Filed under: cosmology, creative process, Dance, Ontology, research, yoga | Tags: annie sprinkle, autumn quartet, breakups r tough, butoh, chakras, cuddle, eco-sexuality, ecosexuality, elizabeth stephens, forsythe, judith butler, KNOW(TOUCH)ME(YOU)(MY/YOUR BODY), labanotation, love art lab, monster partitur, scores, scoring, sexecology, trio a, u.turn art space
Two ideas have been steeping for the last few weeks. It’s about time to get them down somewhere.
The first is a piece that I am performing next weekend at U·turn Art Space in Cincinnati. I participating in a group show entitled “Breakups R Tough.”
This is the gallery’s description of the show:
“Cincinnati, OH—About now, many of those relationships that were flourishing at Valentine’s Day aren’t looking so good. U·turn Art Space is pleased to announce a group exhibition that generates a wry discourse to deflate the melodrama of failed relationships. The exhibition includes Shawnee Barton, Stephanie Brooks, Alex Da Corte, Craig Damrauer, Erica Eyres, Lynne Harlow, Peter Huttinger, Eric Lebofsky, Joetta Maue, Casey Riordan Millard and Michael J. Morris.
Artists using embroidery, drawing, installation, performance, photography, sculpture and video offer different perspectives on crisis points in the human experience. Not strictly focused on just the ‘breakup’ between romantic partners, Breakups R Tough considers how interpersonal interactions cease or mutate into something more chaotic. Grafted into the dialogue are slanted looks at other stages in the quest for love, companionship and sex, such as propositions, courtship and self-pleasure. The assembled artists will address the topic with humor, wit, sexuality, physical comfort, and suggestions for remodeling our culture’s structure for types of relationships and categories of love and conflict.”
You can read more about the show here as well.
This is the published blurb about my piece:
“During the opening reception of Breakups R Tough, Morris will be creating a performance piece in homage to a 2005 artwork by the Love Art Laboratory, which is comprised of the famed sex artist Annie M. Sprinkle and her wife, artist and activist Elizabeth M. Stephens. LAL is a seven-year long undertaking in which the two women facilitate annual performance-based projects and rituals, including wedding ceremonies. In their first year, 2005’s Red year, Sprinkle and Stephens created the work entitled “Cuddle” in the Femina Potens Gallery. Once a week, during the exhibition the artists would put on cuddle outfits and spend several hours cuddling gallery visitors who had made advance appointments. They invited the participants to take off their shoes and socks and cuddle with them for seven minutes. This piece has been recreated by LAL in multiple locations, both nationally and abroad. After receiving a grant to travel to California and interview Sprinkle and Stephens in December 2009, Michael J. Morris will conceive a version of this piece as a performance in the U.turn exhibition. His piece is intended as a subversion of popular cultural perceptions of interpersonal acquaintance and intimacy, physical promiscuity, and socially authorized physical behaviors, while also serving as a celebration of the body as central to identity and expressions of love in non-traditional forms. For more about the Love Art Laboratory, please visit the website here.”
You can read about and view documentation of LAL’s original piece here.
There are marked differences between Annie and Beth’s (and their dog Bob’s) original piece and my re-created homage to their work. Aspects that immediately spring to mind are the differences between cuddling with a lesbian couple and cuddling with a single gay man, the difference between this piece being staged in an alternative arts space in San Francisco (or Glasgow or Austin, where it has subsequently been restaged) and staging this piece in a gallery in the midwest, in Cincinnati. Another difference is that I am attempting to partially contextualize the piece in Love Art Lab’s current work. As simple an alteration as it may be, I am making a purple bed/space: purple sheets on the bed, purple curtains (hopefully), and maybe even a purple cuddling costume. Love Art Lab is currently in their Purple year, the year of the Third Eye Chakra (Ajna), centered on intuition and wisdom. My hope is that the recontextualization of the piece goes deeper than just a shift in color but also in intention. In the original piece in 2005, the emphasis came out of the Red Year (Root Chakra, Muladhara), Security and Survival. Here cuddling seemed to be a kind of reassurance, a cultivation not only of love (part of the mission of LAL) but also a kind of interpersonal security, the safety offered by holding or being held. I think these aspects can’t help but carry over into my re-creation of the piece, but there is also the potential for a shift in intention to be one of knowledge and knowing. The act of cuddling, this temporal physical engagement being an act of both knowing and being known. As I’ve stated, my interests for the piece are “intended as a subversion of popular cultural perceptions of interpersonal acquaintance and intimacy, physical promiscuity, and socially authorized physical behaviors, while also serving as a celebration of the body as central to identity and expressions of love in non-traditional forms.” These notions harken back to the piece I created last year (and enacted this year in the process of Autumn Quartet), “KNOW(TOUCH)ME(YOU)(MY/YOUR BODY)“. Because my research and current perspective situate the body itself as the site for the perpetual perception, negotiation, and performance of identity, I often find it troubling that our culture privileges visual and verbal modalities for the acquaintance of individuals. We get to know one another predominantly by what we see of one another and what we say. I am interested in subverting this, privileging the body not only as the site of identity, but a potential site of acquaintance. The Cuddle piece serves this, and I think there is something of this physical “getting to know you” that echoes the knowing intuition of the Purple Year of LAL. I’m also thinking about the extension of the body/self into the environment (this is essential to my understanding of “Sexecology” and “Eco-Sexuality,” ideas that have emerged from LAL and their performance work), and how the construction of this “cuddling space,” the bed and the curtains and the (hopefully) soft lamp light, may also serve as an extension of myself, the implication of myself into the space, and the subsequent implications for inviting gallery patrons into that space. I am also fascinated by the relationship between this work, Love Art Lab, the chakra system (and thus Tantric philosophy out of which it emerged) and my own yoga practice and teaching of yoga. How does my teaching inform this work, and how might it is turn inform my teaching?
I’ll let you know how it goes.
