Inquiry Observation Analysis

A bunch of blind spiders creeping around

2012-01-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

Having a diverse cohort has its advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is that people from different backgrounds can see my work in a new light from a different perspective and offer me feedback from that perspective. A disadvantage is that they do not know as much as I do about my tools/genre, as I know little about theirs.

By having such surface knowledge about their media, I am not able to push them more in their direction. Yes, I can offer "lay" opinions in their work and shift their progress(maybe) but if we all are continually helping shift each other, will we be able to get anywhere or will be just cover the same ground erratically?

A bunch of blind spiders creeping around the same dusty shoe box? Milling about getting nowhere...

Does this continual redirection prevent us from progressing forward in relation to ourselves not just in relation to the opinion of an outsider?

Fear the Obvious

2011-12-17T14:46:00.000-08:00

Why do we fear the obvious? I would postulate that the current machine of contemporary performance bans the obvious. Too banal, this might be too obvious, too simple was a refrain I heard during the Erasmus Intensive. But obviousness is in everything. And everywhere. Everything ever performed on stage could be stated to be completely obvious. Unless you were looking at a life form composed of unknown elements that you have never encountered and you weren't sure you were asleep or you were on shrooms and all you know of reality was short chunks of time and your personality had dissolved and all you knew was that you were not in a vertical position and rings of colored morphing spinning shapes circled around you. This is what the Mayans saw you scream to yourself in your head. I understand everything. It is all so obvious and I love it. I see the leaves and I know that they are leaves and that they are the source of food and breath for the trees.

But then why do we fear the obvious? Is it because we are not satisfied with what we have now, with the information that our senses give us? Is our fear of the obvious our desire for God, for a mechanism that operates outside of our understanding and creates something satisfying? If I understand the operation, if it is obvious and apparent to me does the beauty disappear. If I understand the metabolic pathways that convert sugars to alcohol do I get any less drunk? If I know that looking at my daughter causes a surge of oxytocin in my body, do I love her any less? No. I love and embrace the obvious. I love the obviousness of sweating, curving, spiraling, weighted bodies. I love unison, I love shit my mind has gone blank and the inspiration for this composition that was improvised in the pattern of typing with thumbs has dried up. Maybe I should have stayed on the tram and gone with the flow, ride the current and improvise within the composition until it ran out.

The two paragraphs above are the answer to the questions that are below. The questions are from Boyan Manchev, a philosopher who has been working with us at the HZT. The short versions of my answers appear after each question. I read to above paragraphs to my cohorts while walking around the tables that we all were sitting at.

Do you fear that your work is obvious, that the meaning behind it will be too readily apparent? Fear people won't enjoy the obvious

Is fear ever a good thing? Yes for survival, but not for the artistic process/sharing

Are you improvising when composing? Do you formally define patterns of composition? -yes and yes

What I forgot to write/say is that the unobviousness is in the intention of the person creating the obvious events. It lies in ourselves when we try to understand that motives of another human being.

S.O.D.A Assessment 101 Feedback

2011-12-12T06:14:00.000-08:00

Below are the feedback discussion points I received from my performance of The Range of Acceptable Outcomes as part of my MA dance studies. The text for the piece is here and the framing statement for the piece is here. I added the numbers for clarity when referring to those specific points.

I am confused by points 5, 6, and 7. I thought a "sense of assuredness, certainty, demonstration of expertise"(point 5) was a good thing in a performer, especially one that is doing a performance lecture.

I also do not understand how "control...of material prohibits interaction". The piece, though a lecture, was also a performance. Interaction in the proscenium format is inherently limited. This could, though, refer to mental interaction. But then again, I refer to the lecture aspect of this piece. The point is to disseminate information is a clear(ish) manner that people can think about during or after the event of dissemination. Maybe I was so engaging that my performance inhibited all thought. I wish that were the case. With that skill I would take over the world!

And point 7 - "too few moments of fragility" Why would I want fragility in a performance lecture? It is not an emotional event, it is a lecture.

As those three points were on the list of discussion points and from my reading, negative, I assume that those were part of the reason I did not get a perfect score. Maybe if I had written a better framing statement, I would have received a better grade. But as those points refer to the performance aspect not to the relationship with the framing statement.

Also point 11 - the piece lost "momentum" and stayed in the "same frame of reference". I admit that my performing lost steam. A question of craft, that. But, as I understand the "frame of reference" that I was referring to - a lecture - always stays in the same frame. People sit behind a table, a desk and speak with the same tone and energy for the whole lecture. Every lecture I have seen so far during the S.O.D.A. program has been in the same energy and tone. Maybe the lecturers did not lose momentum, but they stayed in the same register.

Maybe with this, too, I should have been more explicit in my framing statement.

ahh, the learning curve...

Andrew Wass

Grade: 2.5 Very Good

Assessment 101 Feedback Discussion Points:

1- Appreciated humor and mental ability (word plays/associations)

-2 Are you aware of historical precedence of the 'style' of performance – the rhythmically structured

talking? Is this an attempt at “Leading audience indirectly?”

3- What is your context of investigation of zero point?

4- Categorization of parts brings attention to what is not there – experience of own choices not

evident

5- Sense of assuredness, certainty, demonstration of expertise makes presentation not easily

accessible (as audience we feel tricked, or that there was riddle we were meant to solve..)

6- Too much control in manipulation of material prohibits interaction

7- Too few moments of fragility

8- Improvisation vs choreography – in what way is this important?

9- Need to go into more ludic quality of text to enter into profound relation with these issues

10- Art is assertion of form – formal takes over – Form doesn't support gathered matters of concern

11- Performance loses momentum, stays in same register (no cracks) stays in same frame of reference

12- Need to sharpen own perceptive tools with how improvisation can be developed

13- Freedom and constraint – the relation of these two need to be more thoroughly investigate

14- Some clear questions presented in framing statement –for example: “how much audience needs to

know to enjoy the work?” “individual parts don't last but whole remains in memory”

Examiners: Prof. Rhys Martin, Prof. Kattrin Deufert, Litó Walkey

Protocols of Hierarchy

2011-12-12T05:10:00.000-08:00

From the New Yorker October 31st, 2011 review of Margin Call by David Denby -

"It's about corporate manners - the protocols of hierarchy, the difficulty of confronting flagrant habits of speculation of truth."

Makes me think of contemporary dance.

The protocols of hierarchy - famous people can get away with crap non-famous people would be booed off the stage for.

Speculation of truth - how nobody calls anybody on their so vague as to be meaningless and therefore inaccurate contextualisations of work.

A pessimistic view?

2011-12-12T04:26:00.001-08:00

Art is a creation of the creator's limitations.

Sol LeWitt

2011-12-11T14:34:00.000-08:00

According to Lord Polonius which statement is true?

1. Sol LeWitt wore heels.
2. Sol LeWitt was short.
3. Sol LeWitt had small feet.

please explain your reasoning

i, Ronnie

2011-12-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

Quoting Finley

2011-11-20T05:36:00.000-08:00

I wonder if the lead vocalist of L7 was quoting Karen Finley -

from Wikipedia -

During their performance at the 1992 English Reading Festival, the band experienced "technical difficulties with their audio equipment" and were forced to stall their set. Quickly, the rowdy crowd grew restless and began throwing mud onto the stage. In protest, lead vocalist Donita Sparks removed her tampon on-stage and threw it into the crowd yelling "Eat my used tampon, fuckers!". Sparks has remained unapologetic about the incident.^[1] This has been referred to as one of the "most unsanitary pieces of rock memorabilia in history".^[9]

The Erasmus Intensive

2011-11-04T02:14:00.000-07:00

The Erasmus Intensive

The Erasmus Intensive invervates misuses of sensitive manures taken from unassertive mines. In the ruminative sense the interim suaveness gained by the universe's inmates of this masseur intensive reinvents a misuse of me, a intrusiveness.

What is your reading of this paragraph?

2011-10-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

A fashion show is a dance performance with an emphasis on costume.

A concert is a dance performance with an emphasis on sound.

A construction site is a dance performance with emphasis on set.

A play is a dance performance with emphasis on text.

A fireworks show is a dance performance with emphasis on lighting.

A dance performance is a dance performance with emphasis on movement.

A presidential debate is a dance performance with emphasis on performer.

Assume Perfection

2011-10-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

I would guess that every famous painter, dancer, author, i.e., artist was derided as terrible by some authority or the authorities of his or her time when s/he first came on the scene. "Howl" by Ginsberg was thought to be horrible and people tried to have it banned. Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Elvis was hated by parents for his pelvis. The Rite of Spring caused a riot.

But now all of those artists are famous, lauded, canonized. The works haven't changed. The context changed.

Therefore, all work is worthy of praise and deserves to be canonized.

All that needs to be changed is the context.

