reflection - 220907

more thoughts on care

"...in order to protect oneself from what one fears — this is the strategic achievement of anxiety, which arms the subject, in advance, against the onslaught of trauma, the blow that takes one by surprise."

(Rosalind Kraus, in Formless: a user's guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. p. 196)

o what are accidents? they disrupt action – in big and small ways
o but what are they? and why are they hard to fit into the scheme of things?
o they obviously have causes – so one aspect is very apparent – but they’re not planned – so the cause sits both outside of and within a chosen, undertaken piece of action – they show up a moment of flaw in the deliberation and consciousness of the doing of an act by revealing that awareness levels had been thresholded too low – to a point where attentiveness had been minimalised to a blur and an element of blindness and inattention allowed to emerge and cause harm
o the automatic doing of habitual acts still require an amount of attention, so attention levels are an adjustable factor, they are lifted or lowered, but most of the time they are lowered to levels that push the edge of what we can get away with
o lowering attention levels conserves energy – this is an energy efficiency mechanism – allowing energy to be directed at new or specific areas of the moment
o habitual tasks, like chores that are repeated frequently, may be done semi-automatically because they have lost interest or new-ness value, so learnt behaviour takes over to which the least amount of monitoring attention is given – however too much daydreaming when driving the car can produce a level of attention deficit with catastrophic consequences – or stubbing a toe going into the bathroom through distractedly and hurriedly misjudging the distance between your foot and the door is the consequence of a lower attentiveness level with irritating results
o all of this is about accidents that are the direct outcome of misjudged attention threshold levels
o what is significant is the relationship between attention and habit in everyday movement and the existence of attention levels that are monitored and that are continually changing and adjusting
o attention is a radar that needs monitoring – go off for a quick coffee and you might miss the enemy boat, the UFO, or the distress signal
o further to this – attention IS monitoring – not just something that is monitored (otherwise all you have is ‘monitoring the monitor’ and ‘aware of awareness’)
o awareness of ‘attention as a monitor’ changes its tactility and reveals/amplifies the physicality of consciousness
o what does monitoring do?
o it scans – it measures – it alerts – it evaluates – it judges – it’s a gatekeeper – it assesses – it sums up – it orientates – it signals – it scouts – it informs – it’s wary – it’s suspicious – it questions – it’s cautious – it’s exact – it’s selective – it tests – it stabilises (hmmm… instinctive self-care attached to attentiveness sounds very paranoid! - self-care is deeply connected to the 'structure of anxiety' Krauss talks about in the quote above)

reflection - 210907

random thoughts

o care is about ‘not-to-destroy’ things – it is about preservation – preserving the security of a thing – care is the basis of all movement – and it has come from coordinating skills – and learning how to become coordinated
o with my in-built attitude of care, I have respect for objects in the world and in my immediate environments (although I might heirarchicise these using preference criteria and importance) – generally speaking, I want to keep the world intact and leave objects alone so that they can peacefully go about their duty servicing my and others’ needs – everything sits in a state of readiness and availability – waiting to be used according to melodies and patterns of movement that choose or determine where physicalities alight (Gins and Arakawa’s ‘landing sites’)
o nature provides examples of things we can learn to duplicate - built environments duplicate ourselves
o dance movement is about rearranging body parts in different configurations and relations to each other - they're about manipulating self materiality for the sake of it
o I’m so surrounded by where I can’t go, I get used to it and instead focus on and accept the ‘where I can go’s’, most of the time I completely ignore and forget all the ‘where I can’t go’s’
o big wild movement is an aggression (perhaps all movement has the seeds of aggression) – it is a war against barriers – in open space it intimidates barriers and dares them to come near – in enclosed or narrow space, it is unhappy that it is forced towards stillness – it hates being dominated – movement is a dominator
o the difference between small and big space is the difference between the dark oppression of defeat and the open sunny light of victory
o open space smiles on abandonment
o the mechanical repetition of walking is built around straight lines and right angles which are established in the body locomotive as natural and primary – this is a stiffness and ploddy-plod digitisation that creates flow, evenness, and continuity through the disrupting effect of punctuated repetition – dance breaks and falls through walking’s barriers to catch itself in flow as a departure from the confined mechanistics of walking – flow brings in circularity that right angles and straight lines in the natural walk, postural, and sitting states of the body deny
o when dance is in empty space (like a studio), it has itself to explore, i.e. raw movement, or the architectural planes, designs, and surfaces of other dancers – the ground is a constant that is used maximally to compensate for the lack of other fixed objects
o when environmental factors/structures are introduced and impede open space – these alter and affect movement and immediately invite/attract/enforce interaction
o why straight lines and right angles are more natural for the body and movement is because they dominate the structural mechanics of the body itself – this is the basis for their predominance in built environments – the dominant angularity of built environments not only furnish movement economically, they mirror the body and are customised to its mechanistic form and dynamic (like sculptural moulds) – squares, rectangles, straight lines, etc are not un-organic when it comes to the human body – they are reflections of its dominant construction principles and features
o the body may have curved surfaces that themselves are identified as organic, but the breaks at the joints render it angular
o in movement, the body traces circles more freely than it can make them – the body is predominantly angular in its breaks and construction – the major exception is the spine, which can curve, twist, and become rounded – we can also curve the feet (with good arches) and rotate the forearm – the tongue is very good at circular shapes – but the joint-angled being that we are has no difficulty tracing curves and circles in many different movement ways in the immediate space surrounding the body – this allows us to experience circularity in ways that extend beyond the body’s physical capacity – we vacuum these traced curves back into ourselves as though they were of us and not of the air around us – this is a kind of kinaesthetic reversal – proprioceptive appropriation – we are insect-limbed with snaky torsos – we are climbers more than slitherers

