Dance Anywhere Project. Locations

project #1: the hawthorne street tour, sat. nov. 15th 2008

It’s Friday night, nov. 14th and I’m sitting in café, Fresh Pot, on hawthorne street. I’m thinking about the itinerary for tomorrow’s tour. I notice that my thinking is a little screwy, or maybe wavy is a better description. There is clarity and a fun plan that starts to emerge but then I get a dose of fear and start thinking about which stores and businesses are we least likely to be noticed, kicked out of, made fun of, stared at, not stared at, and so on. This is fucked thinking and I can see how trying to appease the fear-beasts will only lead to paralysis of the needed risk-taking spirit and inspiration to get this project realized beyond the Idea stage. As one measly human being, I can talk myself out of doing anything. Now that’s a recipe for living a life of boredom. This realization makes me happy I do not live on the planet by myself.

My friend Desmond shared a new quote a friend of his told him to help him stay brave and forward-facing in his search for new employment. The quote goes like this: Do not let the life you are living get in the way of the life you are supposed to be living. This is the kind of thinking that squashes the fear-beast. I just decided I’m going to share it with the Dance Anywhere dancers tomorrow when we meet up before we start the tour.

Locations, in no particular order, that I canvassed over the last few weeks. List is to make best choices of locations on sat. nov. 15th, using the following criteria --- 1/location is open during tour, 2/there are people inside the location, and 3/ the piped-in music is loud enough for us to actually hear what it is. I’ll collaborate with Dance anywhere dancers on choice of locations:
1) SE 39th and hawthorne Fred Meyer (in the baking supplies isle)
2) Escential Lotions & Oils, great music, usually good & loud
3) Powell’s on Hawthorne
4) Fresh Pot café inside Powell’s on Hawthorne (they play different music than
Powell’s)
5) Buffalo Exchange (actually ¼ blk off hawthorne on 37th/resale clothing)
6) red light, resale clothing
7) Dosha (Aveda product store and spa)
8) Tattoo & clothing store on 35th & hawthorne
9) Fred’s Sound of Music stereo equipment
10) Coffee Merchant’s (tea & coffee beans)

All these locations have piped-in music and are open on Saturdays. I checked.

sound documentation

**** the pic of the little sony recorder didn't turn out,
so here is a pic of my dog Gus instead. Gus did see the
little sony with his own eyes.

project #1: the hawthorne street tour, sat. nov. 15th 2008


It’s Friday night Nov 14th. I just opened the package containing the Sony stereo recorder (icd-ux70) that I bought at Office Depot day before last. I read the directions and goofed around with the recorder while sitting in the café, Fresh Pot, on hawthorne street. Wanting to get myself used to having the recorder with me on hawthorne and maybe wanting to get the recorder familiar with hawthorne street where it will be taking it’s virgin recording voyage tomorrow, Nov. 15th at 10am.

The little sony, which is close to the word sonny if you don’t think about it much, and means I could call it the little sonny. Cute. The little sonny comes with needed battery so it jumped up and went live right away. Cool. There’s also an earplug and usb attachment included. I feel rich in tiny tech things.

The little sonny will hide out while we are dancing in stores and other business environments and hear what it can hear. I’ll set it on it’s standard settings and trust it’s recording judgment, not manipulate it for clarity or to pick up specific sounds. I want the little sonny to trust me back. The packaging says little sonny has a max recording time of 290 minutes, no wait, I misread that, it’s 290 hours. Wow. Little sonny and I will have plenty of time to befriend each other: 290 hours divided-by 24 hours = 12.0833333 to infinity. Twelve plus days, another impressive passage of time.

There will be no failure on the recording front of Dance Anywhere project. Whatever shows up will be the soundtrack from the tour. Of course, I am borrowing from improvisational movement ideas. My friend and performance artist Susan Banyas sent me a quote that I will misquote here that says something like: these are times when we cannot depend on traditions and rules and what we did yesterday to guide us. We must think on our feet, we must think with our bodies, we must think collaboratively. We must learn, practice, and live by improvising.

