Filed under: Dance | Tags: burr johnson, canyon, Chaos Territory Art: deleuze and the framing of the earth, deterritorialization, elizabeth grosz, gilles deleuze, hahn rowe, james clotfelter, john jasperse, john sorenson jolink, kennis hawkins, lindsay clark, Norah Zuniga-Shaw, Synchronous Objects, tony orrico, wexner center for the arts, William Forsythe
Photo by Tony Orrico
My experience of John Jasperse‘s Canyon, performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts on 28 April 2012, is a play of territories at the precipice of chaos, a shifting superimposition of structures and organizations—of bodies, of time, of space—that enact opportunities for disruption, deterritorialization, and disorganization, and a gesturing towards a fullness of that provides the very grounds from which organizations like “bodies,” “time,” and “space” emerge. My vocabulary here is particular, and it is worth clarifying at the front end. In watching Canyon, I am immediately struck by the multiple dimensions that are at play within the work, not simply “space,” “time,” “bodies,” etc.—fundamental elements of dance/choreography—but the particular structures through which these elements take on definition. I think of these structures as territories, following Deleuze and Guattari. Elizabeth Grosz, discussing Deleuze, writes, “… the constitution of territory is the fabrication of the space in which sensations may emerge, from which a rhythm, a tone, coloring, weight, texture may be extracted and moved elsewhere, may function for its own sake, may resonate for the sake of intensity alone. And, equally, insofar as its primordial impulse is the creation of territory in both the natural and human worlds, art is also capable of that destruction and deformation that destroys territories and enables them to revert to the chaos from which they were temporarily wrenched. Framing and deframing become art’s modes of territorialization and deterritorialization through sensation; framing becomes the means by which the plane of composition composes, deframing its modes of upheaval and transformation” (Grosz 12-13). Sitting in the audience in the Wexner Performance Space, I am met with a collection of such framings, mappings, and organizations: a white Marley floor set askew (not parallel to the walls); a line of bright orange flags—themselves reminiscent of staking claim to land as a new “territory”—dividing the floor into two halves; structuring of the space accomplished through lighting (lighting design by James Clotfelter), inscribing blurry delineations of brightness and shadow; and perhaps most overtly of all, sprawling linear compositions in fluorescent tape traversing the walls and floor (visual design by Tony Orrico). Each of these materials suggests a mode in which the space has been organized or territorialized, a system through which structures have framed (and in doing so, produced) “space.” These various territories do not describe the same space; rather, they function as divergent structures superimposed on one another offering multiple accounts of space, each organization a route for disorganization when considered through a different logic. The lights do not territorialize spaces that reside within the bounds of the lines of tape; the lines of tape do not align with the rectangular Marley floor nor the rectangular architecture of the space; the line of flags cuts through these various other territories; and so on. In this sense, the superimposition of territories effects a series of deterritorializations, each structure producing a rupture in the others, each exceeding the logic of the others. This dense layering of territories/organizations/structures produces the opportunities for their own undoing. Grosz goes on to write, “… art is not only the movement of territorialization … it is also the converse movement, that of deterritorialization, of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and through the body, through works and events that impact the body” (Grosz 18). At these sites of rupture, where these various territories cut through one another, I am brought close to something, what Grosz calls “chaos”: it is that full potential that provides the very conditions for extracting experiences and concepts such as “space.” It is at the collision between these territories where I glimpse their undoing, where I brush up against chaos and “the beyond.”
And the performance has not even started yet.
As the sound score begins, dancers come running through the audience into the space. The dancing feels familiar. It is exquisitely precise; it springs lightly and circles and swings, almost entirely vertical, and always with a particularity that feels both powerful and measured. At first I think that the familiarity of these vocabularies feels generic, then something happens: I notice the spatial pathways of these dancers, juxtaposed over and against the lines drawn on the floor and walls. They move with precision, yet it is precisely not the paths traced out along these lines. Between the “territory” of these highly organized bodies—organized both in the clarity of the choreography, but also in the evident regulation of their training—and the tape, the lights, the demarcation of the Marley floor space, the architecture, I falter. These frameworks or systems of organization (or, again, territories) each provide a way to see and structure the space, and they do not align. They do not operate through the same logic, and thus they continually cleave through one another. Bodies fall into temporary lines with one another, but they are lines that intersect and extend through other lines (light, tape, Marley, cement, flags) in the space. In this sense, what seems familiar or even generic takes on new, unexpected properties. The movement—however familiar it might feel—enacts an unfamiliar operation in the disruption/deterritorialization of other versions of the space, and in doing so, makes the movement itself no longer what it might have seemed to be.
Space is not the only element that is produced through these various forms of organization: these bodies, as bodies do, are moving in/through time. Their movements repeat, and the rhythms of their repetitions segment time, as does the music, and the time produced through the movement of bodies and the repetition of those movements is not always the same as the time that is produced through the complex rhythmic structures of the sound score (composed by Hahn Rowe). These temporal territories deterritorialize one another (or, at the very least, suggest routes—”lines of flight”—along which deterritorialization might be accomplished), and in doing so, I brush up once again with that from which time becomes.
Somewhere between time and space, I encounter the alignments of bodies: dancers coming into synch with one another, sometimes in brief or extended unison, sometime in shared timing of different gestures, sometimes in shared or similar vocabulary that is not in synch with one another. [William Forsythe and Norah Zuniga Shaw define “alignments” usefully in their introduction to the Synchronous Objects project: “Alignments are short instances of synchronization between dancers in which their actions share some, but not necessarily all, attributes. Manifested as analogous shapes, related timings, or corresponding directional flows, alignments occur in every moment of the dance and are constantly shifting throughout the group.”] In these moments of alignment between bodies, fleeting territories emerge, briefly establishing logics capable of holding these dancing bodies together, traversing other configurations of time and space, while also interrupting the clear/stable individuation of bodies on stage.
At a pivotal moment in the piece, the performers distribute themselves across the stage, pulling up the fluorescent orange tape that has traversed the white Marley throughout the performance. This is the first time that these bodies have moved along these lines, taking on the organization of these marks, but they do so only within the very moment that they become unmarked. This is breathtaking, the mundane task of pulling up tape demonstrating something of becoming unmarked/disorganized/smooth in the very moment of reiterating/retracing the given marks. I think of Judith Butler’s suggestion that the opportunity for the subversion of performative regimes is in the repetition of those very performatives. The repetition is the site of agency, the point at which the doing can become undone. The strips of tape peel and snap off the floor, into the air, and are rolled into great balls. So much happens in these moments: following these lines, the lines become undone; the two-dimensional moves suddenly through the air, three-dimensionally, and coheres as haphazard clumps. The linear formations are made to break with their own logic, rapidly transitioning into new states, themselves becoming the tools for their own deterritorialization. Something similar happens with the standing flags throughout the piece: at various points, dancers reconfigure these flags, and in doing so, simultaneously produce new [organizations of] spaces while undoing the spaces that had been described by the flags only moments earlier.
These are the mechanisms of the piece, these various structures intersecting and undoing one another and themselves. But throughout it all, there is the suggestion of something more, something beyond, what Grosz calls “chaos”: “Chaos is not the absence of order but rather the fullness or plethora that, depending on its uneven speed, force, and intensity, is the condition both for any model or activity and for the undoing and transformation of such models or activities. This concept of chaos is also known or invoked through the concepts of: the outside, the real, the virtual, the world, materiality, nature, totality, the cosmos, each of which is a narrowing and specification of chaos from a particular point of view. Chaos cannot be identified with any one of these terms, but is the very condition under which such terms are capable of being confused, the point of their overlap and intensification” (Grosz 26-27). In Canyon, this chaos is most articulate to me in that which is beyond, that which is out of bounds, out of reach, out of sight, off balance, just beyond what is accounted for within the available logics of time and space and bodies, just beyond what is demarcated by the choreography, the lights, the floor, the visual designs, etc. The beyond/chaos operates constantly at the edges of the territories, and I catch glimpses of it in their mutual disruption, but it is perhaps physicalized most overtly in the ridge on the floor at the edge of the performance space: the Marley floor takes on a kind of topographical elevation, inclining upward into a short roll near the far “upstage” edge (see photos). Throughout the performance, dancers and objects move over this ridge to disappear behind it. Quite literally, we were shown where visibility ends and unseeable/unforeseeable possibilities exceed both the visible as well as the floor space. Similarly, dancers frequently enter and exit the space through the audience seating, simultaneously extending the “performance space” and—depending on where one was sitting—crossing out of sight. In these moments, I became keenly aware of what was beyond this organization—“the performance”—and the liminal space at the margins of what is included within the time/space of the performance. This was for me the ongoing brush with chaos between and beyond the intense proliferation of organization(s) within the work.
