househedz - Recently Updated Pages

Choreographer's Notebook

isislady — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:15:45 CST

This virtual notebook/blog documents my overall thoughts as co-collaborator & choreographer/director/project manager of the Househedz project. Though it contains entries regarding past incarnations of Househedz, it will most closely map the newest generation/version of this creative process. It will work to articulate concepts and themes emerging from the piece as it develops combining my reflections on the creative process (illuminations, issues and problems to be confronted in making the work) with sketch notes and video/aural clips from the rehearsal process.

Dec 23 2008: Documenting House as popular cultural politics

Nov 22 2008: Choreography & Writing

November 2008: Intimacy & Generosity

Jan/Oct 2008: Managing house's musical overload

Feb 12 2008: Initial Questions & Comfort Zones

Feb 1 2008: Riff on House

Jan 2008: Staging the Vernacular

Dec 22 2008 / Documenting house as popular cultural politics

isislady — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:15:02 CST

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Househedz

isislady — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:08:12 CST

HHouh

Give Thanks /
The Househedz Project:
Chronicles of a Creative Process
(or the story of a Chitown music/dance/life movement)

Note of Introduction

Why a Wiki

Phases: 2009 - 2008 - 2006-7

Current Highlights:
Performance Analysis of Give Thanks (2008)

Link to Pump up the Volume, a 3-part video documentary on house music from its Chicago roots to NYC/Detroit and its explosion in UK & Europe

Note of Introduction: Give Thanks / The Househedz Project

isislady — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:37:09 CST

Author: M. McNeal

The Househedz Project converges critical performance ethnography and choreographic methods to explore Chicago house music and dance culture, unpacking its movement vocabulary and style; its fusion of spirituality and sexuality; its changing contexts from club, to basement, to radio station, to mix tape and CD; and its current re-contextualization on local and global club and music scenes. In addition to the studio rehearsal experience, the project utilizes a ‘wiki’ that includes an ongoing archive of the creative process and a critical genealogy of Chicago house as a form of local knowledge.

Househedz has seen several phases of development.

It debuted at Links Hall/Chicago in 2006 as part of the LinkUp artist-in-residence program. See the ThickRoutes Performance Collage / Introduction to Househedz (2006-2007) link for more information about the original creative process.

In May 2008, Give Thanks premiered at the Brown Festival of Dance with a cast of Brown University students. Derived from seeds based on the original creative process, Give Thanks explores house's connections to the invincible spirit of historical black music traditions as well as its place as a contemporary lifestyle and music/dance scene. Here, house becomes an example of an urban folk practice and experience.

I am currently developing an evening-length version working with the same cast of performers. Give Thanks / The Househedz Project will premiere at the Providence Black Repertory Theatre in April 2009 and the Africana Studies’ Rites and Reasons Theatre at Brown in May 2009.

Michele

micheleakameesh — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:22:04 CST

12/13/2008
okay - so in thinking about kinds of "fiercenesses" that speak to me, that inspire, things that i want to work with...i'm automatically drawn to gigi torres's work. i took a class with her two summers ago. this woman has fabulous control - her isolations are RIDICULOUS. plus, she's consistently working on choreo that has a grace, an elegance to it. using songs like lauryn hill's "ex-factor"...leona lewis's "yesterday"...other songs by monica, toni braxton, etc.

gigi expresses vulnerability and strength all at once. she's a choreographer who makes the audience notice nuances in the music she chooses. she gets intricate, which i like. and the music - i like the juxtaposition of the strong, soulful, vulnerable female vocalists with the sharp basses and snares that function as the beat of the music that accompanies their lyrics.

since i'm in the middle of finals, i think i'll just post a couple of gigi's videos herer and come back to this after my papers are done.....when i'm home in cali where i will have more time to develop, i'll return to what i like about gigi and other artists into how my fierce other will be.

the vids:
Gigi's piece to "Ex-Factor" by Lauryn Hill
Gigi's piece to "Yesterday" by Leona Lewis
Gigi dancing to "Make it Hot" by Nichole Ray
Gigi dancing to "Still Standing" by Monica

also, i just thought of jilly meyers, whom i also admire and took class with. so i'll post a link her and come back to jilly later:
Jilly's piece to "I Want You" by Common
Jilly dancing with David Moore

something else to add: both of these ladies hit it just as hard (harder) than the guys. i love that about them. perhaps this tough female (border-line male) persona. reminds me of what i loved about getting to do a summer intensive with funkanometry sf: i got to dance with mari martin. talk about hitting it hard(er) like (than) a dude.

