Tide/Fog Cycles, for Anna

2021-Ongoing

Cycles propel endings into ongoingness, carrying us forward, always again yet anew.

In Summer 2021 I journeyed to Sea Ranch on the California coast to perform a ritual, to enact a score of transitions and passings. At the intersection of land’s end and day’s end, in this place so deeply a part of Anna Halprin’s practice, vision, and mythology, I danced with the comings and goings of nature to reflect and process, to mark her passing, to move with my own memories and feelings.

That fall I returned to Sonoma coast, to re-cycle. With the turn in season, the autumn waves heave massive tangles of bull kelp onto the beach. An annual seaweed, bull kelp thrives in the rough-and-tumble coastal waters of California’s northern coast. Affixed to undersea rocks by a rootlike holdfast, the kelp’s stem extends upwards 30 to 60 feet, gradually enlarging to form a single buoyant, bulbous structure from which narrow blades grow, floating in an ever-shifting green-brown canopy on the water's undulating surface. When dislodged from their holdfasts, the bull kelp are hauled up the shore by the incoming tide, then dragged back by the receding surf, which gradually intertwines and knots them into heavy sculptural mounds.

Emphasizing the cyclical, I have been returning to the Sonoma coast seasonally, expanding this piece through an extended creative process that interweaves dancing, drawing, scoring, sounding, and myth-making. Tide/Fog Cycles will culminate in a durational site-specific solo performance from sunrise to sunset, large-format graphic score drawing, chapbook of text scores, and dance film.