In a seemingly completely unrelated speculation (but of course it is all related), I am thinking about a practice or a course (or book?), something like “Scoring: The Constitution of the Moving Self.” This thinking started while writing my recent paper on the process of reading and dancing Trio A from Labanotated score (see previous post), but has evolved into a constellation of thought, touching on my predicted dissertation research and additional systems of “scoring” that I have explored. I am thinking about the lived “here-and-now” experience of the dance and the dancer as inseparable, that in the moment of dancing, both are mutually defined by one another (or, perhaps more accurately, as one). I am thinking about how dances or movement are generated and created, and how the individual is constituted through those generative processes. Because I think of movement as an extension of self (and a force by which the self is invented in the present here-and-now), I am interested in how scoring systems are used to generate movement and in doing so generate individuals. I am thinking about scoring systems like Labanotation and Motif Description, but also verbal/imagistic scores used to produce movement, as in Butoh (the language used to generate movement are called “Butoh-fu” which literally translates to “Butoh notation”) and Gaga, and the various systems of scoring that I experienced in the Forsythe project here at OSU last year, things like “room writing” or inscribing in space (tracing imagined forms in space), and the production of the wall score for Monster Partitur (line tracings of shadows produced by paper sculptures from skeleton models that emerged from a personal history). I am also thinking of Fluxus scores and scores used in choreographic practices by artists such as Pina Bausch. What comes to mind is the question of “what is a score?” Right now I am thinking of it as a persisting physical, linguistic or conceptual artifact by which movement is produced. The nature of the scoring system determines that nature of the movement and the nature of the method by which it is produced. I am not thinking of scores so much as documentation of what was (a record of movement that existed) as much as I am considering it as a generative source. It is, of course, situated somewhere in between these moments/movements: the means by which the score was generated (this may be a documentation of movement as in Labanotation or an idea, as in Butoh) and the movement that the score then produces.
Central to these ideas are the fact that the movement produced (by the score) is intrinsically unique and definitive of the individual. While the score itself is persistent, the movement it produces is not. It is unique to the individual, as the individual body, emerging from and simultaneously contributing to the identity of the individual.
There is a relationship between scores and the regulatory normalities by which persons are constructed/produced. I’m reading Judith Butler right now, and I am thinking about the pervasive culturally constructed systems by which individuals are regulated and produced. Gender, according to Butler, does not precede the acts by which gender is signified, but is in fact constituted by those acts by which it is perceived to be persistent. I am thinking of the engagement of the individual with the score as an active co-creation/participation in the generative structures by which the individual is produced. By enacting the score, the individual practices agency in the formulation of action and the methods/structures by which they are produced. If identity (and gender) are not that from which performative acts emerge but are in fact constructed through the sequence/repetition of performative acts, what then is the implication of the persistent score in the generation of acts? What is there to analyze in the relationship between the score and repetition?
And so, in a sense, it all relates. “Cuddle,” as formulated and enacted by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens in 2005 now serves as the score by which my own actions are produced. I engaged with the documentation of that work as a score and in doing so select the structure by which my self, my situation, and my contribution to culture and society are produced.
I would love for this to be a course at some point, examining the nature of scores and scoring, how it may reflect, co-create or interrupt the pervasive social “scores” by which we are produced (I love the idea of situating Butler in the context of movement scores/scoring), and exploring various systems of scoring in the conscious production of self. If I apply for jobs at some point, I could imagine this being a course that I would propose to teach.
Those are my thoughts today. I hope to have time to continue to serve these ideas as weeks go by. I hope to continue to read and dance Trio A as a means of constructing myself, and to engage with additional scores in the production of movement/self.
Onto the spring quarter . . .
Filed under: art, Dance | Tags: abby zbikowski, dante brown, eric nordstrom, erik abbott-main, fiona lundie, harry shearer, luc tuymans, mair culbreth, monster partitur, rashana smith, Synchronous Objects, wexner
Today I had to pleasure of witnessing a performance of dance at the Wexner taking place in the gallery spaces as part of the Super Sunday event. The last time I saw dancing in the galleries at the Wexner was “Monster Partitur” last April.
Dancers included Erik Abbott-Main, Dante’ Brown, Mair Culbreth, Fiona Lundie, Eric Nordstrom, Rashana Smith, and Abby Zbikowski. I was truly inspired, and came away with thoughts that I needed to get down somewhere. That where is here.
From the beginning, there was a wonderful ambiguity. The dancers were in “pedestrian clothes” (nothing specifically marked them as “the dancers”). And there was also the question of, “Has it started?” Which called into question the arbitrary beginnings and endings of performance. This echoed a marvelous piece that’s at the Wex right now (“The Silent Echo Chamber” by Harry Shearer): it is a series of screens showing footage of famous figures in the moments preceding their television appearances (Barack Obama, John McCain, Anderson Cooper, etc.). These videos came to mind as I watched for the “start” of the dance performance, and offered a lovely connection between my perception of the performance and other work being exhibited in the space.
The basic structure of the performance began with all the dancers on the long ramp that runs on the east side of the galleries, leading up to the top galleries. From here, dancers spread into different spaces. Throughout the performance, dancers migrated into and out of spaces.
Immediately and throughout the performance I was aware of the implicating of both spectator in the performances and performers in the role of spectatorship. By introducing this “non-normative movement behavior” (outside of the prescribed gallery etiquette), the movement behavior/patterns of the spectators were called into consideration. Because my attention shifted to include their movement for consideration, the situation of “the performance” was expanded to include all those present. This was reinforced by the lack of described performance spaces. The dancers could be anywhere; the performance could be taking place anywhere, at any time. Boundaries of beginning and ending already having been called into question, boundaries between performance and audience space, performer and spectator, softened as well. I felt even more aware than usual of my relationship to the other bodies in the space. My perspective would sometimes shift from that of an observer of a discrete dancing body to a larger observational perspective of the entire situation in which I was implicated. It was the way I prefer to experience dance, not through the role of spectator but through the role of the experiencing body, aware of my own movements, my spatial relationship to the other bodies in the space, my relationship to the architecture, etc.
In this ambiguity between “performer” and “spectator,” I became aware of layers of perspective (dancers, audience, dancer, more audience, art, art being viewed, etc.). This was most overt in the top gallery. I was watching Eric Nordstrom and Dante’ Brown dance together. Beyond them I was able to see a cluster of spectators watching the same dance, but from the other side. Beyond this group of figures, I could see Erik Abbott-Main dancing in the next gallery. Beyond him were spectators viewing the art work on the walls of the gallery (Luc Tuymans). I found the boundaries of performance again to be malleable, shifting. I could extend my attention to any of these layers, in which all that lied in my field of vision may or may not be considered part of the performance, or part of the emerging composition.