Photo by Tony Orrico
Finally, this sense of “the beyond” is articulated throughout the dancing bodies of the work. Time and again, dancers (Lindsay Clark, Kennis Hawkins, John Jasperse, Burr Johnson, and John Sorenson Jolink) perform at the edges of their balance (there is a lot of stumbling in this piece), at the edges of unison, at the edges of alignment, at the edges of clear geometric spatial formations, at the edges of stability; frequently, they fall or spill or are thrown or slide into this “beyond,” into excess, off balance, no longer fully in control, not quite in unison, no longer in a straight line. I love the moments of the dance in which the dancers seem to to drift and wander, with drifting foci and limp bodies, somewhere between intoxication and a dream stake, a kind of a wandering about wonder that does not clearly define its trajectory, that does not rigidly contain these bodies. The limits of clear organizations/structures/territories—again, of balance, of unison, of alignment, of spatial formations, of stability, etc.—are explicated through these excesses. This is what lingers with me as the night wears on: the sense of what exists just beyond how this moment is structured, the specter of chaos as the rich, full ground from which territories—those various ways in which my body, this space, this time, my sense of self, my geographical situation, etc. etc. etc.—take on precarious constitution. This is not to disparage organization or structure or territory; these are the strategies through which we navigate our experience and our worlds; these are the strategies with which dances—all art, in fact—are made. Rather, there is a quiet hopefulness in the lingering effect of Canyon, an awareness of the conditionality, contingency, and precarity of such structures, a persistent sense of what exceeds these frames, of hovering at the edge of what else (and how else) might be possible, between and beyond.
Cited: Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York: Columbia U P, 2008.
Filed under: culture, Dance | Tags: abigail zbikowski, baker & tarpaga dance project, beautiful struggle, d. sabela grimes, dante brown, esther baker-tarpaga, gender, king arts complex, nick fanscher, olivier tarpaga, peggy phelan, race, siobhan b. somerville
Danté Brown, Esther Baker-Tarpaga, and Abigail Zbikowski
photo by Nick Fanscher
The Baker & Tarpaga Dance Project’s Beautiful Struggle premiered at the King Arts Complex Pythian Theatre on 13 April 2012. While my interest is to write about the piece itself—choreographed/directed by Esther Baker-Tarpaga in collaboration with performers Abigail Zbikowski, Danté Brown, Olivier Tarpaga, and D. Sabela Grimes—I feel I must first address the title and framing of the piece. Beautiful Struggle is said (by way of promotional materials and the program) to ask “audiences to think about the visibility and invisibility of race and privilege and how violence and love live on in the body’s memories.” It is important to me that when directed towards such complex issues as race, privilege, love, violence, visibility and invisibility, the ideas of “beauty” and “struggle” are not reduced to an antonymic binary. Beauty is not the opposite of struggle, but rather, struggle conditions a very particular kind of beauty. It is a beauty that does not come easily, and it is a beauty that is never entirely accomplished, victorious, at rest. It is a beauty that is necessarily vigorous, necessarily in tension, most likely in conflict. These conditions must not compromise the possibility of beauty; rather, I would suggest that in titling this work Beautiful Struggle, we are being asked to reconsider what is capable of being found beautiful—recognizing that “beauty” itself is never a neutral aesthetic assessment, but that aesthetics are intrinsically entangled with values, with an appreciation of a particular kind of world, and that those values take on social, political, and ethical valences. I do not feel that the title asks the viewer to be on the look out for how struggle obstructs or gives way to beauty, but rather asks us to consider the ways in which ongoing, unresolved conflict and struggle can, perhaps must, be found beautiful. This is the disposition with which I approached this work.
The piece opens with a figure crouched on table in dim light, facing away, tied to the table with ropes. Gradually the figure begins to move, and rises. The figure tied to the table (Baker-Tarpaga) struggles, but not with full force: a light trashing, a trashing that seems self conscious of is own futility. The trashing blends into undulations, swinging arms, stomping and stepping, and I begin to catch glimpses of what can be identified as citations of African dance forms. I am faced with a body—a body that seems visually legible as white and female, a body which is described to us (via spoken text in the soundscore) as a mother, as white, a body produced for us as white and female—being performed or coded with African movements, African culture. The transnationality of this body begins to appear across the surface of this body’s movements, and while nationality itself does not dislodge race—or gender for that matter—this kinetic appearance begins to gesture towards a history of formation that is not immediately legible on the surface of the skin.
The ropes constrain the movement; the body’s action is bounded from the beginning, and as the movements grow, they take on more impact. I see when they strike the limits of their range, with the ropes allowing each gesture to proceed no farther. Certainly there are complex semiotics being introduced in this image—the restraints and the table call up associations with auction blocks, execution scaffolds, go-go boxes at nightclubs, and museum pedestals; the ropes call up centuries of heretics and slaves and the bodies that were taken materially captive under such signifiers—and imagery and visual semiotics are an important aspect of this production. On first encounter, the piece seems in places more concerned with images and the visual that with movement itself. The citation and circulation of recognizable visual markers for race and gender—and in places, sexuality—provide points of departure throughout the piece; however, if the familiarity of these images holds my attention, it is because of how the choreography abandons these images for the less familiar and the less recognizable moving surfaces of the bodies on display.
The piece is predominantly bodies dancing in solo choreography, often in the company of other dancers. This brings attention to the individuation of these bodies, and perhaps, by extension, the formative histories of these bodies. Despite whatever superficial visual identifications I may make—white women, black men, for example—the solos function as a reminder that the stability and consistency of these categories depend on the reduction of bodies to one or two surface dimensions, specifically the visual (I might say, the “stationary visual”), and that such reductions are also elisions of other surfaces and dimensions along which these bodies take on complexity and differentiation. In these solos, the unique ways of moving that define each body, that make visible—however fleetingly—its training, its socialization, its cultures, remind me that these “white women” or “black men” are not merely “white” or “women” or “black” or “men,” but that each of these categories are always already run through with difference, revealing them as contingent and only ever partial. I do not mean to suggest that the complexity of racial or gender categorization can be escaped or abandoned through attention to movement or kinesthetic identity; rather, my suggestion is that in a production that so pointedly set out to address the visibility and invisibility of race, privilege, violence, love, etc., the solo movements of these dancing bodies are one strategy through which individual differences—some of which rupture within the smoothness of racial and gender categories—are made visible.
One such instance of the solo making visible a rupture in the smoothness or stability of what might have been previously ascertainable comes in a solo danced by Danté Brown. What begins as smooth, cool, and groovy moves on the dance floor dissolves into a spoken exchange at the front edge of the stage, calling out to “girls,” presumably in the audience. The monologue dissolves into a more sensuous two-step, a curving sway of the hips that eventually take Brown upstage to pose with the table now turned on its side. This moment of posing, gesturing towards sultry centerfolds and vogue balls, has a feminizing and queering effect on Brown’s body. Suddenly this is a body that no longer comfortably resides in the normative categories of “man” or, arguably, “black” (for a more comprehensive discussion of the intersection of race and sexuality, see Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture by Siobhan B. Somerville). These categories are not fully abandoned through this queering; Brown is still legible as a black man. However, the visible has been amended, and the invisible—here, a latent femininity, or queerness—has surfaced along the curves and swish of his gestures.
Yet the choreography does not become solipsistic; these bodies move through solos, but throughout the choreography bodies find alignments with other bodies through shared vocabularies, shared timing, and shared space, suggesting ways in which bodies of difference are held together, sometimes along visible lines of race and gender, and sometimes across such lines in ways that dance other groupings of bodies. What these shared choreographies accomplished is different each time, sometimes using bodies to demarcate space, sometimes creating presumably unlikely alliances—such as a strip and femininizing duet between Baker-Tarpaga and Brown that then dissolves into some kind of combat—and sometimes functioning more formally, simply showing different bodies moving together.
