Long Live the River

“As a painter who often works completely alone, I was drawn to the possibility of doing something in this space that involved other people in the process.  I had seen Aretha and Ryan perform at the Bates Dance Conference last summer and left their hour-long production exhilarated in a way that was difficult for me to articulate.  It was a loud, jagged, moving performance that made me feel rearranged and pushed out onto the other side of something.

We approached this collaboration openly and decided to work alongside one another and see how it felt.  We thought about the space, the building, and its location on the Androscoggin River.  We focused on our parts of the project and absorbed each other’s trajectories adjacently.

The primary gift of this project has been the level of quiet focus we have found together. We circled each other like a giant eddy. We started over again and again; we threw away almost as much as we kept. We watched the river, and the river watched us.”

- Meghan Brady