FIrst let me say this: Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated. Not only are we NOT dying, we are planning all kinds of excellent activities during our time apart.
In case you haven’t heard the news:
Monica is moving to Boston to learn about dance/movement therapy; I’m moving to LA to learn about palm trees and radical pedestrianism; Theresa is moving to South Minneapolis to learn about pond ownership.
Thursday (THIS Thursday) is our last we-all-still-live-in-the-same-city rehearsal. This weekend (THIS weekend) is Monica’s last as a Minnesota resident. I can’t and won’t recount the history that I feel bearing down around me every minute right now. It’s all too much.
Which is to say I’m psyched about what’s coming up, which is good because otherwise I’d be sad, walking backward and wiping tears away. So here I am to hold your hand, turn you around to walk forward.
Let’s address the facts of the Tenth Year of Madness, a.k.a Today through July 2015.
The King has convened himself and issued the following five edicts:
1) We shall perform artistic experiments!
We’re taking this time apart as a hard reset on “our practice”. This is a curious thing to do, because it’s hard to say what “our practice” is exactly, as it doesn’t even look the same every time. Sometimes we make dances for the telephone or sometimes we pour flour all over a gallery and regret it deeply the next day. But usually it involves sitting together in the same room for 3 hours a week, minimum, and talking about ideas, images and movement.
We can’t sit in the same room anymore, but it turns out that the internet has been invented and can help us communicate.
Over the next 12 months, we are trying something new:
- Each of us gets to be real, actual King. Whoever is King decides what Mad King Thomas does for two months.
- We make the other two participate in this crazy idea we have. Maybe we meet via telephone, or maybe we write a cookbook, or maybe we set things on fire and send the ashes to each other via post.
- ???
- New artistic practice!
The future feels so wide open and so different for each of us. Ain’t no reason trying to have three hour Skype rehearsals if they suck. Ain’t no reason trying to make a hard-and-fast plan when the whole is slipping and sliding beneath us.
2) We shall unleash the results of our experiments upon the unwitting public!
Rather than keeping all these experiments to ourselves, as is our selfish wont, we are going to put evidence of our wrongdoing artistic practice here on this blog. We’ve sensed with our little tyrannical antennae that there could be a lot of internetting in support of our mission to Make Things More Awesome, but we always get busy making a stage show and all those high-falutin’ thoughts falute right out the window.
As the world’s only Virtual Dance Company (this doesn’t count ), we want to give good internet. Starting this fall you will see more blogging, more medias, more internets.
3) We shall procure fancier digs for our experimental results!
AND we’re planning a big overhaul of this here corner of internet. It will look more like us, it will have more content about our work, it will maybe be funny. That’s all I am at liberty to say.
4) We shall celebrate our 10th Anniversary with a show!
Did you know that Mad King Thomas is about to turn ten? Did you know that ten is the last year when you can still display your age in fingers without confusing people? In any case, April 2014 is our tenth birthday, and we’re putting together a tenth anniversary show for next summer. Monica and I will fly back, there will be much dancing and rejoicing and maybe even cake with buttercream frosting (Italian or French-style frosting is not yet decided). I’m keeping all the juiciest details under my hat for now (not a comfortable place to keep juicy things) but there will be trumpet fanfares and all that stuff.
Put “Sometime in Summer 2015” in your calendars now!
5) We shall travel to the Old World and study dance-making with Julyen Hamilton!
We were awarded a Jerome Travel/Study grant to study with one of our favorites, Julyen Hamilton! WHOOO! I finally get to go to Europe. We get to trip out on dance as it pertains to the space/time continuum, mathematics or whatever and we could not be more thrilled to have this time to regroup and hang out together while working our dancer tails off.
Mad King Thomas has, in many ways, just been a vehicle for negotiating our lives via an artistic practice. Sure, it mostly results in us eating things we think are gross, but it’s a way for us to be ourselves, to investigate the things that are happening around us, and to bring all of you around us to talk about it. And it turns out when you hit thirty, some things in life start to change. Like, maybe you need to make a living wage. Maybe you need to live somewhere new. But some things don’t change, and our desire to work with each other is one of the latter.
If you want to keep up with Mad King Thomas’ next adventures, let us know and we’ll add you to our mailing list!