There is yarn all over our house. The dining room table is piled high with balls of gray yarn. The hallway is an obstacle course of various bags of wool and knitting. And the living room floor is scattered with random lumps and bits of yarn that our son enjoys playing with.

The knitting props are important to Kathleen’s piece and create just the right atmosphere as they help to tell her story. But in the end, they are secondary to the dancers and the dance. And yet, much of this blog has been about the creation of these props. I suppose that’s because this is the part of it that I get to see and become involved with.

She’s designed the costumes, and that process I understood, and offered my opinions based on watching more episodes of What Not To Wear than I care to admit. “Yes, the grey sweaters really go well with the burgundy frock underneath”... and so forth.

Right now she’s choosing and editing music for the piece and “choreographing” the music and sounds. All I hear is musical snippets and excerpts that start and stop randomly and sometimes play over and over and over again, like a radio knob being whizzed all over the dial. It’s just a jumble of noise. I understand wrapping yarn around an exercise ball. But this hyperactive jukebox of sound is where I start getting lost. Yet somewhere, somehow it makes sense to Kathleen, and in the end I know the music will flow as gracefully as the dancers.

And speaking of the dancers, the most important part of this crazy process, the development of the choreography is invisible to me. It takes place entirely in Kathleen’s imagination... her “liminal space” as she would call it. She doesn’t share much with me about the choreography or the creation of the dance. She’ll show me videos from rehearsal and tell me a rough outline of the story as it comes to her. But the dance, the movements, the raison d’etre, so to speak, of the piece, is something mysterious. Perhaps it’s something mysterious even to Kathleen. She knows what she’s doing, but she doesn’t “know” what she’s doing. She can create beautiful movements that make your heart ache, but she can’t put into words how or why these movements come about. They just do. So, alas, there’s not much I can write about the choreography.

There is a popular saying: “writing about art is like dancing about architecture”. This aphorism has been attributed to dozens of people, but is generally though to originate, in this form, from comedian Martin Mull back in the late 1970’s. The saying is meant to illustrate the inherent difficulty of a task by using hyperbole.

But it’s not so ridiculous. Kathleen could totally dance about architecture. I’m convinced she could dance about bacon and eggs, or about the first twenty elements on the Periodic Table. Come June 23rd, we’re going to see performers dance about knitting. No way Martin Mull could’ve seen that one coming.