Day 44: Paint

#44 PAINT

Confronted with another not-my-medium task, I turned to theft. I've been entranced by Bruce Connor's inkblot drawing since I first saw them in an exhibit at SF MOMA in 2000.  I loved looking at them, and loved them even more when I read that they were meant to be meditative for both the maker and the viewer. I shamelessly lifted the idea. Call it an homage. The process, even for a totally unskilled artist like me, was indeed meditative. Plus it saved me from trying to paint something figurative.

Day 42: Involve someone

#42: Involve someone or something else in an improvisation, a repeat of an earlier one or a brand new one.



The video footage of this prompt starts with two of us walking away from the camera and into the studio space. The sight of TWO of us walking into the space brought a smile immediately to my face. I think there is a reason that I'm not a solo artist. I suspect that my best - or better anyway - creative self emerges in working with other people (provided that I've done some solo contemplation and prep work in advance).

Parker was my special guest. We did a version of some of the earlier prompts, improvising for 10 minutes with each of three senses (sight, hearing, touch). We chose which sense we'd work with individually for each round, and didn't tell each other, but it became apparent pretty quickly. We went through all three rounds with a small pause, but no discussion, between each. Afterwards, we talked about it a bit. Later, when we talked again, we agreed that it would have felt more complete if we had done a 4th round in which we incorporated all 3 of the senses that we had activated in the first 3 rounds.

Round 1
Erin: sight
Parker: touch



Sight can be a tricky sense to work with. It's at once primary and overwhelming. On the one hand, you could just open your eyes and receive. On the other, there is too much to respond to and it can be hard to focus. Once Parker was in my field of vision, I looked at him, and sometimes this led to being influenced by his movement, and sometimes it was just fascination with his ear or the texture of his pants. We ended up standing close and making very direct eye contact at one point. A nice moment in an improvisation in which it often it felt like we, or the senses we were working with were at odds.

Parker started with touch because it was the sense he was most comfortable improvising with. Makes sense for a movement improvisation. We're used to feeling our weight in the floor, points of contact with other people, tracking the kinesthetic sense of our bodies. When we talked afterwards, he mentioned it taking a little while to drop into this first round and let go of worrying whether he was doing the prompt right, whether he understood what I meant be sense of touch (as if I knew), etc.

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Round 2
Erin: hearing
Parker: sight



Nothing stays the same.

I found the hearing prompt so rich the first time I did it, in the very same studio where we were improvising today. And this time it was different. There was less ambient sound. Or maybe I was less attuned to it. I found that I was expecting to drop into the same kind of experience I had before, but unsurprisingly, that didn't happen. This improvisation became less about hearing and responding and more about noticing the sounds I created while I was dancing: the squeak of skin dragging on marley, the boom of a hollow box, the familiar sounds of feet on the floor.

We didn't discuss this one in particular much after, but in the video, I notice Parker using a similar tactic to one that I found in the sight improvisation: responding to the movement of the other person. It looks a little more spatially and compositionally crafted, I think because of that.

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Round 3
Erin: touch
Parker: hearing


We both found this one the most interesting to do. Parker thought touch and hearing were complimentary. We ended up in a lot of contact. Towards the end, there was a moment where we were pushing along the floor, and we talked about how it was oddly satisfying. I think it had to do with the amount of physical resistance we gave each other.

Day 43: Whiskey with a friend

#43 Have a whiskey with a friend

This one is out of order. #42 requires involving another person in an improvisation, and that didn't come together so I skipped ahead.

This prompt is how I know that Christy tailored 100 days for me. I had an old fashioned on New Years Day with friends who were passing through town. We talked and laughed and ate and ran down the street with our arms flailing.

Day 41: Repeat 40 while cleaning

#41 Repeat (40) while cooking or cleaning

I had a hard time getting into this one while I was doing it, but it did result in a tidier room, and it was fun to cut together a little video from the footage.

Day 40: "function" and "expression"

#40 Improvise "function" and "expression" to your song(s)

I didn't know if I would find a good place to dance at Green Gulch. The public spaces are often in use, and I didn't want to be intrusive (a good impulse as it turns out that musical instruments are not allowed, so dancing is probably not encouraged either). I settled on the deck outside the yurt, which I had forgotten about at first. It's at the far end of things, so relatively private, and had nice echoes of Anna Halprin's dance deck to inspire me. It was perfect (aside from some splinters). There was a breeze, a creek flowing past, and the sounds of eucalyptus pods thudding down on the the deck periodically to punctuate my dancing.




The prompt itself was a bit of a puzzle. I wanted to ask clarifying questions, but that's not really part of this process. I interpreted "function" as a sort of straightforward, direct interpretation of the songs, and "expression" as capturing more of the general emotional feeling. I liked the "expression" versions much better, both in the doing and the re-watching. I didn't have a good way to play music, and it didn't seem suitable anyway, so I just ran the songs through again and again in my head as I danced.




It was wonderful to dance in that environment. I was inspired to follow this prompt up with revisiting the improvisation with sense of hearing, and then a walking meditation. I hope some of that will stay with me in the midst of city life.

Day 39: Write a song

#39 Write a song.

I was away at a zen retreat for a few days, but managed to do a few prompts while I was there. I'm posting them after the fact. Those who are following along closely will notice that day 39 is the same prompt as day 38. Another song!

I am, in general, a fan of repeating exercises or tasks or prompts, with no change to the instruction. When I was given the opportunity to do some artistic exploration and experimentation through the Sandbox Series at ODC, one of the most fruitful exercises was having the dancers create phrases from a piece of text, then having them do that exact same task three more times in a row.

Here is the fruit of my second foray into songwriting:



SOLSTICE SONG

When the days get too short
And your life is so long
And your sitting alone in the dark
Sing the Solstice Song
to yourself
It's a solstice song

It's the longest night of the year
The day flew right by
And I don't want to hear it
I know the light's coming back
Tell me do you think that dawn's gonna crack
before i do

The Solstice Song
Sing yourself a solstice song

Day 38: write a song

#38 write a song

And on day 38, the artist was prompted to write a song, and lo, she wrote a 22 second, 3 chord song:



Lyrics
Fall comes around and around again
I keep on falling and falling again
For you
Scraping my shin
For you
Bruises and blisters for you