The demarcation of space is another way in which visibility is lent to that which is invisible. For instance, early in the piece, Brown and Zbikowski’s perform a rapid horizontal shuffling around the stage, marking off an arbitrary parameter. This is not the only time that the motions of bodies will be used to demarcate space, to trace an invisible parameter. Bodies walk in circles; they divide the stage in grids and on diagonals throughout the piece. I resist reading these instances as symbolic; I am not concerned with what it might represent that bodies are used to coalesce invisible parameters and borders on the stage space. Rather, my interest is that I as a viewer am made to see such invisible forms, patterns, and parameters, and that is accomplished through the movement of bodies dancing together. These spatial figures construct arbitrary and fleeting appearances of “insides” and “outsides,” one side and the other side, and the residues of these barely-visible geographies of the stage aggregate over the course of the choreography, showing that what was “inside” might now be “on the other side,” what was “over there” might now suddenly also be “out here.” There is a multiplicity to how space is demarcated and organized through the movements of bodies dancing together, revealing that these sorts of spatial dimensions are a positional production; they are in no way fixed, and over time intersect with other [sometimes paradoxical] positions and orientations. This is not visibility that is given in a single image, but rather that accumulates over time as an invisible residue of the visible.
Perhaps the most demonstrative performances of making visible something that does not lie in plain sight is through the use of impact throughout the choreography. Impact is first introduced in the opening scene of the dance, with the ropes tying Baker-Tarpaga to the table creating the concrete “edge” of her dancing; the source of the force of the impact is visible and concrete. Yet impact proceeds as a dominant movement motif throughout the piece, often with invisible sources, circulating through all of the performers at various points. What I mean by impact is multiple: first, I mean the force with which the movement stops, as if hitting an invisible surface. This surfaces in movements that strike suddenly, the collision of movement with the strength and control of the body. By impact, I also mean the illusion of the body being struck, performances of feigned combat throughout the piece. By “feigned,” I mean only that in these instances there are no visible opponents; the combat is an effect of a single body’s motion. I do not mean, however, that the force or even violence of these impacts is diminished for having been feigned. On the contrary, the is a poignancy to the extreme force with which bodies box with invisible opponents, jerk and thrash as if struck, and are sent tumbling and rolling across the stage space as if tossed by someone much larger in size and strength. One of the most memorable of these moments is a solo performed by Abigail Zbikowski, lit only by a floodlight handled by Baker-Tarpaga. Zbikowski begins to move with undulating, smooth and circular movement, as if her body is continually curving and sliding around itself. However, as Baker-Tarpaga approaches her with the hand-held light, her body responds violently, as if struck repeatedly from all directions. I want to emphasize that while this violence is an effect of the performer’s body on itself, this does not make the violence of these actions any less real. These sudden contractions, these rapid impacts and blows, while effected by the body also affect the body, live on in tissues. I begin to speculate about the physical costs of performing; the sometimes inherent violence of choreography—imposing, even consensually, movement on an-other body; the ways in which choreography/performance produces the body, participating in the formative history of the individual; and finally, the internalized force of social choreographies such as gender and race. It would be a stretch to say that all of this is directly addressed in these physicalizations of impact, but what can be said is that Zbikowski’s solo, and similar movement throughout the piece, show the force of the body acting on itself, a force whose source, unlike the ropes at the start of the piece, is never entirely visible.
Finally, the image that lingers with me the most as I live with my experience of the piece over the last several days is the use of the light and the front edge of the stage, both of which seem to be principally concerned with visibility (the light illuminating what can be seen a directing the viewers attention, the front edge of the stage being the precipice between the audience seeing and the performers being seen). Both elements are used almost as weapons throughout Beautiful Struggle, the bodies of performers being sent tumbling across the stage into the floor and the back wall of the stage. Both seem to suggest a physical violence to being or becoming visible, that what is or can be seen acts forcefully upon bodies. These images raise questions, even concerns, about visibility, almost a suspicion of the visible. I am reminded of Peggy Phelan’s Unmakred: the politics of performance, and her struggle with the ideology of the visible. She writes: “It is assumed that disenfranchised communities who see their members within the representational field will feel greater pride in being part of such a community and those who are not in such a community will increase their understanding of the diversity and strength of such communities. Implicit within this argument are several presumptions which bear further scrutiny: 1) Identities are visibly marked so the resemblance between the African-American on the television and the African American on the street helps the observer see they are members of the same community. Reading physical resemblance is a way of identifying community. 2) The relationship between representation and identity is linear and smoothly mimetic. What one sees is who one is. 3) If one’s mimetic likeness is not represented, one is not addressed. 4) Increased visibility equals increased power. Each presumption reflects the ideology of the visible, an ideology which erases the power of the unmarked, unspoken, and unseen” (7). Phelan attempts “to find a theory of value for that which is not ‘really’ there, that which cannot be surveyed within the boundaries of the putative real…. attempting to revalue a belief in subjectivity and identity which is not visibly representable” (1). This seems to be the Beautiful Struggle engaged by Baker-Tarpaga and company, a discrepancy between what is seen and what is unseen, between the urge to increase visibility and the tangible apprehension of the violent power of visibility. The piece struggles between the restaging familiar tropes of visible identifications, making visible the often invisible or elided complexity of such identities, and preserving the importance of an orientation and attention to what cannot be seen, what does not lie smoothly on the surface.
Beautiful Struggle does not resolve, not should it. To resolve would suggest that resolution of the issues it addresses is possible or achievable, and such resolution does not seem to be possible, at least/especially within our current historical moment. However, this production does not grieve the unresolvability of this struggle; rather, it stages the beauty of such struggle, the aesthetic and ethical value that is possible only through sustained engagement within difference, conflict, contradiction, the visible, and the invisible.
Filed under: culture, Dance | Tags: counterPULSE, donna haraway, excess, Félix González-Torres, heaven, jiz lee, keith hennessy, morgan thorson, occupy wall street, peggy phelan, turbulence, turbulence (a dance about the economy)
Turbulence (a dance about the economy)
A collaborative failure choreographed by Keith Hennessy
18 December 2011
8pm
CounterPULSE
Performer/collaborators: Jassem Hindi (France/Lebanon), Julie Phelps, Emily Leap, Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit, Jorge De Hoyos, Hana Erdman, Gabriel Todd, Ruairi O’Donovan (Ireland), Karina Sarkissova (Sweden), Empress Jupiter, Keith Hennessy plus special guests
I arrive at CounterPULSE at 7:58pm. I have never shown up that close to the start of a performance; I feel late even though I have two minutes to spare. I stand in line for will call tickets behind my friend Jiz. I am introduced to the person with whom they are speaking—her name might have been Jessica, but I don’t remember for certain—and “Jessica” comments that it’s nice to meet me and that she loves my eyebrows. I say thank you, that they are usually more manicured, but because I’ve been traveling they have gotten a bit out of control.
When we enter the performance space, there is already more happening than I can fully recount. There are more people in the audience than there are seats, and there is a kind of commotion of people greeting one another, moving in and out of the rows of seats, and trying to figure out where might be an acceptable place to sit. I say hello to Beth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle, and Joseph Kramer, with whom I performed earlier that morning at the Love Art Laboratory’s White Wedding to the Sun. On the stage space—a designation which will fluctuate in usefulness as the performance unfolds—members of the audience are lying in what feels like heaps, receiving various forms of body work from the cast of performers. Walking into this scene, it has already become difficult to clearly mark when the performance began; the ending will be similar in its ambiguity.
