swing they enact are intact, but the linear rod — I’m not being cheeky here; I mean, let’s imagine the line that his hips distribute in space — is all off its axis.
Maybe there is no axis. After watching Stop Making Sense for the fourth time, barnacled to a section of the sectional sofa, I uncurl myself and queue again the YouTube clip of “Life During Wartime.” If you walked in on me, you’d think I was earnestly tethered to an Instagram-housed instructional dance video. Like: learn David Byrne’s apocalyptic hips, live at 7PM EDT.
To learn the hips, though, you must first learn that the movement — which writer Matt Singer likens to “a rubber band in an earthquake” — doesn’t actually originate there. In a studio setting, learning dancing is, or has been for me, an experience of watching and trying, and watching and trying again. (“Never mark!” a former Trisha Brown Company member demanded of my class during a summer dance intensive.) Language, the textual kind, buoys up around the gesture — supplementing it, undermining it — to help you along, to generate some productive confusion. A rubber band in an earthquake.
In my body, David Byrne’s hippy to-fro initiates from the knees and the balls of the feet. It requires, simultaneously, lateral shift and vertical lift. To get the airy whimsy of his hips, the heels rise and fall, the knees fight to synchronize, and the feet pronate dangerously. This, it turns out, is hugely destabilizing: the opposite of groundedness. Life During Wartime.
It’s odd to learn from a performance. There is no one helping you along, keeping you safe, securing you the space to watch and try and watch and try again. No one to marley your floor and clear obstacles.
And it requires a snuck imitation: you are approximating the affect of being in the room with those people. You are mining an unrecoverable intimacy.
Dear Personal Practice on Instagram,
It is very hard to learn your choreography.
It is hard to learn because I know you are improvising.
Have you ever tried to learn someone else’s improvisation?
Did you know spell check changes “improv” to “improve”?
I know you are dancing about not dancing.
How do I prove that I’ve learned your material when I have no notes, and no video, to show for it?
--
When you are out with your friends do they ask you to dance?
When you are out with your friends do they ask to film you dancing?
When you are alone have you found the perfect angle by which to film yourself?
When you are alone have you found the perfect angle by which to see yourself?
Three months ago, I was working my entire professional muscle around live, “in-person” performance: being present in my facilitative liveness to match the artistic liveness of practitioners visiting a university campus to create original work. I spent many hours in the studio observing an experimental choreographer direct young pre-professional ballet dancers through movement prompts. She’s fond of an introductory activity called “cooking,” wherein she instructs the dancers to embody oil in a frying pan as the heat increases. (It’s an effective warm-up.)
At its hottest, the floor — hold the metaphor; it’s an imperfectly squared vulcan Le Creuset — sustains and extends the dancers’ evolved gestural weirdness. No longer defaulting to familiar repertoire, they break arabesques into uncoded shapes. They feel out, for instance, what it feels like to initiate from the balls of the feet, from the nose, from the pinky finger. They look like hopped-up squiggles. Breath passes through the air, generating a faint, spat sizzle.
(One of my favorite dance moments in Stop Making Sense is Tina Weymouth’s dulled-out interpretation of a pas-de-chat across the stage to the Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love.” Her blonde curtain hangs in front of her face, shrouding the neck of her bass. After a few up-down prances, she lands in a wide stance, pauses, and bends her leg upward to form an akimbo “P.”
You can find this excerpt on YouTube, uploaded by a user named John Seven and titled, “Tina Weymouth does the terrible, horrible thing you can’t un-see.”
Language, the textual kind, buoys up around the gesture. I’d call John Seven’s language unproductive.)
One of the movement prompts distributed to these teenage technicians produces a phrase that a dancer names “tomato.” I don’t remember the movement, but I can imitate its outline and affect from my sectional sofa: a dribbling roundness, like the shape of a beleaguered exhale. And then, before the body gives out, a summoning of a tiny protective gesture: either clasped hands or a downward bow.
And then I think: “tomato” might’ve looked like something else entirely. As I turn and run toward this memory, I am as insistent in its fiction — in my unreliable remembrance — as I am in its fact: it is too vivid not to be true.
