Letter #1! Greetings, Projects, a Poem

• La Passacaglia on the Starless Sea
• Thoughts on dance for camera, and upcoming videos
• A poem & promise of a zine
• The last roses

I am thinking of these emails as part old-fashioned letter and part old-fashioned LiveJournal post. As such I'm tempted to give each of them a song to set the tone. For this one, let's go with Vienna Teng's "Harbor". It's been stuck in my head lately but it also catches a vibe. As Twitter crumbles and the world leaves the pandemic-isolated further and further behind, I find myself craving safe harbors of reciprocal care and access intimacy, and I am coming to the realization that what I need, I'll need to be. I can't harbor the world, but maybe I can hold a few.

La Passacaglia
This summer I fell down the English Paper Piecing rabbithole. This is a quilting method where paper templates and hand sewing are used to make precise, complex shapes possible. Each piece of fabric is basted to a paper shape, then joined to its neighboring pieces by hand. It is slower than machine piecing - though not as slow as I expected! - but you can easily accomplish very complicated things with shapes that would be impossible (or at least, incredibly hard) on a machine. 


Being the way that I am, I went directly for the infamous "La Passacaglia With Mister Penrose", a large complex millefiori pattern by Willyne Hammerstein (source: Millefiori Quilts) that takes inspiration from Penrose tiling,that is, combinations of simple of shapes that can fill a plane without any gaps, but without having a clear repeat in any direction. It is fun on a nerdiness level but also on a visual level - this one has fivefold symmetry, or in other words, stars upon stars. It's full of movement and delightful shapes. It can be kind of A Lot, so I restricted my fabrics to both a color palette and a theme: my favorite novel, Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea. There's such rich mythology and symbolism in this dreamy, dreamy, multilayered-nonlinear novel, and weaving it into a complex starry quilt is so incredibly satisfying.

The latest spread!

(It has been many years since I last did textile fanart and I suspect the dam on that creative river has broken. Maybe after the New Year I will weave something for RB Lemberg's Birdverse, which I've wanted to do for some time! Have you read The Unraveling yet? Less weaving in that one, but such good nonbinary folks.)

English paper piecing is also simply satisfying in itself. It's meditative to hand stitch, and, each seam is very short, very attainable. No matter how much or how little you sew in a sitting, you have tangible progress, and because the shapes are so cool, it always looks like cool progress. There is a wonderful sense of achievable accomplishment, and the thing I am making will be both beautiful and useful. I wrote more about this on Instagram (and I also have a story highlight of the quilt progression if you want to see).

Dance for Camera
I was fully into in-person touring prep mode before the pandemic hit, but am slowly coming around to the reality of dance for camera. I do like the form, and it can be a powerful access tool - for remote sharing, for capturing disabled perspectives (literally and figuratively), and for integrating accessibility components. Last year I recorded some material for Dark Room Ballet's "Telephone Project", which is fusing movement and audio description in really exciting, co-creative ways, words and movement feeding each other, and will be releasing soon. Check them out on instagram and if you're interested, maybe chip in! 

For my own work, it has taken time to redirect my brain and find the creative energy for a literal new perspective. I beefed up my editing software this spring to make the short film "In This Time Dilation" for the New England Foundation for the Arts' Regional Dance Development Initiative showcase, which the other artists attended in person. (I will be working on description for that piece this winter - sorry it doesn't exist yet.) This piece fuses some of the existing choreography from A Singular They (which had been prepping to premiere by 2021... alas) with improvised aerial choreography with dear collaborator Nicole Dagesse, trying to capture both the isolation and connection, time stretching and compression that the pandemic experience has been. 

It helped nudge my brain into imagining A Singular They as a dance for camera piece, and also helped clarify the reality that in-person performance won't be returning for me for the foreseeable future. I am still grieving that, and will be for some time, I suspect, but it is becoming possible to think about other paths, and see some opportunities. If A Singular They is filmed instead of live, it can be in the woods and on the water and in old buildings; I don't have to tour around accessible, riggable venues or persuade theaters they can be more accessible and/or riggable; it can be shown publicly without involving conventional venues at all, going directly to those who need and want it; audio description and captioning can have multiple built-in options... This winter I will be doing some more at-home filming and description experiments, and hopefully next summer, the show can move into something like production.

Poetry
After a long words-drought I am writing again. Though, it has not been all drought; I wrote more through the first two years of pandemic than I consciously realized. Big feelings come out best in poetry and this time has been no exception. I recently attended a Sins Invalid workshop on disabled grief; it was so healing to be in a space to have big feelings with community, and it also prompted me to think about what parts of my feelings are shared, and what they might be able to offer to others. I wrote four new pieces(!) in a flurry at about one in the morning, afterward, and re-read what I had written in the past few years, and realized, there's a zine here. I think it will be called "What Cannot Be Held". Maybe later this winter. I am possibly lining up too many projects for winter.

One of the pieces was published on my patreon last month. I will reprint it here for you. It is called "I will touch your face again". As I said in the Patreon post, I miss touch. I miss being with people, being easy, dancing together. It is not the masks that make me miss the faces. (Masks tell me they know our lives are still worth saving.) Early-early pandemic I joked that "after this" I would make a series of intimate duets where I just touched my friends' faces. Then it became less of a joke. Then it became a prayer. Now it feels like it is lost. I crave it. I miss you.

I will touch your face again

I will touch your face again.
My palm cradling the revealed topology of your cheek,
our foreheads pressed together, worry lines dovetailing
fogged-up glasses gone,
breath warm and safe.
I've lost muscle but we can hold each other up
on the floor, on the couch, in a tea house,
a bookstore, a theatre, your kitchen,
until the sea of our tears holds us both
floating, sinking, swimming
in what we have lost and what we have found.

Here is the last of the roses, just before the freeze hit.

Take care, friends. Thanks for joining me here. 
Warmly,
Toby

where else to find me: instagram, patreon, https://www.tobymacnutt.com