Therefore, do whatever the %#!?+ you want and wait for everyone else to catch up.

And assume it's perfect!

2011-10-20T03:06:00.000-07:00

The port de bras and the coolest new lift you just learned in contact class have just as much to with contact improvisation as the fist bump. All three can be done while in contact and while improvising.

All three events are small bit of choreography that can be done inside the larger frame of contact improvisation.

Choreo, Memory, and Impro

2011-10-12T07:05:00.001-07:00

The more closely linked an event is to memory, the more choreographed it is. The less connected to memory, the more improvised it is.

Framing Statement

2011-10-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

Framing Statement
for
The Range of Acceptable Outcomes

I call this piece a performance lecture because I have definite ideas that I want to transmit. I call this piece a lecture performance because I want to inundate the audience with a lot of information, maybe some new ideas and I am not so concerned that people follow and remember every word, but more that the words wash over them, giving them more of a feeling than an idea.

In a more strictly movement oriented dance performance every movement is seen and rarely can the viewers remember or recreate the movements. The constant onslaught of movement in such a performance overwhelms me, not allowing me to digest each individual movement, leaving me with a general sense of the movement quality. The movements in relationship create a feeling, a sense, an experience that stays with the viewer. The individual parts are lost but the whole is understood.

In this piece, The Range of Acceptable Outcomes, I am trying to create a similar experience with the words. Not all of the ideas will be remembered or immediately understood, but hopefully a feeling, a sense, an experience will stay with the viewers.

Using the concepts of the Three Stages of Creation and The Six Performance Elements, I aimed to create an event to question the need to know the process of the creation of a work. How much does an audience need to know to enjoy the work? Does the audience need to know whether or not a piece is set or scored? Does the audience need to know what material the artist is sourcing?

The piece itself was created with a talk about "cracks" that I had with Jeanine last semester in mind. We were talking about one of my showings. For her the piece had no cracks, no way in for the audience. The inundation of information in The Range of Acceptable Outcomes - "facts" about the spectrum of choreography and improvisation, the asides, the stutters, the reference how this piece should be viewed, the quotes of Mary Overlie, Deborah Hay, and A Chorus Line - is an effort to create "cracks". Maybe cracks is the wrong term. Maybe tendrils or rhizomes is more appropriate. Some of the information in the inundation might trigger a thought or a question, leading the viewer down a pathway not directly connected to what is happening on stage. Poetry, if you will.

Text for The Range of Acceptable Outcomes

2011-10-12T00:02:00.000-07:00

Below is the text for my newest piece, The Range of Acceptable Outcomes, a lecture performance.

Please assume what you see here as zero. A zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero zero on a multi-dimensional co-ordinate system.

Let us say this costume is zero, not because it does not exist, but is zero in that we will measure the change in the costume during this performance from this point on. ΔCostume, if you will.

In fact performance can be seen as the measurement of the change, the Δ over time of the six performance elements. The one performance element that will not change in this performance is the performer.

Though that is debatable. I will get sweaty, some skin might rub off, I'll age a bit, though we will all age the same amount so that we can ignore that variable. You as audience might decide to watch something, someone else, authorizing a different performer for your performance.

But anyways, let's assume that everything you see here in this moment is the zero on a multidimensional grid.

Should I stop moving or be quiet?

No, as I will not stop reflecting light rays into your eyes, through the pupil, through the vitreus humor, activating your rods and cones, etc. on to your brain and as I will not stop being present in this spot.

Or yes, stop moving, talking and you close your eyes, cover your ears to create an even more truly empty zero point.

This piece, as I see, it is conceptually choreographed but executed improvisationally. To relate it to the three stages of creation, exploration, experimentation, and execution...

well, let me back up, what do I mean by "it"?

The word it is derived from the Middle and Old English word "hit". Hit is a neuter version of he. The neutral he that I refer to is the performance that I have, am, and will present to, for and with you today.

This piece is not completely improvised because I already know what realms, ideas, genres, and themes I will be presenting and roughly how I will execute those ideas. I will be using the human form, using gesture, movement, and sound to convey those ideas that have been predetermined by time spent exploring, one of the stages of creation.

Side note - it is easy to think that these stages happen in a linear fashion - first explore, then experiment, then execute. And you will be forgiven if that is how you see it.
For all of our talk of contemporary this and post that, we really haven't changed in 5000 years and all still want a refrigerator to keep our beers cold. Whether it's avocado or stainless steel in color, we just want a cold beer.

But let me back up again, as I feel that I would be remiss to not define what I mean by explore, experiment and execute.

Exploration is the search before the research. It is the hearsal before the rehearsal. It is the discovery of what exists around you, whether you are in the studio or sitting on the subway thinking about your project. It is the discovery/invention of what tools you will be using in your project.

Exploration is the, and this maybe more important, the rejection of tools. A work of art is more about what it is not than what it is. Granted all types of infinities exist some are just larger than others.

Experimentation is the second stage. Once the tools have been selected/created, their relationships can be investigated. How do the tools interact? What poetry, if you will, do they create?

The final stage is execution - when the work is presented before an audience. I did use the words second and final indicating a linear relationship to time. That is the more traditional relationship, or more choreographed. The further apart the moments of exploration, experimentation, and execution in time are, the more choreographed the work. The closer in time those moments are, the more improvised the work.

This brings me to the 6 performance elements - Costume, Lighting, Sound, Performer, Set, and Movement.

The lighting is choreographed, set or predetermined. It is this, what you see. I chose this because this piece is not about lighting. Because the decision about what lighting to use and the execution of the lighting are separated along the space/time spectrum, we can call the lighting choreographed. If I were to decide midstream to alter the lights or have someone do so with a lighting board or open and close the curtains, the lighting would be more improvised.

I could have choreographed someone to improvise the lights.

As of now the costuming is choreographed. I am wearing this. You could say that I am trying to represent the traditional contemporary western male caucasian urban outfit with slight preppy undertones.

What happens to the costume during the performance has yet to be seen. In the midst of the execution of the performance, I might decide, consciously or not, conspicuously or not, to explore and experiment with the costuming.

Sound - the sound of my voice and whatever parts of me happen to hit any surfaces with enough force to generate vibrating airwaves. The idea of what kind of sounds to use is choreographed as I have decided to not use saxophone or an iPod or a parrot. What has a greater distance between its execution and experimentation is what I will be saying. Therefore more choreographed.

How I will be saying what I will say will be determined in the moment. The three stages in very close proximity to each other. Therefore more improvised.

This brings me to the performance element of set. No set, unless you count the empty stage we have here as a set.

But, I could create a change of set by changing the location of my performance. Going outside for example, or entering the audience. Maybe entering the storage closet and continuing there. For all intents and purposes the set is set. The execution, exploration, and experimentation stages for set all have a different location along the space/time continuum. Set, interestingly enough, is an anagram of est.

Movement - choreographed as in I can only do what my teachers have taught me. The times of movement exploration, execution and experimentation are different, therefore I consider the movement to be choreographed. I consider, though, the movement in this piece to be improvised within that choreographed frame.

I do not know exactly where I will be, when I will be there, what level I will be at, what body parts will be still, which moving, etc. During the execution of this piece today, now...now is here is harmony, something I do, something I see in an audience member, an observer/participant, though more on the observer end, will probably trigger a question. Will open up an avenue for exploration. I then might begin experimenting with the variables discovered in that exploration.

But as you are witnessing/participating/observing my explorations and experimentations, could we not then say that it is at the same an execution also, collapsing all three stages of creation into a singularity? A singular moment in which what I am doing is what you are seeing, when we are discovering the same thing at the same time. We merge becoming essentially one, but opposite sides of that one singular sensation - improvisation.

Coming back to costume. What ΔCostume have we seen thus far? How are the pants? The shirt? The tie.

Talk about a loaded image.

The inherent meaning. Yes, the inherent meaning. We all carry our inherent meanings around with us for others to read us and how we read others. Biases and stereotypes. Our aesthetic biases.

Two performers on stage (and this relates to the performance variable of performer): two men - discord; many men - war; one male one female - love; two females - a man is bad; many females - war is bad; two females and a man love triangle and he is an ass and one chick's a bitch; two males and one female she is a slut, he is an ass and the other guy can't get it up; two heterosexual couples and a couch - an Arthur Miller play. Three couples and a couch - an American sitcom. Four couples, a large tunnel made of brown sticks, a dog house and a table...

But as you have not seen the process and the time that went into making this piece, you can not for certain say which performance elements fall where when in relation to the stages of creation. Whether or not it was choreographed or improvised. Does it matter?

The Range of Acceptable Outcomes

2011-10-10T03:05:00.000-07:00

another explanation of the difference between impro and choreo

Experimentationalistic Dance

2011-10-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

Experimentation is the sending before the presenting. Pre...before, or occurring before in time...experimenting is the sending before the before sending...do a little algebra and sending equals sending. There proven, put a fork in it. We're done here. Where is that avocado with the beer in it?!?