This concept of “emerging composition or choreography of spectators” was one of the most potent observations I felt today. Beyond the dances of the dancers, as my perception of the performance space expanded, I became increasingly aware of the emerging compositions in space an time, compositions made up by both the dancers and the spectators, and even the architecture. This made me think of the Synchronous Objects project and an article I read last Winter discussing the intersection of concerns in the fields of dance and architecture: both are concerned with the movement of people. In dance, the choreography in the directive for movement. In architecture, the structure itself directs the flow of movement in the space. I was keenly aware of these elements during todays performance, and the effect they had on the organization/choreography of the “spectators” (now a term less distinct from “performers”). To begin with, the gallery spaces themselves, each with a different set of art works, negotiated the flow of the viewers. Then there was the added element of the dancers, themselves a moving focal point for attention and activity. The viewers went where the dancers were. Depending on what they saw, they moved to another gallery in search of another dancer, or they stayed. The movement of the viewer, while emerging partially from his or her own agency, was also being directed by the presence/actions of the dancers.
I was also aware of this agency of the viewer. I came to think of it almost as a “curatorial agency.” Unlike the artworks hanging on the walls, the dancers and their dancing is not persistent over time. It changes. Just as in an active stage performer the viewer must select objects of attention on which to focus, this agency was expanded by the distribution of the dancers throughout the gallery. The viewer was given the role of “curator” of their own experience (even as I write this, I realize that there is a sense in which this is our responsibility all the time, but perhaps the sense was heightened by the gallery setting, the movement through various gallery spaces, etc.). The work was constantly unfolding; the viewer composed his or her own thirty-minute experience.
There seems to be a light tension between the choreography of the spatial/temporal organization of the “spectator population” emerging from the architecture and the distribution of the dancing bodies (it carries a sense of determinism) and the “curatorial agency” of the viewer constructing his or her own experience within the gallery.
Finally, I was aware of my posture of observation: how was I standing in order to watch? How near or far was I from the dancer, and how did my stance change given the proximity of the dancer, and any other number of socio-cultural factors. For instance, standing and watching Nordstrom and Brown dancing felt easy, casual, at a safe distance. Then at another point I was watching Fiona Lundie dance. I was standing relatively near to her, and as she moved through various levels of space, I became aware of how much of the dance I spent “above” her in space. I felt complicit in the “male gaze,” man higher than woman, gaze transforming woman into object. Not that those were my experiences, but the posturing of it felt like a social model that I generally reject. I decided to kneel, bringing myself lower in space, and almost assuming a reverential posture (again, participating in the emerging choreography, implicated in the performance situation).
Other brief observation/thoughts:
-How did things change when one of the dancers “exited” their performance mode and simply watched one of his or her colleagues?
-How did the presence of one dancer change a specific gallery space differently from the presence/dancing of another dancer occupying the same space? How did that affect the perception of the art works on display?
-At one point during the 2:30 performance I was watching with Eric Falck. He put his arm around mine. Eventually we shift to holding hands. At one point I was aware of other spectators behind us watching the dancers we were watching. I questioned how it affected the performance, the role that we were playing in our spatial and relational situation: two gay men holding hands being watched while watching solo female dance in art gallery; two gay men holding hands being watched while watching two male dancers dance in art gallery. How was our “demonstration” (which was emergent from a personal relationship, not just a nexus of aesthetic/cultural/social/political dynamics) a part of what was going on performatively?
There are many more smaller thoughts, but that’s all I have time for at the moment. Needless to say I was deeply inspired, so pleased that work like this is being done, and hopeful that maybe I’ll participate in a differently prescribed role the next time it happens!
Filed under: art, creative process, culture, Dance | Tags: agora, body attitude, choreography, coco loupe, deborah hay, identity, impermanence, junctionview studios, monster partitur, spectacle, the body, wexner, William Forsythe
So I tried to blog about seeing my friend/colleague/teacher CoCo Loupe perform Deborah Hay‘s “The Runner” yesterday at the Agora festival at Junctionview Studios here in Columbus, and it just didn’t happen. The experience just did not lend itself to the third person. So I have instead decided to invite you, gentle reader, into my “personal” creative conversation with CoCo. I offer excerpts of our email correspondence as another way of looking into this dancing life, another way of contributing to the “cultural library” of dance literature. Here we go:
Michael wrote to CoCo 9:11am, 17 May 2009:
“I loved watching you dance. I will never tire of your movement quality. And maybe it’s just because we’ve been working on this in class (or maybe it’s part of why we’ve been working on this in class?), but I was transfixed by your ability to move from focus to focus, from extremely inner concentration, to smiling and making eyes and playing with a puppy, etc. I was fascinated how this affected your entire body attitude, or way of carrying yourself, your way of moving through the space, through your joints, in and out of the floor, etc. This plays a huge role in the “big thought” I left with.
I left thinking a lot about context and perception and framing and how dance is a truly physically transgressive medium. It rejects so much of how we’re “supposed to be” in our bodies. And as long as it is removed from us, sanitized by the proscenium or the performance space or even just a demarcated time and space in which it has been stated “this is a dance,” society/the culture of society can palate it. They can recognize their way of looking, their role of coexisting with this moving body. In the opposite “extreme,” when a space has been designated or described for “social dance,” in a club or bar or whatever, there is a kind of clarity in the expected role or way of looking/coexisting with the moving body. In the performance yesterday, all of this become blurred, and it was all related to the shifting of your “body attitude.”
I watched the dance, watched you dancing. But maybe it was the choreographer in me . . . I couldn’t not watch how it existed/negotiated itself in the space, with those others present in the space. And this is where I hit my “descriptive wall” in my blog, so bear with my meager language. There was a process of watching the audience not recognize, then recognize that they had not recognized, but rarely did they ever quite grasp what it is that they had not recognized. This was most palpable when your physical countenance was the most “normal” (fit neatly within the definition of the socially acceptable body), moments of just standing and looking, or meandering. They were brief, and those co-habitants (I’m not sure I can call them “audience members” in this speculation) who came upon you in those moments did not distinguish you/your body as atypical or anomalous in the space. But then your countenance would shift. Sometimes it was as subtle as the pacing of your steps, a shift in focus, or a sudden stop. Sometimes it was more overt, like a sudden battement or rond de jambe en lair. But whatever it was, in that moment, they would realize that there was something present that they had not previously recognized. That body (your body) was not “playing by the rules” and they did not know why. They were in this strange in between space of almost panic? When they had this moment of recognition, still had not oriented themselves in it, recognized that they had very likely walked right “into the middle of something,” and knew that they had been seen doing so. Maybe too much of my creative ideas right now have to do with shame, but I saw these flickering, vibrant moments of shame, when they recognized not only that this body (your body) was not playing by the rule, but by implication, neither was theirs. They suddenly weren’t quite sure of the rules, and they were aware of how public their “misstep” had been. Different individuals handled themselves differently in this suspended space, but it was that moment that I found fascinating.
