A clear narrative with a point would be a fiction. Meaning, really is a projection, not something intrinsic to life. It's just a story, a sequence of events and a wave of experience. In fact, that is all I really have now is some sort of tumble of stories. I don't even know what really happened. I can only share some stories.

-

I was born in a place that doesn't exist anymore.

Well, that's actually true in some way for everyone, but in my case, it is very true. When I was 18, I returned to the hills on which rested the deciduous forests of my younger youth in rural New Jersey only to discover that the entire landscape had been re-carved by land-moving machines and blanketed in artificial lawns and cookie cutter homes. The trees were gone, indeed the actual landscape was hardly recognizable, with entire hills having been rearranged.

I had a lot of fond memories of wandering for hours on end by myself through those forests exploring soft clay, strange trees, swimming holes, frogs and other small animals.

Strange that place could be so literally impermanent.

I didn't cry at the time, but just felt an emptiness. I have a funny relationship to tears. I think a numbness comes to me more easily than the release of tears in such circumstances.

Later on the plane ride home back to California, I cried watching The Mark of Zorro starring Anthony Hopkins and that rugged handsome Spanish actor whose name is escaping me. I don't think that the tears were exactly sourced in the movie, although it was a nice film.

-

I received a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley. That sounds relatively straightforward, but it actually involved two years of pretending I was a student when I wasn't enrolled, convincing professors to give me credit once I figured out how to get into the university, finally discovering the strange rules that were keeping me out and figuring a strange way around it, developing an understanding of quantum mechanics that now mainly serves to fan the flames of irritation when I catch people trying to manipulate other people with catch phrases sourced in popular distortions of quantum theory, getting a scholarship that accidentally encouraged me to stay longer than I should have by giving me a full ride, and doing two years of graduate-level environmental policy work after abandoning physics upon the realization that it is basically useless, we have the technology we need, and that what needs development is our social organization, not bigger and better bombs. It also included beginnings of sexual experimentation, falling on love and writing graffiti in Russian under a bridge to express my undying love to someone who now doesn't speak to me, living in a radical vegetarian student coop, and, accidentally being introduced to dance as a physically fun visual art. It includes starting my long standing habit of working in cafes and my coffee addiction. 'and dancing naked covered in chocolate and wine and being arrested... at least it includes the first two times I was arrested.

So when I say in my promotional blurb that I got a BA in physics with honors from UC Berkeley, that's what I mean.

–

As I think about this project of writing my mind goes back not linearly through the story of my life in some other logic of connections or relevance. I flip quickly to blood dripping down my arms from throwing myself into barbed wire and concrete in heavy rain of an autumn New York City night, sometime in the mid 90s, to the enigmatic stencil image of my girlfriend, Isabelle, holding a feather in her mouth, that I spray painted around Berkeley sometime around 2006, to looking out over 1000 square miles of empty dessert landscape and knowing that no one was there. I flash to sitting on a roof feeling numb and paralyzed, having climbed out the window quietly to avoid a conversation, to running 40 miles through the night over two mountain passes wondering about mountain lions, to gently examining a calm rattle snake next to the Yuba River, still feeling a bit nervous. I think about an incredibly cold, icy afternoon in St Petersburg, about a difficult conversation had over the computer and a loss of trust, about questions of meaning. I remember finding answers and knowing that the answers were going to drift away. I remember really good hummus in Abu Ghosh, and I remember thinking something I am not going to tell you about but that makes me smile, even 8 years later. I actually can remember running through a crowd and my mother grabbing me by my suspenders and suspending me in the air, chuckling at what she had just done and the situation we were in as she reminded me not to go too far from her. I remember my old friend, Sean, throwing me through the air in rehearsal, my feeling that the trajectory was slightly but dangerously off and my grabbing his suspenders as I flew in order to save myself, dragging him off balance with me.

–

Contact Improvisation

I feel I need to say those words if I am talking about myself, my world having been shaped so much by my relationship to it. I've written and talked about it so much elsewhere that it feels redundant to write more about it here.

For a description of the art of contact improvisation, go to CONTACT IMPROVISATION. You will find there a basic description, details of some fundamental practices, specifics of contact jamming culture, and the specific release-based approach to contact improvisation that has been my study for the last 17 years.

–

In 1995, I moved to New York. That statement actually carries a lot... it carries the leaving San Francisco, it carries the why I left San Francisco, which also carries why I went there in the first place. It then carries ideas of why do artists generally move to New York, the experiences I had that year, and most importantly why I left there a year and a half later.