A wronged metronome forms the backbeat for a dance instruction:
In the corner of my living room, on a dull weekday night, a person I am seeing is surprised to learn that I — a dancer, a woman, a millennial — don’t know how to “floss.” They tell me it originates in the hips. They demonstrate, modeling a slouched undulation set to an internal rhythm. They’re confident the fixed rod-like arm comes naturally on top of the hips.
I can’t imitate it. I’m furious: not because I can’t nail it technically, but because I’m being told to perform something I know is wrong.
A righted metronome forms the backbeat for a dance instruction:
In the corner of my dining room, on a dull weekday afternoon, I take my first-ever Cunningham dance class, free through Instagram Live. The instructor — for whom I send a prayer of equitable compensation — moves through each instruction, snapping one finger, keeping perfect time. Before I attempt the bounces and tilts, I must first move all of my furniture along the wall. It feels good to clear the space.
I think Stop Making Sense is a dance film: everything from Byrne’s hip-swatting to the technical crews’ lumbering in and out between songs to build the ever-enlarging set. The overall concept is attributed, in the film and elsewhere, to Byrne. But when I watch, I search for the crevices where his reach slips away and runs up against another idea. I see Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt jogging in place in drab gray sweatsuits, smiling at each other from a few feet apart, telegraphing their own language for what’s going on — undermining the official, productively confusing it.
Save for walking neighbors and shopkeepers, I haven’t seen anyone outside of my family the last three months. I have had a lot of time to prepare, or not-prepare, for the eventual widening of that circle.
In dreams, I land repeatedly on one image: I am standing on the bleachers of my alma mater’s football stadium, and someone important to me is standing eight or so bleachers below. We form a short diagonal. You’d think big space would encourage big words and grand gestures, a theatrics of distanced interaction: I love you, you’ve hurt me, I miss you, you’re wrong instead of hi, what’s for dinner, how’s the cat, public library, grits, dog, time clock. But we pass both back and forth, collapsing all into equal affirmations. The negative space encourages an intimacy for which I feel unprepared.
I used to spend summers working at a publicly funded immersive program for high school students. Teenagers are accepted and attend for a given primary discipline: English, Social Science, Visual Art, Dance, Theater, et al. (It will not take place this summer.) At the end of the six weeks, most of the disciplines stage a culminating performance or presentation. The Theater students, during those years, always made a from-scratch, devised performance on a topic of their choosing.
What I remember is this: a blackout in the tiny black-box theater on the bottom floor of a women’s college academic building. Then, a sprinkling of light from upstage (this move was notable because students were typically banned from using cell phones). A chorus began:
Well, we know where we’re going / but we don’t know where we’ve been.
I remember this beginning detail and little else; I hear their voices whenever I hear the beginning of the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.”
As I turn and run toward this memory, I am as insistent in its fiction — in my unreliable remembrance — as I am in its fact: it is too vivid not to be true.
It’s odd to learn from a performance: mine, yours, a dance company’s, a livestream; one from five years ago, three months ago, or tonight. What are we learning, outside of our memory of the mechanics of movement? Should we feel better, smarter, safer: that we can get through another day of this?
And the future is certain / give us time to / work it out.
Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?
She/her. I live in Durham, NC. My primary professional work — where I am from 9 until 5 and often, during “in-person” times, late at night — is in performance presenting/programming, where I design and facilitate artist residency projects at Duke and in Durham. I’m a dance critic for Indy Week and elsewhere (including for my Instagram, and for myself). I’m an educator.
I’m most interested in how performance collides and entangles programming, criticism, documentation & archiving, and education.
The things I was most excited about a few months ago were: campaigning for Bernie and learning to skateboard. I love water, clouds, disco. And I miss people.
There is a tension in your piece between the intimacy of the shared experience and the mimicry of said intimacy on internet platforms. You hint towards a lack of security or maybe unwelcomed vulnerability when engaging with online platforms.
MD: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this a lot these past few months as dance artists and practitioners have mobilized (and, for those who are able, monetized) their teaching and artistry on online platforms. I see, through this virtualization, a beautiful opening of accessibility and participation and, actually, if I may be so bold, general interest in dance, which also makes me feel quite cynical as much of this (labor-intensive) content is being consumed for free and without the (labor-intensive) enriching context that complementary non-movement programming can provide and encourage.