The first moment that I recognize as an image to be recognized is a human pyramid with six performers, each with their head wrapped in a sash of dazzling gold material.
photo by Jiz Lee
I am struck by the amount of information that is contained within a relatively simple image: this is a precarious structure; it will eventually collapse. It is composed of exhaustible bodies, and although the exact moment of each one’s threshold of exhaustion cannot be predicted, I can recognize that each component of the structure, each person/body, is operating within its own mysterious but inevitable timetable of fatigue. These performers are masked, made anonymous by radiant gold hoods. It would be simple enough to read this as a metaphor for the economy, or for any such social institution that is constructed from unforeseeable and unsustainable variables. I cannot help but see this human pyramid of hooded figures alongside the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, in which prisoners were stacked in similar pyramids, naked except for hoods that rendered them faceless. And these are perhaps significant associations. But they also seem to me too easy. The genius of this piece is not that it finds clever choreographic representations of society or of the economy; to understand Turbulence in this way—or, indeed, to be satisfied understanding any dance work in this way—impoverishes the dance itself. It is not enough that this human pyramid, amongst many other such choreographic experiments, might be considered metaphorical or representational (and to be clear, it can certainly be considered in these ways). More importantly, it is an experiment with bodies. I cannot abandon the connections between the dance and the economy or American society. It is, after all, entitled Turbulence (a dance about the economy). But the connections I make between the dance and the economy, the economic aboutness of the dance, are not representational. It is as if the forces that shape the economy, or at least the popular understanding of the economy (it would be interested to hear an economist’s perspective on this dance), had been put to these bodies. What happens when bodies form exhaustible and unsustainable structures? What happens when bodies assume the postures of tortured prisoners, here with no real threat of bodily injury, here fully clothed and hooded in gold? What happens when bodies grip one another in counterbalance and spin with such force that they barely maintain control? What happens when bodies spinning out of control collide? What happens when there are innumerable small actions being designed and executed, but any comprehensive oversight of all actions is impossible? What happens when bodies are displaced from the spaces that afford them identity (spectators put on stage, performers occupying the audience)? Rather than this dance representing the economy and the many forces that shape and are shaped by the economy, Turbulence seems to be produced through taking such abstract economic forces as the choreography and design for this performance, for these bodies.
The action of the performance is a bit of a circus, more happening than I can take in at the time or recount after the fact. And it is for the most part improvised, although informed by collaborative residencies held over the last year. Actions that stayed with me: an interactive project in which audience members were asked to read the labels in one another’s clothing as shout out where the items were made (I was wearing “Canada,” “China,” and “USA”); other audience members were transcribing the names of these countries with sharpies onto cardboard taped to the stage; performers wrestling with one another with full body force, tugging one another to the floor and back up again, struggling in such a way that seemed more about exhausting their bodies than overpowering one another; performers gripping one another’s arms in counterbalance and spinning with such force that they barely stayed in control of their motion and often collided with one another; one person being pinned down on the stage by five others, in a moment that evoked gang rape or mugging or a restraining a struggling prisoner or patient; performers directing one another and the audience during the performance; a trapeze act with three performers (Emily Leap, Jorge De Hoyos, and Keith Hennessy);
photo by Jiz Lee
Leap crumpled on the floor while Jesse Hewit reads from a notebook, whispering (but with a microphone) in her ear about love and tenderness, a shared history, risk, dancing an impossible dance, the desire to outmuscle exhaustion (this was a quote I believe was attributed to Peggy Phelan; I believe the full quotation reads:
“Love, despite its toxicity and violence, can bring us closer to the possibility of expressing human tenderness. If one is ambitious enough to want to create a shared history, then one must be willing to risk an impossible dance, one that pivots on a desire to outmuscle exhaustion, a desire alive to our wavering capacities to bestow and receive responses, and an apparently insatiable desire to question these capacities and what motivates and blocks them, repeatedly.”);
a game in which audience members are invited to exchange with performers whatever they had too much of; shouting (lots of shouting) throughout the performance; Hennessy reading a text that sounds like a polemic of some kind, but is obscured by the additional layers of sound and action reverberating in the space; the frenzy of the space breaking into a dance party, fueled by Rihanna and champagne and even a roasted chicken. Throughout all of this action, I am tracking the chaotic blurring of boundaries, borders like performer and spectator, beginning and ending, in control and out of control. I am aware of competing forces, forces (aural, physical, etc.) that are sometimes in oppositional conflict, and are at other times merely in parallel competition for attention. Much of the performance feels as if it is enacted somewhere between anger and exasperation. It feels like a protest, but a protest of many things at once, with no clear focus (and while these are descriptions that have been leveled at the Occupy movement, Hennessy’s website offers that this piece was instigated before the recent Occupy Wall Street actions: http://www.circozero.org/performances/turbo/index.html).
The organization of the stage space reminded me of a piece I wrote about earlier this year, Morgan Thorson’s Heaven. The space was large and predominantly white. It contained various “stations”: the sound boards and microphones in one corner of the stage, a large trapeze hanging just off of center, cardboard taped to the walls and floor. As the dance unfolds, similar to in Heaven, places around the space become indexed as the place where they _____. This mapping of the space is filled with overlap and revision. The corner of the stage where two dancers laid on top of one another becomes the corner where the audience members sat after being brought on stage. The central area where dancers spun almost out of control becomes the area where they danced to Rihanna, drank champagne, and shredded chicken onto one another’s bodies and the floor. In both dances, there is always more than one thing happening simultaneously, one action bleeding into another set alongside another and in competition with another. While the overall effect of Turbulence in no way resembled the overall effect of Heaven, these formal similarities situated Hennessy’s piece within a larger landscape of the field of dance.
I was also reminded more than once of the work Félix González-Torres. This had mostly to do with materials. Near the middle of the piece (or perhaps closer to the end), the largest and most extravagant prop piece was brought onto the stage: a massive gold curtain, probably somewhere around 10 feet by 15 feet, and which likely cost in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
image of gold curtain from previous performance of Turbulence
Performers walked at the edges of it, crawled underneath it, pulled against it, wrapped themselves up in it, all the while throwing dazzling light wildly around the space. There were some moments at which I could hardly look at it, the light was too intense. I was reminded of González-Torres’ golden curtains (I recently saw one installed at the Art Institute of Chicago).
In a museum, González-Torres’ curtain introduces a spectacular campy glamour to what might otherwise be designed as a pristine, respectable space. Both curtains— González-Torres’ and the prop used in Turbulence—are ostentatious. They are excessive, too large, to sparkly, too showy. They overpower the space with grandeur, and in both instances, I am made self-conscious of that moment when I must simply look away. This formal association with González-Torres gave Turbulence a situation in art history for me, and a distinct tie to queer art and queer formalism. In the performance, the brilliant Empress Jupiter ranted about the curtain as cash, as gold, as wealth and status. It was all of these things, both symbolically and literally (again, this was not an inexpensive prop). But it was also kind of tacky in its glamour, just a bit “too much” (where would you hang a gold sequined curtain of these dimensions?), extravagant in a way that reinforced the theme of excess in the work overall, and makes you avert your eyes once or twice.
The intersection of extravagance and exhaustion is excess. Extravagance exceeds the necessary, ranges into wasteful; exhaustion is the full expenditure of that which is available. Turbulence pushes madly into both extravagance and exhaustion as if to interrogate—sometimes playfully, sometimes brutally—what is possible on the other side of each. What is possible when dancing in excess of material necessity and physical stamina? What emerges from or lingers after such bacchanalian excess, where there is no single direction or director that can be held accountable for all that has transpired, where no single participant or observer can attend to a majority of what has happened? When we cannot say for certain when it began or when it had ended; when the spaces and coextensive identities designated “stage” and “audience,” “performer” and “spectator,” have been so thoroughly transgressed from either direction, what then? It would not be consistent with the nature of the work to even attempt a single or succinct conclusion. What I can recount is a variety of reactions: some people left once they realized that the performance was, for them, over; others began to engage in conversations, some talking about the work itself, others discussing the economy or the Occupy movement, others just catching up with old or new friends; many of the performers, and some people who were in attendance as spectators, cleaned the stage, struck the set, put away equipment, etc. Eventually, I left with my friend Jiz to get a drink and some food. I might suggest that, at least in this instance, what happens on the other side of excess is not predictable. It remains a variable, even once it has arrived. By its nature, it has exceeded what one was prepared to describe; to find oneself in excess—temporally, spatially, physically, financially, sensorially, etc.—is to exist in ways that exceed preexisting terms of description. I want to resist valorizing or demonizing this state; for now, judging whether to exist on the other side of excess is “good” or “bad” does not seem a useful question (I might suggest that it is rarely if ever a useful question). Instead, I want to focus on the unpredictability of excess, excess as a space of possibilities and potentialities. When the preexisting terms or frameworks have been exceeded, new terms or frameworks must be developed. This is the creative potential of excess. There are numerous theories and theorists with which/whom I might correlate these observations. The association of queerness with excess has been written widely, for example. However, what comes to mind immediately is a quote from Donna Haraway that I read recently: “Breakdown provokes a space of possibility precisely because things don’t work smoothly anymore,” (Haraway How Like A Leaf 115). This mad drive into excess constitutes a kind of breakdown, and whatever else breakdown constitutes—remorse, regret, loss, disorientation, etc.—it is also the space of possibility, as Haraway suggests, “precisely because things don’t work smoothly anymore.”
