Filed under: art, Dance | Tags: autumn quartet, lindsey whittle, matt morris, sparklezilla
My brilliant and renowned art writer of a twin brother Matt Morris wrote an excellent and insightful piece about my recent project “Autumn Quartet” for Sparklezilla, an online blog-based zine published by Lindsey Whittle.
You can download the full issue here.
Matt’s article about the piece is p.23-25.
Filed under: creative process, research | Tags: autumn quartet, bebe miller, labanotation, Norah Zuniga-Shaw
As part of a course I am taking this quarter with Norah Zuniga-Shaw and Bebe Miller, I am working through an analytical excavation of the creative process of Autumn Quartet. There is such a density of material to consider. There is video documentation of the piece itself, the months and months of blogging here throughout the process, and two Labanotation scores that I wrote last quarter documenting the set movement phrases in the piece. A central consideration of this analysis is the identification of an “implied hero,” an ideal or perspective of “utopia” that is “worshipped/pursued” through the process of the piece. As of now I think what comes out most clearly are fundamental assumptions that if the body is the site of identity (I believe it is), and the body/identity is constantly participating in the performative reinscription of social normalities, and if physical practices/disciplines are methods in which this participation takes place, then dance and choreographic practices carry significant possibilities for the interruption/intervention/re-enforcement/reiteration/deconstruction/reconstruction/rethinking/etc. of those socially(bodily) regulated normalities. The investigation of this piece centered around issues of relational power, intimacy, trust, indeterminacy, and operating(moving) within/transgressing imposed regulatory systems (such as the algorithmic score for the piece).
In this post I wanted to share some of the collected materials through which I have been sorting.
First, there are the blog posts (anything tagged under “autumn quartet”). These posts serve as a chronological history of the lineage/evolution of ideas and my perceptions/understanding of the work. There is a sense in which this collection of writing in itself functions as an “analytical investigation.” My work with these writings have been seeking the meta-narratives in which the piece was participating. How does the language with which I discuss the piece (as a microcosm) reflect potential understandings (rooted in the performative bodily practice of the piece) for the macrocosm of societal regulatory structures, relationships, power(political) dynamics, and physical etiquette?
There are the hours and hours of video footage. Which I will not offer here. But what I can offer is a five minute “montage” video in which I identified “key” moments in the last few months of practice. It may or may not be definitive of the whole process, but it does create an interesting exchange between moments/choices/acts that occurred over months of time:
There are the Labanotation scores. These are the source materials that I have taken the least amount of time to analyze, but there is something in how they may reveal structures, implications for bodily deportment, assumptions concerning space/body, etc.:
As part of my analysis/thought process, I constructed a “mind map” for conceptual lineages within the process. I organized these in a Presi site that you can explore. Interesting to me are the networks of meaning, the paths that can be followed from one idea to the next, the relationship between “initial interests” and “emergent interests” and how they create circuits of meaning. The Presi interface is fairly simple. You can zoom in and out using the controls, move around the map by clicking-and-dragging, and move through an example of tracing a conceptual lineage on the map by clicking the forward arrow:
I also wanted to offer the original algorithm for the piece. Typed it is about a page and a half (originally three pages hand written). It is the regulatory structure for the piece, describing the situation in which we made choices and formulated each iteration of the piece.
This project will likely continue to evolve throughout the quarter, but these were my initial sources/findings. As they constitute both an evolution of a creative process and a new creative research model, it felt appropriate to share them here.
At some point I hope to find time to blog. I want to write about the experience (success) of the “Cuddle” piece last weekend in Cincinnati, and discuss a new process in which I am engaged excavating/analyzing the creative process of “Autumn Quartet.” During the time I have spent watching the various videos of practice sessions, re-reading the almost thirty pages of blogging I have done about the piece, and reviewing the notation of the movement material (I have notated both of the primary movement phrases for the dance in Labanotation), I generated this image. It is pulled from a short video I made that glimpses various moments of the piece that I experience as somewhat definitive. This image offers a similar, stationary glimpse. And it will have to suffice in lieu of a more involved post to come:
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 . . .
I am already exhausted today and the day has hardly started. I did not sleep well last night; around 4AM I stopped trying. I got out of bed and tried to get my mind off of things by doing household chores. Around 5AM I decided to shower, make coffee and “start” my day.
