Revolutions with Sycamore

Sylvia "Sycamore" Toffel and I met when I joined the cast of a dance called "Math in Motion" in 2008. "Math in Motion" was a school-touring show produced by The Dance Foundation (then Children's Dance Foundation) in Homewood, Alabama. We performed dances about math for elementary school students across the state. I actually knew who Sycamore was from my youth. I had seen her perform at dance festivals when I was a teenager. Maybe it was in 1995, I saw her performing a duet with another dancer named Ann Law, dancing to The Blue Danube, a nonserious dance that was definitely improvised and broke with all the expectations I had for dance at that point in my life. I could be wrong. I seem to remember that they were both wearing shoes in this dance. Sycamore showed me a video of the blue danube duet, and they're not wearing shoes. I could be wrong about a lot of things. Sycamore's mother was a dancer too, Laura Knox. They moved to Alabama when Sycamore was a kid so Laura could direct a ballet company. Sycamore doesn't care for ballet, except for when she does. It's complicated because of her mom. In 2011, Sycamore and I performed a dance duet - a trio, actually, with music by Michael Glaser - at Railroad Park in Birmingham. We're friends, and Sycamore is always dancing, performing, being creative. She's always remaking herself, a habit or a commitment to the artistic process. Always asking questions about why things are the way they are and what might happen if we did this instead and what does it mean to be a human body in this world.

We made this project, Revolutions with Sycamore, as a part of that process. We are simply being alive and making art.

Revolutions with Sycamore is a conversation between the two of us, in the forms of dance and video.

This conversation meanders, gets interrupted, repeats itself, and makes vague references.

The page you are viewing includes drawings of frames from our video materials.

And video excerpts from Revolutions with Sycamore.

Sycamore and I began working on this project near the end of 2022 and continued to create and collect materials until 2025. While the two of us are ultimately responsible for what is presented in this project, there are many other artists and folks who deserve recognition for work that is included in it:

May Mae for composing new music heard in the section we call "Other Time."

Katherine Birdsall, dancing with Sycamore, and an unidentified vocalist in a section we call "Debris." Archival footage.

Ann Law, dancing with Sycamore, and Bruce Kaplan on guitar with unidentified musicians in a section we call "Debris." Archival footage.

A musician who I believe is LaDonna Smith in "Endings." Archival footage.

Revolutions with Sycamore is made possible with support from the Verdant Fund, a regranting program of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and with a grant from the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at the University of Alabama.