And what it says about our perceptions of the body, our expectations and rules for it. And how quickly we take cues and prescriptions for ourselves from the other bodies we encounter. I felt like it revealed something so fragile: maybe the choreography of identity? Maybe when you develop a research interest you begin to see it everywhere, but it was something like that. Up until their encounter with you, the others in the space knew the “rules” and they were playing by them! That’s maybe the crux of this connection is that it revealed some layer of awareness or intentionality of the ways in which these other individuals were handling themselves in their bodies, the way they were choreographing their actions to fit within their understanding of the “rules,” and by encountering you/your dancing body, their understanding of the rule, and thus their “choreography,” was called into question. So fragile.
Moving past that moment/observation, I was interested in the moments in which your actions were recognized as a dance. And it seemed really clear. When there were spectacular actions (again, battements, rond de jambes en lair, roles to the floor, jumps, etc.), it was seen as a dance, you as a dancer, and thus both as entertainment. The viewer would stop and offer their attention. And when the “moments of spectacle” (for lack of a better term) had passed, so did the attention of many. I thought to myself, “These people are not ‘people-watchers’. They are not the kinds of people who are drawn into subtlety, who sit on the Oval and simply observe how people are their bodies, and how that works itself out. They don’t find themselves captivated by the gate of a person, or the architecture of the body.” I don’t know if it had to do with the amount of STUFF going on visual/aurally/energetically/etc. but so many people walking around seemed to be doing so like . . . something dense and blank, and gave pause to whatever made a large mark/impact of their perceptual fields. Because of this, it was interesting to watch people come in and out of an encounter with your dancing body as a dance.
It made me think of something Bill Forsythe said about the thought behind “Monster Partitur” and the whole exhibition at the Wex. He talked about how in the art gallery culture, their is a certain “viewer agency” to meander, to wander, to direct attention for whatever duration, to come in, to leave, etc. And in the dance world, we tend to hold our viewers captive. They come in, they sit down, we turn out the lights, and for the most part, they are expected to STAY. He was interested in moving dance into the gallery space to potentially explore this viewer relationship. it raises questions like, “Dance, unlike a static object, literally changes and unfolds over time. How does its meaning or relevance shift if the viewer can come in or exit an encounter with it at any point? How is its value effected if they don’t see the ‘beginning’ or the ‘end’, only some piece in the ‘middle’?” I felt that “The Runner” leant itself to this way of viewing remarkably well. There is something about the piece, how it moves from one thing to the next with very little through-line, how each moment it partially characterized by the total abandonment of the previous moment, that gives immense permission to see/encounter only a part of it. I felt like I was fully engaged with the piece for its duration, but by the end I could not begin to describe the sequence of events, or even recount all of the events that had transpired. Just as it seemed as if you moved from moment to moment, event to event, with a total abandonment of what came before, I felt that I was invited to do the same. Which seems to relate much more to that “gallery, come and go as you please” mentality than to the proscenium “come in, watch from beginning to end, then leave” way of engagement. In that sense, I commend you hugely. I think Agora was a perfect match for the piece. I think I would also love to see it in the Wex, either in a gallery or outside on that quad . . . something about framing it in the manner of engagement associated with gallery/museum spaces that I described above. I think that is a fascinating connection between the context and content of the piece.
And I think that’s all I have right now. I have this other thought, something about interpersonal engagement, the way the socially devious body, or the dancing body, becomes less “personal” or “human” in the way that people relate to it . . . but I haven’t found the words for that yet.
Thank you for an amazing performance, for creating such a thought-provoking experience, for being “benignly socially devious” in your body/environment, and the commentary that offers. Thanks for introducing me to Agora. I would love to experience it again in years to come, maybe even share work there.
-M”
CoCo wrote to Michael 9:54am 17 May 2009
“[from reading what you wrote], I immediately heard Deborah saying something to the effect of YOU MUST BE IN LOVE WITH IMPERMANENCE. i will get the exact wording from my notes later and send them to you. but that is one of the foundations of this work. her point being….you can’t take this moment too seriously..it’s gone. the next is here and you’re it and your cells are it and it’s gone. don’t die when that moment dies and goes….just let it go and enjoy the next. this is one of the big things i’ve been trying to share with our class at OSU……maybe i need to dig up Deborah’s exact words and share them with the class…..that’s what i’ll do.”
and at 10:30am 17 May 2009:
“there is great vacillation b/w interacting with people/objects/energy in the space and the same entities that are built into the structure of the work. the inner logic of the practice is constantly melding/threading/weaving with the natural flow and construction of the logic that comes with the environment in which the practice is being …..practiced…..(word weirdness)
anyway….it’s a very strange and lovely state that i’m in when doing The Runner…..i never feel like i’m “being” a particular way towards the environment….like extremely inner concentration, to smiling and making eyes and playing with a puppy….although i am doing those things…..while i’m doing them, i really don’t have an attachment to the connotations of those gestures and actions…..like “oh i’m doing this and it means this or can be read as that so therefore i’m building/having/presenting an experience that must hinge on this/that meaning”……it’s more like, “oh….i’m attending to this right now because it’s in the lab….and i need the lab….but i’m inviting being seen and surrendering the pattern of facing a single direction, while every cell in my body is getting what it needs….and it’s no big deal”…….so while the action seems very specific and makes it appear that i’m “meaning to make a statement by doing something like snarking a dog’s nose”, it is actually very omni-dimensional …..from the sheer physiological/anatomical physicality of the experience to the linguistic/textual interpretive potential of the experience……………….
does this make sense? in a way it means having to let go of accepted notions of dancemaking…..dancedoing…..dance-ness. there is no structural heirarchy….the rules are laid bare in the moment and constantly shift so that no goal or meaning can root itself other than the perpetual attention to the directive.”