I can also describe a kind of state that I experienced after the performance, a kind of disorientation after having my attention pulled in so many different directions simultaneously: a kind of madness from the over stimulation and the overall disintegration of that which I was trying to observe; a kind of hopeful nihilism (if that isn’t too much of a paradox—and if it is, perhaps one more “too much” is fitting), in which no one thing held any special meaning over another thing, and no explanatory framework held true for all that had transpired. It was a feeling of, “Anything goes,” “Sure, okay,” and, “Well, why not?” In this sense, it was positively affirmative without any real investment in anything I might affirm. By the end of the performance (although, again, I cannot quite offer when the performance “ended”), I had pushed through any anxiety about being incapable of explaining or recounting all that I had seen. By the time I left the performance space, I felt very open to possibilities, to what else might be done, to what else might happen. The disorganized proliferation of activity had softened (or numbed) my senses of order or ordering. In this state, very little seemed impossible.
photo by Jiz Lee
for more amazing work by Jiz Lee, visit: http://jizlee.com/wordpress/
Filed under: culture, Dance | Tags: L'A./Rachid Ouramdane, michel foucault, panopticon, Rachid Ouramdane, surveillance, wexner, wexner center for the arts, world fair
How is one to demonstrate surveillance? How might the body be put on display in such a way as to bring attention to the attention in/for which it is situated? What are the conditions for and effects of bodies being examined, and how might such conditions and effects become inscribed in/as “the body” itself? L’A./Rachid Ouramdane’s World Fair offered an ardently focused and meticulously measured multi-media rumination on the theatrical situation as a space of surveillance, while positioning this function of performance in the larger anxious landscape of the surveillance, recording, exploiting, and conditioning of the body at the levels of the state and national(ist) identities/histories.
from World Fair, photo by Patrick Imbert
Being surveilled produces the subject/body in a specific sense: a sense of suspension, a sense of anxiety, a sense of anticipation that inscribes the constant observing other as not only a persistent condition of sociality, but—on a phenomenological level—possibly even a constituting condition for our existence. The perhaps uncomfortable reality is that we appear far more for others than we do for ourselves; those who see us see more of us—more of our bodies—than we can ever see of/for ourselves, making our appearance in the world inherently social, and our experience of sociality inherently about seeing and being seen. I found these facets of social existence to be central to World Fair. From “before” the performance began (I say “before” because in this vein of thought it seems important to acknowledge that “the performance” is more of a constant/persistent state of being than it is something that can be demarcated by theatrical spaces, tickets, audience seating, and a specified 8:00pm start time), as the audience was ushered into the performance space, we were directed (itself possibly worthy of comment) to only enter from one side of the audience seating, an entry that necessitated walking past Ouramdane, already displayed on stage. He stood stationary on a large turntable that rotated slowly, displaying the three-dimensionality of his body. His eyes were closed, and it seems to me that this in itself might have functioned as an initiation into the recurrent themes of the piece: we as viewers began in a more-or-less compulsory encounter with the performer, whose closed eyes reminded me that this performance situation (all stage performance situations?) was organized around the axis of our viewing, and his being viewed by us.
Yet Ouramdane’s performance did not situate himself/his body as a passive receptor of our gaze. Throughout the performance, he demonstrated his own complicity in this surveillance of his body: removing his shirt at the start of the performance, a gesture that seemed somehow both medical (“Go ahead and take your shirt off”) and criminal (think strip search), while also more subtly addressing gender itself as a form of surveillance (the removal of the shirt as a kind of confession or confirmation: “Yes, see here, I am indeed a man. Rest assured that there is no ambiguity about my gender/sex, and that, yes, this is an identification that can be made/affirmed by way of my own visibility”); pushing the large counter-weighted light/camera rig hanging center stage as if it were a millstone, contributing his own kinetic energy and strength to the circulation of illumination and recording, both of which at various points mediated his own visibility; the raising on the flat screen television high into the air as if hoisting the national flag, a “national symbol” that was ostentatiously alternatively recorded and live-feed images of the performer himself. In each instance, he revealed his own complicity in the formation of the ways in which he would/could be seen.
I could not help but feel further implicated in this power play of seeing and being seeing by virtue of my position as a member of the audience. Although there were several stage devices that seemed invented for this particular production (namely the large light/camera rig that hung ominously in the center of the stage), by and large, the materials through which this performance was conducted were those of the theater: the relatively intimate proscenium stage, the organization of the audience in relation to the performer, and—most notably—the stage lights. While it is certainly possible to consider this piece for its relationship to—and even commentary on—the world beyond the theater, it is important to recognize that any such relationship or commentary was carried out through these rarefied theatrical tropes. In this sense, although the politics of seeing and being seen that were addressed by the performance extend far beyond the context of the event itself, such extensions never fully evacuate the theater; the political and cultural history and tropes of the theater itself functioned in this piece as both the means of articulation and, to some degree, that which was itself articulated. Large grids of white theatrical lighting hung high above the four corners of the stage, and throughout the performance, their illumination suggested the possibility of visibility from all sides. Although my visual perspective was limited to my particular seat, the activation of these lights on all sides of the performer gave me sense of being able to see even that which was not visible from my point of view.
Circularity was a theme throughout the performance: Ouramdane circled on a turntable at the start of the performance; a small siren-shape sound amplifier circled; the large rig suspended center stage circled; the performer himself circled the space over and again; finally, at various points, the light itself circled, moving from grid to grid in a way that for me evoked a prison yard. But what could possibly be the connection between this theatrical space and a prison yard?
Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish that, “Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere,” (195). He proceeds to discuss Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison designed to heighten the visibility of the prisoners in such a way that the experience of constant surveillance becomes internalized, a perceptual prison that forms from an internalized sense of being seen.
Foucault writes that the principles of the panopticon are opposite those of the dungeon. “In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap,” (200). He continues: “… Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so,” (201). The last point I would like to borrow from Foucault follows: “The heaviness of the old ‘houses of security,’ with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a ‘house of certainty’. The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side – to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection,” (202-203). What Foucault suggests is that the effect of the panopticon, the prison in which the prisoner is fully visible at all times, and in which the prisoner can never fully verify whether or not he is being watched, becomes internalized by the prisoner. The constant awareness of the possibility of being seen restrains him; this sense of internalized anxiety becomes his prison.
This model of the panopticon is pervasive in our modern world. We live in an age of constant surveillance, of our bodies, of our borders, of our information, of others, and of ourselves. We police our own behaviors, our social selves, our gender, etc., always with the anxiety of being seen and the consequences of being seen. Because of its formal properties—the light, open space in which three-dimensional visibility was emphasized time and again, the repetition of the circular form through which such visibility was both evoked and achieved, the circulation of static and moving recorded and live-feed images—themselves demonstrating either their own histories as sites of inspecting/recording the body or the very instance of inspecting a re-presenting the body, the suggestion of the racialized history of minstrelsy and the expropriation/exploitation of bodies encompassed by that history through the brief and unexpected tap dance wearing white face, etc.—World Fair operated in logics similar to those of the panopticon. And it was not only the performer who was enacted through these logics: throughout the performance, Ouramdane’s musical collaborator Jean-Baptiste Julien entered the space and looked directly into the audience, a reminder of our own visibility, our own implication in these regimes of surveillance and regulation.
I have heard several of my colleagues and my students say that World Fair felt incomplete, unfinished, or unresolved. I would like to suggest that this is perhaps the nature of power as it operates through visibility and surveillance: its efficacy is not purely in its ability to follow through, to exact punishment for the transgressions that it observes. Rather, its true power is in the constant state of anticipating such consequences, the internalized apprehension of what might happen, what could happen. By never fully delivering a satiating climax or resolution, Ouramdane’s performance effected a sense of anticipation that I then carried with(in) myself, unfulfilled and unresolved. Like the performance itself, I can never fully predict the consequences of my own visibility, and thus I live with a constant uncertainty and anticipation of how I might be seen. As disorienting as this might seem, the anxiety of visibility, the constant state of uncertain anticipation, and one’s implication in vast systems of seeing and being seen, may in fact be formative of who and what we are. These effects of power are inherent in sociality, and—in ways I will not attempt to explicate here—being itself depends on sociality. Thus, it seems, Ouramdane’s performance of the situation of surveillance is not limited to a commentary on the theater or even the political sphere. To address surveillance seems to address the conditions of ontology itself.