So, the spirit of the sound memories of Dance Anywhere will follow the path of improvisation, and the little sonny will be our collaborator.

first stop on hawthorne, waiting

it's Saturday and I'm sitting at Starbucks, our agreed upon meeting place. I've spread out my stuff on the table set up to accommodate people with wheelchairs. The table is bigger than the others. I'm not planning on being @ bucks for long. We'll see though. I feel anxious, performance jiggers and telling myself 'this isn't a performance' isn't helping. It FEELS like a performance. I mean I'm taking photos of my stuff on the table, this is not something I do everyday. But, hey, now that I think about it, maybe I should take pictures of my Sitting Spaces for a week or so to see what that would look like... ahhh, distraction thinking about another project, that's helping reduce my jiggers.

What if no one shows up to dance with me?(aaaaa, high school panic of throwing a party that no one shows up to. That only happened once, and it was just a bunch of stupid freshman boys who didn't show up at my house with me and girlfriends and who I had made all this food for: stacks of pancakes and fresh squeezed orange juice and little Jimmy Dean sausages all on paper plates with my mother's wicker plates underneath them and folded paper napkins and ouch, how disappointing was that?)

Okay, I'll do the project anyway.

No one chickens out, everyone shows

So all the
Dance
Any-
where
Dancers
show
up.

Hi every-
one, you do not know how happy I am to see you.


first here's Lisa then here's Lindsey and then here's Judith. Dancers, troopers, brave ones of the day. My favorite people of the day. We talk about our expectations and fears, laugh a bit, drink coffee and

we're ready to go.

First stop Fred Meyer

We are in the baking isle at hawthorne street Fred Meyer. Right next to the cake and brownie mixes, close to the sugar, flour and chocolate chips. The music is hard to hear. I think it's someone like Celine Dion but I cannot remember her name exactly. Lindsey keeps correcting my mis-spoken-ness and this is helpful. We start becoming a more intimate group, we take a deep breath and dance. I am surprised how easy it is to dance in the isle's here. A few people turn into the isle and then pull their carts out. Fred Meyer employees in blue shirts appear more and more often walking by the end of the isle, glancing in, do they think they are being casual? and then continuing on. I hope they come dance with us.

A woman and man come down the isle, she is talking about their grocery list. He is staring ahead at us. She follows his gaze and sees us. She smiles and wiggles her body slightly.

Do we have a taker?

She comes down the isle and says she likes what she's seeing. She tells us they are shopping for the makings of a cake and probably needs to dance a little. We all laugh with her. The man looks over our heads but is listening and hanging in there, not pulling away.

The woman is actually swaying her shoulders and hips a little more but doesn't seem aware that she is dancing with us. She says, maybe next time and continues on, waves to us at the end of the isle.

More Fred Meyer employees watching us and then following us as we go to buy the mouthwash I need. Judith says they are like ghost, showing up and then disappearing. I think they think we might shop lift.

I made committment for this project to buy something at each place we dance so we have a merchant/dancer exchange experience, not just us taking up their space.

We leave Freds. On the sidewalk we talk and decide that the music at Freds seems designed to make sure you do not move your body or get inspired to do anything but shop. We also think Freds security thought we might be Terrorists, as in, dancing terrorists for the liberation of bodies moving and having joyful experiences. Ha ha ha.
We laugh at our cleverness and our relief that the we did it. And we did do it.

red light and dance anywhere dancers

This is the dancers top and bottom doing
there thing at Red Light, resale clothing
store.










the music is so loud here it's like being in a club. right now the music is all girl music, singing about being free from 'fucking bad boyfriends.' we find some floor space in front of a shelf with shoes and get going. we are warmed up from our previous gigs up the street and since the music rocks, so do we.

a women carrying an armload of clothes eyes us from a row over and is coming closer, slowly. she asks, what are you doing? I explain Dance Anywhere the hawthorne street tour. She says, can I join in then? we all say, yes,
come on. she puts her clothes down on the floor and starts right in swaying and swinging her arms. we are all smiling at each other.

this is really fun and I feel happy dancing away.

a store employee wants to know about the tour when we go to the cashier to buy our purchases (Lisa, t-shirts for her son and Lindsey a cool pair of shoes). I give her one of the 'cards' I made for people who ask about us or participate...she's happy now too.

being in our bodies as we move around hawthorne is like being high on something. I will not say "high on life" because it's not life exactly, life is too outside of us. o, we're high on us. that's it.