Summer Break

Dime and Honey is going on vacation.

Wishing you a beautiful, relaxing, spacious summer!

Diverse Space Dance Theater Gala Performance Tomorrow!

Diverse Space Dance Theater, Toni Bravo's baby, is performing tomorrow night to raise money for their young dancers who have been invited to participate in the Youth Dance Festival in Dublin this summer!  This is a perfect opportunity to see Toni's magic in action AND to support the travel and study dreams of these young artists!
Ballet Austin, Sunday, Mother's Day, 6:45pm, $10 admission.

Light and Suicide

Tala Madani makes some of the funniest, saddest and most beautiful paintings I've ever seen.  She is currently showing work that she made during a residency at Artpace in San Antonio entitled Light and Suicide Paintings. 

She talks of deskilling, yet her handling of the paint is a study in confidence.  It is that confidence that allows the viewer to move beyond the material presence of the work, albeit stunning, and open up to the uncomfortable crossroads of humor and pain gracing these pictures.  

Her animations, which there is one of in the show at Artpace, are also gross and fantastic.   

Last chance to see it!  It closes on May 19.   

Save the Last Dance for Me

"A song tells a whole story and the music fills in the atmosphere 

where this embarrassing content unfolds."  

Mary Heilmann

New Work Waiting

Weather Rolling In

I am having technical difficulty this week.  There is a little hack in my website, and my heroine Sarah is working hard on cleaning it up.  In the meantime, here is a glimpse of new work waiting to go out into the world.  Fingers crossed my site will be healthy again before I know it so I can add the work I lost and new work too.

Toni Bravo and Company

Toni Bravo in a still moment before movement.

Toni's dancers in the park.

Last year, after seeing Pina in the theater, I became obsessed with modern dance.  The stunningly beautiful documentary by Wim Wenders looks at the life work of Pina Bausch, a German choreographer who explored the depths of the human soul through the movement of the body.  Pina died unexpectedly during the making of the film, and it organically became a kind of memorial with emotional snapshots of the dancers in her company talking about memories of her and performing in honor of her.  As I watched, completely moved, I had one thought: I want to be a dancer in my next life. 

In the meantime I decided to find a class that I could take, just for me, without any expectations or goals.  It took me several months to find the right class and to find the guts to show up, but I finally did.  Who I found was Toni Bravo, and I fell in love.  Toni teaches an obscene number of classes at Ballet Austin, including the modern dance class that I try to show up to as often as possible.  Her classes are for both experienced dancers and complete amateurs, like myself.  She is a tireless and inspired teacher.  I always have a ridiculous smile on my face for the first half of class because what we are doing is so liberating and unusual in the use of my own body, and that smile inevitably turns into dazed confusion in the second half of class as my brain tries to keep up with my body, and vice versa.  Modern dance is freaking hard.  But, I love it.

At the last class Toni explained a particular series of movements as drawings in space. Drawings of straight lines and drawings of curves, from here to there with the hand and here to there with the foot.  That's when I knew for sure I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Last Sunday evening I attended a performance in Stacy Park choreographed by Toni called One + One + One & Aspects of Shen.  It was a suite of dance: some performed by kids, some by adult dancers, and two performed by Toni solo.  To be outside in the chilly evening air to experience these dances was such a pleasure.  They could have perhaps all been performed on a stage inside, but the green plane of grass and the surrounding trees united the dancers and the viewers in a way that doesn't often happen in a traditional theater.  In All in Time, the first piece of the evening performed by Toni, the viewers surrounded her as she moved within a sea of fabric, a parachute, that enveloped her like a dress and eventually swallowed her whole as the perimeter was lifted up by attached ropes that were draped over the branches of a beautiful old live oak.  But, before the swallowing, Toni's calibrated and exquisite movement of straight line and curved line drawings in space could be seen both through and above the billowing fabric in a way that slowed down time to present.     

The Punk Singer Rocks

For my one and only film of SXSW this year I saw The Punk Singer, a documentary about the legendary riot grrrl, Kathleen Hanna, by filmmaker and performance poet, Sini Anderson.  It was rad. It was emotional.  It was fucking inspiring.  Fingers crossed they get distribution soon!

Wall Space

New hand-painted mural going up on the side of Hillside Farmacy 

by brother and sister duo 

Joe Swec and the very prolific Jana Swec!

