To make our newest work When We Fall Apart, we asked our friends to share their real life experiences... then we wove pieces of these stories into a series of studio showings (Human Kind), ultimately leading up to the critically acclaimed world premiere performance at Z Space last month. Here - in their unedited, original form - are the submissions we received from friends. Now we want to hear from you! Tell us what you thought of When We Fall Apart...Do you have a story of your own to tell? Share your story and thoughts in the comment section below.

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Before we begin making dances there are a couple of questions we need to ask ourselves. Like…. why bother? Who cares if we make a dance or just dance around in our bathroom? Is it for some public recognition? Is it merely to show off the skills we have learned or to dazzle our friends with our ingenuity? Of course, the ego is all tied up in art making and that’s pretty unavoidable, but is there some greater purpose beyond the glory and recognition we can bring to ourselves? Dancing is pretty simple. I mean, dancing is universally understood to be a good thing. It feels good. It’s sensual...

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I love language. Anyone who knows me or my work knows this to be true. I particularly love language when it is juxtaposed or collided with movement. For me, this provides endless possibilities. Deeply felt movement or gesture can illuminate something hidden or fallow in the text. Similarly, powerful language can dislodge the prettiness or vanity of dancing. I am fascinated by the conversation between the two. I also love the human voice. Like most dancers I fell in love the human body and what it can do at an early age, utterly fascinated at the multitudinous ways it could bend and twist...

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Jess Curtis is the director of Jess Curtis/ Gravity. He lives/works part of the year in Berlin. Jess is a choreographer/dancer and generous spirit and was willing to talk to me from Berlin (via SKYPE) about his work and about being bicontinental. A side note for my Bay Area dance friends- Jess will be here with his “Symmetry Project” at Counterpulse, March 27-30, April 3-6. He will also be guest dance faculty at UC Berkeley Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. yay! Okay, here it is: JOE: Mostly, I want to know the big sweep of how you came to split your time between...

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What do we know about Argentine dance? passion, sexuality, an air of theatricality- the tango! well, I would love to say that I’m here to debunk these shabby myths, but actually the contemporary work I have seen here is ALL of those things EXCEPT the tango part. Maybe the contemporary artists are trying to get out from under the shadow of tango or maybe it is so intrinsically in their skin that they don’t need to overtly “quote” it, but I would have to say it is nowhere in sight on the alternative stages I have visited so far. What I have encountered instead is a kind of theater...

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Melissa Hudson and Hannah Schwadron are graduate students at the MFA program at UC Riverside in Experimental Choreography and Dance. For a course in “Rhetorical Approaches to Dance Studies” they came up with the following questions: In general, we have been investigating the ways that words and language relate to movement and our understanding of the body, and this week we are specifically considering the ‘policing’ of bodily movement, particularly in regards to gender. We were given David Gere’s article entitled, “29 Effeminate Gestures: Choreographer Joe Goode and the Heroism...

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Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer/ dancer/ beautiful mind who lives in NYC and dances there and in Europe. His own work is starting to get a lot of attention and he can still be seen working collaboratively with others, most notably Deborah Hay, Alain Bouffard. He also is a former member of the Joe Goode Performance Group and was instrumental in creating some memorable works with the company a decade ago including “Maverick Strain”, “Stareways”, and “Take/Place” to name a few. I ran into Miguel recently in Barcelona where he was performing with Alain Bouffard (to be discussed...

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PARIS- Tonight I saw the company of Mathilde Monnier. This is solid work with a point of view. It seems to me that this artist is tackling the very hard question of how does the dancer get out of the way of the dance? In other words, how can one make a dance that isn’t about the technical skill of the dancers? This is not a new thing, we have been thinking about this since Judson days, but here she has even skirted the usual pitfall of the star personality. We are not looking at Trisha Brown being Trisha Brown or David Gordon being David Gordon. She has transcended skill and personality...

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How to sum up my experience with Tanz Im August? I think seeing it 2 years ago for the first time, I was so delighted by the atmosphere- wine drinking, animated people actually having heated debates over the merits/non-merits of the art on display. People clamoring for tickets- every showing in every venue beyond sold out! And all for contemporary dance/theater! Even more bizarre, a genre of dance/theater that was cerebral, even opaque at times, certainly not the easily accessible variety. This time around, because I was not so busy being stunned by the heady atmosphere of the festival,...

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Something fresh- Tino Sehgal Here I am sweating through my tee shirt feeling very out of place. Frankfurt is full of men in black suits looking bizarrely unruffled and I am careening through the streets with my torn shoulder bag and my frayed map feeling every bit the unworthy tourist. It’s worse than that, actually, I am feverish- the jet lag sniffles have turned into something worse, a flight of stairs makes me all clammy and I feel disoriented and addled. This is not good for someone like me who gets lost in the aisles of Safeway. I am famously without a sense of direction and now I am stumbling...

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