The Foundry is on of my ongoing projects. It is a contemporary dance company based in San Francisco that I co-founded in 1998. I am still an Artistic Associate involved in its directions, even though I have re-located to Holyoke Massachusetts. These notes were written upon the completion of the Fleshing Memory Project 2003. These notes reflected our intentions and feelings towards our creative process, and in many regards, although not completely, still hold weight.
The Foundry created The Fleshing Memory in 2002-03, during a Wattis Artist in Residency at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco California. The Fleshing Memory was included in the Bay Area Now 3 exhibition.
Final piece
The final performance piece (i.e. product) is an important part of the project, but ultimately a detail among many. The focus on the presentational aspect of the art must serve to transfer the greater ideas being explored. The greatest value of the work lies within the process itself, and although the translation of a process within a work is inevitably a coded and difficult task to accomplish, it is the task we strive toward.
The Fleshing Memory, served this point. It was our explicit interest to have an opportunity to create a new body of work generated from within the chosen non-public subterranean spaces within YBCA. This was attempted and accomplished. We are essentially ballet choreographers whose uncharacteristic approach to choreography is best exemplified within one key detail, we choreograph on site (in very rare instances within a dance studio) in response to the site. This is not to say that we are ignorant to the long history of site-specific work, but given the history of ballet, it is mildly noteworthy.
The development of a new work and a new process is always a mysterious endeavor. We approach our process in the way I imagine a journalist approaches writing a story. The journalist cant know what the story will be before it is investigated. Like the journalist, we continue our investigations right up until the deadline irregardlessless of what we find or how it makes sense. We aren't interested in creating a performative logic (i.e. a shape which adheres to established understandings of correct or comfortable viewing standards), but rather we attempting to present the closest state to the moment of creation (i.e. process, the journalists story) we can.
For example, how does pink paper become realized within a piece that explores parallels between architecture and people? We created this metaphor, as does any artist who asks questions of nonexistent answers. It is this art history, of abstraction and process and ideas that we reference, not that of presentation or decoration. As long as there are expectations of good or successful, the greater point of the art will be trivialized and lost. To objectify the work serves nothing more than the lowest common denominator of entertainment.
