The Piece is Done!

We finally finished it, we edited 29 minutes down to 25 minutes, and performed it last weekend at the Rover, here is a video clip:

Everything went well.  Here is a little more about how this piece came about.

I first got the idea for Age of Unraveling about a year ago, when I was in Brooklyn/East Village last year working on Made of Paper.  I saw a documentary on Patty Smith on PBS. (not sure if they have shown it in Boston yet?)
She spoke about the Punk Rock movement and other stuff in the 70s in the East Village as an expression of the cycle of creation and destruction.  I liked that and was glad to realize it was more than just noise!  So I started to think about this as an idea I might like to explore since it is so related to images of transformation, a theme I like to explore.

As the process of making the work has progressed, I’ve been thinking it feels like more than ever right now the world is in a stage of unraveling, financially and  most of the ways we did many things, like for example communication, have changed drastically since even a decade or so ago and things are in a constant state of change, building, unraveling and rebuilding.

In my own life as well, around age 40 I began to really want to live my life in a different, less structured way and to sacrifice some stability for increased freedom and variety.  So in a sense age 40 has been for me my own personal age of unraveling and about changing all the things in my life that were not in line with who I am.  So I guess the title fits how life/the world feels right now on many levels.

At the end of the piece there is a section of repetition that goes on for a while that is extremely visceral and you can hear the dancers breathing and it represents a sort of physical unraveling, a metaphor for this idea of things breaking down before they are reborn.

Keep reading down below for more week by week updates about the process.  See you at the show!