Paris, 12th arrondissement

Dear reader,

tomorrow is our first day of rehearsals here in Paris. I am getting excited, preparing my material and looking forward to start wrapping our heads and bodies around the questions we are raising. As we’ve been getting closer and closer to this point, more and more people have been asking me how I intended to reprise the work we have left off at Middlebury last February. I guess you might be curious too. So here is a very synthesized answer, which I hope will cover some of the interrogatives which have surfaced.

First and foremost, POST•M needs to start building its new company; since Heather and Andrea have joined the backstage production crew, Alena has been joined on stage by Viviane Irina Neumann and Maria Zamino, an Italian actress and dancer living in Paris. Our first days will therefore be focused on getting to know each other and starting to figure out a common language (English/French but also an artistic one). This entails a lot of what I call company work; physical improvisations, composition exercises (to simplify that’s what Anne Bogart calls constructed and led brainstorming sessions in Viewpoint technique), Authentic Movement and content analysis.

The content analysis will span from reading newspapers from February to today and attempting to organize a narrative line, deconstructing civic engagement from our personal and cultural point of views, exploring the concept of the “weight” of the individual in society, ordering thoughts about generations and citizenship. I am sure that as we try to organize, many more questions will arise. And I can’t wait to be confronted to the challenge.

For the moment, I just look forward to finding myself at Le Regard du Cygne tomorrow at 2pm and dive guts first into the heart of the matter with Alena, Viviane and Maria.

Whooshing around,

Nerina