my battery is pure love

Underglass Black hallways are rooms in basements Beneath the clothes and jewelry Of old days And jade dancers mocking window A pigeon cannot see the darling crumb His eyes lost to concrete dust Prokofiev broke off the retina Like a bow beneath remorse Loaves of bread planed By snapdragons, their mouths gape Too soft now to bite at the news Now alone in a room of dead Birds, shoes, purses Ghosts of giggling children blue with No sound of oppressive observation No watching this funeral please Kitten mummified; the ribbons of immortality Unwrap in spirals of time-edged Long ago The diamonds continue in an upward path Whiskers still feeling the edges of time The door warns you of this impending sense The walls whispers in their Flagrant subtle colour The bowl gathers the words in a bind, a spell To protect a foetus From 1900 to 1960 they embalmed Egypt In a forgotten camera the waters stir Say hello to spring for me in the ink used to Keep fresh the dead And to letter the posters As circus...

Viv's new solo show "Worcestershire Saucy" open this Wednesday Dec. 2 at 8pm at Factory Theatre in the Studio Theatre space. Tickets are $15 (CADA, Student) and $20 (general). Reservations 416 504 9971 www.vivmoore.com Anyone who has seen Viv on stage knows she is a rare beast, the kind of artist you want to be on stage with and the kind of lady you want to have a beer with. She has been a role model for me for many years now and though I don't drink beer, I have had the immense pleasure of being on stage with her in several different shows. She is a relentless scene partner who gently dares you to follow her when she makes an audacious move. In my years of knowing Viv I have not seen her in a solo performance. I can't wait. Here are a few questions I asked Viv about her upcoming production. How did "Worcestershire Saucy begin? What was the initial idea? In 1999, I created Bogie Woman for fFIDA (Paula Citron Award). This was the start of my re-claiming my Mus...

Listening to Arvo Part -- music I meditated to while pregnant, music I had hoped to play (to remind myself to breathe!) while giving birth, music that could not be played while I was giving birth because everything happened so fast. Sitting on the floor of the studio stretching after dancing/warming up for half an hour. Pablo begins stretching as the music plays. He has been sleeping since we arrived. Focusing on his sleeping body liberates me while improvising. My body is loose, except my lower back and laterally in my pelvis (muscles over-worked during the delivery), disassembled, wriggling, eager. My ego slips away. I am watching the baby on the floor sleeping while I am dancing. I realize I need to turn the camera on in the corner and just let it go for the whole time. Something new is happening. The mirror doesn't exist, the ego, which sometimes directs my improvisations to things that feel good and I know I can do well, is absent or perhaps watching the baby too. Pablo wakes...

little one if these leaves of grass do not soothe i hope the captain's verses do each night a little insight for little one who cannot understand nor hear everything but feel vibrations of the madman with wild white hair among the blades we hope for you good nights sleep dreams movement, words, music that carry we do not hope you to be "artist" see instead the living of life as an art and fill your thoughts with imaginative kindness blade by blade green by green each burnt to a crisp of meaning for future reference love of all loves made you together we rise, that song you have liked along the way we have moved twisted swords built worded armies to combat this world and its disappeal making new words as necessary like Germans ear to ear listening and if your first word starts with an F we will laugh we only ask you not become a 20-something smoking weed in a park with a can of cream soda and a cell phone continue kicking as hard ...

About six or eight weeks ago, just after we moved into the new digs, I started reading our fetus Pablo Neruda poetry. I found the poem "The Son" and hung this excerpt on the door to our Pablo's room: "Like a great storm we shook the tree of life down to the innermost fibres of the roots and you appear now singing in the foliage in the highest branch that with you we reach" That says it all.

Our baby arrived July 1st at 10:06pm. The delivery was an intense, fast and slightly complicated event but baby came through unphased so who cares, now? Pablo Echlin Pehadzic. I look at him constantly amazed that two little cells met and made two more cells and made two more cells and on and on until this whole creature was formed and ready to emerge. Someone said that Dennes and I maybe waited too long to have a baby, but at the cellular level, we can't have waited too long because any other point in time would not have created little Pablo, but some other probably just-as-wondrous creature, but not Pablo. And we are rather fond of Pablo. During the last two weeks of the pregnancy (and during my efforts to poop post-delivery) I have been re-reading "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch" by Henry Miller -- one of his greatest books, probably indicative of the depth of tides and beauty in Big Sur -- and I feel compelled to share this passage as a new credo for life...

An interview for the DanceWorks Mainstage Event coming up April 29-May 2 at Enwave Theatre. Accident 1. an event that is without apparent cause 4. occurrence of things by chance Fate 1. a power regarded as predetermining events unalterably 2. an individual’s appointed lot (source Canadian Oxford Dictionary) Both artists have been asked the same questions: Consider the similarities and differences in their answers, and if the “how” of their answers as well as the “what” is evident in their choreography. Susie Burpee choreographer and performer of Mischance and Fair Fortune1. What was the initial spark to create your work for this show? Ovid's myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramus_and_Thisbe#Ovid.27s_version 2. Do you believe in accidents or fate? Accidents. 3. What made you want to start choreographing? I imagined things that didn't exist yet in the world, and I wanted to realize those ideas. 4. What would you want an audience to take away from seeing ...

Yesterday Lola McLaughlin died. An amazing woman, choreographer, friend, spirit. I did not know her but still I cried as I sat in the audience of DanceWorks' presentation of "Provincial Essays". So many fine points in the choreography, so many things accomplished with elegance and humour and humanity that I have watched other companies attempt, stumble upon and eventually leave hollow. Simplicity of gesture and movement for the sake of execution with the total body. And Ron Stewart....I can't go on enough about how this strangely proportioned body can churn up space and itself. He is not ferocious but a vortex unto himself on that stage. Utterly thrilling. All the dancers were remarkable -- not only for their ability to perform with clarity and depth, humour and emotion without slipping, just hours after finding out that Lola had passed away. It ended. I almost missed the end. I'd been staring at a non-focal point on the stage and my mind was wandering over the im...

Below is an interview I conducted with William Yong, artistic director, dancer and choreographer for Zata Omm Dance Company, regarding his upcoming premiere as part of the DanceWorks Mainstage Series at Enwave Theatre. What frameworks do you feel in your life? How have you applied them to your current creation? My dance work Frames is an exploration and manipulation of perceptions through the idea of framing and frames of reference. It is a structure and vision-oriented piece playing imaginatively with the overt and the hidden, the expectations and the discovery. I wanted to create a piece inspired by the idea of framing because it is of such great interest and concern in our world saturated with manipulative media. In my own life I’ve noticed a series of childhood stories that altered in my memory through the passage of time. Some of the events I have begun to see very differently as I have grown older. Psychological perspective on our experiences constantly changes depending on the a...

Phil's and Club Abstract. If you know Kitchener-Waterloo, don't laugh. You know when you're there for four years of school you have no choice. At some point you will find yourself spending too much time at these bars. I've been reading "The Body Eclectic" a group of essays about changing training models for contemporary dance and it has led me to thinking about where I got my most significant training. Sadly, not at the University of Waterloo Dance Dept. I learned many great things there, but how to dance, how to perform? Not so much. Not at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. I was not there in a meaningful way long enough, and frankly did not have teachers who believed in me -- for various reasons, not all of which are they to blame for -- and the 8:30am Graham classes were treacherous for my body. I am built like my father more than my mother and lack the seemingly requisite maternal, uber-feminine pelvis. Some great training came after I left STDT and st...