Mari dancing to "Wreckless Love"
Mari dancing to "Go 'Head"

til next time.
~ meesh

Gayelle Process Notes (Nov 08)

isislady — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:50:06 CST

Fly/Prelude & Gospel (images one & two)

isislady — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:45:17 CST

Fly/Prelude:
(:00-4:00) The beginning image is blues man meets plantation work song/chain gang meets conjure/myth-maker woman. We open with a lone singer - he is 'blues' as tradition, as passed on in text and practice where minor chords and rawness are integral elements of story-telling. His song is bittersweet - longing, sadness, but it is also acceptance and the realization of yearning, unfulfilled desire and pain as part of living process, as part of the process of "love."

The introduction of the chain gang adds a layer of a connected, but also different sense of trauma. They suggest our history of slavery/racial discrimination. So, while blues reiterates this history through the poetics of its lyrics, its minor discordant sound and its connection to Jim Crow history, the dancers embody this idea of trauma again via their own linked bodies, as the literal “chain” in the chain gang – they are low humming a chain gang melody as they move in a call & response fashion.

The powerful thing about house is that somehow it manages to contain all these fragments - to connect history and the present - to connect the longing of bodies who want to be whole and loved whether from a historical past that continues to wound or from present-day personal experiences that speak to contemporary concerns and struggles of living. So, these wounds could be racial/ethnically-derived and/or they could be gendered, classed or anything else that's within the realm of social categorization and has the power to make certain kinds of bodies feel excluded, unrepresented, unloved. House has been a home for all of these concerns. House becomes a safe space to call these issues up in an embodied manner. To name them and dance/sing them out. But not in a facile way that assumes when you leave the mix or the dancefloor your problems are solved. Just that maybe you have shared them with a community or called them into the light of day (so, house here as testimonial/witnessing) to throw a little clarity on them, to make those problems or issues a little bit easier to engage or deal with outside, in the "real" world.

Right, so I have digressed. Going back to the beginning of the piece and the figure of the blues man and the chain gang I was also experimenting with choreographic structure by layering the blues tune and the chain gang hum. I was trying to translate something I recognize as a DJ compositional mixing device that is characteristic of much of Chicago-derived house music (and from what I’m learning might be best associated with Ron Hardy’s style). It is the putting together of two or more discordant sounds, but being able to layer these non-matching tracks in such a way as to find their glue or the cohesive point that link the discordant harmony into some kind of musical sensibility that works.

The addition of the female griot character adds another layer, telling an old myth and folk tale, “The People Who Could Fly” that integrates house with other black traditions that use expressive forms (story, music, visual art, dance, etc.) to both remember our legacy of disempowerment and to voice with urgency how art/cultural practices have been strategies to survive disempowerment. As I keep working through this house project it's a theme I keep coming back to, that I think lies at the foundation of why house is so powerful as a form of cultural expression. The fact that it has not been articulated as such is something that I both want to undo and to understand why it has not achieved its potential as a more direct tool/example of art/culture as social justice mechanism. So, in a sense I want to connect house with this complex of practices – blues, griot stories featuring epic memories of loss, slavery, disenfranchisement and ultimately, stories of survival and the building of alternative frameworks and alternative communities.

The long group phrase contains images, gestures and qualities of release, holding on, strong core – limbs might be soft, but core is strong, tactile earth, waiting and striking, heavy weight, manual labor, sweat, pushing, pulling and digging – so in some ways it’s a figuration of plantation labor/economy. But, it’s also about a collective sensing as the group has to hum together, count together, stay together with no musical accompaniment just the group’s sense of timing and breath. It’s about the strength, the core of strength as the community.