I built up a company, got interested in somatic-psychological explorations, and recognized that what I was doing with contact improvisation was actually rather unique, something important to explore. The work that I had been doing through contact improvisation had gotten narrowly focused on issues of efficiency which brought me to subtle observations of reaction patterns. Alexander technique, tai chi, and Peter Levine's trauma theory all were references for the work I was exploring. Strangely Growtowski's paratheatrical work and les exercise plastiques also informed this work on the self, as did my understandings of authentic movement practice. I became fascinated with reaction and the beginnings of movement, and in them I started to unravel fear in the body. The one side of the work (Alexander, etc) gave me the tools to see it and to allow it to dissipate, giving space for movement that was less hindered by fear-based dysfunction. Growtowski (and later Mendel's process-oriented psychotherapy) gave me tools for going the other direction. Instead of dissipating the blocks to free movement, going farther into the block and thereby through it. These small voices of fear and control in the body have become a life-long interest of mine.... looking to examine them, free them and thereby free the body, free the self.

The feeling is amazing. Again, I think we can all recognize it in spaces, but then we forget that it exists when we loose it.

The inhibition path

Releasing the occipital joint sends a zigzag of release through the spine and shoulders and breath feels freer. I feel subtle undulation of the spine with more sensuous detail. In studying the initiation of movement and letting go of unconscious fear patterns, a given moment opens up to reveal frames of reality to which I had been blind. A second opens up to reveal far more time than I had seen before.

The completion path

finding a glitch in movement and amplifying the glitch, removing the resistance, some process unfolds. Sometimes it is on obvious action from a specific moment in life, interrupted. Sometimes there is no known story .. one is not needed. The process unfolds in action, often unorthodox, unexpected, outside the bounds of how I “know” myself. Sometimes just a flash of action, sometimes an hour or more storm of movement, and afterward, breath is free and the body is light and calm.

I think that we all recognize it when we see it, even if we don't have words for what we see and feel. Something feels freer when we see it... freer in ourselves as we see the freedom in someone else.

I digress into my work, though. I meant this to be an exploration of my personal history, so back to that...

–

San Francisco, 1992-1995. Strange that those three years seem like so many more years. Probably it was the time in my life... mid 20s, post-undergrad. I worked part time for the Department of Energy, doing energy-policy analysis. The rest of my time, I explored the possibilities of being a Bohemian in San Francisco. San Francisco in the early 90s was something of the end of an era. 1996 was the beginning of a new one with the meteoric rise of the dot.com boom. San Francisco was thrown upside down, rents tripled in a year, people stopped making art, left the area, or kept doing art and went a bit mad with overwork. The art that happened was less developed, more thrown together. Workshops became short and expensive instead of long and cheap. A scene dominated by people who organized their time to work as little as possible and have as much time as possible for living became a culture of people working all the time to get by and then spending money in quick bursts for special events. A scene disappeared and something else came in its place.

The Bohemian world that was there before shaped me. Lots of time to wander the city exploring. Informal happenings and performances. Long physical/psychological exploration and rehearsal processes. Evening events and community spaces with organic events that didn't end at the end of the show but kept going all night. People living on the cheap to have more time. Exploration processes that were not bound to a product but where just for exploring, seeing who we are as people and what is possible.

It is easy to see a trajectory that was (and which failed to go where I thought it could) as a failed trajectory. I think I am a bit less disappointed nowadays and just recognize the good time I had, recognize that things always change. I also see new fun things, unexpected in San Francisco. I can get cynical, but truth be told, I can still have a lot of fun there.

I digress, though. In the early 90s I was just exploring. Everyone was queer and relationships were fluid. I kept making art, getting more and more engaged in my process. I paid no attention to modal boundaries. It wasn't about recognition by granting agencies or reviewers, but about community explored through art.

I wanted to explore things actually happening. I hated illusion. I was Brechtian before I had heard of Brecht. I liked things that you felt rather than looked at and analyzed, and I liked things that left you feeling something that helped you grow as a human being. My buddy Jeff once said. “I don't care if people like my work. I get excited when people are engaged in interesting conversations after the performance.” That sunk in with a big “yes” in my heart. It's not about approval... it's about making a difference in the world, and that difference happens through the whole human being, through the body, with change in how people live their lives. Life is an art project.

I was getting very curious about certain aspects of the human and wanted to dive in farther than I had been able to. By late 95, San Francisco was starting to feel like a small pond. As I wanted more, I suddenly started feeling its limits. Flip of the coin. Heads I get into this company in San Francisco, Tails I leave work, move to New York and devote myself just to art making until the money runs out.

I tried to get into the company, but Tails it was. A little bitterness and disillusionment, but taking it as a push to take up more space and make my own vision in the world, I went off to New York. I made a company, I started to define my work. I got a lot of encouragement. Then I met someone, had a mad affair and an explosive break up, decided I couldn't take the madness of juggling it all in New York and the lack of nature there, and I headed off to explore some gigs in Europe.

Strangely, the money never ran out.

