Dance Solo-with live music-"The Sundowning Part IV" (2005)

This dance was created for the Music and Motion concert for the Five College Faculty Dance Department concert at Hampshire College. Costumes by Emily Dunn, Lighting by Kathy Couch.

The piece is personal and deals with my mothers slow descent into dementia-the music was played by accomplished drummer Gary Rzab, layered with live vocals with the amazing Alecia Chakour. The rhythms were created in rehearsals with all four of us working together.

The dancing here of Jen Hackworth is exceptional. The hymns and the presence of the spirit was an expression of my great-grandmother who raised my mother. My mother was very close to her family and she loved Mahalia Jackson. Her reckoning with her own mind slipping away was an opportunity for me to find an abstraction and expression for me to better understand her plight and to help me deal with the perpetual grief that can come from watching a parent's mind slip away and be helpless in intervening.

Upon viewing the work in tech I was struck by how blurred the lines were to my own life struggles. Was this my mother or me? Or were we, are we so interconnected and similar? I think the latter. How else could I have known or imagined how lost, angry and imprisoned by her own fate had she become? I spent many a night, while working on this piece wondering what would become of her. She passed away in 2007. I was able to, thanks to my sister, Andrea, spend some very quality time with her and say goodbye to her.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Modern Dance
• Contemporary
• Dance Theater
• Alzheimers
• Drumming
• Mahalia Jackson