[I had the opportunity to see World Fair on 22 October 2011, at the Wexner Center for the Arts]
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
This is still very much a draft. But I’m not sure when I’ll next find time to post writing to my blog, and I want to begin to give this writing a life beyond my laptop.
This is a short piece of writing that I did in response to a piece entitled Heaven by Morgan Thorson.
The piece can be viewed in its entirety at http://www.ontheboards.tv/.
This is a nice trailer for the dance:
And this video has some beautiful footage of the piece, as well as some interview footage with the choreographer:
My reading of the piece is not perfectly in line with Thorson’s explanation of her interests/process, but I think they create a lovely dialogue with one another.
I could have written far more about this piece. But it was a productive exercise to restrain the writing to (just under) 650 words.
Here are my words about the piece. Enjoy:
If There Is Always This and Here
Morgan Thorson’s Heaven, premiered in 2010, stages the affective possibilities of materiality. As exemplary of a contemporary “total art,” it choreographs not only the movements of bodies, but renders intentional organization to costumes, props, sets, lighting, and music as they evolve together through time and space. The work consists of a rigorous investigation of the materials from which it is composed—bodies, motion, light, textiles, and sound—offering an account of their immanent significance that relies not on systems of symbolism or representation with which they might be associated, but rather, on the inexhaustibility of their own potential.
Just over an hour long, Heaven unfolds as a boundless proliferation of differences that somehow feel the same. The use of “white” in the piece provides an example of one such proliferation of differences. Through often gradual and occasionally sudden shifts, I come to see white, not as ideal or sacred in its singularity, but as endlessly transformable, itself a composition of light, shadow, depth, and motion, always a different version of itself. The stage floor is white, and the three sides of the performance space are draped in white fabric that sometimes hangs like a veil and at other times billows in monumental waves on the impact of dancing bodies. The dancers are all dressed in assorted shades of white. White is the color of much of the light that throughout the piece reveals other “whites” in the play of lightness and shadow across the many surfaces scattered throughout the performance space. Across and between these surfaces, white unfolds not as a single neutralizing quality to which each surface refers; rather, “white” becomes a richly textured field of infinite variation that asks what else “white” might be.
The treatment of moving bodies is another mode through which Heaven demonstrates its internally differentiated unity. The dance begins in silence with the performers already moving in a lengthy synchronized procession around the parameter of the stage space. At various points during this procession, individuals drop out to engage in other tasks, while the original action of the procession is constantly maintained by at least one performer. This becomes a structural theme of the piece, particular actions carried on by one or more performers while others proceed into other tasks, gestures, and phrases. Processing continues during bowing, bowing is simultaneous to standing and rolling and colliding, which someone carries on while others move into circling, circling that flows into singing and spinning, spinning while others break into running and later into kneeling, and so on: the cohesion of the choreography comes from its layering, actions always overlapping with other actions, and in doing so, smoothing out what might otherwise register as decisive breaks in a dance so varied in its movement vocabularies. The effect is a busyness of action that somehow over time feels like stillness, a broad domain of movement possibilities that paradoxically simulate uniformity.
In Heaven, Thorson not only accomplishes a compelling example of contemporary performance work that takes its own materiality as the source of its own possibilities of meaning. The title of the piece makes the deployment of many of these materials (pervasive whiteness, dazzling beaded curtains that might elsewhere suggest pearly gates, singing in groups with eyes closed and hands raised, the departure and return of bodies) notable: their abstraction from traditional representations of “heaven” asks us to consider the affective significance of symbols that need not signify, and to consider the immanent sacredness of materiality. What are the sensational possibilities of the physical and the familiar when they are no longer used for religious iconography, but are instead put forward to be considered in their very own glory? Thorson’s Heaven asks how our concepts of transcendence, divinity, or salvation might transform if the materials through which such concepts have been represented were to take on tacit interminable meanings of their own.
Filed under: culture, Dance, Grad School | Tags: antigone's claim, judith butler, lindsay caddle-lapointe, m. candace feck, mary thomas, queer behavior, queer yoga, this I believe, writing about dance
I have been neglecting my blog lately. I’ve gone over a month without posting anything.
Life right now is a montage of:
-Teaching “Writing About Dance,” a second-level writing class for undergrads at OSU–a sort of introduction to dance criticism–which involves hours and hours of grading papers. It is time consuming, but full of rewards, not the least of which is the opportunity to share dance/dances with students who have only experienced dance in limited settings, if at all.
-Reading Judith Butler. I am taking a seminar in the “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” department focused that is entirely focused on the works of Judith Butler. It’s being taught by Mary Thomas. I’m thinking a lot about subjectivity, psychoanalytic frameworks, speech act, and the constraints of epistemology on ontology. This week I’m reading Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death.
-Writing. I’m taking a writing course called “Aesthetics and Criticism” from M.Candace Feck, and it is giving me an opportunity to delve deeply into the intensive project of my own writing. I will share some of those writings here.
-Dancing. I did a video shoot two weeks ago for Lindsay Caddle LaPointe, in which I danced with a giant sculpture of a praying mantis. The next two weekends I’ll be performing with cocoloupedance at TRAUMA.
-Teaching yoga. I teach a yoga class every Wednesday night. It’s called “Queer Yoga” and is sponsored by “Queer Behavior.” Currently, the class meets at 83 Gallery in the Short North, Wednesdays, 7:30-8:30, $5 for students, $8 for the general public.
In an effort to share a bit of this with some range of readership, I’m posting a piece of writing I did earlier this quarter. It follows the format for “This I Believe” on NPR. You can read the essay guidelines here. Below is my statement of belief, specifically my belief about dance. I’m considering submitting it to “This I Believe,” but either way, I wanted to publish it here:
Who/How I?
I believe that dancing is an act of forming, deforming, and reforming the body/self, a belief that turns back on itself, calling into question this very “I” whose belief is professed. Dancing has taught me that “I” am my body, even if “I” exceed my body and even if my body exceeds “me.”
Language is limited—and limiting—in this way: to articulate myself in speech is always to simplify and to reduce myself within the term “I,” an anonymous first-person that accounts for myself only in ways that are presumed to be shared with all others who have described themselves with this term. Indifferent to whatever words might surround this “I” in a given context, it is the perpetual declaration of a self that remains the same with each repetition; each time this term is deployed, “I” represent myself as unchanged. This is not the only limitation of language: to speak of “my body” is always to figure it as separate from myself, as property—“mine”—which, in order to be possessed, must necessarily be distinct from the “I” who claims it. From within the boundaries of what is speakable then, “I” feel myself questioning, “What of myself is excluded from this term ‘I?’” and protesting, “No! This body is not ‘mine,’ it is me!”
Dancing cannot be limited within these constraints of language. In dancing, “I” am never separate from this body that moves, nor is this body unchanged by its motion. Dancing reveals myself as more fluid than solid, more transient than persistent, continually mutating with each gesture, often in ways uncertain and unforeseen. Through these bendings and flingings and fallings and collidings and tumblings and sinkings; through fleshy places become firm then flaccid, finding firmness once again to only again inevitably become flaccid; through the touch of skin against skin, the calm and sudden disorientation of giving and taking weight that confuses “you” and “I”; through encountering another’s movement as my own, taking in choreography that becomes yet another version of myself; through focus that transforms cells into galaxies and becomes a prayer in the gaps of body-becoming-universe; through calluses and tears, surfaces pushing and opening outward, clarifying the uncertainty of my boundaries; through sweating and bleeding and crying, flowing beyond myself: through dancing, “I” am made as this body, a making that is always both unmaking and remaking.
Dancing reveals myself as a matter of repetition with difference, each moment of movement becoming both this body again and for the first time, each “again” not quite the same as it emerges from the cellular and neural residue of actions that came before. Regardless of whether the movement is thought of as rehearsed or improvised, it is always both, a reiteration of how “I” have been before and an enunciation of how (thus who) “I” am now. As this body moves in so many ways through so many forms, its dancing displaces and replaces this “I”—and this nearly ineffable fluctuation becomes my most fervent belief.