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dance - ÉDUARD LOCK

AMELIA – la la la human steps [ on dvd ]


~ torah torah torah
~ attack attack attack
~ the thrill of speed
~ erotique
~ the body is a turbine
~ moving camera – swimming perspectives
~ film me film me film me
~ I am filming you, the camera replies
~ tight taut female bodies
~ straining to erupt from their musculature
~ the female as killing leg
~ behind in front in front behind
~ partnering that has only 2 sides
~ shadow support
~ hold hold hold
~ flick release
~ woman is the front of man
~ she faces him or is his face
~ a body face
~ his erotique body face made of her
~ put a woman in a man and a man in a woman and you get a smiling man and a serious woman
~ in every other respect their suited selves are the same
~ skin swapping
~ sharp edged
~ support given support taken
~ object object object
~ staged lives
~ dramatique erotique
~ puncture puncture puncture
~ grasping grabbing razored spinning
~ desolate con(front)ations
~ touched distance kept at arms’ reach
~ insatiable demand
~ pointe-shoe’d women powering over bent-knee’d men
~ there is work to do in this state-of-the-art arena
~ the human parts don’t fit
~ they super-charge it fractally
~ converging walls and 2 supports
~ the arms of man and the legs of woman
~ all meeting at revolving hips
~ manipulated on a spin point
~ strobe dancing
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postcript

~ if the woman’s hips are the spinning earth, if earth is read as the womb and nourisher of life, then this dance still makes masculine hands control its spin, i.e. God hands – but the hands are obsessed with their task and the men’s eyes never divert their focus from their intense concentration on the hips at hand – are they trying to get at something they can never know? - the secret of life’s source inside a womb not in their own bodies? – this interpretation of woman’s hips as spinning earth is viable given the setting – a concave world made of sloping walls – a bowl – the hollow of the pelvic bowl with a female dancer at the centre being spun from the hips – and, as per historical feminist literature showing that wo-man has no identity of her own, this dance has eroticised woman (naked legs and see-through tops) or elsewhere she is further fetishised in a man’s suit – woman made in the image of man’s choosing with no-where else in that sterile world of polished wood to be anything else – the only way out is up – but only the floating (and trespassing) Spirit-eye of the camera, like some invasive mechanical viewing implement being manipulated by a curator/collector of species, comes and goes from there to examine what’s been trapped and caught for its curiosity and fascination – a swimming zoom-presence that penetrates and rotates its own viewing in the way the choreography rotates the dancers, and their bodies and hips, or goes up high as the eye from above (the eye in the sky), or peers very closely into the woman’s eye but sees nothing except compliance – a woman’s eye, like the hips, unlike itself – a woman’s eye, a collected thing, that cannot pry in the way the prying camera eye, self permits – the object of fascination can only be handled this way and that, turned round, inspected, its quality appraised – serialised and categorised by the connoisseur – human liqueur for the cabinet – a matured product – expensive – there is no soil in this world, it doesn’t belong – and the men-servant-dancers can only do the eye-in-the-sky’s bidding, be its hands – making sure to duck under the woman’s blade-like arms and overly adamant gestures – or try to access her through competitive imitation that forms no bonds - parodic cross-signalling posed and turbo-charged as a mystique with a plaintive air

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dance - JULYEN HAMILTON

improvisation [ on dvd ]