Experimentation is also the setting up, the creation of known conditions, knowing what elements you have in play and setting them free. Improvisation is experimentation, the only real form of experimental work. If someone has set/created/ossified something, they are not experimenting in their work. Unless of course they are forcing the experiment into/upon the viewer. Create something known, a choreography, for lack of a better word send it before an audience or present it to an audience, a somewhat known entity (No, you say...really...don't you keep seeing the same people at shows and everyone is pretty much dressed alike...). The experiment is then what happens between those two entities. The problem with many choreographers who call their work experimental is that they don't realize that their work isn't, it's just trendy and using the adjective du jour. It would actually be experimental if they were thinking of their relationship to the audience.

Contact Improvisation gets big!

2011-09-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

In the not so distant future, within 5 years I'd say, a contact improvisation duet will happen on a stage. It will receive great accolades and fanfare. Critics and arty folks with indeterminate European accents and thick black framed glasses will talk about the brilliance of the choreographer, how cutting edge and brilliant she or he is. The choreographer will be praised for discovering new ways of movement, and entering uncharted waters of aesthetics challenging what people think of as dance.

But, the piece will not be labeled as contact. Improvised, yes, as that is becoming more the trend here in Europe on the big money stages. And the choreographer will personally not have done contact improvisation. The dancers, maybe. Probably a few classes. I doubt that a really famous and funded choreographer would know any people who are really good at contact improvisation, that bastard child of the dance art world, and would have to use ballet-gone-release dancers who can partner.

Using language riddled with isms and dead French thinkers names, this choreographer will bring the tools of CI into the brighter wider better funded stage. Using words ending with "icity" and words with "post", "pre", and "neo" suffixes, the choreographer will dazzle us and amaze us with a new dance frontier.

Will it be Forsythe, or Le Roy? Bel, maybe. How about Wade? Sehgal?

National Debts

2011-09-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

The population of Germany according to the CIA is 81,471,834 (July 2011 est.)
The national debt of Germany is € 1,895,561,620,931 according to nationaldebtclocks.com

The population of the United States according to the CIA is 313,232,044 (July 2011 est.)
The national debt of the United States is $ 15,091,192,666,470, also according to national debt clocks.com.

Dividing the debt by the population gives us a €23,266.47/German debt and a $48,178.96/American debt. Converting the Euros to dollars with an exchange rate of €1=$1.36, gives us $31,642.40.

This gives us a difference of $16,536.56, that each American owes MORE to whomever than each German owes.

What have you gotten for your $16,536.56?

Hmmm...

2011-09-11T04:13:00.001-07:00

Ok last attempt before the zoo.

One more try

2011-09-11T04:10:00.001-07:00

this?!

2011-09-11T03:56:00.001-07:00

Now, maybe both icons will be there...

Maybe this one!?!

2011-09-11T03:51:00.001-07:00

Here goes nothing...

2011-09-11T03:45:00.001-07:00

Hmm...that last one didn't work maybe this one will...

Twitter Widgetgreat free widgetsWidgetboxMore info

Fiddling

2011-09-11T03:42:00.001-07:00

Currently fiddling with getting twitter and FB share links to be in every blog posting without having to insert the code every time. I think I have the twitter code in, but not the FB one yet. Let's see.

Also realizing that the iPad kinda sucks for content creation.

Not post anything only pre

2011-09-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

From an email to a friend - (with some additions)

I think that we are not "post" anything, only "pre" what is coming down the pike. I think that "post" implies that whatever we are past, what tools, logics, and aesthetics we explored in the past are over and no longer relevant. But love stories are not gone. Dances about the human condition are still being made. They are not being created with Graham technique, but with release, CI influenced deconstructed ballet choreography. So why if the logic(topic) of the piece is basically the same, but the tool used is post - or contemporary we do not call the piece modern? What criteria are we using to define work - the tools used, the logic expressed, or the aesthetic used?

Every age, -ism, and ide[a]logy that is created doesn't die out but becomes part of the available pallate(sp?) palette, incorporated in to what people have and can use, expanding the reified world.

We all get hung up in the details as opposed to viewing the relationships among the details. Heidegger, after all, said that existence is defined by relationship to.

The Conservative Rhetoric

2011-09-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

Republicans have historically borrowed more than Democrats.

Who cares...Gay people shouldn't marry.

Our bridges, roads and other infrastructure are crumbling.

Who cares...Marriage is for only a man and a woman.

Our schools are crap and America is losing its competitive edge.

Who cares...Gay people are ruining marriage.

The polar ice caps are melting and the Earth is heating up.

Who cares...Gay people are brainwashing our children.

The so called "death tax" only affects people who actually have money.

Who cares...Gay people are causing the breakdown of the American family.

The politicians you keep voting for keep screwing you.

Who cares...Gay people shouldn't adopt.

We are running out of antibiotics.

Who cares...Gay people shouldn't be able to visit their partners in a hospital.

Our oceans are overfished.

Who cares...Gay people invented AIDS.

Solar, wind, and wave energy sources could be completely viable if we invested in them.

Who cares...Gay people ruined marriage.

Why are we still subsidizing the profitable oil companies?

Who cares...Gay people ruined marriage.

etc.

The fear of being Understood

2011-09-08T02:29:00.000-07:00

"As soon as someone says to me that they understood my performance, I become instantly discouraged." —Kazuo Ohno

This quote to me exemplifies what is wrong with most dance. Once it, the dance, the art is understood, the artist fears that it is destroyed. Why does understanding something destroy it? I remember once hearing a friend say that she didn't want to know too much. How can we ever know too much? The more we learn the more we learn how much we do not know. The more we learn about astronomy, the more we learn that there is an almost number of stars, nebula, planets out there to investigate. The more words we learn, the more questions we can formulate.

Ohno's quote makes me thing of the post I wrote recently about formulaic vs. poetic. It also reminds me of a quote I heard once but can't find anywhere about philosophers. Something like the greatest fear philosophers have is that they will be understood.

I think people fear being understood because they themselves are actually hiding behind a mask, a curtain. Like the Wizard of Oz. Yes, they can do what they do and do it well. But they want a bigger more grandiose image of themselves for people to see so that others will be impressed and so that they do not have to explain themselves, because that can be arduous and (cynically) they really can not articulate what they are doing/thinking/feeling. The next time you hear someone say that something was good or bad ask him or her to articulate why. Dollars to donuts, s/he will not be able to do so.

Why should we laboriously articulate our thoughts, when we can just express them emotionally (wrapped and bundled in signs, signifiers, etc) in a shorthand that leaves room for interpretation? If expressed clearly, we might find out clearly, that there isn't as much there as we would like there to be.

The imagination after all is more powerful, than...

Formulaic vs. Poetic

2011-09-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

The difference between the poetic and the formulaic is that you haven't figured out the formula for the poetic yet.

Abstract Industrialism

2011-09-02T15:49:00.000-07:00

Watching my 6 month old daughter and how busy she is when she is awake made me think of the term abstract industrialism. Similar to abstract expressionism, abstract. Is there an abstract realism? Anyways. M. is usually quite busy, moving herself, vocalizing, grabbing things, putting her limbs and other objects in her mouth. Very industrious she is as babies if her age are.

Industrious - working energetically and devotedly; hard-working; diligent: an industrious person.

Wha she is trying to do, what her intentions are. I see that she has the book and is banging it. Is that all she is doing? Maybe that is all she is doing and I shouldn't be trying to read more into her actions. (see post about seeing vs. imagining)

Maybe what she is doing is realistic industrialism, and my confusion about her intentions makes it abstract. Hitting a book while shouting "babababababab" isn't abstract. It is hitting a book while shouting "babababababab". Nothing unclear there.

Which then makes me unsure about my original idea for this post. Which was - most improvisational performances are good examples of abstract industrialism. A lot is going on but no one really knows why. But maybe the abstraction comes from wanting to see more than there is

Hmmm must think about this more.

Emotional Improvisation

2011-08-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

From an article on the movie "The Rise of the Planet of the Apes" in the most recent New Yorker:

"If invention, wild and free, yet tied to emotion and philosophical speculation, is given a chance, digital filmmaking could have a more brilliant future than any we can now imagine."

Replace the word invention with improvisation and digital filmmaking with performance:

If improvisation, wild and free, yet tied to emotion and philosophical speculation, is given a chance, performance could have a more brilliant future than any we can now imagine.

Taking the form of one idea and replacing some of it's parts can lead to interesting thoughts. Improvisation, as it is mostly taught and perceived, is about being wild and free. Emotion, as I read it here, is not the happy or sad generic reading of it, but the faster processing aspect of the human mind. An emotion is really a bundling of thoughts into one package. For some people, such as myself, those packages take a while to unpack. But I digress.