I hope that offers you some insight into the performance, my perspectives, some of CoCo’s perspectives, and maybe in the larger sense the way we dancing artists think of/talk about what it is we do. Welcome.
Filed under: creative process, Dance, Grad School | Tags: butoh, doubt, marcia siegel, monster partitur, notre-dame de paris, osu, Synchronous Objects, victor hugo, William Forsythe
Today was the first day of classes in our spring quarter at OSU. Besides starting work in a smattering a new and exciting courses, today we were graced with a special visit from Bill Forsythe. It was a pleasure to see him again and hear him talk a bit about his work and the work we’ve been doing. He sparked lots of idea, many of which will not get decent attention in this post, but which I at least wanted to jot down, for myself and for you. In no particular order:
-He spoke briefly about making dance legible, and how difficult it is to put dance into words, to articulate verbally what is essentially non-verbal. I tend to think of it as articulating the ineffable. Dance is something that is so rooted in immediate corporeal experience, so many sensations and feelings that do not have names, that do not lend themselves to verbal description. I find that sometimes when I try to discuss dance and what it is I do as a dance artist, I am tempted to wax into poetry and metaphor, hedging in this ineffable practice in descriptions that cannot possible translate the actual experience, but hopefully create some sort of defined space in which exists the indescribable thing itself: dance. I am actually interested in hearing Marcia Siegel speak on this subject on Thursday. She is giving a guest lecture on the subject of Forsythe’s work in relation to criticism. I am interested in how that might address this concern, for putting dance and choreographic knowledge into words.
-He spoke about how early on he began to question if a thing had to be the way that it was. This is such an important question. It emphasizes the arbitrary nature of practically everything we do, especially choreography. When faced with the infinite field of potentialities for human movement, each time we make a dance we make a series of choices of what we will do, the sequence in which it will occur, and this becomes choreography. Throughout the creative process, I am constantly coming to find myself asking this same question: “Is this how it has to be? How else might it be?” I think it has to do with clarifying WHAT it is you are doing. What are your intentions? How malleable are those intentions? Might I abandon them if I see something new emerging in the work? Whatever it is I am attempting to serve and embody in the work, how else might it be? What other movements, what other organizations, does it even need to be a dance? What other form might these concerns take?
-This segued into another idea, that of DOUBT. Bill encouraged us that the ability to constantly doubt what it is we know is a greatest gift in dancing and making dances. I dare say, it is a/the great gift of living, of being human, the ability to constantly recognize the limited base of perception and experience on which we “know” anything. This is so important in the creative process, the ability to look into the face of the things you “know,” your pre-existing assumptions for your work, your field, and ask yourself how you know this thing that you think you know. I think doubt is a space of amazing creative potential. I have long thought that doubt and faith share a common source, and that is uncertainty. Faith is that in which you can believe despite uncertainty; doubt is that which you may not be able to believe due to uncertainty. When we allow ourselves to live in that uncertain place (because whether we admit it to ourselves or not, uncertainty is always where we live), we open ourselves to potential motion. Uncertain is like unstable, able to shift, able to fall, able to tumble and roll, and in that motion, make new discoveries. I have a reverence for doubt, and doubting what we “know” as dance artists is a perfect way to keep things moving. By questioning what it is we know, we risk finding new answers, new solutions, making new choices based on these new discoveries, and new work comes out of these place.
-On the subject of “knowing,” Bill touched on a the idea of “feeling as knowing” and “knowing as feeling.” Because dancing is an active experience (like consciousness itself?), it is a way of knowing that has roots in the feeling of that experience. This sort of concept seems to re-prioritize the hierarchies of knowledge, giving validity to a way of knowing that comes purely out of personal, subjective, physical sensation.
-Victor Hugo’s “This Will Kill That” was recommended to us. It is the second chapter of his larger work Notre-Dame de Paris and illuminates how the printing press was potentially responsible for the recession of cathedral architecture, shifting from a visual to verbal culture. This seems relevant in the discussion of translation and literacy shifts, how the evolution of technology is involved in both of these.
-The misunderstanding or challenges of making dance legible perhaps lie in a larger cultural issue of text and literacy being privileged. So how then do we explicate what it is that we do/know without depending on something as privileged as text? The “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, Reproduced” project has depended on a visual literacy, translating choreographic data into visual representations of that data. Remember, that web project goes live THIS WEDNESDAY!
-We have the unique ability to discuss art as a state of BEING because we are our art, it exists as us; dance is an embodied art form.
-In the larger version of this “Monster Partitur” (“You Make Me a Monster”), the audience participates in the construction of the cardboard “monsters” that serve and choreographic information for the piece, before being told the story of the piece’s origin’s: Bill’s wife’s illness, her bleeding, her bending, and her death. Bill described the experience he has witnessed in the audience once they have been told the story, once they realize that the folding of the cardboard skeletons is in some way referential to this personal narrative. He spoke of them being implicated in the story, and how their work then felt somehow dirty or contaminated by the revelation of what it represented or referenced. It raise for me the question of how this described experience translated into my experience of the “monster making,” having the fore-knowledge of what it was I was doing and its origins? It certainly contained none of the surprise. I hardly even feel that it felt contaminated . . . it felt beautiful, reverent, but in the way that Butoh feels beautiful and reverent to me, honoring the fullness of experience, including the grotesque, the unpleasant. I have long felt (and still do, to some degree) that the nature of beauty or aesthetic experience is one of contrast. We appreciate a thing as “beautiful” by its relation to something else. Some of the most moving and dismantling art for me has been integration of this contrast within the single composition, in which the lovely is mashed up with the grotesque; both become richer due to their companion. I think this sort of experience, one of “beauty,” was a big part of negotiating the foreknowledge of the origins of the cardboard monsters in the process of making them. The work was crafting, making elegant forms and compositions (the lovely), while being framed by, or even saturated with, the knowledge that this work came out of grief, out of suffering and death. As tempted as I am to spin off into a discussion of the synthetic process of beauty, suffering as a source of transcendence, I think I have to stop now.
Maybe I’ll have time to flesh these out a bit more later in the week? We’ll see.
Hope you are able to make it to some or all of the events going on this week (see earlier post).
Filed under: art, Dance | Tags: accad, Alva Noë, bacKspace, hixon dance, Maria Palazzi, monster partitur, Norah Zuniga-Shaw, osu, Synchronous Objects, William Forsythe
As I look out over the calendar for the next few weeks, it’s more of the same: art event after art event, with so much to see. I hope I get a chance to see it all. I hope you do too.
