Movement
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The PROPOSAL
On September 18, 2022, we (Binda Colebrook and Jenny Katz) met at Iconica Social Club in Northampton for a coffee. We talked about what we’d been working on and playing with. Jenny mentioned a character she’d been hearing in her head lately, a vampire who wanted to do standup and had been honing her set. She told Binda a couple of the jokes.
“Dating… it’s hard, right? Making small talk. I mean, some questions are easy: ‘What are you drinking?’ ‘Red or white?’ Other questions are harder. ‘So what do you do?’ ‘Uh… I’m a people person?’”
Binda, as she often does, was making notes in her sketchbook. Then she looked up and said, “I recall you saying it would be fun to do something together, and I’ve been thinking on that. And here’s my proposal: How about I make a thing, I give it to you, and then you sit with it and make a thing — it could be a song, or a piece of art, or whatever — and give it back to me, and we just keep going with that for a couple of rounds.”
Jenny suggested one change — what if they BOTH made a piece of art to swap, so they could each always have something to play with. It could be a kind of creative double helix.
Later that day, Binda texted:
Jenny had just been chatting with a friend who was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She was struck by the similarity in sound to “Helices.” Helysses/Helices — not just a double helix but also a mythic journey! That sounded right.
There are 24 chapters in the Odyssey. If Binda and Jenny each made 12 artifacts, that would be a way of equalling 24 “chapters.”
What would be our cadence? We proposed two weeks — long enough to get something done, but not long enough that we could spend much time either planning or polishing. This project wasn’t about creating perfect artifacts; it was about the movement of spiraling each other, moving away and then coming back to cross. With that in mind, we decided to call these two-week periods “movements.”
Twelve movements, two weeks apiece. That sounded like a dauntingly long project — almost half a year. We decided not to think about that part of it too hard, just jump in and see how it felt.
Our first movement would be some kind of artistic response to this very conversation. We would meet again in two weeks and see what we’d come up with.