The Tarot Garden

Catherine Cabeen and Company is fully immersed in our summer creative residency at On the Boards.  As I shift from questions, to clarity, and back again to more questions in the choreographic process, I am grateful to be working with an incredible team of dancers and collaborators. 

The process we are undertaking to create Fire! is very different than how we created Into the Void.  The process for Into the Void, a piece about immateriality, was as spacious as the subject matter of the work.  We had a week on, a few weeks off, then on again.  I traveled to work with out of town dancers.  We had a luxurious year and a half to make the work, during which time I held the thread of the piece in open hands. 

Fire! on the other hand is being wrung out of the ether with both fists.  I have been researching and creating phrase material on my own for Fire! for the last year.  However this time, the company is assembling for 6 solid weeks to construct the entire work in an intensive residency.  All of us are working tirelessly during this rigorous month and a half to create, edit, cut, destroy, and then rebuild; phrases, costumes, sets, music etc. 

I am enjoying the realization that the process we are using to create this work reflects the subject matter of Fire! in the same way ITV’s did.  
Niki de Saint Phalle’s work is dense, luscious, overwhelming, violent and aggressive. So it makes sense to be wrestling the muses for this work in a volcano of creative energy.

Inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, Fire! is organized around the Major Arcana of the Tarot.  Saint Phalle’s garden, which was constructed between 1978 and 1998 at Garavicchio in Tuscany, is the largest sculpture park ever created by a woman artist.  It is full of wild, fantastic creatures, many of which the viewer can enter and climb. 

I had the pleasure of visiting the garden earlier this year.  The colorful mosaics that embellish the parks monuments are often delightful, but just as often they include skulls, spiders, and images of violence reminiscent of Saint Phalle’s earlier works.

As the dancers I am working with push through 6-hour rehearsals, five days a week, I remind them that our bodies get stronger by breaking down and rebuilding; a core theme in the work that we are creating.  Saint Phalle’s glass and mirror mosaics are composed of the same reality as our amino-acid chain muscles, wherein fragmentation and wholeness coincide.

Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden inspired me to approach Seattle Art Museum (SAM) about the possibility of performing a related work in their Olympic Sculpture Park (OSP).  SAM’s support is allowing CCC to create Where They May, a site-specific work that crosses the movement vocabulary we have been working on for Fire! with the landscape and architecture of OSP.  

In contrast to Saint Phalle’s garden, OSP is designed to be enjoyed walking almost entirely in straight lines.  The consistent lack of straight lines in Saint Phalle’s work however, is a significant inspiration for the movement vocabulary I am creating for Fire!. As a result, Where They May is an experiment to see how the voluptuous work looks when framed by narrow passages and straight paths.

I hope you will join us for this free, 

one-time-only event, 

CCC's Where They May 

at the Olympic Sculpture Park, 

Thursday Aug 16, 7:15-8:15pm 

... as we dance down into the Sound.