The Invitation Situation at Stomping Ground LA this month!
- Aug 10
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 12
On a sunny Tuesday morning at the beginning of August, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Andee Scott, performer/collaborator/initiator for the upcoming west coast performance of The Invitation Situation at Stomping Ground LA August 28th to 30th. Even though this was my first time meeting Andee, and even though we were speaking on a virtual platform, I can’t imagine how anyone leaves a conversation with her not feeling gleefully inspired to ask questions and listen tenderly for the answers. The Invitation Situation, a choreo-performance experiment based on Durning’s nonstopping, is a facet of a larger process and exploration for Andee. It’s a life’s work of grappling with belonging, meaning, process, and desire through interrogating and reimagining the choreographic process. As a mixed-race Asian person, Andee is deeply invested in understanding the “why” of things happening, and this manifests in her choreographic invitations to queer women as a means to locate community, (re)place power with the performer, and move outside of ‘normal’ structures.
In 2005, Andee worked with Jeanine Durning on a solo and found that Durning’s movement practice, nonstopping, was a grounding sort of homeplace that allowed her to move away from creating choreographic identity-focused content and dig into how she might go about practicing while still presencing her intersectional identities. During the beginning months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Andee reached out to friends and colleagues, most of whom were (and are) academics, to practice together. When I spoke with Andee, she said “it took two years to even feel like we knew what we were doing.” Through this process, the group found that being in the process yields more and more information over time. Andee invited Durning to bring nonstopping to the group, and from it, The Invitation Situation was developed.
As our conversation unfolded, I found kinship in many ways that Andee experienced dance and choreographing as a young person. She grew up in classical ballet, terrified of choreographing, and upon arriving at college wasn’t sure that she would pursue dance. But she did. And in that, found more and more questions about creative process. During that time, she worked with Jose Bustamante, to whom she would ask “how did you do that?” of his choreographic works and found it magical, un-understandable, and even crazy-making. It was through improvisation that Andee found ways of moving that made space to practice practicing rather than always being in the mindset of composing or choreographing. Durning told her that “improv is a thing to be worked,” as in, you have to do it over and over and over again to understand the practice and accept the material that comes up. And ultimately, Andee found that it wasn’t about the content, and that it didn’t need to be about the content. By practicing practice, she not only found a way to unlink content from importance, but also she found the permission to try (and fail). And this can be a conduit for process and flow, rather than a creative obstruction. “Failure,” Andee said to me, “is a possibility.”
When we are able to recognize who we are, the difficulty of making something new, the emotional charge of laying bare our bodies, identities, and labors, we can generate a spaciousness for thinking/feeling/being otherwise. And with that comes the understanding that when we improvise we are generating information that we’ve received through the filters of our own experiences and values. This is the task, and success, of The Invitation Situation. As Andee said to me near the end of our call, “it’s all practice. It’s all information.”
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The Invitation Situation invites uncertainty, spontaneity, collective will, and personal agency to meet amidst a constantly shifting environment to make visible the dancers’ capacity to create anew. Catch Andee Scott, Mary Williford-Shade, Heidi Brewer, and Clare Croft in Jeanine Durning’s choreo-performance experiment at Stomping Ground LA August 28-30, and on Saturday, August 29, Durning will teach “MAKING our way: some strategies for nonstopping” from 2pm-6pm.
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