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

I don't know who took this, but it's awesome.   

I pulled it from acwlp's twitter feed.

You can see Shea's reflection in his perpetual motion.
(update: photo by Virginia Rutledge)

The Texas Biennial is hosting a truly engaging event in the spirit of intellectual public discourse called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, a nod to a little bit of Austin art history, referencing the short-lived gallery by the same name that was a Dave Hickey project here in 1967.  The performance happening at an open street level space on Congress is a chance for the Biennial to kick off its 2013 season with SXSW presence.  Artists, writers and curators are reading texts of their choice in a little glass box with high end recording equipment and talented operators who are sending their voices and faces out into the world via the internet while art folks and supporters mingle about outside listening to the live readings and sipping on cocktails.  It's like the perfect college classroom.  

I had the honor of reading two texts by Agnes Martin yesterday: Reflections and The Current of the River of Life Moves Us.  What's interesting to me is that so many people are reading texts that I love and connect with, like a letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse and Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium.  And, of course, Dave Hickey.  

Virginia Rutledge and Shea Little are the brains behind this operation, with lots of volunteer help as well.  They will be out there again tonight until midnight and again tomorrow night from 6pm to midnight.  Stop by, read, listen, tune in!

Quotable Kiki

God, I love Kiki Smith.  Betsy Lewis of Glasstire captures some of her honest and hilarious quotes from a recent lecture at UNT in The Quotable Kiki Smith.  Here are some of my faves.

"I made it then I thought, 'you are ridiculous'."

"People say, 'Oh you're moving around too much in your work,' but I'm not trying to get anywhere."

"I went back to a super-hippie phase, which I'm in now."

"It's not to be read in some linear way that these are ABOUT things.  They just ARE things."

"You don't need to know what you're doing in the slightest."

"It completely changes a neighborhood if you put a sculpture in it."

"I love honey, and I love bees, and I love making things."

Beili Liu @ Texas State

Feeling a little tense?

Amass by Beili Liu at Texas State through March 8.

One Billion Rising!

One Billion Rising on the Texas State Capitol steps!

Two weeks ago, on Valentine's Day, I participated in the "biggest mass global action to end violence against women and girls in the history of humankind"!  This dance revolution was brought to you, the world, by the inspired folks at V-Day, who are doing really important work.  Let the healing begin!

Studio Visit!

It was such a pleasure talking with Andy Campbell, a writer, curator and lecturer, about my studio process, his writing projects and our teaching strategies.  You can read the studio visit interview in today's Chronicle!

The Mystical Arts of Tibet

Texas State was the lucky host to the Tibetan monks from Drepung Loseling Monastery on their Mystical Arts of Tibet tour this week.  I stopped by to see them working on the mandala sand painting yesterday afternoon as they were getting close to the end.  They worked in silence, but for the hustle and bustle of the student center and the clanking of their tools. Amazing to watch such a fluid and intricate collaboration in action.

The ephemeral mandala was destroyed in a ceremony today, and followed by a procession to the San Marcos river for a blessing by the monks with sand from their week-long work.

The students had an opportunity to collaborate on their own sand painting at a table near the mandala.

Last night the monks performed Sacred Music Sacred Dance, a healing blessing for the environment and for us.  It was beautiful.  The costumes were spectacular.  The movement of their bodies and deeply felt sounds of their chants and instruments (horns, cymbals, drums, bells) were full of vibrations of drama, humor, peace and loving kindness. 

Mess

Memorials

"The material falls away in onrushing experience.  It peels off like skin from a molting snake.  Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go.  And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."   

                                                            

                                                            Rebecca Solnit from A Field Guide to Getting Lost

When Adrienne told me she was deconstructing fabric objects (a painting on canvas by a friend, her dad's Hawaiian shirt, a collection of sweaters) and rebuilding them into spherical sculptures, I offered up my wedding dress.  I loved my wedding dress.  It was shimmering mint green, subtle and elegant.  And in the wake of the most transformative event of my life, the break up of my marriage, I couldn't think of a better way to honor the memories embedded in the loaded threads of my dress.  

Adrienne wrote to me to share her photos of the works and she describes them as "quiet, humble, pretty memorials."  I couldn't agree more.