Saturday, April 26, 2008

Fieldwork Showcase on Tuesday

I am running behind on nearly every conceivable part of my life. It feels as if I started out 2008 with the flu and never quite recovered. Physically, yes, of course, but not the time. Stupid flu.

Anyway. This coming Tuesday, April 29, is the Spring Fieldwork Showcase. The official announcement is on the Several Dancers Core website (as they are the sponsors of Houston's Fieldwork) and you can see it here:

http://www.severaldancerscore.org/flyers/field/houspr08fieldshow.htm

The basics are: 7:30pm, Barnevelder Movement Arts Complex, 2201 Preston, just blocks from Minute Maid Park (man, I hope there's not an Astros game that night---baseball fans take over that neighborhood during games!).

Fieldwork colleagues showing new and developing work will be playwright Kay McStay, choreographer/dancer jhon r. stronks, writer/comedian Margo Stutts Toombs, performance artist/writer Angel Viator Smith, playwright Diana Weeks. You'll see work about living close and isolated, escaping Hurricane Rita, visiting New Orleans, writing a nudie movie in the 1960s, and you'll also see a dozen roses get destroyed. In other words, something for everyone!

(and of course, no one's work is "about" these surface descriptions. but these are things you'll notice. what else they're "about" is up to you, the audience. but i'll guarantee you laugh and maybe cry, and if you can stand it, think.)

I will be reading an older short story that I worked on this session. It's called "Men, Dancing" and is inspired, in part, by Ted Shawn and especially by Barton Mumaw's autobiography. Ted Shawn, with his wife, Ruth St. Denis, were dance pioneers in the early 20th Century (contemporary with Isadora Duncan). Their Denishawn Dancers included such future luminaries as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. Ted later went on to found Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers, the first all male dance company, which toured the U.S. in the early 1940s. Barton was Ted's principal dancer and, oh yeah, his lover. (Ted and Ruth were estranged for most of their 50+ years of marriage---they never divorced, but lived together only briefly.) Anyway, parts of my story take place in the historical world of Ted and Barton, and parts take place in a fictional world of a small town university dance department.

And that's probably enough said about that.

Looking ahead, I've scheduled another Writing Marathon for Saturday, July 12, again at the Montrose Library here in Houston. Hopefully, I'll blog several times before then, but given my recent record for blogging, perhaps I should mention it now so any of you interested can mark it on your calendar now . . .

Necropolis is behind schedule. Another 3 weeks? 4? Hopefully no more than 4 . . . But it's coming and it's good. You'll want to buy a copy for every room of your house. Really.