the hijinks of molly & tara

my sister recently introduced me to this incredible song, Handlebars, by Flobots:

i checked out the band a little further, and found that they’ve linked up with a few other organizations/websites/networks  in a movement to encourage civic participation, support the anti-war movement, and generally get people talking to each other about important things like dissent, government, war, and community. it seems that interest and participation is slowly increasing:

fight with tools 

let us rise

america will be 

given the hysteria over the Twilight saga, i really haven’t found it that impressive – as a book, a movie, or an idea. however, once you acknowledge this, you can appreciate the amazingness that is The Hillywood Show’s mash-up parody of the movie, where they ingeniously retake and remix shot-for-shot sequences from the first Twilight movie and Katy Perry’s Hot n Cold music video:

i’ve been showing it to everyone i know (regardless of whether they have read or seen Twilight), and you should too. these two girls (Hillary & Hannah Hindy, the Hillywood sisters) are miles more creative than Stephanie Meyers, and damn do they have skill and follow-through. talk about commitment!

Last Sunday, t&M, along with a fellow circus friend & collaborator, went to see STREB’s latest SLAM show, CATAPULT: 

We work our way through the increasingly trendifying Williamsburg neighborhood of murals, bookshops, and cafes, down industrial-looking side streets, and finally  stopped outside the  large metal door of a semi-abandoned looking building from which we could hear music and cheers leaking. We walk in, get our hands stamped club-style, and scramble onto an enormous red mat as big as my living room.

We locate the performance, happening among the packed crowd, where dancers are flipping along a row of mats, landing in full body slams onto the ground and each other, then sliding along a parallel strip of slippery flooring, shouting the name of each move before they perform it. The crowd cheers at the highest flips and giggles when the dancers playfully bump into each other, gasping when they narrowly miss each other’s flying bodies. I stand up for a better view and wobble on the cushy mat. It feels like I’ve walked into a party, not a performance.

STREB is a dance company in Brooklyn, NY specializing in an energetic, dynamic, extremely physical form of experimental dance called popaction. They also use custom-made apparatus like trusses, frames, low- friction floors and spinning wheels to play with the bounds of physicality. SLAM, which stands for the ‘Streb Lab for Action Mechanics,’ is their HQ and primary performance venue, a converted warehouse garage by the banks of the East River. It’s stocked with mats, mechanical russes, and a flying trapeze rig (in fact, STREB is where I first trained as a flying trapeze instructor my last year of high school, as it was for a while the only indoor rig in NYC).

CATAPULT! was similar to other STREB shows I’ve seen, broken into a cabaret-like string of act/pieces, interspersing longer, demanding dances with video projections, mini-dances, and even a short demo of a multi-jointed dancing robot toy. The pieces are wildly inventive, playful, full of risk and excitement. In one piece, a heavy slab of I-frame metal hangs suspended from a single cable as the dancers shove, swing, spin, and push it around, running around, hanging from, and ducking under it. In another, three dancers abseil up and down a wall, leaping and turning as a vertiginous video projection behind them creates the illusion that they are astronauts, jumping tens of feets with each leap as the planet recedes and returns behind them. There’s even a group of young trapeze artists (full disclosure: that’s one of the other reasons I went to see the show – I’m friend of the catcher’s) who do a short piece during intermission. The finale centers around a rotating catapult, a sort of counterweighted hamster wheel, that the dancers ride in and on, climb up and down, and are flung from. It reminds me of the Wheel of Death act recently being displayed by bigger circuses like Cirque du Soleil in Kooza, only more intimate.

The space is so small you can feel the vibrations of the dancer’s thundering bodies as they perform, see the rest of the audience’s faces mirroring your own reactions. There’s a feeling of community, of  solidarity, energy drummed up by the dancers and tossed back by the audience. At one point, 3-, 4-, and 5- year-olds are invited up on ’stage’ to do a short dance led by one of the company who teaches the youngest kids’ dance class. As they copy her simple movements, jumps, turns, and rolls, it becomes obvious that as adventurous and childlike the company’s pieces seem, it’s the high level of professional skill and roots in mature movement theory that make STREB’s work so engaging and interesting to watch.

this blog has been through many reincarnations: from molly’s personal blog of graphic design and social change, to tara and molly’s blog of interesting internet things to do with graphic design, social change, and circus, to T&M’s travel blog… what next? what now?

the answer is: a free-for-all. we will continue posting our thoughts about everything that interests us: graphic design, circus, baking, traveling, video, the interwebs, freerunning & comics & stiltwalking & stripey clothing items. steampunk & muffins, bicycles & marching bands, scavenger hunts and pillow fights, environmentalism & creative commons.

themes will emerge, in all likelihood. there will be links, and photos, and haikus and recipes and surprises. we will update sometimes more, sometimes less – sometimes about what’s going on in the world and sometimes about what’s happening in our heads.

so thank you, dear readers, for keeping up with makeshift media… we’re having a great time blogging & we hope you’re having a great time reading!

love,

t&M

what’s better than a pickup game? a semi-planned, semi-improvisational pickup game with a group of strangers in a public space, following strange rules and using the environment around you and/or mobile technology to coordinate and fulfill objectives, that’s what! in the last few years, pervasive gaming has been on the rise. inspired and influenced by flashmobs, live-action role playing (LARPing), street theatre, and the increasing popularity of cellphones/PDAs and other personal mobile electronic communication devices, people have been finding ways to connect on the streets, for silly, bizarre, fun, interactive experiences.

we’ve long been fans of Improv Everywhere, the New York City based improvisational theatre group the coordinates large-scale, orchestrated happenings, like the now-annual Pants Off Day on the subway, where lots of people, er, take their pants off on the subway and ride in their skivvies.

a great example of a pervasive game is Pac-Manhattan, where a group of people dressed as Pac-Man characters played out a game of PacMan on the streets in NYC, using the street grid as the game’s layout. the player’s movements were dictated by other players who were tracking them at a control base via GPS and communicating directions via cellphone.

when we were in london in March, we went to Sandpit, a festival of pervasive games, run monthly in varying locations all over the city. there were running-around style games, there were games built off of texted suggestions, games to play with a pack of cards or a pad of paper, games where you needed to interact in character in order to collect pieces of information, etc. there were all sorts of ages, professions, and nationalities, playing together. it was a lot of fun, and gave us a lot of ideas.

for even more ideas, ludocity is a wiki-style collection of tried & tested and in-progress pervasive games. perhaps SCREWY will soon concoct such a game and implement it!