Ensemble Thinking is an improvisation based modality that uses the conscious mind to train the emotional mind. When on stage, a performer trained in E.T. doesn't have to think about where the hotspot is, but feels it allowing him or her to more quickly respond. E.T. allows the improvising performer to be more emotional about the performance.

Improvisation can benefit from more philosophical speculation - why are we improvising, when are we setting the number of performers, the costumes, the performance space and time, but not setting the spatial and kinespheric movements? What are we trying to convey, reveal to the audience? What do we want them to walk away with? Why should they give a damn? Is improvisation the means or an end?

The DODOcase

2011-08-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

I got a DODOcase for our iPad2. The thing is beautiful. It holds the Pad well, covers it completely and provides more impact protection than the tighter rubber/plastic cases available at the Apple stores and kiosks in malls. I have not done a test, but that is my guess.

When we first had the iPad2, I dropped it as I had gotten used to the magnetic flip cover and was using it as a grip to hold the pad while filming my daughter in my mother's lap. A quick move later and the pad was face down on the edge of the carpet between the dining room and kitchen, the upper left corner cracked and shedding glass. Don't get that cover from the Apple store. But go there if you drop you iPad. They might replace it for free!!

So three days and $65 later, my iPad2 is in a DODOcase. I try to take a picture...no go. Have to use the camera on the front side or pop out the pad. Also to change to volume, flip the mute switch, or turn off the Pad is not so easy. The curves in the bamboo are not generous enough and I have a not easy time accessing those buttons.

I wrote to DODOcase about the camera issue and button issue: Hi Dodo,

Was I accidentally sent an iPod 1 case? There is no hole or window for the camera on the back of the case and I have a hard time changing the volume or flipping the switch on the left side. The case looks good and protects my pad well, but I am surprised that there is no camera hole and that the side buttons are hard to access. Guess I should have read the description better before purchasing.

Andrew

This is their response: Hi Andrew,
After much deliberation the DODOcase design team decided that we did not want to compromise the simple and classic design of the DODOcase by poking holes in it. The DODOcase for iPad 2 does NOT have a cut out so that you can use the rear facing camera while in the case.

We think that in general the rear camera will be best used outside the case. The DODOcase is an easy in easy out case and on the occasion that you would want to use the rear facing camera it is easy enough to remove the iPad from the case. Folio style cases (i.e. the DODOcase) do not easily lend themselves to rear camera use because the front cover is designed to flip all the way back and would still obscure the rear camera even with a camera hole in the back cover.

Thanks!

Team DODOcase

Are they serious!?! Having a hole in the backside would not compromise the design. Punch a whole in it and rivet the hole so the material doesn't fray. And it would be quite easy to take a picture holding the flap at a 90 degree angle so as not to cover the lens. The DODOcase is not an easy in easy out case. I can see in just the few times that I have taken the iPad2 out of the case how the rubber corner pieces that hold the pad in are coming up. Doing that too much, or as much as I would like to USE THE CAMERA ON MY IPAD, will loosen the rubber corner pieces.

The designers of the DODOcase assumed too much about how the case would be used.

The DODOcase might have been great for the first iPad, but it is limiting the user experience with iPad2.

Gender in Dance

2011-08-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

It has been said many times.

"oh, it's a man dance."

2 guys on stage, it's a man dance. Why, when the dance consists of all women (and 99% of dances made consist of all women), we do not say "Oh, it's a woman dance"?

Well, precisely because 99% of dances made consist of all women. Therefore a dance, by default, is a woman dance. So when a dance has all men or even a slight majority of men, it becomes a "man dance".

Heard this just the other day. In a group of what I thought were contemporary post whatever artists. But I guess not. They are still stuck on gender, on viewing a dance through the lens of gender. Dancers aren't bodies, creating shapes in space/time in relation to other, but men and women creating shapes in space/time. Have we not progressed beyond Martha Graham?

Or have the tools just changed but the story is still the same?

PS
Graham = Bausch = Stuart

Maybe...maybe not

2011-08-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

Why do we say that?

If it, the situation might happen then it also might not happen. We don't need to say both "maybe" and "maybe not".

Save your breath.

Pick one.

Coffee and Orangutans

2011-08-09T22:00:00.001-07:00

Just rolled into the Microtel Inns & Suites in Klamath Falls, OR. It is a gorgeous drive from Portland. Green, green, green, and not many other vehicles. Also the most remote wifi - 10 miles west of Oakridge, OR, on the 58.

Not sure how this popped into my mind, maybe because I was in Portland earlier today and had the best cup of ever at a Stumptown. If you don't know what a Stumptown is, think Starbucks before it went national. We bought some friends of ours some beans from the Stumptown Roasters cafe. Fair-trade they are labeled.

Oh, I remember what made me think of all this. Sitting in our gas guzzling F-150 truck in the parking lot of a Safeway. Seeing how far apart all the shops, restaurants,and homes, how large all the vehicles are, how fat everyone is, seeing how large the grocery store is, made me realize that the American way of life is unsustainable.

The great coffee my wife and I enjoyed in Portland,while fair trade, was grown in another country. How did the beans get to Portland? Were they flown there? Was It on a ship? On the backs of donkey led to the great Northwest by Juan Valdez? For all of our crunchy goodness and wanting to keep the world for our children, should we even be drinking coffee?

And then from the Safeway, my wife purchased some gluten free crackers. Very exciting to find those. As I was coming back up to the room from the truck with the crackers, I took a look at the ingredients. Palm oil is one of the ingredients. Palm oil, in case you didn't know, is, or rather the growing of trees for palm oil, is leading to the destruction of orangutan habitat.

You just can't win

The Stage is a Test Tube

2011-08-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

Imagine, if you will, a Petrie dish or a test tube. A test tube is a glass tube, closed at one end. Usually the end is rounded and the opposite end has a slight lip around the opening.

In a lab a test tube can be used many times. Many different reagents are added to the test tube; experiments are carried out. Acids and bases, metals. Water is split into hydrogen and oxygen; nylon is created. A vast array of experiments can be carried out in a single test tube.

If the experimenters are good and follow a strict protocol, they clean the test tube out each time after their experiments. This is done so that the reagents and results from the previous experiments do not affect the following experiments.

Yes, the information learned from previous experiments informs how the experimenters view the results of their next experiments. Yes, the previous experiments will affect what experiments are later run. Yes, what experiments run in other test tubes in other labs affects through the knowledge of the experimenters what happens in said test tube. But the experiment itself is not affected by the reagents of the previous experiments.

The empty performance space is a test tube. It is a blank space that can be a place to run experiments. What has happened in the space before, in other test tubes in other labs, does not have to affect what will happen next in the space. What has come before affects what will come next only in the minds of the experimenters - the performers and audience.

As performers, creators, artists, we need to recognize that a blank slate is possible. If we can clean out a test tube, a petrie dish, wipe a chalk board clean, we can also start with a blank(referenceless) performance space.

What do you see?

2011-07-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

This has been a question used in the past couple weeks of my MA course at the Uferstudios here in Berlin.

(please note the use of the word here, as I am in Berlin. This attention to detail is similar to the uses of come and go & of take and bring that are too frequently misused. )

For the past couple weeks, we have been doing an exercise of Susan Rethorst's , who maybe got it from Simone Forti. Who knows where it really came from, but I am sure people have consciously arranged objects in space for millennia. Did an exercise once with Mary Overlie in which we arranged white beans. The focus of that exercise was spatial arrangement. The focus of the Forti/Rethorst/Durning is quick decision making. (does it ever seem like so much of dance creation training is helping dancers get over their @#$%?!?)

Anyways, the exercise progressed from objects to people to solos. Each of us worked on something for 30 minutes (the exact time length varied each round). We watched each person writing down what we saw the person do. After everyone had presented, let's not say performed because there is just too much baggage around that word, we read what we had written about each person.

Somethings I wrote - read from notebook, put notebook down, close eyes, open eyes, place downstage heel to arch of other foot...

Something I heard - a heroin addict, deliciously slipping, time expanding...

After the feedbacks, I felt confused. Were we supposed to write what we saw or what what we saw made us think of? For the next couple weeks, we did variations of this exercise with a new visiting artist. The feedback was stated to be of two different kinds - what you saw and then what it made you think of.

Good, I can roll with that. But then when the feedback happened, both kinds were mingled, eventually the what you saw losing a significant share of the airtime to what it made you think of.

Talking in the Ufer Cantine with my cohorts - (paraphrasing not quoting)
"When you see a man and a woman on stage, you don't immediately think love story"
"No, I see a man and woman on stage."