~ solo figure dialoguing the space gracefully and articulately
~ stillnesses punctuate erupting expansions of physicality-activity
~ much looking up and crossing an upstage diagonal area with his back to the live audience (and camera – which is positioned high up at the back of the seating)
~ slapping and grabbing gestures and motifs in the start as though he is internally recounting some kind of story or pursuing an inner train of thought
~ playful physical melodies circulating his freedom, that rest back into reaching extensions of arms, body, and legs and then into gazing up into space above his head
~ he has a distance focus that gets dissected and slashes his body in opposing directions
~ he begins talking and this produces laughter and amusement – his dialogue is entertaining – does the talking take over from the earlier movement interest?
~ he revels in the freedom that the space, his body, and the attention affords
~ when he stops talking the movement quietens the laughter – he is casually virtuousic (extended travelling handstands, diving cartwheels, hovering jetés, mercurial and intricate changes of direction, unexpected level shifts, feline technical assuredness), but uses a lot of idiosyncratic gestures and eccentricities that are sobering rather than laughter-provoking
~ the 2nd bout of talking reflects on personal correspondence with and to a third person, it throws up the 4th wall and excludes the audience – he then dissolves this tactic and engages with the audience once more, this time talking about the doing of 2 things at the same time – which is what he is doing by talking and dancing simultaneously
~ if he couldn’t melodise his body so intricately the point of his value would be lost
~ it is audience-directed as a reverie of uncontained performance slippages and insertions into self – he is swimming in the deeper freedoms and ramblings of the psyche – talking forever with his body
~ his physical talk is as natural as speech, peopled and shaped by an imagination partially externalised by his behavioural and spoken entertainments and mannerisms
~ he has filled an empty space with invisible things inside and of himself that he brings in and then reveals – he reveals an abundance of physical history and dexterity and a narrative that is running and unfolding internally and occasionally articulated in speech, emotion, and characterisation
~ he is a travelling shape-shifter with a sizeable bag of tricks surrounded by his highly controlled and feigned virtuousic madness
~ he circle stamps the space in a pacing heavy walk (earlier it was with loping stallion jetés), spirals to the front then retreats to the back with his back to the audience, turns downstage and walks energetically as though he is going to exit through them, stops very close and does some enigmatic parting gesture with his hands, he then surveys them close-up, and then speaks confessionally and explanatorily – he produces more laughter in respect to decisions made backstage about the order of the show and what he is going to call his piece – he retreats upstage diagonally to the edge of the space in the direction of the stage exit, turns, and sings diagonally into the space – he then walks into the direction of his song, gradually dancing with his singing and occupying the centre area of the stage - at the end of his song-dance he bows and exits
~ there are subtle lighting shifts throughout the piece that open the space, close it and make him more intimate, or spill up under him when he is downstage to make him eerie
~ what does the space allow?
~ a lit opening in a darkness in which to look down and focus attention on the trapped but willing (mutually desired) occupancy of a physical minstrel who in both hurried and unhurried improvisations, journeys and weaves his body and the space in the psychic landscape of a momented and shared self-absorption
~ the space allows him to circulate and to buffet himself across its dimension – the darkness cushions and velvets his containment like a padded cell
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dance - MERCE CUNNINGHAM

TORSE: LEFT SCREEN [ on dvd ]