As I’ve partaken in virtual dance classes, I’ve shied away from ones carried out over Zoom; right now, I’m not taking class to receive corrections. (Because I am not making my living as a professional dancer, I’m able to “get away” with this.) I’m doing it, as long as I’m healthy, to get back in the habit of taking class, which feels like a very important, albeit personal, thing.
I tend to lean confidently into vulnerability in my social media presence as long as it doesn’t immediately implicate my body, or my dancing body. Like most dancers, or former dancers, I have a complicated relationship with my continued attachment to and embodiment of it. However, I feel very comfortable posting a photo of a cloud and writing some searching abstract caption to accompany it. Because I don’t dance professionally or formally maintain a movement practice anymore, writing feels like my primary mode of expression; I devote more time to it, feel more practiced at it, and feel more comfortable staging myself that way.
Your photographs are a collaboration with your sister. The one word/image combination is striking. Coupled with your writings they read like a demand to move.
MD: I really appreciate this observation. I feel uneasy being attached to anything that could be interpreted as a “demand” to move, especially in terms of sensitivity to ability and access, but I think the text in the images can function a little bit like a movement prompt — something to generate movement, or movement possibility — or the resulting name for a movement phrase (like the “tomato” I reference in the piece).
The images were created by my sister, Sarah Dwyer, who is a photographer and graphic designer. I asked her to interpret photos I’ve taken on walks and runs around my neighborhood over the past three months, during which, especially in the early days of self-isolation, I was listening a lot to Stop Making Sense.
Sarah’s images are meant to be a direct callout to the images displayed onstage, behind the band, during the “Making Flippy Floppy” sequence in Demme’s film. I asked her to use some of the same words incorporated into the images in the film. But she intentionally created these images independently from my text. We wanted a somewhat randomized element.
The words you see in the images here are the particular words I latched onto upon first watch of the film. (There’s something really satisfying in the sonic slide between grits-dog-time clock.) When I see them now, they read like this whole constellation of things I want, need, and miss; like an aspirational grocery list for my life.
You grew up studying dance. You also point to movement often in your writing. How does dancing inspire or play a part in your writing practice?
MD: With varying degrees of abstraction, I always feel compelled to insist on the presence of my body, of the body, in writing. Sometimes I do it simply to remind myself I’m still there: a directive to be, and stay, present. I learned this entire sensibility through dance training, and figuring out methods to work it into my writing is my way of honoring that practice: both my own and that of anyone, of any ability, who has worked through some form of body-based training.
Dance and writing aren’t a one-to-one correlation — i.e., I don’t believe dance is a “text” we can “read” and vice versa — and I try to resist that assumption when I’m, say, reviewing a dance work and looking to describe, at least in some part, what “happened” in the dance. I really like this line from the choreographer Tere O’Connor: Dance is “an abstract documentary form that doesn’t search to depict.” In my dream world, I want to think about writing in a similar way — using words in a way that reinforces their existence and collection and shape apart from established narrative structure or meaning (I wish I’d had more early training in poetry, because they get this) — but there I am flattening O’Connor’s proposition by extending it to another art form.
There are so many different ways to approach dance writing. Critic Sally Banes has a book called Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, and the energy of the phrase “writing dancing” has stuck with me as something to invoke. I need to move to write. I think this is true for many writers, not just those focusing explicitly on dance or performance. This zooms in on the privilege I have to move around right now: i.e., go to another room of the house and find a comfortable place to sit, or to do yoga, or to go outside. A lot of ideas settle as I’m tossing and turning back and forth, trying to fall asleep.
In pretty much all of my dance writing, you can see me trying to work out how it feels to me, physically, to be among those watching the performance. I’m very interested in the emergent choreography of audience behavior. (Unsurprisingly, this is something I’m thinking a lot about as we navigate virtual performance.)
How has your engagement with writing and dance changed during quarantine? If at all?
MD: I’ve felt more compelled to write overall, but, oddly — given I’m participating in this series — I’ve felt less compelled to write for the public eye. The way I made peace with this urge, for this work, was aiming to be intentional about interweaving these meditations on public and private, or private and personal. For better or worse, I gravitate toward the meta.