(4:00-5:45) This section came out of an improvisational exercise. Performers paired up and had to create two loose lists of movement - one determined by action words (e.g. press, hover, yoke) and the other a game of twister (e.g. hand to hand, cheek to cheek)

When the pairs come to each other, it is an intimate partnering. They begin to focus in. It's quiet. It is just about that other person in your space. Eye contact, bodies pressing surface areas together, leaning on each other, picking each other up, counter-resisting weight, and so on. The group is a community transforming from carrying a burden to lightening their collective load by sharing it. Joy and pleasure begin to emerge as some couples slow groove together, others lean and caress, and others lay head on shoulders, hug, embrace. Its intention is to display love/care/connection via touch for an other human being.

The musical accompaniment is E. Badu's version of the Eddie Kendricks song "My People." I chose this track because it conveyed some of that utopian "we shall overcome"/future-yet-to-come aura that surrounds house, a cosmic Sun-Ra Pharoah Sanders Alice Coltrane kind of future human sonic discourse that never loses its attachment to Earth - that is somehow future vision, present condition and past history rolled into one experience. But, I also chose it because I know the Kendricks' tune - have experienced it in party settings as very much part of a Chicago house aesthetic. Badu's update is nostalgia, takes me back to memories, but I also love that it's a woman's voice leading this version.

(5:45-end) The last section is set to Marshall Jefferson's Ride the Rhythm, an example of classic Chi house. As I continue to work with house aesthetics and experiment with ways to stage what is really a club-improvisational form of expression, I keep asking myself how I can push the 4-4 beat of a typical house track and pull out what I would experience in a house set - that interplay between dancer and DJ and the track. For the dancer, the performance/the dancefloor activity becomes a conversation. You respond with your body - following the 4-4 or adding polyrhythm or a syncopation to it, adding the voice or clapping. What a layperson to house hears and what I hear are definitely different because while I am guided by that bottom 4-4, I am not a slave to it. I'm hearing the other things going on in the track's arrangement of sounds and I'm definitely kinetically adding another layer - I am processing the music in a different way. I was intrigued by this Marshall Jefferson track because when I listen to it, I can literally hear three faces of house music converging - there is this hoe-down/folk layer, a gospel/sacred/church layer and this profane/sexy/sensuous layer. Solo dancer calls the congregation in. Her sequence with outstretched arms, mobile pathway, syncopated phrasing is a translation of images from my grandma's Westside Chicago church. The gospel sound is definitely at the base of the track; it's the backbone. The rest of the sequence moves fluidly back and forth between this folksy/squaredance image (swinging a partner, the low driving skip) and the church pew (syncopated claps, heads thrown back). The sensual reemerges in minute body waves, undulating pivot turns - that sequential slinkiness that connotes (to me) a sense of sexy play.

Gayelle duet (Revisions Nov-Dec 08)

isislady — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:28:00 CST

Gayelle Process Notes

Improv #1

Improv #2

Improv #3

Finale/Melodies (image seven)

isislady — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:38:30 CST

The finale section is all about the reintegration of community. It begins with a group clap. The performers are layered into the space and sound. The clap is also a reminding image of church and spirit depending on where you want to enter and how you want to identify. At bottom, their collective polyrhythm is dependent on folks' listening to and for each other, adjusting volume and keeping tempo, making up for the loss of sound if too many folks fall out, etc. I tried to imagine what an urban folk dance might look like by playing with circle formations and other group-based spatial patterns that emerge and then fade away but always looping into another version of partner/group contact.

I am intrigued by how spatial forms/patterns can suggest certain things. For example, the "circle" can evoke this kind of romance, nostalgia and/or for connection, a kind of fetish of the folk embodied in the simplicity of a circle. Yes, it's oversimplified but its clarity is so useful, so clear as a physical/visual symbol. There are also allusions to couples' dances (e.g. hustle, merengue, salsa, stepping) which is different from the community of the circle. The partnering goes back to this idea of body-to-body contact that comes in and out throughout the piece. Here though it's about pleasure, play, joy, sensuality, sexiness, a little bit of that fierceness popping back in. Then there is the "Army of Queens," the accumulating long phrase (4:46-5:50) that riffs again off the vogue/ballroom aesthetic. Masking as strength/vulnerability comes back in their forward motion march and direct attack on the movement. But there's also an elegance, dignity and challenge that figures in those brief tableaus line by line.