Filed under: art, creative process, Dance | Tags: becoming, butoh, gilles deleuze
[this is a score, to be approached as butoh-fu; inscribing these images in/as the body produces the dance. I hope to get into the studio with it soon. I also think there is a possible forthcoming essay about butoh as a practice of "becoming," in the Deleuzian sense.]
becoming sunflower
unfolding exquisite organization
always turning, towards the sun
decaying as a ground of wet leaves
and worms and beetles and grubs, black soil and feces
becoming crucified in arms and hands
belly gutted like a fish, ever bleeding opening onto loss
back-body becoming moon in shadow,
fingers becoming moonbeams
waves cresting and crashing with every gesture
becoming fucked in ass and mouth and eyes
lungs spreading gills through ribcage
cheeks becoming city lights
winds sweeping over plains under arms
shedding serpent skin, cells/scales pushing outward
skeleton melting glacier, thundering downstream to sea
stars as joints becoming constellation,
night guide for a weary pilgrimage
flesh as film becoming imprinted with the image of the world
watching the film from your deathbed
rising as the sun
and still becoming sunflower turning towards . . .
Filed under: creative process, research | Tags: anal ecology, deterritorialization, disindividuation, ecosex symposium II, ecosexuality, experiential anatomy, experiential geography, felix guattari, gilles deleuze, green porno, isabella rosselini, karl cronin, polyamory, post-humanism, serena anderlini-d'onofrio, somatic natural history archive, tessa wills
It’s been far too long since I’ve written anything productive here. As I’ve moved into my work this summer, starting with the Ecosex Symposium in June and into my summer reading in July (working through various texts by or about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), there has been very little time/space in which to generate thoughtful material for my blog. Between the symposium, my studies, and inspiration from a spectrum of different artists, I have been saturated/overflowing with ideas, just not the time to translate them meaningfully or articulately to this blog space. And I don’t really have time to enact that translation now. But in addition to this site functioning as a platform for (more) transparency in my creative and scholarly work, it also functions as a holding space for ideas, for snippets and scribbles of ideas and thoughts that may eventually evolve into something more developed and cohesive (or intentionally in-cohesive, as the case may be), and that is what I need today. The following is a series of scribbles that amount to mere hints at what I might develop further:
Intersections of landscape and body
Mapping (cartography) of bodies/spaces (need to read Henri Lefebvre on space)
Where are the overlaps of experiential anatomy and experiential geography, somatic physical practices and environmental sustainability projects, body politics and global/environmental politics? These intersections seem rich and worth exploring. I was profoundly inspired by a piece presented by Tessa Wills at the Ecosex Symposium II entitled Anal Ecology, which took as its premise the potential for queer bodies to provide information for sustainability projects (my understanding was that this piece was specifically concerned with issues of sustainability surrounded radioactive waste, waste deposits as places that are forbidden/toxic, and queer bodies as bodies of knowledge practiced in venturing into the “forbidden” within our own bodies). I’m also interested in the occurrences of experiential geography and experiential anatomy in Karl Cronin’s work, and how those two [fundamentally phenomenological] approached to experience might inform one another.
In my presentation at the Ecosex Sympsosium II, I suggested that a central project in my theorization of ecosexuality has been towards disindividuation, or the deconstruction of the discontinuous autonomous/self-sufficient individual subject. If there is a larger project or concept in which I think disindividuation might function, it is that of deterritorialization (this is a concept that is addressed by Deleuze, and I am interested in how his work with this concept might inform/enrich my own understanding). In my understanding, the territorialization of bodies is a process of organ-ization, the fragmentation of the body into a collection of organs, organs (especially where genitalia are concerned) that function as the foundation for oppressive regimes such as gender and sex. This organ-ization [territorialization] of bodies resembles the territorialization of the globe, and it is from this correlation of something like organs and nation-states, and the fundamental logic of territories that underlies both, that I see the possibility of a productive inquiry into the intersection of body and global/environmental politics.
Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio: she gave a truly inspired keynote address at the symposium discussing polyamory alongside ecosexuality, a discussion of love not as a need (a concept developed with notions of scarcity and lack), not as a resource that is non-renewable, but as something expansive and inclusive, this being inherent in polyamory, and this offering a model for relationships, human, more-than-human, and otherwise. Intersections of polyamory, ecology, and sustainability…
I am more convinced than ever before that post-humanism is central to ecosexuality. The category of “human” seems to me another act of territorialization, the production of an inside (human) and outside (non-human) that is necessarily binary and hierarchical. Post-humanism does the important work of deconstructing this category, and I think such a deconstruction is a necessary foundation for ecosexuality. I am interested in what performative productions of a post-human sexuality might look like. I curious about the ways in which various performance works move us beyond the human. And I wonder how sex/sexuality might provide avenues for movement into the post-human. It means changing how we understand sex (especially as it is entrenched in the Oedipal narratives of psychoanalysis . . .). In various discourses–especially psychoanalysis–sex operates as a central organizing principle in the development of subjectivity; I suggest that ecosexuality might provide a necessary intervention in how we understand sex that could in turn shift “human subjectivity” towards a “post-human intersubjectivity.”
The radical thoughts towards new choreographic/performance work:
Partially inspired by Karl Cronin’s Somatic Natural History Archive. I see Karl’s practice of learning/imitating the movement patterns of various plants and animals as a method for shifting the human towards the post-human. Movement/action are productive in that our bodies are literally formed, informed, deformed, and reformed by that actions we carry out (this is part of what is profound about dance, its role in the production of bodies). I see choreography as a profoundly intimate encounter: for the dancer to incorporate the choreographer’s movement is to literally allow the choreographer to participate in the formation of the dancer’s body. To the degree that the body is central to who we are, this constitutes a profoundly intimate exchange. When Karl looks to other-than-human sources for movement, I believe that the distance between the territories “human” and “non-human” are collapsed in the production of his body through other-than-human movement forms.
What I am inspired to consider is sourcing the sexual behaviors of other-than-human sources as choreographies for human bodies (I immediately think of Isabella Rosselini’s Green Porno). How might bodies be produced towards a post-human sexuality through the imitation of other-than-human sexual behaviors? An important question would be how to assess “sexual behavior” other than reproductive sexuality. For instance, what would constitute non-reproductive sexual behavior for plant life, and how might such behavior function as choreographies or scores for movement/behavior of “human” bodies? I don’t have an answer to that question, but it suggests itself as a site of investigation, and I feel like the possibilities of the piece(s) such an investigation might produce could be transformative.
those are the scribbles and jots towards new ideas/concepts.
we’ll see where they go . . .
Filed under: Dance
Take a look at the courses being offered by the Department of Dance at OSU:
I‘m teaching two sections of Yoga and one section of Modern I.
Filed under: art, Dance | Tags: bound, gregory maqoma, semiotics, shanell winlock, sidi larbi cherkaoui, southern bound comfort, wexner
Bound (2010)
Artistic concept & choreography: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
Material devised & performed by: Gregory Maqoma, Shanell Winlock
This evening I had the pleasure of seeing “Southern Bound Comfort” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, a double bill project of work by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Gregory Maqoma, perfomed by Gregory Maqoma and Shanell Winlock. As I continue to make a daily practice of writing, I decided to give attention this evening to writing my experience of the second piece on the bill: Bound.
This piece was for me an unraveling and re-ravelling of semiotics and interpersonal entanglement (and in some senses, the semiotics of interpersonal entanglement). The ropes that comprised the set and properties with which the dancers performed (many hanging from the ceiling, others coiled or piled on the floor) functioned as the materials for a shifting play of references and representations. It was not that the piece had a singular narrative organization, but instead that it made use of a series of symbols (and symbolic structures) that alluded to poignant recognizable situations enacted between two people, entwining, colliding, supporting, containing, dividing, etc. At the start of the piece, I had the experience of being led through a kind of childhood playtime: Winlock explored a range of possibilities with a short length of rope, how it swings, how it wraps around her body, how it pulls, etc. There was a coolness and ease in the way that she moved, but also a sense of attentive exploration, as if seeking the unfamiliarity of what was (most likely) “set” movement material. Even in these earliest moments of the piece, I experienced hints of danger in this “playtime.” Each time the rope was wrapped around her neck, I felt my breath get shallow. But it never lingered around her neck, and I felt as if the neck as a danger zone was being denaturalized, demonstrated as a possible formal configuration alongside a plethora of other entanglements between body and rope. What (and where) we think of as dangerous is perhaps less specialized than we might think. This denaturalization of the familiar in its deployment was a theme that lingered with me throughout the work.
