Author: norarainethompson

• Danspace Project Journal: Tilting the Mirror

  In this essay in Issue 15 of Danspace Project’s Journal, I reflect on Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake’s unique and historic collaborative performance and installation, Drawing in Circles WHY (an experiment), presented at the Castelli Gallery in partnership with Danspace Project. Please read an excerpt below, or read or listen to the full piece on Danspace Project’s website.

  Eiko and Joan move curiously but without hesitation, with purpose yet without any insistence on a particular narrative. Through this focused, inquisitive work, the importance of serious playful experimentation emerges. Eiko and Joan, though each with remarkable and established styles and identities cultivated over decades, are instructive in how to keep experimenting wholeheartedly.

• Responding (notes app edition) to Faye Driscoll’s Weathering at New York Live Arts

  

  

  Images read:

  faye driscoll
  
  emily rose called it a pressure cooker
  
  a boiling pot of humanness with its skin
  folding mouth dripping lungs bellowing
  spiral fall spiral rise
  pushed along by stage managers
  managing the stage of course
  a snow globe of humanness with its heavy breathing treasure finding sucking spraying
  turning turning turning
  
  spray for us to keep us with them
  spray for us because we are them
  
  spinning and making a mess and stripping down and discarding and letting it go out
  splintering out into pieces
  weathering as in wearing down as in wears go down as in indents form as in evidence of movement as in desire lines as in people make peopled marks
  wet spots
  accidents
  falling watches
  falling
  
  stage managers no longer managing
  but director directing
  until the end of the world
  
  emily rose said i lost my breath when i saw the loss in his eyes

• Responding (notes app edition) to Julia Antinozzi at The Judson Church

  

  

  Images read:

  a painting
  
  young small bodies shift in stutters
  model bodies that don’t make mistakes until
  they shake with the weight of time
  clothes that sit just right
  ah, there
  
  cold slab of marble with warm tea, steam
  take my picture i’ve made the frame
  sumptuous clarity steeping in her precisely dewy curls center part
  just a touch is all that’s needed
  for symmetry can balance and unbalance in ways that will make you feel like a king
  to spin with control
  
  is the drone the tyranny of ballets influence on their toes?
  spread and reaching,
  knobby knuckled babies ‘hands to the sky
  is that why the drone is beautiful and powerful and distant and close?
  is that why i feel suspicious?
  
  formalism, when it works, hits me like a cool breeze or cold water
  delicious yes
  but no
  rather
  the virtuousness of drinking a green smoothie
  subtle sweetness infused with the sharp delectable taste of catching the teachers eye
  swallow knowing you will be getting the A
  
  the consequences are yet to be understood
  in the meantime i eat clean
  chase alignment
  control the spin

• Responding (notes app edition) to Stina Nyberg’s Make Hay While the Sun Shines and Sweet at PAGEANT

  

  

  Images read:

  stina nyberg
  
  may hay while the sun shines like a prelude
  to the big story of everything
  like remembering the future when
  humans are symbols of themselves
  humans are beautiful glitching action
  figures find pleasure in repetition
  mischievous concepts of selves
  
  sweet
  
  make hay while the sun shines makes more sense once the solo suite tells the big story of everything
  of a jacketasaurus, fuming, shining
  of the silly way humans ruined everything
  of the silly way humans will leave this earth,
  finally
  of the fun we had here –
  try to fly, trying to dance, trying to show our moms how high we can jump, trying to make eye contact, trying to exorcise demons, trying to slow down
  the big story is remembered, of course
  remembered into the past and into the inevitable ends that will let this place breathe again
  welcoming ends

• Responding (notes app edition) to Audre Wirtanen , jaamil olawale kosoko, and Levi Gonzalez at The Judson Church

  

  

  

  Images read:

  audre
  tell the story with frankness
  of the devastatingly fucked up world
  this world where glitter and cake adorn slow violence that keeps us weary
  talking shit like it’s her job like her life depends on it like our lives depend on it
  because how else will we realized the magic trick that turns red to green and buries alarms under the plush covers
  
  body encased in sparkling air
  body swimming in puns that lighten the despair
  face smashed into lumps of sweetness
  frosting salted with tears
  it’s hard to breathe through a thick treat

  jaamil
  opulence reigns
  effigy remains
  ring light portends a reading for the fans
  video feed makes the fans
  pop star from afar makes an appearance for the fans
  
  a sermon spectacle delivered as
  conversation or
  let me just read this to you
  until we’re all saying amen
  until they are shining, even once derobed,
  placing the fringed gloves and the
  shimmering shift into the arms of a man in a suit

  levi
  hey hey hey hey i see you
  a child’s game of tag with voice
  an improv class’ game of contact with the
  hesitation and sludge of men knowing men
  is that what an old friendship among men looks like? pushing and pulling and reaching for somewhere to hold and saying sorry with a hand and aiming for a sturdy spot to lean on?
  