This week, 1 April, is the long anticipated launch of “Synchronous Objects for One Flat Things, Reproduced” (you can read more about it in the New York Times, featured in my previous post). This is in conjunction with many other exciting events related to Forsythe’s work.
william forsythe
The Wexner Center for the Arts and the Department of Dance at OSU is hosting the “William Forsythe Symposium: Choreographic Objects.” Here is the official description of this event:
“You’ll hear about how this idea takes form in the works on view in the exhibition William Forsythe: Transfigurations and inSynchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced by William Forsythe, an ambitious new web project created by Forsythe with Ohio State’s Maria Palazzi (Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and Department of Design) and Norah Zuniga Shaw (Department of Dance) and an interdisciplinary team of collaborators from across the arts and sciences. To celebrate the launch of the web project, invited outside experts contextualize the project in terms of its relevance to current trends in the philosophy of cognition and architecture.
A celebrated roster of special guests joins Forsythe for these talks: Mark Goulthorpe of MIT’s School of Architecture; Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley; Synchronous Objects creative directors Maria Palazzi, director of ACCAD and associate professor in the Department of Industrial, Interior, and Visual Communication Design, and Norah Zuniga Shaw, the director of the dance and technology program and assistant professor in the Department of Dance; and Charles Helm, the Wexner Center’s director of performing arts and curator for the Forsythe exhibition.”
If you are not in the Columbus area, or if you are and are unable to be in attendance, follow the link above to watch a live stream of the symposium on Wednesday.
The previous day, 31 March, Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, will be giving a lecture and book signing at OSU in the Sullivant Theater from 12pm-1pm. He is a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the author of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness and Action in Perception, both of which explore the idea that “consciousness is not something that happens inside of us–not in our brains, or anywhere else; it is something we do.” It sounds like a riveting lecture, and extremely relevant to dance as well as human existence.
This week will also host the performances of “Monster Partitur.” Here is the official statement from the Wexner concerning this event:
“Dancer Alessio Silvestrin delivers a mesmerizing performance against a backdrop of sculptural elements created from life-size models of human skeletons and line drawings traced from these gnarled forms, which also serve as cues in the performer’s score (the word “partitur” in the title is a reference to the musical scores utilized by orchestra conductors).Monster Partitur is a condensation of and companion to Forsythe’s Bessie Award–winning You made me a monster.
Show Times
Wed, Apr 1 | 2:30, 5:30, 6:30, & 7:30 PM
Thu, Apr 2 | 12, 12:30, & 7 PM
Fri, Apr 3 | 11:30 AM; 12, 12:30, & 7 PM
Sat, Apr 4 | 12, 12:30, 1, & 7 PM
Sun, Apr 5 | 12, 12:30, 2:30, & 3 PM
Please arrive early to see the performance. Performances are free, but audience size is limited to approximately 50-60 viewers per performance, who will be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis. The performance is approximately 20-25 mins. in length (and seating is not provided).”
You can read more about my experience in contributing to the production of this piece here.
Hixon Dance is presenting “Airs and Dances: An Evening of Live Music and Dance” starting next week. Here is their official description:
“In our upcoming concert, Hixon Dance will present 4 new works, all accompanied by live music!
Featured music includes Claude Debussy’s “Sonata for Cello and Piano,”
Francis Poulenc’s “Sonata for Clarinet and Paino,” and two works by local composer Jacob Reed.”
Filed under: cosmology, creative process | Tags: "About", "Ascension Variations", "Passage", Guggenheim, impermanence, meredith monk, monster partitur, new york times, NPR, wexner, William Forsythe
I have been both thrilled and overwhelmed at the response to my last post. it amazes me how quickly anything on the web can go viral in so few hours. Thank you all for reading (if you are continuing to read); I hope my reflections offered you insight into this experience and provoked contemplations of your own.
I have further contemplations/connections to reflect upon emanating from this experience working on the constructions and tracings for “Monster Partitur.” For days now, despite the sound scape that has been present in our work space (that has ranged from Madonna, to BT, to Jay Brannan, to Cirque du Soleil, to the Cranberries, etc.), the sounds that are constantly occurring to me come from Meredith Monk’s album impermanence. Released last year, it was a composition triggered in response to the unexpected death of Monk’s partner, Mieke van Hoek, in 2002. It has been discussed as a meditation on death, loss, and the fragility of human life. You can read an article about the piece and Monk’s thoughts of music for posterity, and listen to a few of the tracks (I highly recommend “Last Song” as one of the most profound pieces of music I have ever experienced) from NPR here.
I assume the connections between this work and the work with which I have been participating are fairly evident. Both are responses to or expressions of loss and grief, both contain a meditative quality on the transitory nature of life, of all things. Both raise issues concerning that which is left behind, the translation of an impermanent experience into a lasting trace, be that trace in musical composition, or graphite drawings on plywood panels.
Monk offers these words in the liner notes of impermanence:
“How does one create a work about impermanence? One can only brush upon aspects of it; conjure up the sensation that everything is in flux, everything constantly changes, we can’t hold onto anything. What we have in common as human beings is that we will all die and we don’t know when or how. We will lose our loves ones, our own health and finally our bodies. Keeping this in mind leads to a deep appreciation of the moments we have, to not take anything for granted.
“In a way, making a piece ‘about’ impermanence is an impossible task. I could only imply it, offer glimpses, create music that would be evocative but would also leave space for each listener to have his or her responses. Generally, the music for impermanence is more chromatic and dissonant than what I usually write. My music tends to be modal while in this piece I explored other harmonic possibilities. The themes to the piece seemed to suggest the musical language that I found.
“In the past I composed primarily for the voice and deliberately kept my instrumental writing simple and transparent to leave space for the voice to fly. now after composing my first orchestral work and string quartet, I have begun to open up to the rich qualities of instruments. From the beginning, I wrote the voice as an instrument; now I am allowing myself to think of the instruments as voices . . . “
-Meredith Monk
Themes that this short passage bring to mind are the elusiveness of the impermanent, or perhaps even our condition at large; ending as more accurately changing, shifting, becoming; the inevitability of ‘endings;’ allowing space for the personal experience, the subjective, and the awareness that reality itself is objectively inaccessible, but perhaps apprehend-able as a conjunction of subjective experiences.