I am baffled as to why in our post-modern contemporary age we would still automatically see love story. Am I supposed to see war automatically when I see two men on stage? No matter what age we say we are in, we all still have the same expectations. Love songs are still written and will always be written. The only difference will be the instruments and the notes.

But back to seeing...It took me a while to understand, but what everybody else mean by "what do you see?" is "what do you think of when you see..." And this is very dangerous territory. Just because you think something does not mean it is there.

Of course when I see stuff, it makes me think of other things. But when I am in a studio and I see someone sitting slumped against the wall, I see someone sitting slumped against the wall. I don't see a heroin addict, or a depressed business man, or swirls of pain an agony. I might think of those situations or scenarios, but I don't see them.

Are we not trying to be clear with our language and context in this MA program?

During the feedback after my showing on Monday, I brought up this issue and not understanding how people were seeing. This lead to a discussion of poetry...hmm not remembering so well, the connection to what I am thinking of...

but here is the thought anyways -

the need for the poetic, the dissatisfaction with what is there is the same need that has given rise to religion. People want mystery, people want there to be stuff going on behind the curtain and then they want to forget about the curtain.

People want to see what they imagine

Don't get me wrong. I want people to imagine whatever they want. But when we say that we are going to write what we see, let's do that. And then when we saw, we are going to write what what we see makes us think of, let's do that.

there was something else I wanted to write but I forget what it was.

And here is quote of a quote to provide some triangulation and provide some sand to build this house on -
'Ulmer affirms that Beuy's objects are "...both what they are and stimulation for the general processes of memory and imagination."'

We should not confuse the two.

Night of Fire

2011-07-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

How long before Xavier Le Roy puts this on stage?

Formulaic Film

2011-07-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's just like 300!

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/immortals/

change the bad guy, change the good guy...isn't this Star Wars all over again? Which was The Hidden Fortress all over again which was...

formulaic, yes...but wasn't also Picasso? He just had time to develop multiple formulas

ps
I wonder how long these links will last.

pps

here is a photo of my current writing process

Another definition of choreo and impro

2011-07-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

Choreography and improvisation are both a set of rules to follow during a performance.

One is usually a longer more detailed set; the other is shorter.

One has a wide range of acceptable outcomes; the other has fewer.

Dance is a Visual Art

2011-07-07T13:39:00.001-07:00

Here are some links to compositional ideas for painting and photography that I think apply to dance. Especially in relation to the instant choreo composition modality of Ensemble Thinking.

The Rabatment of the Rectangle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabatment_of_the_rectangle

The Rule of Thirds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds

The Rule of Odds
http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/11475/what-is-the-rule-of-odds

Placement of Elements
http://painting.about.com/od/composition/ss/composition-painting-elements.htm

The Painting's Secret Geometry
http://www.francois-murez.com/composition%20en.htm

p.s.
if dance is a visual art, why are the people who watch it called an audience?

2011-06-19T07:42:00.001-07:00

Arts, as they descend into entertainment, cling to seriousness and sadness as a means of validation. This leads to dismissal of humor as less valid because it highlights the lack of valence of the performing arts as affecting any real change.

Descend into entertainment can also be read as becoming a commodity; appropriated by the capitalist market.

Tour vs. Make

2011-06-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

Hot off the mental press, coming at you live. As I ponder more and more of late about what to do in life, what path to follow or forge, all due to grad school and the birth of my first child, I think now about a binary of touring vs. making work. Is it even a binary? All these thoughts could be because I am just lazy and don't want to do the work of getting my work out there. Writing grants, making packets, sending them out, schmoozing with presenters is a lot of work. Work that scares me. Maybe scares me is the wrong word.

I see other artists who tour and get presented and looking at their work, I don't understand why they were presented, why the director of theater X gave them a 6 month residency. Must be in the documentation the artist presented, or maybe the kind of work s/he does is more easily marketable. Could be that my work is just not interesting. Don't get bitter, don't get bitter, don't get bitter.

And grad school, context, context, context. Shit in on context smell, a different context helps make food. So maybe I need to rewrite all my performance blurbs so the context is sexier. And then write the grants, make the packets, and hound the presenters. But for whom am I making the work? Because I work in a time based medium that can be viewed as performative, does that mean the work is made for other people? How many painters make work for themselves, and have studios full of canvasses not meant for general consumption?

And now a child! What a wonderful bundle of joy and confusion. Her laughter, smiles and cries make everything, all my frustrations disappear. But then they come back. Provide, provide, provide...that is what a parent, a father is supposed to do. Hack away at performing, etc to make money to provide. But then touring could conflict with schooling. School is still a couple years off yet.

So, do I finish this schooling, get my MA then jump out of the artistic realm into the academic realm to get health insurance, income to provide? Just as much chance of getting a big grant. Both require applications and schmoozing.

Maybe this is all justification for laziness. Artistic high road and all that. Even now all these thoughts/emotions I don't want to bother to craft into a polished blog post. But isn't this more just for me as a place to vent?

No one reads this anyways...

waaah
waaah
waaah

What is it?

2011-05-24T07:48:00.000-07:00

Flo eminates from the kitchen.
Grub is collated frantically.
Foxy lemmings kite checks.
Worst Oma eliminates four tiny kittens.
Bald Mary stems collegial fraternizing.
The rebar knows kind chicks.
A kangaroo taps foul Tibetan koans.
The wild bran challah collective failed.
We all got tan in Kay's chalet.
The tilted atrium failed the kinetic colloquial festival king's child.

Lists

2011-05-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

1. Is
2. This
3. A
4. List

The Need for Context

2011-05-22T01:43:00.000-07:00

The need for contextualization exists because humans can not free themselves from the good-bad binary. That being said, contextualization is also needed because we are now in a post-disciplinary moment. How long that moment will last is another question.

Because we are in a post disciplinary time and still are saddled with the evaluative binary, we need contextualization to help us determine where a given work of art/documentation/performance/representation lies on that spectrum. For better or worse, we are no longer saddled (not really but roll with it) with the evaluative binaries of disciplines, which are themselves shorthands for contextualization.

Osama

2011-05-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

Hmm...Osama is now dead and his body was dumped out to see. Of course, the U.S. military observed strict Islamic protocol before they dumped his body. So as not to enrage anyone. When are the photos of the Navy Seals or Delta Force or whoever caught him going to surface? The photos with the soldiers posing with empty beer cans, hot dogs and Osama's dead body?

That question aside, I think it is quite remarkable that the US found him without co-operation by the Pakistani government. We give them billions every year, his compound was within spitting distance of a Pakistani military base. What I bet happened is that the Pakistani government co-operated fully with the understanding that the US government would make a big stink about how they received no co-operation. That way the Pakistani government gets full deniability(sp?) and the US gets Osama. A win-win situation. Yes, there have been some deaths due to do protests/retaliations by Osama supporters.

But imagine how much worse it would have been if the Pakistani government had publicly supported his capture and been excited by his death?

Also, what happened to due process of law and trial by a jury of peers? Or are those not unalienable self-evident rights...?

John Cleese on Terrorism

2011-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved."

Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let's get the Bastards." They don't have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 400 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide." The only two higher levels in France are "Collaborate" and "Surrender." The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France's white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country's military capability.

Italy has increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing." Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

The Germans have increased their alert state from "Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs." They also have two higher levels: "Invade a Neighbor" and "Lose."

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual; the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Australia, meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No worries" to "She'll be alright, Mate." Three more escalation levels remain: "Crikey!", "I think we'll need to cancel the barbie this weekend" and "The barbie is cancelled." So far no situation has ever warranted use of the final escalation level.

There is no bad art. Only bad craft.

2011-05-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

Recently tweeted that. It is another iteration of the burrito/taco/shoe/title idea.

Craft as defined by dictionary.com is - an occupation requiring special skill. It is also a verb defined as - to make or manufacture.

Craft, then, we could say is to make or manufacture something requiring a special skill.

Art, coming from the Latin ars, means craftmanship. But why go back to the roots of the words. Useful? Maybe, but the meaning and relationships to those meanings change with fashions and trends of the day. (insert appropriate dead French philosopher quote here).

I prefer to use my relationship to these words now. Art and artificial, similar, no? For me art is anything that is intentionally created, something that did not already exist in nature. Nature is the opposite of art (insert dead German philosopher quote here). To create art, all one has to do is something, anything.

Craft, on the other hand, has a set of skills and expectations. To craft a chair from walnut wood and leather requires a certain set of skills - cutting, measuring, sanding, staining - that must be executed in order to create an object that can fulfill a certain function. In this case, someone has to be able to sit in the chair. If the chair cannot fulfill this expectation - it breaks, hurts the person sitting in it, isn't comfortable - it is not a very good chair.

Another layer of craft, the visual component, then, comes into question. Does the viewer like the way the chair looks.

