Artistic Statement
When I was dancing, I particularly loved contact improvisation and began to suspect that the real discipline of Contact was not so much to connect with another dancer or to generate phrases as it was to learn how to welcome disorientation, to build a practice of falling and trusting that something inside of you – a technique, an instinct, a trust in your partner - will deliver you back to safety.
Similarly, my plays try to model the pleasures of a good partner in improvised dance: Someone indirect, energetic, decisive, and provocatively there, predictably unknown. I strive for my work to hold its own willful mass, to be something against which/with which we can better understand what the hell’s going on around here, both inside of us and out, both now and before.
Or maybe—when it’s working, when it’s really working through something live—I write stories with the hope that we can find the ground before the ground finds us.
Similarly, my plays try to model the pleasures of a good partner in improvised dance: Someone indirect, energetic, decisive, and provocatively there, predictably unknown. I strive for my work to hold its own willful mass, to be something against which/with which we can better understand what the hell’s going on around here, both inside of us and out, both now and before.
Or maybe—when it’s working, when it’s really working through something live—I write stories with the hope that we can find the ground before the ground finds us.
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Patrick Shaw
Artistic Statement
When I was dancing, I particularly loved contact improvisation and began to suspect that the real discipline of Contact was not so much to connect with another dancer or to generate phrases as it was to learn how to welcome disorientation, to build a practice of falling and trusting that something inside of you – a technique, an instinct, a trust in your partner - will deliver you back to safety.
Similarly, my plays try to model the pleasures of a good partner in improvised dance: Someone indirect, energetic, decisive, and provocatively there, predictably unknown. I strive for my work to hold its own willful mass, to be something against which/with which we can better understand what the hell’s going on around here, both inside of us and out, both now and before.
Or maybe—when it’s working, when it’s really working through something live—I write stories with the hope that we can find the ground before the ground finds us.
Similarly, my plays try to model the pleasures of a good partner in improvised dance: Someone indirect, energetic, decisive, and provocatively there, predictably unknown. I strive for my work to hold its own willful mass, to be something against which/with which we can better understand what the hell’s going on around here, both inside of us and out, both now and before.
Or maybe—when it’s working, when it’s really working through something live—I write stories with the hope that we can find the ground before the ground finds us.