How does one directly address that which is fleeting, constantly shifting, or gone? More elusively, how does one go beyond addressing a thing that is impermanent, and address the condition of impermanence? I’m not sure I would know how, and yet I find that both Monk and Forsythe have found solutions to this inquiry. As Monk states, she does so by implication, brushing the service of a thing, a state of being, that refuses to stay, to still. In my experience of this work with “Monster Partitur,” I find impermanence is addressed by facilitating an experience in which the relationship between that which is impermanent and the record of that thing is brought to the fore-front. I am not sure how that will translate into a solo performance, nor how it will reside in a gallery exhibition. Nor am I certain that a meditation on impermanence is the goal of “Monster Partitur;” yet that quality and subject have been essential to my experience of this project. I will be unable to view the “product” of this work without the connotation of loss, of creating and recording and destroying, of marking that which will shortly no longer remain, and how all of this pertains to the human condition.
Without a major segue into a discussion of my most recent work “About,” I did want to relate that piece to this discussion. First, there is the reality that it is “over,” that this process and performance with this cast, with this piece in this form, is now passed. I am experiencing the familiar “postpartum” grief of a lengthy process coming to a close. I am grieving that loss in a sense. Which certainly relates to the subject at hand. I am wondering the ways in which the piece now lasts, in body and cognitive memory, but also as concept or information, as a “choreographic object” (to allude further to Forsythe’s research), and how that choreographic information might find expression or realization in another form. A professor of mine speculated today whether this piece might become a sort of “life work,” continuing to be questioned, carrying its concerns throughout my life, with new dancers, new spatial situations, new configurations of the concept. What if the cast was larger? What if it evolved into an evening length work? What if it was seen from above, and the full complexity of the spatial patterns could be appreciated (perhaps is a space like the Guggenheim, where, remarkably, Monk just presented a performance of her “Ascension Variations” this month).
photo by Stephanie Berger for The New York Times
The question concerning “About” has become how might it live on in this field of constant flux and change? How might it’s “ending” contribute to a future “beginning”?
This is another larger speculation that has recurred in my own work, but become more acute in this experience with “Monster Partitur,” the question of ending as something like an illusion. Perhaps nothing ends absolutely, but instead participates in a collective state of reorganization. This was the inspiration/subject of a piece I choreographed in 2007-2008 entitled “Passage.”
photo by Clara Underwood
It was a reflection of our human aversion to death and ending, the inevitability of loss, and an awareness that as any thing ends, it contributes to the formation of something new. I was thinking about decomposition as fertilization, or the conservation of matter/energy, how nothing truly ends absolutely, but instead in reconfigured, reorganized, to become something new.
[You can see videos of "Passage" here or here.]
This speculation does shift me experience of the work on “Monster Partitur.” Yes, it is an exercise in perceiving impermanence, yes, there is a gravity in creating tracings of that which will cease to exist, and relating that experience to my personal experiences of loss and memory. But even in the loss, something new comes into being. It is not the thing itself, but it is the evolving expression of the thing. The trace, the translation, becomes the embodiment of that which no longer exists, and in that sense, it does continue to exist, reorganized into a new configuration, into new materials, new spatial and temporal situations, but born of the loss of what was.
This is perhaps all art. Nothing is truly created because all that exists always has and always will. The work that we do when we “create” is reconfiguration, reorganization, making and describing connections that perhaps had not been made before. The artistic/creative process is feeling like an eternal three-step-program, something like “the idea, the realization of the idea, the trace or record of the realization,” in which the tracings or that which remains from that which no longer exists becomes the basis of the next idea to be realized. In this sense, impermanence is a constant state of being more related to change than ending.
Filed under: cosmology, creative process | Tags: "About", grieving, Marion Dorice Rogers, memory, monster partitur, mourning, osu, Synchronous Objects, wexner, William Forsythe
I have had an overwhelming day, following an already overwhelming week. Today we began work at the Wexner on the sculptures and drawings that will serve as the score for William Forsythe’s “Monster Partitur” that will be presented at the Wexner in April. I don’t know everyone else’s experience with this process, but it has brought me into a deeply contemplative, introspective, internal place. And yet I also feel like my thoughts are drowning in one another, in need of some sort of organization. That is what I will attempt to do here.
I think my foremost awareness after today is how much choice and arbitration is a part of art making, living, recording, memory, etc. This process of constructing sculptures from cardboard “human skeleton” kits was an elaborate exercise in choice making. These choices were a negotiation of personal aesthetics, group collaboration, restrictions that had been put on the choice making (such as each piece needs to become three-dimensional, but can only be folded along the originally implied ‘fold lines’), informed by gravity and the shadows cast by the sculptures, with the foreknowledge that the primary purpose of these constructions is to serve as shadow casters, shadows that will then be traced and serve as the “score” for the dance. In each moment we were asked to make a decision: how to fold the cardboard units, how to assemble them, how to suspend them in order to cast light through them, how to orient them in the light, which shadows to privilege in the drawing, etc. I became keenly aware of the infinite field of potentialities within every moment, and I felt a bit overwhelmed by that awareness, and by my mantra, that to do any thing is to do so to the exclusion of all else in that moment. That can be sometimes too heavy, and starts raising questions concerning the importance (or lack there of) of every moment. More on that later perhaps . . .
My second large existential issue in today’s experience concerns . . . what remains of something that is impermanent. What is left behind, and in what form. Such as these shadows that are in themselves impermanent traces of these sculptural forms, traces that vanish as soon as the light changes. I began to think of what remains of the impermanent, primarily in the form of memory or representation. I am very aware that the medium in which I operate (dance) is extremely transitory in both time and space. It exists only briefly and then is gone. Part of the research that Forsythe is doing with OSU on the “Synchronous Objects” project is how those impermanent experiences leave traces that are then translated into other remaining forms. I’ve done some work cataloguing images of “movement traces” of my own work, in an attempt to see what occurs over time, what is energetically ‘left behind.’ There is a sense in which I have made my peace with this transitory nature of dance, with the consolation that it continues in a new form, the form of memory, within the bodies of the dancers, and within the cognitive memory of both the dancers and the viewers. Today this came into question . . . as I drew the shadows of these sculptures, the question of accuracy came to mind. I was companioned by the awareness that the marks I was making were the only record of that moment, that shadow, that impermanent situation and its orientation, and with that awareness came an incredible concern that what I leave behind was as accurate as possible. I recognize that the subject of accuracy itself is complex. What is the most accurate, the most correct? All knowledge of a thing is filtered through subjective experience, and so my drawings, reacting to these shadows, are obviously “accurate” to my experience within each moment. But what of the thing itself, the inaccessible objective sculpture, the shadow it casts? It seems a bit insignificant, the accuracy of a shadow, but the pressure is a familiar one. It occurs in the performance of choreography, attempting to honor the original intentions of the choreographer as accurately as possible. It occurs in the record of history, attempting to leave behind precisely that which occurred, as objectively as possible. It occurred today with the memory of the dead.