Hmm...just had the thought that craft is many layers of either/or statements.

Art, on the other hand, is a henna tattoo for an Indian wedding. Yes, and doesn't have the same level of either/ors. In relation to dance, many dancers are more craftspeople. They spend many hours trying to get a specific sequence down pat. They are not creating anything new, they are not creating anything artificial, but crafting, getting the either/or statements as correct as possible. They are simultaneously creating and defining an infinite number of either/or statements.

Art happens before craft. Only down the road, as time passes, does craft come into being.

Fussy Dance

2011-04-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

Definitions of C and I

2011-03-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

Choreography:
That which has a higher degree of reproducibilty a larger percentage of the time.

Improvisation:
That which has a lower degree of reproducibility a smaller percentage of the time.

Sidewalks

2011-01-27T05:34:00.000-08:00

I had the thought yesterday or maybe it was the day before that. Sidewalks, their width and culture of a city.

My basic thought is that the wider the sidewalks in a city, the more interesting the city. New York and Berlin have wide sidewalks and are very interesting cities. San Francisco is also an interesting city and the sidewalks are not as wide as Berlin's and New York's. This follows as San Francisco is not as interesting as either of this cities.

Austin, though, has terrible sidewalks. At least the parts I have visited. In one area, the sidewalks disappeared and my wife and I were almost hit by a car. Other parts of Austin that I visited were quite interesting.

This small modicum of data made me change my hypothesis to the amount of foot traffic. The more foot traffic a city or section of a city has, the more interesting that city or city section is. People like to look at each other, no? The most popular shows have little activity in them and it's just people sitting around talking, giving the viewers plenty of time to just stare at other people.

Foot traffic, it's all about the foot traffic. The more a city has of it, the more interesting it will be. The more interesting a city is, the more people will flock to it. The more people flock to it...you get the idea

Federal Oversight

2011-01-24T09:48:00.000-08:00

I am not sure about the Republican argument against Obama's socialist takeover/makeover of healthcare in the United States, something about how the Constitution doesn't allow for the Federal Government to require people to have health insurance.

SIDE NOTE - Please check what the Constitution has to say about marijuana (nothing, yes?) and the internet (nothing).

And from what I know, the Federal Government has the right to oversee and regulate businesses that cross state lines. I don't think there is a national health care commission. There is a person who oversees insurance in California. Maybe other states have such an office.

I can't imagine that the health care in any state does not cross state lines in many ways. The doctors are educated in another state. The test tubes, pipettes and needles are probably made in China. All the diagnostic equipment - MRIs, Ultrasounds etcs - if not made in another state of the Union or Germany are probably made in China. The billing services that the health insurance companies use probably are involved in more than one company and one state. The patients who get sick are crossing state lines bringing illness home from other states. Food, a known vehicle of pathogens (spinach, eggs to name a couple of recent vectors) crosses many states lines.

With all of this interstate business involved in the business of health care, shouldn't the Feds be involved to make sure it all runs smoothly? Maybe they already are, but if so, they sure are doing a crappy job.

Critique of piece I saw during the S.O.D.A. audition

2011-01-23T08:05:00.000-08:00

In order to relate what I saw without being descriptive I will offer a short list of whats that I saw:
1. a tattoo
2. a cube
3. black tape
4. gestures
5. white tape
6. a hypodermic needle
7. blood

My feedback about the piece would be to simplify. The piece has at least three different pieces in it - Man with Cube, Man with Tape and Man with Needle. He should pick one of them and investigate it more deeply. I would suggest that he keep his manipulation of the tape to a minimum and not rearrange the tape once it is on the wall. Also I would suggest that the black tape movement section occur further downstage facing the audience. The tape is already abstract and geometric and his focal and spatial choices re-enforced that. Maybe it was his intention to replicate the impersonal nature of the tape. But what I saw was more of a coping mechanism than an artistic choice.

Black tape plus movement plus white tape plus the downstage space plus low level movement plus text plus needle plus blood. Eight dimensions in all. Is this piece, then, about the progression towards the multidimensional, the ultra dimensional he said he was seeking? I do not know. I can not say whether or not this piece worked as I do not know what he was trying to achieve. I can say whether or not I liked the piece. I did not. But whether or not I liked it is of little importance. I can say what it made me think of. The use of the cube made me think of Donald Judd. The black tape pictographs on the white wall made me think of Lawrence Wiener and Robert Motherwell. The piercing of the skin made me think of Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.

Any of these references, though, is at best a stretch and more present in my perception of the performance than in Riccardo’s presentation of the piece. This brings up the question of what does an audience need to know about the work. Do we need to know what the artist knows? Do we need to have the same frame of reference? Do we need those references to get out of the piece what the artist put into the piece? Is it important for the viewers to get what the artist is saying? Or is the artist creating something for us the respond to with our own references?

Despite not liking it, I feel that of the pieces I saw yesterday this piece had the richest vocabulary to be investigated. And I intend on taking his Man with Tape piece and investigating it further.

Critique for SODA application

2011-01-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

Below is a reworked critique of a dance piece I saw in 2009. This was part of my application for the SODA program here in Berlin. Here is the "original"

Accords by Thomas Hauert/Zoo, which I saw last summer during Tanz im August, consisted of sections delineated by performers entering or exiting the stage through the spaces between the back panels. The movements within these sections were governed by either the simultaneous initiating and halting of movement, flocking, or awkward partnering. Flocking is when people move in a clump changing spacing/facing with no discernible leader. Awkward partnering is skilled bodies coming in contact in an improvised manner consciously eschewing the Contact Improvisation movement paradigm.
As someone who performs and teaches the tool of improvisation, I appreciated the clarity in this improvised performance. It is very satisfying to see an improvised piece by people who have been working together for more than just a handful of rehearsals. All to often, improvised performances have three rehearsals. During the first one, half of the group doesn't show and the half who are there just talk. For the second rehearsal 80% of the cast is there and some dancing actually happens. The third rehearsal is on stage in front of the audience, i.e., the performance. In Accords, the hours sweating together in the studio came through during the performance. I saw no moments of searching or moments of awkwardness when performers are in between inspirations.
Dance improvisation is a nascent art form. Because of this, there are many assumptions about improvisation and its uses. The three main assumptions about improvisation are that it is not supposed to be rehearsed, be well produced, or have a point. Also due to the newness of it, improvisation based work is in a vicious cycle. The work is underfunded, therefore the work cannot be well rehearsed and produced. The work is not rehearsed, so the quality is not consistent. The quality is not consistent so producers and curators do not want to show the work. The work is not shown, so artists making improvised work can't get funding. They can't get funding so they can't rehearse. The cycle continues.
Thomas Hauert, it seems, has been able to break this cycle and to get beyond two of the three main assumptions about improvisation. His piece Accords is well rehearsed and has a high level of production value. The lighting was not left over from the previous performance. The costuming, consisting of black mesh body suits over primary colored pants and shirts, was not thrown together right before the performance. The set, more than just a black box, was simple — black, one meter wide panels, each the height of the stage. The panels, which covered the back wall, were wide enough apart for the performers to slip between them. At times acting as either a visual backdrop or an obstacle course for the movement, the set was well integrated into the performance.
Where Hauert failed was topic. His piece had all the production value of a choreographed piece, but not the point of a choreographed piece. An improvised piece can have just as much of a point as a choreographed one. What was Hauert trying to reveal to the audience besides the tool of improvisation? Is it the means or the end? If improvisation is what he was trying to show the audience, he succeeded. We saw people improvising. But listening skills and group awareness in and of themselves do not make a good piece. If all it takes to make a good piece using improvisation is good listening skills then any sequence of memorized movement is good choreography. This, we know, is not the case. Even if improvisation itself were the topic of the piece, nothing was developed strongly enough to become the point of the piece. The dancers did not work flocking, group timing or any of the tools I recognized for such an extended period of time to take it to a new level.
Maybe Hauert intended to provide the audience with an enjoyable visual and auditory experience for 90 minutes. As an artist using similar tools, I want to see the tools create something besides themselves.

Personal Statement for SODA

2011-01-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

Below is my personal statement that I wrote in applying to the SODA program here in Berlin.

