postcards and choreography - 21.01.2025
a reintroduction to my world the past few years has been the postcard. i don’t particularly remember receiving many as a kid but i do remember sending them whenever we moved (and we moved a lot!), normally to mark the move and make a gesture at staying in touch that would invariably never last. it wasn’t until receiving my first postcard in over a decade, from my partner agnes, that i began to re-engage with this form of short letter writing. we’ve been trading them back and forth for over a year now, its been nice.
postcards are mostly very private things, two sides, one for display and the other for a private message, normally an expression of missing someone, or a recounting of a holiday etc. one for public, one for private. each one feels very special and tender.
a recent postcard
when i began writing my first one, it reminded me of my university years of attempting fluxus scores. i was enamoured with them, their creativity within simplicity. each one a personal and gentle view into a world the artist was building. i thought they were beautiful in their poetry-meets-score approach.
music for two players ii, c. shiomi (1963)
while researching and re-engaging with this method of poetic scoring, i stumble across the work of remy charlip, a children’s illustrator and member of the merce cunningham dance company. as the story goes, while traveling charlip was commissioned to choreograph a work for friend and in doing so came up with his air mail dances. choreographic scores contained in letters and postcards.
air mail dances
i adore them. they’re cute, funny and genuinely meaningful, bringing playfulness and expression to a medium most people see as self-serious and exclusionary. they felt akin to the silliness and absurdity of oskar schlemmer’s choreography, but with a personal and tender touch of being encapsulated in a private and tender message to a friend.
i’ve worked in dance and with dance companies for quite a few years now, all be it within a narrow framework of contemporary modern dance with chinese and european/ north american influences. but i have choreographed before (as my colleagues never fail to remind me, despite my protests) during several performance works i made between 2017-2019. it was very basic, normally just a list of actions to run through during a work, but apparently enough to qualify in the eyes of those in my dance company.
score from She / They / Him (2018)
i’d been reattempting choreography for a while but upon seeing charlip’s work, i realised i had been attempting something far too self-serious and dramatic and was bounding myself in preconceptions and technical documentation. so i began something more similar. something that accentuated the way i wanted to play with silhouette.
set 2
it’s not done yet (far from it) and so far, bares way too many of the hallmarks of it’s inspiration but i like its simplicity. each movement contains a only 3 elements, two lines to represent the silhouette, as respective to the audience and one circle to represent the head, and provide a reference point for the silhouette to be interpreted from.
(i'm experimenting with a 4th element to represent motion contained within a movement to break up the pose-to-pose of the current form)
so far i’ve been sending these pieces to friends, either in the form of cards or postcards. little funny gifts, but recently i’ve thought of a development for them. a way of using them to invite people without experience in contemporary dance (like i once was) to get involved in the form and see that, like most art, contemporary dance can be, and should be, performed and attempted by everyone. that dance can be funny, sweet and tender, all at once. that just because you don’t have years spent studying at an art school, you can’t also move your body, in ways that are fun and beautiful to watch.
hopefully i’ll be able to share more of my plans for this soon. watch this space.
)°(
happy new year <3