The final image of Give Thanks is this ending circle. It is the strongest coda of community. It combines movment, clap, breath. It solidifies the union and codepedence of this group - one sound, one vocabulary though always with infinite individual variation.

Queen (image six)

isislady — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:32:57 CST

Gesturing to the beginning of the piece, Yuka once again calls members of the community in just as she did in Gospel. She is the announcer, the emcee, the procession leader, opening the court for the entrance of its own urban rag tag royalty. Two male performers enter with force, eating the floor as they cross it. Owen glides, Mark pops. It is a combination of a muted fierceness combined with extroverted over the top flounce. They are competing companions.

This section feeds off my pure fascination with the battle element of the underground ballroom scene. I love the kinetic power of the hits, accents, dips, stops and direct attack in movement that is intertwined with a complementary set of movement aesthetics: elegance, lightness, sustained lines of the body, detail of the arms and hands. The juxtaposition is sublime. The Queen section is the most skeletal to me at this point. I look forward to resetting it with the intention of matching the potency of an actual battle.

When I bear (mediated) witness to these clips of ball scenes, I am aware of my own involuntary physical responses - wanting to vocalize, cry out, move. (I must note here that I am dying to attend a live ball competition) There is something in this style/logic that speaks to some part of my movement base - something about letting a ferocious presence tumble out into the external world rather than keeping this "other" persona internalized.

Right now I can admit to occupying a space of delight. I am savoring the visceral reaction and the resulting divine pleasure more than attempting to understand this phenomenon through conventional analytical thought.

But there are seeds of ideas that I want to explore as I anticipate deconstructing this movement style/logic in its context(s):

Men signing women….Men expanding notions of manliness….Women wanting to experiment with the kind of "performance" that happens when men signify womanness…Or is the spectre of woman even part of this analysis? What and who is really being “performed”? And what work is “performance” doing?

This is perhaps the most direct illustration of fierceness as a technique for living – it is a mask, it can cut a competitor to shreds, it is training to stay a step ahead, to stand up for oneself. Performance, in this instance, is also a challenge to repression. It is the laying bare of taboos and the disenfranchised (so often these two are co-joined) - blackness, maleness, bodies, the popular, the poor, the young and reveling in the human beauty to be found in these forms and communities. It is the pleasure of long arms and flowery wrists taking space and being recognized (finally) as gorgeous and valuable. It is hands akimbo on male hips while head cocks sidewise in a body gesture more commonly associated with the codes of (black) womens’ body language as if to say there is no unitary dress code for gender here - all narratives are free to expand. It is a challenge to an onlooker to see through the guise being performed and to call one on it if the performance falls short. It is a code of survival as one must work, eat, serve one's competitor.

In this place, performance is serious business. It is the affirmation of life even as it is embodied testimony of the harshness of life.

EXERCISE: Building your "other you"

isislady — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 07:04:53 CST

December 5 2008

Think of these characters under the rubric of a number of masking tropes - alter egos, drag personas/impersonations, avatars, etc . As you build the contextual world of your own "other you," think about what you are masking as much as what you are revealing. Is the experience about letting out or hiding behind, or parts of both? Is it historical, future-oriented, real or fantasy, etc?

Referencing the arena of underground ballroom performance, think about how we can draw from this idea of performance to create a sensibility of "fierceness" (or, what I like calling a technique of fierceness to acknowledge it as a skill set, a set of practices that are learned, mastered and performed to display both strength and vulnerability). How can we - in the context of this piece - also go to that place? Think of this performance of yourself as a kind of fierceness to voice and show who you are or want to be to a community of viewers (our dancing community, an audience, the daily-lived world, and so on). What does a fierce you look, feel and sound like? When do you need this persona most?

