Sometimes I see my job here as to catch asides – moments when people say something that might get lost if I don’t write them down. Mole mentioned that he might look at the song ‘I was strolling through the park one day’ that one of the astronauts sings in a video clip we found the other day. He might use it as a movement score. When looking at the lyrics I see the line soft-shoe break in brackets in the chorus. I look this up and find that it means a soft shoe dance that was originally executed while wearing soft shoes and sometimes done on sand. This seems to connect with Lisa’s ideas about creating a movement sequence to represent Neil Armstrong’s left foot and Mole’s empty shoes onstage. And moon dust. And moon rock. And the way footprints on the moon will stay there forever. A break occurs in a dance when a noticeable change in the music occurs or even stops. I think of the idea of moon bounce and delay and how we might use a dance as some kind of interlude, some kind of break in transmission, waiting for the signal to arrive 5.4 seconds after it was sent. Maybe we could make footprints in the sand after performing a soft shoe break to ‘I was strolling through the park one day’. Maybe a dance based on delay and waiting. A dance of questions and answers. A dance of call and response between someone on the moon and someone on earth. A dance to the beep Lisa found that was recorded in 1969 during the moon landing. I think of the line in the song: A smile was all she gave to me. And how Mole’s text said that Leen would be smiling and laughing. Something connects to the song, something’s drawing us into its orbit.
