dance process journal #18: short Philly Fringe excerpt

We performed our Philly Fringe shows on Sunday and Monday of this week, and I was able to record four out of the six performances.  It will take a while to look through and edit the footage but for now I'm posting a short excerpt from our Sunday shows.  In outdoor performances of this work, our encounters with audience members become a more visible part of the dance so I've chosen to have the dancers get closer to and sometimes more directly involved with the observers.  Even if people choose not to dance with us in the actual audience participation moments, they still become a much more visible part of the performance than they would be in a darkened theater, adding another spontaneous, unpredictable element to the piece.  In this excerpt two of our observers seem a bit unsure of how to react to the dancers working so close to them.  We also had a wedding party taking photos beside us on Sunday after we chased them off of the performance space; I don't know if they watched our dance! 

The dancers performed so beautifully and valiantly on this difficult terrain.  Dancing on grass proved to be more tiring than dancing on a flat surface and we were also covering a somewhat larger distance in this particular space.  The quieter, leaning moments became vital in helping the dancers to recover and prepare to reengage with the explosive pushing and struggling movement.  Some cast members had also danced in a very demanding show over the previous two nights, so there were varying degrees of physical exhaustion happening. I was so proud of them all for the focus and intensity that they maintained throughout our Fringe performances.

I was also truly moved by the number of spectators who approached us to make cash donations.  The park doesn’t allow a tip bucket, but many people came up and handed us contributions.  Unfortunately our IndieGoGo campaign did not reach its goal, but I am feeling grateful for the support we’ve received in this short time.  Our fundraising started fairly late in the game (IndieGoGo recommends a campaign of about three times longer) so I'm thankful that we have raised as much as we have even though it fell short of covering our costs.