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Submitted by Malcolm on Sat, 2010-07-10 10:58

I think the sheet dance is about marriage. The sheet references the bedroom and the movement shows two people, connected by a strong bond, who must work together/around each other. I don't know yet how it will transform in time.

I think my challenges with this piece reflect my challenges with marriage. It's strange to talk about frustrations with this experience to which I am deeply committed and which supports and suits me so well. Yet there are frustrations: I want to see my wife more, particularly one-on-one, which has become far harder to arrange since we had Maya. I want to know even more about Jen, to understand her better than I do already. I want too much, probably: I want to craft a perfect meeting of minds within this improvised partnership.

Amanda Abrams and Alexander Short in Hooked, part of Closet Dances

I want too much from this dance as well. It cannot be the world, it's just a dance. It's a dance about two people, not my wife and myself, two people who struggle to attend to each other, whose bond is sometimes too strong, unwieldy.

I need to return to the beginning with this dance, to strip out some of the heavy lifts. It has become clunky already. We will emphasize small gestures against the backdrop of the sheet: the tender, unplanned moments, often lost to memory, hand against cheek, nose to shoulder, knee to knee, that make a marriage work.

Human Landscape Dance will perform next on Wednesday March 23, 2011, at the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage at 6pm, free. We will follow this with the Washington DC/Philadelphia Exchange at Dance Place in Washington DC, Saturday July 9 at 8pm and Sunday July 10 at 7pm. We will share the Dance Place stage with Philly dance veteran Anne-Marie Mulgrew and her dancers.

Photo by Bill Hebert.