nola studiola

November 2015 is MOTHERFLOCKERS

ways of forgetting in many ways spawned the genesis of FLOCK. This piece began with a few simple questions given to each dancer at the audition: Where are you going? Would you take me with you? Each of the seven performers who ultimately came together made up more than just a cast–they were a tribe, or […]

Attention is cast upon the exterior world with an infinite scale of intensities. From hyperfocus to ambient impression, the makeup of a memory is always a complex assemblage of sensory inputs. Captured but never fixed, memories grow more distorted with time. Intimate memories intertwine with constructed social memory to build individual and collective fictions of the present. My […]

Jake in hallway

Laura Stein, Executive Director of Dancing Grounds The first annual eDGe Dance Festival represents our latest effort at Dancing Grounds to raise the bar for New Orleans contemporary dance performance. Dancing Grounds is a nonprofit community organization with the mission to provide high-quality dance education and performance programs to New Orleanians of all ages. We […]

The Waiting Rom

We’re spending a couple days discussing The Stop Suffering Project. Yesterday you heard Ann Glaviano. Today we’ll hear from Monica Mata Gilliam, the founder of daMata Acupuncture and a Master of Eastern Healing. Performances are November 20-22 at Dancing Grounds. Come prepared to play, bring your cell phone, and buy tickets ahead of time here. Wonderfully congruent to the […]

This week we’re discussing the first workshop performance of FLOCK’s newest piece, The Stop Suffering Project (and other inquiries). It’s being presented as part of the Dancing Grounds‘ eDGe Contemporary Dance Festival and Faux/real New Orleans Festival of Arts. The Stop Suffering Project is an existential dance performance that views suffering and healing through the […]

Colin and Yanina

A few thoughts from the musical composers/performers currently working with FLOCK on their pieces in development through Dancing Grounds‘ AIR program. Colin Myers, composer, performer, trombonist in The Stop Suffering Project (and other inquiries) Working with Meryl can be a pretty freaking awesome and terrifying and beautiful thing. In the nicest possible way, she pushes us […]

New Orleans is a place with a rich musical history. It is also a city where musicians can make a living playing music, and where they are treated with a lot of respect and honor. The role of music in contemporary dance is constantly being questioned and explored. As a choreographer I feel that the […]

le Pain film

The development of the dance piece le Pain was one of true mutual ownership and collaboration between Gregory, Jordon, and myself. Subsequently, when we went to translate it into a film we tried to keep the production non-hierarchical and collaborative, where each person wore multiple hats. The Director of Photography, Christian Hardy, danced with the camera […]

I am interested in dance as a wound, how physically one can push the body to the point of exhaustion and submission, to the point of doing violence. In the choreographic process for the stage version of le Pain, which was an intense, intimate collaboration with Jordon Waters and Gregory Dorado, I was focused on […]

An intro from FLOCK Artistic Director and Choreographer Meryl Murman I like questions without answers – or at least without singular easily definable ones. Such as: Why do people lie? Why do we so often feel compelled to distract ourselves from being intimate with each other? Why do we create borders and binaries? Is it […]