 

–

I almost ran away from everything at the end of the millennium. The date was just a coincidence actually. I had just gotten exhausted with dealing with human beings under urban psychological distress and wanted some time alone.

In the mid 90s I had started to bring together my passions for wilderness backpacking and physical creative process. I was spending a lot more time off in the wilderness, sometimes alone, sometimes bringing other dancers out with me for creative projects. Something happens to the mind in long periods of isolation from humanity, at least potentially. Something gets a bit quieter. In that quiet, there is more space for perception.

Every time I came back into the city, the encounter was getting more and more jarring. People were so agitated and reactive. I kept seeing how people were constantly navigating their perception by others, hyper-reactive. Even when they were outwardly happy, most people's interactions started to seem tinged with fear and driven by some sort of panic or insecurity... this was perhaps doubly so for artists. I started to see exhaustion in myself and in everyone else. At first, I would transition back into “city-mode” after a week or two. I would forget the experience of the wilderness and of this perception, just remember the “story” of it that I made. After time, though, I became more able to resist the transition and less and less inclined to do so. It also started to make me feel more distant from the world.

I spent a month alone in Death Valley. It was a beautiful time. Just thinking about that time brings a certain sense of peace. I remember standing up on the top of a rise and looking out over this rolling valley floor and realizing that there was likely not another person out there for a good 40 miles in every direction. I had the feeling over time of watching the wheel of running words in the mind first reveal its ongoing, perpetual motion, and then, after some days, start to undo itself. The strands of words would run for a while and dissipate, leaving this unusually peaceful sitting in sensation. Wind on the skin, sound of a bird's feathers against the air as it flew over head, sight of Joshua Trees scattered across the landscape for mile after mile, gravel and rock under the feet. Strange to think and feel so calmly ... just sensation.

When I came back, I knew I had to go away for longer. I started to organize myself to leave society for a year or two and just live off in the dessert.

Then, I met someone from a little rural island in Canada, who invited me to come and teach.

I loved it! I decided to finish up some gigs I had in California and Europe, put my dessert plans on hold for a while, and move to Lasqueti where I lived for about 4 years. I homesteaded, spent lots of time wandering the woods, organized in the community, did research in the community hall, and taught long intensives there each winter. Mostly it was a long period of finding distance from the mad race of modern urban life. It was amazing how while in the city it seemed like I couldn't stop doing things or I would become disconnected, yet as I lived out on Lasqueti it didn't really matter so much. I could reconnect still when I came back to the city, and maybe the ways that I was disconnected weren't so vital in the end.

I think of some other things I could say here, but you don't really need to know everything …

–

1999

On my way up to Lasqueti, I met someone on the old hippy bus line, Green Tortoise. Nowadays, they just do tours for the young and funky, but there was a time when they had a commuter line that ran from LA to Seattle. Instead of individual chairs all facing the same way, it was all benches and tables organized for conviviality, and the whole back third of the bus was one giant bed to sprawl out on with whomever else happened to be there. That's where I met L. She was in the midst of a year long project of going up and down the coast to educate people about globalization, the WTO, and the upcoming WTO meeting in Seattle. She was part of the Direct Action Network, an anarchist group that was forming organically to assemble and try to mess up the WTO meeting and change the course of history. There was no one leader, just a vision of local empowerment, environmental sustainability, and justice combined with an openness for many leaders and many groups coming together with the shared goal of trying to interfere with the meetings and take back some of the local sovereignty that the corporations had been quietly taking from us over the years. Encountering her and talking with her got me excited.

I stopped into Seattle on my way up to Lasqueti to take part. I met up with a rather rambunctious but apolitical friend of mine who was fun to dance with and excited to do things your not supposed to do. We decided to be roving entertainment for the people doing more dangerous actions, coordinating with people on walkie-talkie to go where the support was thin and draw crowds in order to forestall police violence.

The tale of the Seattle protests can be found elsewhere, told much better than I could tell it. I'll just say that it was wildly inspiring and empowering. It was also an incredible wake up call to the brutality of the American police state. It was also a clear reveal of the layers of internal policing that we take on when we are younger and forget about. In the space without police that we created for a while, the feeling of freedom was intoxicating and joy spread like wildfire amongst everyone there!

The next day, I got the shit kicked out of me by police. I carry a scar hidden by my left eyebrow from a police officer shoving my head into the pavement repeatedly. I (along with over 600 others) spent 7 days in jail without charges. I have to say that I feel proud of having stood up against the police. I think that everyone should go out and get themselves arrested doing something useful at least once. The experience is very educational and liberating.

–

2003

My rural collaborators on Lasqueti were hungering for the opportunities of urban life, so we all left for different destinations. I ended up in Seattle. Many stories there and some wonderful friends.

