Ms. Mary Lucy

How ridicu­lous can a body be?

This project, built espe­cially for a dance-rhetoric-specific forum, set out to embar­rass every­one involved. Using phrases like “bow-chick-a-bow-wow” and the sing songy, school age lim­er­icks “Miss Mary Mack” and “Miss Lucy/Suzy Had a Steam­boat”, I think we pretty much man­aged to make every­one present feel some­what weird about “dance per­for­mance”. It was a tawdry play of school girl rhymes and porno rhythms. Aubrey’s Mom flew down just for it and really didn’t have much to say afterwards.

The thing is though, the silent stares and inabil­ity to com­pose a typ­i­cal con­grat­u­la­tory response is, for us, a sure sign of success.

there’s not much I can say is more sat­is­fy­ing than mak­ing your friends and strangers ask “what the hell, exactly, is going on here?”

Well, to be a bit more descrip­tive, what went on was this: We gath­ered all observers in the gar­den of earthly delights at fritz haeg’s geo­desic dome dwelling on a Mount Wash­ing­ton hill­side. We infil­trated the space through a series of hip-oriented trav­el­ing steps, akin to gyrat­ing, mak­ing our way to indi­vid­ual spots allot­ted through­out the gar­den. It was a cycle through a group­ing of des­ig­nated move­ments, per­formed in a sort of round. All bod­ies were dis­play­ing some­what rudi­men­tary, or “pedes­trian”, vocab­u­lary cul­mi­nat­ing amongst the tomato and grape vines.

And then…


there was a pause in momen­tum. Each body began to iso­late a cer­tain body part: an elbow, a calf, a knee, the flab beneath the bicep, and what we all know as the fatty con­glom­er­a­tion of the haunch. Using eye-contact as a sure-fire way to make oth­ers a lit­tle embar­rassed and uncomfy, we pro­ceeded to rest in this break­down for quite some time. Only to re-energize by singing Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack, all dressed in black, black, black.…
We revis­ited the days of “Red Rover” and Hide-and Seek” through famil­iar melodies paired with, now, grown-woman attrib­utes, redis­cov­er­ing them as more twisted than we once perceived.

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