~ sounds of dancers feet squeaking on tarquette or thumping in the landings from jumps
~ geometrical movements and spatial formations
~ split video screen
~ clumsy unison work
~ structure features groups ranging from 10 down through to 2, with isolated solo work
~ split screen is a viewing decision – binocular
~ regimented movement with held and posed waiting interludes – regimentation is a theme
~ preoccupied with tendus – the tendu is the central driving movement force
~ vertical ‘balleticality’ – a narrow movement vocabulary tightly bound up in mummy wrappings that keep the arms stuck out at the sides all the time – this is the coppelia doll as a wooden anatomical artists modelling toy (stripped of her frilly clothing) – marionettes on the open stage clunking around as per the stringed manipulations
~ the formality keeps the space spatialised (intimacy is sporadic, fleeting, and also formal) – spatialised space is where space between is consciously maintained
~ the spacing and regimentation is an obedience to structural demands
~ height competitions between the more and less flexible
~ as the space connects and divides the space-between so too do the small rectangular video screens sitting alongside one another (like two square eyes) within the larger screen (the skull)
~ the darkness that borders the lit dancing space is mirrored by the dark screen on which the two smaller screens sit
~ the dance is a classroom with lots of technical dance exercises being practiced – or the classroom has migrated to the stage
~ the right screen turned blue and was empty of image and dance momentarily – sky? – and then the previous dancing screen resumed
~ dancers enter and exit from the bordering darkness
~ these are fine articulate dancers who a have a casualness in the feet which makes them seem noticeably sloppy in the numerous ballet moves and extensions
~ more waiting in posed classical tendu positions with arms in 3rd
~ the dance of the almost-ballet that has been around so long now that it has its own completeness and can’t be said to be an almost-anything anymore except itself
~ grid patterning
~ the sounds of jumps inserted again – this is conscious because the sparse electronic score died down in order for the feet thumps to be amplified unaccompanied
~ patterns on patterns on patterns
~ the patternated body
~ forcing/labouring the big jump – the ground is woven in floor travelling sequences (mostly box step variations) and pushed off for jumping
~ punctuations of little partnering and lifting moments – the sporadic and structurally isolated nature of these make them like a motif that emphasises the off-the-ground and relentless airborne nature of the dance
~ everything is off the ground and up – retirés, relevés, demi-pointes, arabesques, sautés, beats, cabrioles, assemblés, battement, extended and lifted port-de-bras – this is a mad hot-footing on hot coals
~ there is so much anti-ground it becomes a battle and the dancers lose – eternal body flights of the flightless
~ flight is the desire and after a time and with relentless perseverance, the illusion gets believed – the argument for the possibility of unassisted human flight is won
~ facings are mostly camera (i.e. front) oriented – the camera never leaves its fixed location centre front, it only zooms in and out to dissect or enlarge particular groupings or individuals – but the body and choreography also utilise circular pathways and multiple facings that orient the front of the body in other directions
~ gaps and spaces are harnessed
~ repetition is a dominant factor – it is as if the dance is going over and over itself like a photocopier producing endlessly varied versions of a piece of material in an attempt to… what?
~ it’s like a tickertape or court transcript that goes on and on trying to… and now it just flickers out inconclusively, but not till it has reintroduced a movement that takes the dancers down to one knee for the second time – the first was at the beginning
~ the overall impression is of a community of uni-skinned dancer/androgynes busily and concentratedly carrying personal semi-largish basket-bundles of space in front of them as they travel around, across, through, in, and out of the performance area (which is hot on the feet) (– it’s also like an egg and spoon race) – perhaps the space-baskets have their clothes in them and they’re on the way to the river
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dance - SHOBANA JEYASINGH

animating architecture: FOLIAGE CHORUS [ on dvd ]