One of the greatest experiences there was the opportunity that a lot of really talented and interesting people gave me to direct a wild experiment in interactive performance, Axolotl. I had been dreaming of this piece for years, but it was just a bit too far out there until Felix Ruckert wandered through Seattle and broke some ground with his interactive performance work, Deluxe Joy Pilot. Suddenly people were curious about “interactive” and I could launch this thing I had been sitting on.

The concept is simple. The audience is blindfolded for 2 hours and left in complete freedom in a space with a group of other audience members and performers. In preparation, I direct the performers in explorations, but I neither tell them what to do in performance nor even encourage the idea of “agreements”. We just have an ongoing process of investigation and an understanding of each other's histories and curiosities. This mutual understanding and dialogue then creates the culture.

The piece and process were amazing. What makes this piece specific is the field of investigations that I draw the performers to in laboratory, the kind of selection process I go through in picking the mix of performers, and this wide-open frame of possibility. The word “intimate” does not quite capture the kind of revelation and encounter that happens in the piece. It is unmarked territory of immediate meetings, physical and psychological, verbal and non-verbal.

I have written about the piece elsewhere so won't duplicate that here, but just encourage you to go explore the project web site at Axolotl. I will say in the context of the development of my work that the research for this piece was pivotal in the development of my approach to participatory performance... highly interactive pieces where the “choreography” of the work is on the meta-level of culture and field of investigation, rather than a replicable physical narrative of bodies in space. The central investigation theme of the piece is “meaning”. It is hard to imagine a more elusive term, and yet it is in some ways the central one of who we are as people... what do we find significant, important? What do we value and why? How do we experience it, feel it?

Moreover the piece is both an amazing gift to and somewhat overwhelming for the performer. There is a kind of vulnerability and psychological exposure that is beautiful and overwhelming as social masks, in bits and pieces, drop away. Over the years of doing this show, I think I have had the honor of being exposed to the strangely naked processes of over 2000 audience members.

It's really impossible to describe in words... just felt I had to try a bit, even though the attempt is doomed to failure.

–

Kharkov, Ukraine, Spring 2009

I directed a piece on a group of Ukrainian and Russian dancers. This was a couple of years after my big work, Proximity, and the Yuba Life Art Project. I wanted to do something a bit humbler, less emotionally edge-pushing: Streams. The piece was a highly structured piece investigating the myriad possibilities of investigating physical contact. Performers oscillated between dancing with each other and initiating explorations with audience members. The performers were all experienced contact improvisors, which was necessary for certain skills required by the piece, but also meant they were coming in with a lot of unquestioned emotional/physical patterns. I think that for them, this was one of the most interesting parts of the work, the opening up into other realms of physical interaction possibilities that they didn't realize that they were blocking with the mythology of “flow”. As in Axolotl, the physical action was not the essential... what was essential in Streams was the inner experience of contact in its many variations.

I did not intend to polarize the audience. I just wanted to give them an interesting experience, but polarize the work did. My Russian is not the best, so a lot of what I understood of the audience I got via translation, but my impression was that there were two audiences present: contact improvisors and theater people. The contactors all loved the piece and were delighted by the range of possibilities it showed. The theater people were extremely polarized. The polarization largely was around the lack of narrative structure. Many were down right angry that we called it “theater”, it lacking clear narrative. Others, on the other side, loved it for the experience of not having a narrative or “message” and for the physical immediacy of it. I had to work hard with the dancers to get rid of ideas of “showing” things. I proposed that we did not have to show or interpret, but that it could be interesting to just “do” something. We put social/physical experiments on stage for people to see. We weren't pretending to anything that wasn't actually present, and I think that this immediacy is what the theater folks who liked what we were doing found so compelling. It is also what upset others so much. This wasn't really my intention, though. I actually did not mean to offend or shock. I know next time I am in Ukraine to have written on my advertisements:

“Warning: this piece has no real narrative structure.”

–

November 2010

Grad school at University of California, Davis

I'm getting an MFA in Choreography, simultaneously doing all the courses for a PhD in Ecology. This is my second year. By June, I should have my MFA. By next December, If all goes well, I should have gone through my qualifying exams for the PhD.

Why? I get asked that. I ask myself that.

Relatively successful international teacher of contact improvisation, living the life of a bohemian. Why didn't I just move to Barcelona.

There really isn't one answer, but several at once that seemed to make it make sense. 'shake up my life and get a little distance from the life I had constructed, reenter the sciences and look for ways to have bigger impacts in the world, get some perspective on my art-making, have a clear job and income for a while and not have to stress about self-producing for a bit.

I'm getting all of that, even if I didn't really anticipate what it was going to look like.

It is damned hard dislodging myself from Bohemia so abruptly...

Lots of clarity is coming though from many directions, even if some of it is not comfortable at first.

I'm looking forward to Barcelona this summer!

–

Warning: this piece has no real narrative structure.

 

Karl Frost