  later we’re alone with our skin
  playing examining experimenting with the soft flesh that men pretend they don’t have
  pink flushes the smooth
  pink betrays the heat, the liveness of his parts he manipulates like clay
  
  we’ll get dressed again after, slowly
  and look at each other again
  

• Responding (notes app edition) to Tere O’Connors Rivulets

  

  

  Image reads:

  satisfying like drinking from a water fountain
  not all at once but also all at once
  unison can be hydrating
  butterfly sweat stains and
  bodies in a rorsharch test
  i guess i like a ballet formation
  i guess i like a ballet formation when i can unfocus my eyes and just get blurs off
  green and flat hands and body vibratto
  bodies in teres image teres eye’s making
  but less eerily thin than i remember the ballet formation
  bodies i recognize executing precisely

  i’m surprised they didn’t laugh more
  because pattering little hands in unison is just funny
  it tickles
  it is choreographing serendipity
  it is choreographing a giggle
  in all seriousness choreographing a chorus of giggles and patty cake
  tastes like the lick of water

• Responding (notes app edition) to Christopher “Unpezverde” Nuñez’s The Circle or Prophetic Dream

  

  Image reads:

  technicolor billowed circles
  bodies bare and light ready
  bodies cloaked in relics in masks in tiny houses

  the twang of a jawbone being struck
  produces a twitch in my body
  a spasm like the memory of bone

  the slow fade the slow cresting wave
  the full full full silence in the dark
  oh how i love the moment before applause starts
  where we sit receiving the prophetic dream together

• The Brooklyn Rail: Sharing Opacity

  This writing was published in The Brooklyn Rail’s November 2022 Issue as part of “VESSEL: Seeing Double,” parallel reviews by Noa Weiss and myself of David Thomson’s new work, VESSEL, which premiered at The Chocolate Factory in New York in October 2022. Read an excerpt below, and read the full interview on The Brooklyn Rail’s website.

  One performer, shrouded in a blanket, approaches the walls often, a sliver of their face exposed, though nearly impossible to make out. They emit soft mouthy clicking sounds, like the echolocation of a bat. I can only hear them when their body is less than a foot away from mine, which gives me a glimpse of clarity and closeness, even while muffled visually by the veil between us. Opacity, Thomson shows us, does not preclude intimacy.

• Responding (notes app edition) to Mina Nishimura’s Mapping a Forest while Searching for an Opposite Term of Exorcist at Danspace Project

  

  Image reads:
  
  is the opposite of an exorcism an incantation?
  laughing bones of a building
  laughing ghosts of a building gasping
  through them
  how do you listen to ghosts
  how do you cast a spell incomplete and unbothered
  trails in sand snails leaving slug tracks
  shard of bone twitching
  praying for a silly ghost
  
  i didn’t do it
  i didn’t do it
  i didn’t do it
  
  white person says i didn’t do it
  to the echo of a church built by enslaved people
  they don’t believe themselves?
  
  sensitive instruments must (can?) listen closely for ghosts

• Responding (notes app edition) to Fana Fraser’s MINDSEX at Abrons Arts Center

  

  

  Images read:
  
  mindsex
  
  waiting for it to move you
  waiting for it to speak thru
  auras and ghosts
  couldn’t watch some spit spots
  nauseous
  honey viscous sweet
  tongue
  spittle
  burp
  mind fuck – perpetual opening
  nora is anxious
  what are we there for?
  whose sex?
  starting stopping getting distracted can’t decide can’t decide
  
  getting confused and confounded by
  oddities staged and ways of being and
  deciding to be ways enacted
  heart tired need to lay down
  
  is fana ok
  therapy twice a week and herbs and
  a signal a specter a ghost making me scared of my shadow
  i think it speak to my fear of going crazy
  of really allowing myself to lose it
  of being watched and feelin getting into that disgusting zone of what they me contain
  impossible impossible
  what am i so scared of

  These notes were written after and informed by conversations with Bella Thorpe-Woods and Emily Rose Cannon.