~ artificial elements – sea / birds / insects / nature
~ otherworldly – projections of branches
~ transposing nature onto/into geometric hard-edged architecture – in which it wouldn’t grow
~ projecting something onto surfaces and occupying its space in ways that compensate for its exteriorly cold functionality and aesthetically death-like surface visage
~ giving it artistic translucency and life to provide/replace what it’s not
~ the journey of the digitised subconscious featuring futuristic skull-caped androgynes
~ organicising and biologising inanimate environments that are now the ‘natural’ in which we live
~ romanticising steel – fish bodies swimming in translucent blue-lit balconies – all fakery with digital bubbles and weed – space and ocean – sub- and ‘over-’ conscious – caught midlevel between 2 heights – super-ego and unconscious – outer and inner spaces
~ dancers connected in linear relationship with fronts dominantly facing audience
~ travelling sequence as a group keep tight proximity, establishing connection and sameness
~ common twining snaky movement mimicking tendrils of vegetative growth
~ extending out along space exploratively, then opening and spreading across space, inhabiting its nooks and crannies, with the aid of projection, which matches the growth and expansion (proliferation) of the expanding dance tree
~ emphasis on slithering and climbing onto, into, and against the spaces boundaries and ledges
~ a breaking of the 4-unit at the point of arrival in the centre of the balcony, individuals work in unison facing the audience with equidistant space between them – establishing themselves now as independent offshoots from the earlier rhizome – fledgling trees that grow, assisted by the projection, into thick enveloping vegetation
~ the process of arrival and growth is then reversed at the end to signal exit and the decline or retracting process of death, decay, decline, or the seasonal withdrawal and disappearance of vegetative growth
~ humans imitating vegetation in an architectural space made purposely barren and screen-like in order to artificially control the life it allows in – the backdrop (building) may be well-meaning in its desire to make its organic mobile occupants more prominent and visible – but the danger to me is that its neutrality has a kind of quarantining effect – by removing anything from its design that might distract, it sanitises whatever occupies it and challenges/imposes the cult of the modernist white canvas as the dominant universalising medium for art – this is also the order and soft tyranny of the pristine – it is like the radiation chamber in which the dangerous messiness that art sometimes is, is placed to be made safe (one of the unfortunate aspects of bureaucratisation which in every other regards is a benefit maximiser)
~ the 2nd section used 2 big round columns, a wall, and open space - this section was energetic and had a different theme from the balcony section – the dancers embraced their bodies around the pillars at the start (vegetation growing up them – perhaps this is the linking idea to the balcony) and then used them as supports to launch from, lean against, flow around, erase and rebirth themselves – a place for coming and going and echoing, through much use of matching pair work and synchronised 4 work, the repetitive regularity of the columns
~ this section with the assertive columns and the bigger than necessary open space, which was cropped down to a smaller size by a red rectangular light that defined and established the performing area, produced more dynamic, fast-paced movement, accented, occasionally air-borne, energetic – in contrast to the narrow balcony in which the movement was cautious and slow-paced - greater physical abandon and risk in the open space, and greater care and deliberation in the more confined space
~ as with Akram Khan, the dancers moved in synchronised unison that was not as tight as the choreography looked like it might have wished it to be – they were more confident in solo work, but in the unison work it was apparent that 2 were secure with the timing and phrasing (and form) and the other 2 were following them and not producing the same clarity or exactness of movement design
~ dwarfed by the pillars, the dance was lopsided, and lived under the overhang that the pillars supported, like little animals coming in and out of their holes, but a bit timid of full exposure and freedom – as though, like animals on leads, the pillars were not going to let them get too far away
~ in the end it looked like an excuse to decorate a bit of building with some available dance art, which is fine if it is a love and thanks transaction towards an environment effectively and responsively (responsibly) devoted to reciprocate as a replenishing, servicing, housing, and vitalising resource for artistic activity, well-being, and growth
~ so – there are 2 sections in this work and 2 environmental metaphors:– the first: the building has lots of open space, cut out spaces, and glass – so the metaphor created by the dance is about fish and fish tanks – referring to the fact that people in the building are connected most of the time to 2-way vision – they can see out and the out can see in
- the second: the dancers hug the 2 big pillars and live in, out, and around them and the sheltered space they hold up – the nurturing and sheltering provided by the pillars, the cold mothering pillars, represent or symbolise the support that the building has been designed to provide the arts and young fledgling artists who, like infants growing, need protection and sustenance to help them mature and venture out into the wide spaces of the world (towards the sea of faces of the audience, the representatives in the symbolic drama of the horizons of the world) to become pillar-like elsewhere (in the partnering sections in the open space, the dancers repeated movements on each others’ bodies that they did at the start against the pillars)
~ the architect in his interview says the rounded shapes of the pillars create more flow and that as people are organic, they make a ‘foil’ for the geometry of the building, he said that if the building was more organic, then people would be camouflaged
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reflection - 150907

directions matter

o in empty boundless space, directions have no meaning because there’s nothing to create direction
o in the bounded real spaces of the world, all directions matter
o I can go down the same stretch of road to and from where I live and the importance of each of those directions is inversely proportional to whichever way I am going
o the importance of whether I am going towards or away always favours the direction I am heading
o in one moment, when I am facing and heading towards the destination of where I live, that direction has no rival in importance and significance, but in the next moment, if I have to turn around and go the other way (or any other way for that matter), the importance of the direction I had been going immediately dissolves and disappears
o I create the importance of any direction relative to my purpose
o not only do I establish direction in choosing what to do and where to go, I also elevate its importance
o I thicken it and it becomes paramount above all other directions
o I extract it from anonymity and the deep and cosy companionship of its friends and singularise it in stature above the rest
o but I am fickle, its elevation is always short-lived and totally tailored to my needs – once I reach my destination and I have no need of the direction and route that got me there, it is immediately dismissed and forgotten – or remembered fondly if something interesting worth noting happened (like snapshots from holidays and adventure memorabilia)
o from differentiation and distinction it is discarded and merged once more into multidirectional surround-space – the porridge of non-distinction
o this is one of the deep body grammars that Morris talks about to do with facing and orientation
o directional space is a narrow groove – body width wide and conceptual
o it is also a linking element in the structure of spatial mobility
o direction stretches space together linking points and locations
o linking spaces are measured and quantified by time, distance, and effort
o they are physicalised and personalised to individuals and use
o by facilitating movement through space, directions extend the physicality of the body
o distance is a form of diminishing inconvenience – its inconvenience diminishes the closer the destination becomes

more on ‘avoidance’
o I can move because I have nothing to avoid OR I move freely when I have nothing to avoid
o so I choose to move in the places where avoidance is minimalised
o this defines ‘open’ space
o open spaces are merely spaces that have been enclosed in particular ways – they are defined and consequent on configurational and design elements