Dandelion at BAC - More Culminating Reflections

As we returned to the grind of daily life back home, reflections on our BAC Residency have been trickling in. Here are a few more:

MICKEY KAY(Collaborating Performer) For me, "Don't Suck" was such a strange and powerful mix of things. New York City - somewhere I've never been and a place that completely overwhelmed and intrigued me. Competition - something I crave and love in certain contexts, but am deathly afraid of in others. Dance - where my inexperience both helps and hinders. All this smashed into two-and-a-half weeks of 8+ hour days, alongside an eclectic mix of very different people, away from my girlfriend for too long each day, in the midst of a 3-month road trip, subsiding on a diet of too much falafel and not enough water. The challenge of the whole project felt immense and exciting, and I've come away from this process very satisfied with what we've created and experienced.

JESS HOOKS (Costume Designer) I strongly feel that this could be one of the more pivotal projects I've worked on in recent years. It gave me an opportunity to revisit working with a movement-based company from the bay area that now I know was formative to my career and practice. Specifically I was able to ask questions and explore what it is to work with a designer in a devised / ensemble format as well as compare notes on making work in New York versus the west coast. I found that the cultures on each coast generated the same sort of problems with devising - both the gaps between the way designers and performers work as well as the challenges of time & money that exist creating in a collaborative way. I expected the performers to have a more relaxed relationship to competition than what I'd expect from a NY based group and what came up was surprising: I feel that the expectations we put on ourselves and how we compare and define our work against each other exists unanimously, regardless of art-making cultures. Its not just a NY thing. Its an art making thing. I also explored the relationship and use of the audience in these projects and was able to really experiment and try new things out on how to engage and understand how performers work with the audience. Being able to create work on the dancers which came out of my intuition and these experiments will hopefully integrate into my practice and I'm psyched to continue on with this. I think a lot will come out of it - and it was fricken awesome that Baryshnikov showed up & stayed for the whole performance.