EXERCISES
1) Create a descriptive list that combines how you imagine your character's physicality and general code(s) of behavior (e.g. proud, erect, no-nonsense, soft, languid, commanding, crying, clear stride, meditative, direct). Allow yourself to go in the direction(s) you need to go in. It can be a messy mix of contrasting features if that's what it needs to be. In other words, don't censor yourself. Play openly.

2) Write a close description of how you imagine your character's walk. How does s/he enter a room, take up and move through space?

3) Collect images, sounds and text that remind you of this persona. Is it a representation? Is it something that your character feels strongly about or identifies with? (With this wiki you can embed video, sound and image information through the widgets feature in the editing toolbar.)

4) What's your character's defining mantra?

5) What is your character's name?

Documenting Househedz's development

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:06:48 CST

TRPC Brainstorm Notes (2006)

Seed Ideas (2006)

Househedz Working Draft (2006)

Househedz (2006-2007) / ThickRoutes Performance Collage

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:04:38 CST

Introduction to TRPC & Househedz

Documenting Househedz's development

House as Epic Memory / History

House as Cultural Politics / Theory

House as Cultural Politics / Cultural Theory

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 08:01:55 CST

RIFF #1:
House as ripe to be explored, theorized, documented in a nuanced way
As a manifestation of local/global cultural politics
As discourses of gender/sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, communities of belonging
As an embodied dialectic of the sacred and profane
Of US puritanical respectability and a counter-resistance of slackness, sexuality
Of a critical utopia
A treatise on love as radical transformation
Aplace to conceive the body as power, knowledge, labor, meaning, code, discourse, action
And as a historical narrative of continued discrimination, disenfranchisement, disempowerment, displacement…
Bittersweet longing and the nectar of salvation…

A Chi-House Manifesto
The preceding link is an offering up (of sorts) of a template to name(call up) Chicago House aesthetics as a discursive utopic collective sociocultural (and literal, body) politic. In the spirit of urban anthropologist, Setha Low, Chicago House offers a site for "theorizing the city" that is Chicago from the perspectives of thosewho've long inhabited its peripheries even as our culture work lives as the core of city.

House Nation: critical culture notes (2006)

Applications for Househedz: The Consuming Blackness Diasporically Project
http://cbdcollaboration.wetpaint.com/
Consuming Blackness Diasporically (CBD) is a performance ethnography project focusing on traditions across Black diaspora including Trinidadian "rapso," Chicago “house”, and Brazilian "capoiera." In a collaborative format, CBD explores the interaction of concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and resistance in expressions of urban black difference. The CBD technology platform will incorporate existing multimedia technologies (wikis, blogs, and “jam” sessions facilitated through real time videoconference links) to create an intimate forum where artists and scholars can present, exchange and produce their experiences of and reflections on blackness, identity, citizenship and belonging through a virtually-mediated critical/creative exchange. How can the CBD project help us to think about "diaspora" as a mode of action, as creative process and as a site of intercultural dialogue between localities that are both unique and linked through traditions of black cultural practice?

Introduction to TRPC & Househedz

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:59:02 CST

Founded in January of 2001, ThickRoutes Performance Collage is a collaborative of women drawing from a variety of creative mediums, heritages, and perceptions. Our dialogues consistently work towards negotiation, compromise, mutual understanding and respect for the right to difference. We strive to use our multivalent skills to conceive, explore, and develop performances that evoke thought and inspire thick conversation. TRPC creates original movement-theatre works merging dance; spoken word/vocal exploration; original sound-scapes based on environmental sounds and ethnographic-based conversations/interviews; and video.

Our work shifts between personal narrative-stories and larger macro-societal forces, creating collage-like meditations that focus on the dialogue/dialectic between individual agency, collective space and the larger cultural, social, political and economic issues that frame our daily lives. Past works have dealt with issues of women creating safe “home” spaces (Home Stories, 2001); understanding the African diaspora’s significance to local African American women (Bag Ladies, 2002); and intercultural negotiations of race and nation/citizenship issues between the disparate cultures/nations of Trinidad/Caribbean and Chicago/America (Race Travels, 2004).