My interest in the S.O.D.A. program stems from a desire for a more profound connection and dialog with the dance/performance community. I am looking for thoughtful, candid feedback about my work that is more constructive than the often superficial comments traded after a performance. I am also seeking the tools -language, books, other minds - with which to understand and view my own work better. I am hungry for the same level of rigor and feedback in the studio and theater as I got when I was studying biochemistry at U.C., San Diego. Over exposure to acetone will destroy your liver no matter how you contextualize it.
What I am hoping to gain from the S.O.D.A. program is the same kind of discourse I had in the lab. Working individually or in groups, we evaluated and discussed each other's methods and findings. I hope to interact with people of similar interests(performance, dance, presence) from varying backgrounds(age, country, training) in a focused yet open environment. I hope hat they know and have experienced will open my eyes and increase what I know and will experience.
My artistic skills, capabilities and development have been driven by my proclivities. I am drawn to the tool of improvisation because it keeps my mind constantly engaged, constantly sensing and interacting with my environment. Having studied other approaches to improvisation, such as Action Theater and the Viewpoints, I am more drawn to the tool of contact improvisation. I find that it is the clearest model with which to examine performance variables in relation to improvisation. This is not to say that I am only interested in unfettered vague improvisational work. In fact, quite the opposite. My work, though improvised, can be quite restricted. In Any Fool Can Think of Words that Rhyme the three dancers are restricted to moving one joint at a time. In A2Zed/Nexus one point of contact is maintained and returned to as much as possible. Other limitations or choreographies for my work involve the lighting, body tone, or staying still and grunting.
I am also drawn to the tool of improvisation because there is an assumption that improvised work has no point to it or thought behind it. Sadly, most of the work out there professed to be improvised does not have a point other than it is improvised. The artists are so enamored of the process of real-time composing, that they forget that the tool of improvisation can be used to create something other than itself. Anvils can be used to create other things besides anvils. I, therefore, make a point of creating work that has a very definite concept outside of improvisation itself.
Just as I was drawn to study biochemistry to understand how the mechanics of life work, I am drawn to the theater to understand how it works. I am interested in the underlying structures of theater and their relationships. Currently, my specific area of interest is the function of a title. Is a title a sign to tell the audience what the performance is about? Is it a lens through which the audience should view the performance? Neither function I find satisfactory. If a title is to tell an audience what is happening, there is no room for the audience to participate, for them to create an event within themselves initiated by what is on stage. On the other hand, if the artist uses the title as a lens, the artist runs the risk of being too vague, leaving all the work of creating the performance up to the audience's imagination. If the artist is too vague then the audience could just as well stay home and imagine their own performance. Truth in Advertising, my most recent production, arose out of confusion about this function. The concert consists of seven pieces, each with two titles. One title is straight forward, the other title more obtuse. For example one piece is titled Man Grunting and Distillation - This piece is a distillation of the collective human experience of cruelty - cruelty that we experience from direct or inadvertent action of others and cruelty that we consciously or unconsciously inflict upon others. The intention of Truth in Advertising is to lead the audience to question the function of titles.
If art, as Brecht said, is a hammer with which to shape society, I would say that I aspire to be a hammer that shapes the hammer that shapes society. I say this because I make work in response to my environment. Observing the patterns and trends in the work around me inspires me. I aim to create work that leads my peers to question the tools and possibilities they are using in their work. I created Do You See What I See?, a series of performative still-lifes which bombard the audience with biographical information, as a response to all the intensely biographical work I was seeing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I created the sound score for Content with Content from descriptions in a film catalogue. By incessantly telling the audience what the piece is about, the sound score forces the viewers to question what any piece is about. I created Sentimental Pussyfooting: a study in plagiarism because I was tired of hearing "Oh, that's been done." The basic dance formula has been done again and again and no one complains about that. In Sentimental Pussyfooting I used pieces that have been done as points of departure, showing how much more there is left to investigate within ideas that "have been done". Yoko Ono's Cut piece, Paul Taylor's Duet, and John Cage's 4'33" are some of the pieces I used.
By surrounding myself with curious intelligent artists, I hope to gain new insights and avenues of inquiry into the inner workings of dance and performance. The S.O.D.A program will be the hammer that shapes the hammer that shapes the hammer that shapes society.

Is Tango Ruining Contact?

2010-12-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

Are Tango and other forms of social dance ruining Contact Improvisation? Ruining might be a strong word. How about changing it in a direction I do not like? Expanding maybe? No, I think that I will stick with ruining. And I will explain why. From my small exposure to the CI world, I see the form being "ruined" by social dance forms. Ruined, I say because their influences are not expanding the range of the form but changing the bulk of how it is practiced.

At the jams in Berlin (granted this is a small slice of the CI pie), I see more and more codification of CI. I see person X and know what five moves he will do with a woman. And this person is also practitioner of Tango. I see person Y and know what 5 moves she will do and end up on person Z's shoulder.

I am not saying that we shouldn't have habits. Habits are fun. They are enjoyable and give us a benchmark of how we are progressing. They show us how "good" we have become at something. But is that the goal? Is the goal to know how good we are at something? Is the goal of CI to practice moves that we know and have an enjoyable experience? Is CI a product or a process?

I would say that for more and more people it is becoming a product. This might have been what Danny Lepkoff was talking about at Freiburg this year. CI has basically become another social dance form with set moves and gender roles. People go to the jams to engage in a certain movement style and do certain moves, basically a milonga with baggy pants and a less structured frame than the tango.

And as more and more people engage in social dance forms, they bring however un/consciously the values from those other forms into CI and expanding CI. Just as someone who studies Karate or Judo will bring values from those physical practices into CI. Or Alexander techique. Or opera singing or Feldenkrais. All of which people are un/consciously bringing values from those practices into CI. And I hope those values are always brought into CI. This problem, that I see(and I might be the only one) could be a result of not knowing enough about tango. I might need to expand the side of the G.U.T. triangle between logic and tool of tango. Hmm…

Anyways, I just worry that people are reducing CI to a set of movements, basically to small snippets of choreo that they then improvise with.

Grammar and Global Warming

2010-11-29T11:16:00.000-08:00

Hello again, my dear single reader. Single as in solo, not as in Han, but as in being only one reader, not in reference to your social life.

After, or rather in the midst of my second double Americano, I have decided to write about a subject I have been thinking about a long time, but do not have enough concrete examples to fully support and elucidate my hypothesis.

My hypothesis: Bad grammar, specifically subject verb agreement, leads to weak thinking.

Take the following sentence - The well appointed man wearing many felt hats are going to the haberdashery.

It should be - The well appointed man wearing many felt hats IS going to the haberdashery.

The subject of the sentence is man and he is going to the haberdashery. Granted the hats are also going to the haberdashery as they rest upon his head. The hats, however, are the object of the preposition of and, therefore, not the subject of the sentence. The singular form of the verb "to be" is needed because the single noun and not the plural noun is the subject of the sentence.

The plural form "are" would be used if hats were the subject of the sentence.

The many felt hats on the well appointed man are going to the haberdashery.

More and more I hear and read incorrect subject/verb agreement. People are using the noun that is closest to the verb to determine which form of the verb use. This shows an inability to think complex thoughts. It shows a need for immediacy and the inability to think through more than one step.

How does this connect to global warming, you ask. Take the term global warming. Climate scientists chose this term because on average the temperature around the globe is warming. The global climate is changing and warming. This warming is causing large temperature changes over the whole globe. This is why it is now a lot colder in San Diego than normal. This is why it was a lot warmer in So Cal in November than normal.

Most people assume that because the term has the word "warming" in it, they will only experience warming. They are not able to put do the mental process of global warming- the whole globe/average temperature - temperature swings. They are looking only at the immediate relationship of "warming" to what they are experiencing right now.

This leads me to another hypothesis - Most people in the Tea Party do not use correct grammar.

The Three Points of Contact Improvisation

2010-11-23T23:31:00.000-08:00

Where is your center?
Where do you contact the floor?
Where do you contact your partner(s)?

What is the distance between the floor and your center?
What is the distance between the floor and where you contact your partner(s)?
What is the distance between your center and where you contact you partner(s)?

How do you use one point to affect the others?

What is the size of each these points?

What is the size of the triangle?

Ephemeral Art

2010-10-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

(Written in 2005, recently found when looking for something else.)

How long do you gaze at a tangible art piece?
How long do you look at art?

Dance is not ephemeral if looked at in relation to a larger scale than it is usually viewed. When people watch a dance they spend more time watching it than they usually spend looking at a painting or sculpture in a museum. But the dance can be considered ephemeral if what is important are the details of it. Those fleeting movements/moments, but the structure of the piece will hopefully throughout the piece and that will be at least 5 minutes, much longer than most people spend looking at the Mona Lisa or a Picasso.

Those paintings are just as ephemeral unless you own it or live in the same city as the painting. But then do you measure ephemerality(?) in in terms of a work's self or in relation to the viewer. Yes, the dance comes and goes, but so do the viewers. And a painting does not go, only the viewer. But what is a sculpture if not viewed? Nothing. it is merely the possibility of something to be viewed. But any dance piece, once conceptualized and rehearsed(known) becomes the possibility of something to be viewed.

Dance is considered to be ephemeral because the reason for most dances existences, the minute details of the choreography, are ephemeral, they do not last past the duration of the viewing. But what could last for the duration of the viewing and beyond is the conceptual construct of the piece, of the performance elements. The more definite they are, the more definite the zusammenhang, the more tangible the performance.

