Just back from dinner with Mei, Paul, Larry, and Yuchia and a reading at Columbia College Chicago. Thanks to Tony and Yuchia for helping to make the event hapen and to Larry for tech support. Had a good turnout for such a blustery bad weather day that turned many umbrellas inside out. A couple of faculty from the lit department showed as well as a few students from the B.A. and MFA programs in creative writing from Columbia. Susen James from my SAIC days who is now teaching at Columbia came and I ran into Luba in the hall, while waiting for Tony, who was running off to teach a composition course. Walked over to the Fine Arts building with Tony to the Rain Dog cafe and afterwards went up to the 8th floor to check out the Subcity Projects elevator. Currently deinstalled, but gave me an idea of the installation space that Ellen and I will be working with -it's not a functional elevator. There is a history in Chicago with working with challenging installation spaces - everything from living room and closet galleries to truck installations!

But the real highlight of the day was going over to the Hedwig Dances studio space on Randolph and meeting Mei and seeing her dancers interpret "Recipe for Paper". I almost cried. I only saw the second part of the piece which is set to an audio recording of me reading the poem backed by Gao Ping's beautiful musical compositions while the dancers move slowly across the floor wrapped in cloth, traveling the Silk Road and coming together at times like the interwoven fibers of handmade paper. As the dancers slowly exit, their movements are not unlike walking meditation which is the metaphor in my mind of the art-making practice - the making of paper,the writing of the poem.. 3 dancers, 2 female and 1 male, with a shaved head who evoked for me a Buddhist monk in his deliberate steps. Fantastic. My classmate Judy from SAIC put together a piece for NPR on the Hedwig program which should air on Wednesday or Thursday. When I get the live link, I will post it here. I also caught a sneak preview of another dance piece written by a Cuban poet in Spanish about a florist who is utterly commited to her oeuvre - the piece is danced by a beautiful young woman in a white dress on a stage strewn with flowers. This performance is also quite moving, ending with a recorded reading by the poet of her poem in Spanish.