The Grandparents Project

On October 25th we've been tasked with presenting some sort of performance that involves collaborators in another location. This set the gears in motion for an idea I'm pretty excited to create. I'm titling it The Grandparents Project.

Allow me to explain:

There is a really old VHS video of my grandfather that was taped before he passed. It was filmed when I was 2 years old, so I'm actually in the video, but I have no recollection of the event. In the video he plays a bunch of old Russian/Yiddish/Jewish folk songs on guitar, tells stories from Russia before he escaped, and recounts his time on the Lower East Side of New York working at my great-grandfather's kosher bakery and hanging out with folks at the Henry Street Settlement (including Alwin Nikolais, I discovered!).

I'd like to create a movement improvisation score, invite some dancer friends, and create a short group improvisation in front of a projection of this video (possibly edited in some way). I'm interested in ideas of memory and recollection because I've been thinking about:

• my grandfather's memories that he recounts in the video
• my lack of memory of the actual filming of the video
• realizing, years later, that my grandfather was probably in the early stages of Alzheimers at this point
• the way ancestry/family shape our personal identities/narratives

And there's audience participation:

The movement improvisation score created for the dancers will include dancer-enacted short stories collected from audience members/classmates - short anecdotes from their own relationship with a grandparent.

Oh, and a collaborator abroad:

Dancer Leia Weil has agreed to participate in the improvisation from Tel Aviv. She will be Skyped into the performance and will interact with a story sent to her during the performance via Skype chat.