I can’t seem to get my mind to slow down and stop spinning. In my yoga class this morning my theme is revisiting the idea of “letting go” (the arching theme of the Bhagavad Gita, which we have read from this quarter). It seems apt here on the last day of class, the last week of the quarter, transitioning from one season to the next, winter to spring. It’s personal as well: last night was the last practice for Autumn Quartet. It has been a process for us since September, and now it is over. And as I laid in bed all night unable to sleep, I realize how much I am not ready to let go of it. I feel as if I am only now beginning to fully understand some of what we were doing, the potential significance of what was going on, and I feel torn between the desire to go deeper into those places, investigating their possibilities and implications, and the reality that at least within this project, this process, the unique constellation of the four of us, I will not have that opportunity. I keep feeling sensations similar to the cyclical reprocessing of an argument, when you keep thinking of what you could have said, what you “should” have said. It’s a sensation of, “Oh, but . . .” only to realize that there is no space in which to make such amelioration. It is now passed, “fixed” in memory (as much as memory can be considered fixed), and I find myself in the present, faced now with the work of letting go.
Because so much of how I have thought about this piece has been described here, it feels natural to share the perspectives that are occurring to me now, this week. The first has to do with intimacy, as demonstrated in the stripping and biting, and even in the source material from which those actions were inspired (the stripping coming from the season finale of season 2 of The L Word, the biting inspired by the craze of vampirism in popular media). It has something to do with a kind of situation in which intimacy occurs . . . situations in which we ask/desire others to be responsible for our intimacy. There’s something about the desire to be intimate and the construction of a situation in with the “other” is made responsible for that intimacy. When we strip for one another, it is a response. I have almost exclusively considered my situation in the role of the “angry gestures” which demands for someone else to strip. I’ve considered the dynamics of power of this construction (the person in “angry gestures” being stuck there until someone responds, the shift of power when someone does respond, and the negotiation of how far the person will strip), but I have not been explicit in my explication of the implicit desire in these roles. When I am in “angry gestures,” it is both compulsory (prescribed by the algorithm) but also motivated: I choose to initiate the phrase that brings me to that “terminal position” and at least in part that choice is fueled by desire: I want someone to undress for me. However, only recently have I become aware of my experience of desire in the other role, the one responding by stripping. On some level, there is the desire to undress, to be undressed by the actions of the person in “angry gestures” (I am the one removing my clothing, but they are the one’s demanding it; I am being undressed by the both of us). This is what I am recognizing as the construction of a situation in which the “other” is made responsible for the intimacy between us: I am undressing, but it is because I have put myself in a situation in which I am being asked (demanded, forcefully) to undress. I have a similar experience in waiting to be bitten. By bringing myself to that “terminal position” I am asking to be bitten. It is a dramatic transference of responsibility for intimacy, an explicit desire/request/demand to be bitten, to be inside someone else’s mouth. Of course, these are partially abstractions of my experience. The emotions involved are rarely as clear and unaffected as this: the piece is (was . . . I keep writing in the present tense, the piece is now over . . .) intrinsically interpersonal, our relationships form the piece (on some level) and the piece has formed our relationships (on some level). There were plenty of times, depending on how I was feeling about the other person (or perhaps more specifically how I was feeling about myself in relation to the other person) that I specifically did not want to strip for someone . . . but even that is not uncomplicated. If I truly didn’t want to engage in that situation, then I would not have; there was nothing in the score that demanded that I respond. If I did so, it was fueled by some degree of desire to do so, whether it was an act of care for the person in the terminal position, an intentional demonstration of doing what I did not want to do, or simply (none of this is simple) a unit in an ongoing dialogue of our relationship.
As with the themes of violence and sexuality that emerged in the piece, I think this dynamic of the transference of responsibility for intimacy has implications as a meta-commentary on dance practice itself, the “tell me what to do so that I can do it” way in which so much of dance training and choreographic process is organized. Again, this is an oversimplification of what is in practice a flowing tide of agency between dancer and choreographer, instructor and student, but still I think it gets at something, something like “enable me to do this thing that I desire to do.” This of course has personal implications as well.
I need you to make it possible for me to do what I desire to do.
I feel as if I am ranging dangerously close to a psychological self-analysis through the analysis of this piece, the structures I put in place and what they may elucidate about either the way in which I construct/conduct relationships or the way in which I want to construct/conduct relationships. An implicit respect for the agency of the other, a need to not overstep that agency, and in desiring, a request for the other to make it possible to act on that desire.
This week I also finally began to understand some of the choices I made regarding the sound score, what it might mean to go from “Poker Face” to “Bad Romance,” how the one might lead to the other (playing games and what playing games get you), and the appropriation of the text of various docu-porns.
But the day is moving on. The sun will be up soon, birds are already chirping (it must be spring after all), and I have to teach yoga. Continue to practice letting go.
Filed under: inspiration | Tags: autumn quartet, bad romance, butoh, lady gaga, trio a, yoshito ohno, yvonne rainer
Somewhere between here:
and here:
and here:
and here:
Where is that?