This playtime took on a more representational (almost make-believe) quality as a long coil of rope on which Winlock stood was transformed into a pathway unwinding towards a pile of rope in the upstage left corner of the performance space. The pile of rope (an island perhaps? this edging towards the symbolic, the representational, was not overt; although I recognized the pile-as-possible-island, I didn’t feel as if that was my only choice. It was perhaps a make-believe island, but it was also self-evidently a pile of rope). From the pile emerged the second performer, Maqoma. He sat up, still wrapped in ropes–almost as a deity or holy man–and more I began to feel invited into something between the playtime of children and a ritual from an unfamiliar culture. Either way, I was in a semiotic space, in which materials and bodies (even, perhaps, the materiality of bodies) were simultaneously both axiomatic and symbolic. I was aware of trained dancers in a particular theatrical situation that had been choreographed and costumed and lit, for which tickets had been sold, of which I was a participating spectator; these were ropes configured in various ways to create scenic designs and even costumes. But I also felt the symbolic potential exceeding the immediate context/actuality of what I was seeing. I do not often look for symbols in stage dance works, so as I felt myself ushered into a landscape of shifting signifiers and allusions to situations beyond our immediate experience in the context of the performance situation, this joint experience of both axiom and symbol became for me a significant portion of the content of the work, part of what it was “about”. From the rope island, Maqoma moved to the center of the space amidst the hanging ropes; Winlock soon followed with a small rope doll, being handled like a child. Maqoma began to connect the hanging ropes, building a hanging structure that soon emerged as a “house”—the outline of a house, a recognizable symbol for the form of a house. More make-believe. Playing house. A house made of hanging ropes; rather, an outline of a house made from hanging ropes. Where/how do these forms collide? Ropes, they bind (as suggested by the title of the piece), they tie, they are woven and wrapped, they hang and support, they ravel and unravel; a house that binds, a house that ties, a house that is woven and wrapped, a house that hangs and supports, a house that ravels and unravels. House as symbol begins to slide into ideas about “home.” Home as entanglement, as formed out of our entwining lives, with all the properties suggested by these ropes. And here I took a [post-structuralist] step back, and asked myself why I recognized this configuration of tangled ropes as a house/home, why it is that the entanglement of lives (and the suggestion of a child) takes this particular representational form, for me as a viewer, and for people in a more general sense. To what degree are all houses/homes a kind of “playing house(home),” and why does that play take on this (recognizable) form? Why is it that I see this tangle of rope, these two people, a rope-doll, and also see a [heterosexual, procreative] home? From what is that fantasy woven? Moored in part in the shifting sands of questions of social constructivism, I return to the dance.
The dancing that took place in this rope-house was a tangle of weight and limbs and supports; it reminded me of watching partnering developed from well-figured contact improvisation, but it took on additional meaning (or potential signification) because of the ropes. Here is a house/home built from ropes entwined; inside we find bodies/subjects/lives entangled/entwined. There was an odd exchange of the rope-doll with a larger rope puppet performed by Maqoma. And then the house became unraveled. In a strobe light, Winlock disentangled the ropes that had formed the outline of the house. The house/home/symbol undone, and with it a question concerning the residue of what was in what then remained. How have these materials been marked by their symbolic deployment? These were no longer just hanging ropes; now they were hanging ropes that had been a house. They are the remainder of a house/home/fantasy undone.
Later in the piece, each dancer gathered up a bundle of the hanging ropes and wrapped them tightly into vertical cords spreading out into the ceiling above. The divorcing of the previously entwined ropes, the deconstruction of one form and the reconstruction of another, had an immediate “first layer” symbolism (separation, the rending of lives, shared spaces, the materials from which two people made a home together, etc.), but more interesting to me was the shift in how the ropes came to symbolize. Was I now looking at two trees? Was there a relationship between seeing first a house and now two trees? I never fully escaped the self-evidence of the situation (dancers, theatre, ropes, costumes, lights, etc.), but in a space suspended/removed slightly from the immediate actuality of the performance event, I found my “scene” had changed, and that scene change had been accomplished by the redeployment of materials from which symbolic forms were constructed. This redeployment was significant for me, a suggestion that one thing can be reconfigured to become something else, and in doing so, the entire situation changes. The two danced and returned again to their bundles of ropes. They brought them together in the center of the space, and wrapped their “trunks” together, merging the separate “trees” into one larger “tree”-form. Aside from the “separation-reunion” symbolism, I found myself thrust into a different situational register. Specifically, I was confronted with (most likely unintentional) references to the racial politics in Jena, Louisiana in 2006. In a series of incidents involving escalating and horrifying racial tensions, nooses were hung from a tree on the grounds of Jena High School, a tree that was referred to as the “white tree.” Within a few moments, this image was dramatically reinforced in the performance when the two performers hung nooses from the large bundle of (white) ropes, and put the nooses around their necks. This was a tree; those were nooses; and the symbolic potential of the image exploded beyond the constraints of the immediate/actual circumstances/context of the performance.
And yet another layer of symbolism was still lingering beneath the surface of what was striking as an overtly political/racialized image: I could not ignore the fact that these were the same ropes that formed the “house” and the separate(d) “trees;’ a narrative was forming for me, a narrative concerning the entanglement of lives, the fantasy and imitation of particular social ideals (heterosexual, procreation, etc.), the rending of that fantasy/ideal, the reunification of separate lives into a new form, and that form providing the support for this hanging/joint suicide.
All of this was immediately subverted by a comedic turn in which a musician provided a sound score for a series of gestures that evoked a bickering husband and wife (all while still hanging loosely in the nooses). While the drama/tension of the moment was diffused, the bickering couple did reinforce for me the unfolding narrative of particular relationship ideas/ideals.
The piece “resolved” in an illusionary game of double-dutch. A long rope was stretched between the two dancers. The exchange began as each one whipped the rope, sending a forceful ripple down the length to the other (terminating in demonstrative impacts, as if thrown by the force of the other’s impulse). Symbols here abound: references to distance and attachment, exchange and injury, etc. These impulses escalated into a rapid swinging of the rope between the two. The lights shifted again to a strobe light, creating a visual effect of two ropes swinging opposite one another in double-dutch style. Again, potential symbols abound: the discrepancy of one or two, the discrepancy between actuality and illusion, difference across distance, etc., and what each of these association might have to do with human entanglement/relationship. All the while still, these possible signs were informed by the unique propertied of the ropes: ravelling, binding, hanging, tying, etc.
The ending was perfect. A sudden break: simultaneously, the music stopped, the rope hit the ground, and the lights went out. In a dramatic shift, all of the materials from which the scene was crafted (sound, props, lights) were abandoned, and all we were left with was darkness and silence (or approximations of darkness and silence).
As beautiful as their dancing was, I am not left with crisp memories of their movement. Rather, the piece functioned for me as a playground—sometimes tender, sometimes sentimental, sometimes terrifying—for recognizing the constructive/deconstructive formations of [performative?] semiotic potentials; the ways in which material properties suggest meaningful content when deployed to symbolic/representational ends; the redeployment of materials, and the residue of previous significations in the newly shaped/recognized signs. This theatrical exploration of semiotics was not removed from the bodies by which it was performed; in fact, the bodies themselves as never purely axiomatic matter may have been central to my understanding of the work. The bodies, like the ropes, were never stable in their signification/representation. They were never only the bodies of dancers (as if that position in itself could be considered simple or non-referential, non-discursive); they were deployed in formal configurations, in make-believe scenarios, in domestic(ated) ideals, in interpersonal relationalities, in socio-political scenarios, etc. The redeployment of bodies throughout these shifting “scenes” was perhaps less overt than the transformations enacted through the ropes; but the bodies were not circumstantial: it was a body-based performance, and as such the bodies became implicated in this internal logic of signification, representation, construction and deconstruction. The situation in which I found myself bound, then, was not as simple as the binding capacities of ropes or bodies (although certainly these properties were demonstrated), or even the “bind” of human relationships; rather, what I am left considering is the binding capacity systems of signification. The recognizability of the images deployed on stage, the relative stability of symbols put forward, and the demonstrative arbitrary instability of the materials that comprised them. Arbitrary should not here connote meaninglessness, not randomness; rather, the arbitrated/mediated stabilization of what is essential unstable associations between form and content, signifier and signified. Bound within [performative] conventions of [symbolic] meaning, cultural ideals and social realities surfaced, and I was left to observe myself associating signifier with signified, referents couched in custom and normative convention. Herein, for me, was the bind.
