Patrick Gracewood

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Margaret's Ghost

Carolyn Stuart and I performed "Margaret's Ghost" in L.A. and Seattle at the Seattle Festival of Dance Improv earlier this year. We're still exploring who and what the ghost is.

For Youtube we divided the 15 minute performance into parts 1 & 2. # I is the intro and setup for #2. It's a single camera from way back in the lighting booth, but it captures a bit of the magic when things go well on stage. At the end because of the close up, you can't see that I'm holding Carolyn, apparently by her head, a foot off the ground.

Dance reviewer, Michael van Baker at Seattlest said, "Two outstanding performances left us convinced the fun isn't just for dancers and dance groupies, though. "Margaret's Ghost" by Carolyn Stuart and Patrick Gracewood, is a study in the quicksilver side of contact improvisation-

a duet that abstractly could be viewed as the work of a single organism. But it's also very much modern dance in it's reflections on age and the body and relationship. At one point, Gracewood is cradling Stuart as if she's in a bath, slippery as an infant; she's buttery-jointed, and almost mindless in her emotive presence: playful, fearful, trusting. You love art when it makes you feel as alive as that."

The 28th Breitenbush Jam is happening this week, March 5 through 11.

Contact Improvisation dancers from all over the USA, Europe, and even New Zealand are flying in to converge at Breithebush Hot Springs, Detroit, Oregon. Eight days of dancing and soaking and relaxation with good vegetarian food.

Jacqueline McCormick ( above left) and Carolyn Stuart (above right) are facilitating the 2009 conference "State of Inquiry: How does a state of inquiry inform our dancing?".

We will focus on, share and explore out personal investigation and its relationship to our partners.

What / how can we learn from each other?

What unfolds as we embody our curiiosity, physically and verbally?

We wish to honor our diversity, your perspective is unique.

Wabi - Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

It is a beauty of things modest and humble.

It is a beauty of things unconventional.

That is from the book Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers by Leonard Koren.

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I've always loved the way a plastic bag can catch the loft of passing cars and become suddenly animated.

For this last stint at the factory, every day I drove by this certain fence. Humble, nothing special.

Ugly chain-link in fact. Topped with razor coil like a prison wall. Trashed bits of plastic wrapping blown and snagged, caught on the razor's edge.

It is beautiful.

I've claimed it as found installation sculpture. The transient plastic, held prisoner by the barbed wire, is given life by the breeze. In true wabi-sabi way it evokes many things. Many emotions: The invisible wind and the conflicting elements of human nature are made visible. Trash and beauty. The brutal and the elegant. Time passing. Time Standing Still.

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