In 2006, TRPC began to develop Househedz. A cultural context deeply familiar to most of us, we wanted to approach house’s impact on our lives – how it affects the way we move and, in many ways, the way we perceive the world. We conceived Househedz not simply as a performance but rather as performed scholarship (mixing critical performance ethnography and autoethnographic modes). We strove to situate our stories as micro-refractions of a larger story, of a community, of a regional experience gone global, evolving over time and space. We felt that house, as a social phenomenon, was (and still is) in dire need of critical theorizing. Indeed, house provides an active site/space to theorize globalization, regional/multiple performances of “blackness,” the cosmopolitan/provincial, the sacred/profane, humanism, love, beauty, gender/sexuality/class/ethnicity/national belonging as fluid constructions (though not without contest and tensions), and the persistent trope of embodied memory (as stories of struggle/survival/success) across Black diaspora.

When we began work on the project, I had recently returned from two years of fieldwork in Trinidad and while I love Trinidad’s rich musical/performance complex (calypso, soca, pan, bottle & spoon, jouvert, bongo, bele, chutney, chutney soca, etc.) being away also intensified questions about my own cultural experience: Was I part of a folk tradition? Were there songs and dances that rang of a unique vernacular experience in my own backyard? Handgames, “Miss Mary Mack,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” stepping, the Smurf, the Wop, the Prep, jacking, etc. were the practices that reminded me of home...Most of all, I realized Chicago house occupied that space for me.

House is a metropolitan folk form, merging working class rural roots with the modern-day urbane. As a DJ friend of mine quipped, “How did Chicago black folk come to love industrial blips and bleeps?” With the entrée of acid house, Chicago’s sound became electronic noise matched with percussive rhythm. Yet it also remained a blues-R&B-funk sound, marked by blazing disco-laced soulful vocals, church sermon cadences and gospel shouts. It was/is old and new. It was/is a through-line of history marking the migration and settlement of black folk along a South to North axis. It was/is a pregnant site of embodied history, of epic memory. Unpacking these strands, I imagine house’s potential to tell a multilayered story about the US African American experience, carving concentric circles outward – local, regional, national, hemispheric, global. House is not just a story of Chicago; it is a story about popular music/dance and the world.

In such a way, Househedz explores Chicago house, unpacking its movement vocabulary and style; its exploration and fusion of spirituality and sexuality; its changing contexts from club, to basement, to radio station, to mix tape and CD; and its current revitalization. Essential to this highly localized culture is the creation and use of “home-made” or “house” music that both lyrically and thematically encouraged and cultivated an atmosphere resembling a social utopia of racial and sexual equality and unity through a Chicago-style youth-based social dance culture. Recent revivals – as demonstrated by the success of Chicago Summer Dance Project’s House Wednesdays (especially in the summers of 2004 & 2005), 5 Magazine, and a surge of house collectives and themed nights at bars/lounges/clubs across the city– display house as a fertile ground for investigation.

Further, the local phenomenon of Chicago house represents the diversity of black experience in America’s Midwest region. Through the development, performance, and outreach activities of this project, we place Chicago house on a continuum with other American music/dance idioms including jazz, rock & roll, R&B and hip hop, noting the significance these African American-derived cultural productions have had on the overall development of America’s national culture and beyond.

Meida McNeal
Artistic Director, TRPC

Urban Waltz (Oct 2008)

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:55:50 CST

New section material

Give Thanks, Performance Analysis

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:50:15 CST

A performance in seven images.

Images 1-2: Fly/Prelude & Gospel

Segue: Testify

Images 3-5: Comfort/Gayelle/Fierce

Image 6: Queen

Image 7: Finale/Melodies

Documentation of full performance Sunday May 4 2008

Performers' Workspace

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:14:53 CST

As part of this next version of Give Thanks, each of you will construct your own character. Here are some opening guidelines to start you off. Following their completion, feel free to take your character exploration and development into other directions that feel right to you. We will use these beginning studies as raw creative material when we return to the studio in late January 2009.

Exercise: Building your "other you"

Performers' Spaces
Lindsay
Karina
Michele
Meg
Jake
Mark
Erin

Erin

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:13:30 CST

There is no abstract available for this page revision.

Mark

isislady — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:12:50 CST

There is no abstract available for this page revision.