Inside the Studio Series:
Kathy Westwater

Comments:

1. Kathy Westwater (September 10th, 2009 at 6:43 pm)

   The dancers pictured here are Rebecca Davis and Rebecca Brooks. They are wearing what I’ve dubbed the ‘tree shoes’ that exist somewhere in the cross-section of stilts, the platforms shoes of the 70s like of Gene Simmons of Kiss, and traditional Asian and European platform shoes. They are extremely challenging to move in without falling over, making the dancers really attentive to their balance.

2. Kathy Westwater (September 26th, 2009 at 10:55 pm)

   The text below is from an email exchange with poet Jennifer Scappettone after her studio visit to Dance Theater Workshop in August. Jennifer is a collaborator for this new work. We met through Djerassi Artist Residency program where we found we had overlapping content, her project and mine. So we decided to see what would happen if we worked together. Neither of us has ever done this before, i.e., me work with text, Jennifer work with movement. For Jennifer’s August studio visit the dancers and I began to experiment with creating physical scores of her text.

   Kathy: I’ve been thinking a lot about these ideas that you brought up about the representation of landscape in your visual poetry and then in the rarified environment of the studio/stage. It does seem to be a very important conceptual and formal concern for this piece. And then how those things relate to the body. You talked previously about your interest in the text being reflexive to the body/movement. I’ve started by going in the inverse direction: how the body can be reflexive of the text. But it seems as though maybe the body is absorbing it as well. So it’s a deepening sort of reflexivity.

   Jennifer: Watching the process unfolding was an immensely provocative and gratifying experience. I’m even more excited about the possibilities now than I was when they were juggled
   around in the abstract (and that doesn’t always happen–sometimes ideas seem more interesting than their instantiation can be!). It struck me that even if I hadn’t been “foregrounding” the body, so to speak, in making those pieces (which I tend to call “stills” as in film stills) it is everywhere in those lines, as the dolorously receiving and frenetically reprocessed, reprocessing end of toxins and of history that are buried in the landscape in which it stands/lies down/strolls/etc. The body’s activation in reaction to the text physicalizes such reprocessing, almost as if the words are toxins or releases with which the dancers are wrestling. On the other hand, even as the text/scapes are literally incorporated by the dancers, they are in being regarded on the page several steps removed, petrified, even what the Marxists would call reified: representations of landscape hovering apart. I’m sure that in moving forward my writing will be influenced by these witnessed oddments of reciprocity–so that the text will in tortuous fashion be reflexive of these bodies and how they have dealt, as well as of the space excavated and overseen.

   In case you are interested in hearing one possible example of my “mowing”–the digressive and repetitive strategy for reading these texts–here is a link to an audio file in which I read the 19 “stills”:

   http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Scappettone/KWH-UPenn_04-14-09/Scappettone-Jen_09_19-stills-from-Exit-43_KWH-UPenn_04-14-09.mp3

3. Tuesday Funk #19 « Gothic Funk (January 15th, 2010 at 12:36 pm)

   [...] scores are now being adapted for performance in collaboration with choreographer Kathy Westwater as LAND. She was guest editor of the feature section of Aufgabe 7, devoted to contemporary Italian [...]

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