Because I’ve been privileged to be physically healthy, I’ve found space to incorporate a lot of different movement practices into my life these days. It’s necessary for me to move through the sadness and confusion of the right-now. I don’t even think I’m processing; I’m just trying to keep moving. (Dance is one of these movement practices, but so is running, walking, sleeping, doing yoga, being still, breathing.) I’ve been happy to find I have space to be a bit more mindful of how my body navigates movement right now. I’ve really needed that.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Mom’s Seven Layer Bars
I keep posting recipes that are not casseroles. But this week, I want sugar. You’re welcome.
Mom’s recipe translation:
Mix one stick of melted butter and 2 cups of crushed graham crackers on the bottom of the pan.
Then layer the following in order:
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup nuts (you choose!)
1 cup shredded coconut
1 can of sweetened condensed milk drizzled on top
Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes (@ 325 degrees if using a glass dish)
Alexis Bravos
Alexis Bravos, a poet and an artist, breathes new life into ancient tales.
Passage
Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?
AB: That's a hard question to answer. At the moment I'm a full time second grade teacher to a quarantined 8 year old. I'm an optimist, at least I try to be. I'm afraid of the ocean but I'm drawn to it. I read a lot. I used to be against wearing headphones outside, but now I'm pro headphone. Whatever gets you through the night.
Growing up Catholic the titles, Letter to St. Brendan the Bold and Passage (St. Margaret Mary), immediately orient me to a space of simple/solitary benediction almost mirroring the tradition of keeping holy cards. What’s your relationship with saints?
AB: I grew up in what I'll call a spiritual household. I went to Catholic school for 13 years and went to church every Sunday until junior high. I never bought any of it frankly, but I was fascinated by the stories behind the beliefs. I had a lot of time on my hands during church and religious instruction. I stopped listening to the priests and spent a lot of time looking around at the paintings and statues. I started reading about saints at a young age, and was really captivated by some of their lives. It seemed to me like a lot of them were mentally ill, or what our current society would perceive as mentally ill. Lots of visions and strange sojourns. I also loved the symbolism and imagery, to the point of having the sacred heart tattooed on my back in an ill conceived ploy to impress a dude who wanted to tattoo me with an exacto blade. Thankfully it's on my back and I don't have to look at it. That tattoo style influenced the drawing that goes with the poem "Passage". I wanted it to look sort of kitchy, which is how I see the bulk of religious imagery. A lot of it seems very campy to me.
Speaking of holy cards, can you talk about the relationship between the images and poetry?
AB: Both of the drawings are modeled on holy cards at least loosely. It's sort of an experiment for me to do that. I write and I draw but I've never put the two together. You don't need to experience them together, however. I'd like to make a book of poems about saints with drawings and photos. These are the first attempts.
In Letter to St. Brendon the Bold, there is a beautiful shift in your poem from discovering, adoring to being discovered, handled, adored. Can you talk about this move?
AB: I don't really want to explain that because I think that the reader should interpret that however they see fit. For me this poem is about this particular saints journey (which is bananas- look it up), but it's also about how lovers relate to each other, and give and take of a love relationship.
In addition to writing, you’re also a filmmaker. For you, does one influence the other?
AB: For sure. I wrote poetry long before I made films, but it was always a secret pursuit. I never really shared the writing with anyone outside my family. I guess you could say my films are poetic. I've included my poetry in some of the films as text or voice over. In my film The Argonaut, the protagonist has a diary which is read as voiceover. Some of it is taken directly from her real life journals in the mid 1800s, but I needed her to be more descriptive at points, so I added lines from a poem that I wrote for the film. I wouldn't say that films affect my writing though, other than generally as inspiration. I remember Tarkovsky's The Mirror inspiring some writing.
In quarantine, how has your writing changed, if at all?
AB: Quarantine has not changed my writing. The only thing that's changed it is aging. The funny thing is that my poems have always been a little gothy and dramatic. But the style has matured. I think I've come a long way from writing poems about Jim Morrison at age 13. I would hope anyway.
Alexis Bravos is a dogwalker, poet and filmmaker from Hillsborough, NC.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Italian Turta
Not quite a casserole but a family favorite. Turta is an Italian dish passed down in my family straight from the old country. From my great aunts to my father. My twin brother, Conor, recently made it for his own family. Simple and delicious :)