Here is where today’s experience became incredibly personal and emotional. I was very aware of the fact that this piece, “Monster Partitur,” exists in response to the death of Forsythe’s wife to cancer, and his grief surrounding the experience of losing her. I made a choice to hold that awareness in mind as I made these sculptures and tracings, recognizing and referencing the origin of what it was I was doing, and allowing it to become personal. I began to think of my grandmother, Marion Dorice Rogers. She died of cancer in January 2006. My brother and I spoke just yesterday about the length of time in which we grieve/mourn. It is long, and various in its approaches and expressions. Today became a part of my grieving, allowing these drawings to not only be tracing shadows, but an act of grief, allowing that grief to inform the way in which I was drawing, and offering that experience to this larger work. I began to think further about memory and accuracy and that which is left behind, that which we record. And I began to become anxious, that my memory is too imperfect, that already, only three years later, things are missing. The lines are less clear than they were in life. The traces of the impermanent are so much less accurate than the life that was lived.
There are other traces, the unconscious traces that live on in me, the way I do things or think of things that are a direct result of the life of my grandmother. But it is the conscious trace that troubles me, the one for which I feel responsibility and inadequacy and loss.
This sense of responsibility segued into a speculation concerning the way in which we know a person or a thing. I watched as we cast light on the sculpture from one direction and traced its shadow, made a record of it, then cast a different light from a different direction, leaving behind an entirely different shadow. The traces we left are a negotiation of these two shadows, and neither are the thing itself. This makes me think of the removal of experience, the relationship of the subjective to the objective (hint: this is the subject of my piece “About” which some of you may have seen this week). It also made me aware of the arbitrary nature of memory and record, how in remembering, we are selecting what to remember (consciously or unconsciously), and there is the inevitable omission. Just as in knowing a person, we only ever know them in parts, in certain ways, in specific situations; who we think of when we think of that person is a construction/negotiation of these (sometimes conflicting, sometimes intersecting) perspectives. For a little more existential anxiety, this is not only the way in which we know, but it is also the way in which we are known.
Finally (and this hardly concludes all that I have dwelt upon today, just the major themes), I began to question the density of experience. It should come as no shock to those who know me or my work that I appreciate, almost more than anything, taking time with a thing. Thus slow movement. Thus long rehearsal processes and conversations. It is an effort to fully understand (which is an impossible ideal that I find to be worth reaching towards) or fully appreciate (which we so rarely do). I spend time with a thing, with a dance, with a person, with myself, in order to recognize and appreciate the nuance, the complexity, the uniqueness, and here discover true beauty. This was extremely important at the beginning of the day today. But I confess, as the day wore on, the uniqueness of each line, of each shadow, of each moment, became less important, less rare in a field of the similar. And yet it was still full of its own uniqueness and nuance . . . but in the dense experience of these moments, these lines, these shadows, the distinction became less clear, lost in the speed at which we were moving and the amount of experiences. I have to say I regret that. I regret even more that life can become that way as well.
That’s all the decompression for which I have time. Last performance of “This Season” tonight at Sullivant Hall Theatre at 8pm. I hope you can make it.
[EDIT]
I just wanted to offer a few images from our process to hopefully illuminate what I am sure seems a little esoteric. These photos are courtesy of Lindsay:
Filed under: inspiration | Tags: "About", alexander mcqueen, anthony gayton, fashion, flowers, monster partitur, winter concert
I feel the urge to write a “real” post, especially in the wake of “This Season,” the OSU Dance Winter Concert, my piece “About,” and the other work I’ve experienced (last show TONIGHT. If you have an opportunity, I highly recommend it). But it will have to wait. I am off to the Wexner for seven hours to begin work on “Monster Partitur,” about which I am very excited.
Until I write a “real post”, I offer you inspiration for today. These I love:
Alexander McQueen’s ready-to-wear 2009 line:
Images by Anthony Gayton, sent to me by my friend Maungsai. They made him think of my new piece “About”:
And finally, also from Maungsai, a tremendous joy in my week:
Hope you have a truly inspired day!
Filed under: creative process, Dance | Tags: anne carson, autobiography of red, butoh, monster partitur, red monster
I started work on a new solo today. I’m not sure what it is for as far as its final presentation, but it is loosely inspired by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, which is an interpretation of a myth written by the poet Stesichoros about a little red monster named Geryon who was killed by Herakles. The piece (I think) is a further exploration of shame and desire, themes that seem to make their way in and out of my work. It is thus far very Butoh driven, and has already brought me to my own edge of “grotesque.” After only one studio session, I’m both exhilarated and a little terrified. I may be asking more of myself than I can give (as a performer), but I’m also not sure it is the kind of piece that I want to translate onto another body, into another person. Beyond its literary inspiration, it is also a very personal question of my own monstrosity (it is synchonicitous that I am working on the “Monster Partitur” piece in two weeks . . . I don’t think this piece is asking the same questions or moving about the same subject, but there are common themes: monstrosity, the grotesque, the misshapen, etc.).
From Autobiography of Red:
”XI. RIGHT
Are there many little boys who think they are a
Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the
Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him
Joyfully”
I think I am questioning the grotesqueness of the body and of desire, the things that make me (us?) monster(s). Which is fitting into a larger question in my research concerning the recognition or construction of identity in/through movement, and how this process relates to dance as an art form.
I don’t think I have much more to say about this new piece yet, it’s still so new and raw and unexplained. But I just felt like I needed to write something about it, having just spent an hour in the studio working with it.
I never know who’s reading, but if you are reading and feel like writing, I’m curious when you have felt like a monster, and what made you feel that way. If you care to share.