To summarize - All arts are equally ephemeral. It depends upon how long the viewer is looking at them.

Flow and the Evolution of Contact

2010-10-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

Have you ever watched Magnesium? It is probably on Youtube. The seminal performance that gave us contact improvisation. If you watch it and then watch a contact jam at a festival or a weekly jam somewhere in the world, you will probably not see the connection. One is a performance with an audience and one involves performing and there are people watching but not an audience in the traditional sense. The theme of where performance has devolved to in the CI community I will not touch right now.

What I want to ramble about now is flow. The early examples of CI that I have seen on video where rather flowless - bodies bumping into each other falling, flailing, hitting the ground loudly. See contemporary contact, flow, continual contact, and ease are much more apparent. Flow and ease are constant themes of discussions, classes and workshops.

But the Tool does not have to determine the Logic.

Flow has become so paramount because it is as far as you can get from the beginnings of CI. The pendulum has swung to the flow end. And many people like it there. Flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, flow, is the name of the sensual touch junkie game. Go to a jam and get your flow on. Though on Wednesdays at K77 in Berlin that is impossible and no one seems to mind. Maybe that jam is closer to the original idea of CI.

But really, who wants to stay with the original idea of anything? Cooking...certainly not. Housing...certainly not. Living in a cave cooking rabbits over open flame?!?

Ideas evolve and improve. The need for flow grew out of a need for sustainability and easy. Bashing one's self about as they did in Magnesium hurts, is tiring and grows old artistically quickly. So the other end of the kinetic spectrum has developed over the past 38 years. But in that last sentence, there is an inherent problem.

CI should not be viewed as having a kinetic spectrum - flow at one end and bashing at the other. The frantic energy of Magnesium can exist but with a softer body state. Or a slow tempo with a very held body state. Something I try to open people's eyes/minds/bodies to when I teach the 4 Winds into Contact.

What I am worried about in relation to CI is that is stuck in the flow world. That flow is the Paragon of CI. And that is why so CI is hard for so many people to watch. It is the same tempo and tension the whole time. No Sturm und Drang. That and most people training in it have no performance training. Well, they might perform at contact festivals, but (uh oh) that doesn't count.

So go out there do contact. Flow and don't flow. Find all the flavors in between and around and amongst.

The Absence of Sequential Thought

2010-10-11T05:25:00.000-07:00

Above is a picture of the structure of the last piece from The Absence of Sequential Thought. The piece, All Structure/No Content was constructed by arbitrarily combining one or more of the 6 performance elements - Costume, Pathway, Lighting (here listed as video), Sound, Movement (here listed as Kinesphere), and Set.

Sentimental Pussyfooting

2010-10-06T08:25:00.000-07:00

Here is the text from the program of Sentimental Pussyfooting, Non Fiction's ground-breaking performance from 2009 -

Sentimental Pussyfooting - a study in plagiarism
How does an idea become part of the public artistic palette? Can an idea be used
without being seen as a reference?

performed by Kelly Dalrymple, Sonshereé Giles, Sean Seward, Adam Venker, Andrew Wass.
directed by Andrew Wass

Counterpulse Theater San Francisco
Feb 29th and March 1st 2008

Imagine if all of dance consisted of a performer wearing a video projector?
Or done in 4:33 of silence? Or was 5 dancers on a diagonal line?

The way I see it dance, or most dance, has the same structure - lights go on, music and movement start and they all end together. It's essentially the same skeleton every time. Whether it's San Francisco Ballet or Robert Moses, the skeleton is the same. Just the meat
around the bones has changed. The costumes are different, the music is different, the
performers are different etc. But still essentially the same piece.

In this show, I am using works by Trisha Brown, John Cage, Jess Curtis, Paul Taylor,
and Yoko Ono as points of departure. Some pieces will be fairly straightforward recreations
of the structures. Other pieces are using a structure or an element from a piece to examine
or express something different from the original intention. The title of the show and all but
one title of the pieces are taken from sentences in an Iris Murdoch novel.

One of the structures used in this show comes from a piece by Trisha Brown,
called Homemade. In it she performs with a reel to reel projector attached to her back.
The video projected is of someone doing the same choreography, of faces, hands and feet.
The structure of Homemade is redone pretty faithfully. A woman is dancing with a video
projector on her back, projecting the same choreography that she is doing live. It is the same
structure/skeleton but all the variables/meat are different: the performer is different, the
costume is different, the video projector and video are different etc. So is it the same piece?

If Moses' and San Francisco Ballet's pieces are different, then Brown's piece and mine
are different. The costumes are different. The people executing the movements are different.
The choreographies and videos are different. The skeleton in both cases remains the same, yet
people are more likely to say that I am repeating Brown's piece because it is a different
enough of a skeleton from the basic dance skeleton.

No one says to ODC or Paul Taylor -
"Oh lights, movement, and music...that is So and So's piece" Why not? Because that skeleton
is from time immemorial. And most dance I see is just repeating the same skeleton over and
over again. And dance is so rich because we keep investigating the same skeleton over and
over again. Where would dance be if people stopped making dances to music because that
had already been done?

By keeping certain structures identified with and tied to certain artists, we limit
our collective artistic investigation. By being sentimental, by saying "Oh, we can't do that
because that is So and So's piece", we cut ourselves off from so many possibilities.
We need to stop pussyfooting around and appropriate/steal/use/riff on/reject performance
history. Every piece in this show that I am relating to I consider a door that was opened when
the pieces were originally made, a door for us to walk through. Those artists pointed us in new directions. It is up to us to continue in those directions and continue their investigations and
create our own skeletons/structures.

Truth in Advertising Titles

2010-10-02T05:40:00.000-07:00

Below are the two sets of titles I created for our latest performance, Truth in Advertising. Please see the previous blog post for more information about why each piece had two titles.

1. 20 Discrete Events

2. Person with Object and Pop Song

3. Choreography Created by 6, Performed by 2
choreo by Shelley Senter, Nina Martin, Margaret Paek, Rebecca Bryant, Kelly Dalrymple-Wass, Andrew Wass

4. Contact Improvisation Duet

5. Man Grunting

6. Improvised Trio

7. Scored Contact Improvisation Duet with Sound Score

***************************************************

1. A Useful Fiction - Free will and self determination do exist. We all can choose to act but the circumstances may change before we are ready. Can we adapt to and survive in these new conditions?

2. Still/Life - love, absence, longing.

3. Homage to Elsewhere - What is memory? Is it located in the brain or the body? Can we use the experience and existence of another to trigger memories of my own?

4. Adept At Any Altitude - What is rehearsal? Do two people engaging in an improvised performance modality need to rehearse specifically with each other for a performance or are their years of practicing the form with other people their rehearsal process?

5. Distillation - This piece is a distillation of the collective human experience of cruelty - cruelty that we experience from the direct or inadvertent action of others and cruelty that we consciously or unconsciously inflict upon others.

6. Trigger Conditions - It is hot and bright in the theater lights on the empty stage. Three dancers move and gesticulate through space, time and existences. In this piece the performers grapple with the tension between theater and the spectacle of the contemporary world. It is an investigation: How do we live, how do we breath, how do we reach each other in this post capitalist period?

7. A2Zed/Nexus - Every word/action/idea is at the same time the end of a series and the beginning of new series. Whether or not these two progressions will be related or make sense can only be determined if and when the next word/action/idea is created.

Truth in Advertising Program notes

2010-10-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

What is the function of a title? A sign to tell the people who read the program what the performance is about? Or a lens through which the audience should view the performance, creating an event that is something different than is what is happening on stage? Neither function we find satisfactory.

If the function of a title is to tell the audience what is happening, then it leaves no room for the audience to participate, for them to create the performance within themselves initiated by what is presented on stage. On the other hand, if the artist uses the title as a lens, then s/he runs the risk of being too vague, leaving all the work of creating the performance up to the audience's imagination and perception. And if that is the case, then the audience could just as well stay home and imagine their own performance.

"Truth in Advertising" presents 7 pieces each with two titles - one a sign and one a lens.

Going to Performances

2010-09-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to see Nah Dran XXII at ada. Didn't know anyone on the program, but it is a theater nearby AND I didn't know anyone on the program. Off I went at 5 past 8. Took me all of 4 minutes to bike to the theater. And found parking right away.

I enjoyed about half of the performance. Most of it, if I just viewed it as cool moves in time and space with some sounds. But after reading the program about how do people connect and trust and does this character want to leave her spot...blah blah blah de#$!@blah...

Anyways that is not what I am here to talk about. Upon reading the program, I was surprised to see a friend was performing. She had been pulled into the performance a week ago due to an injury of another dancer. I enjoyed that piece. It has a fruitful structure. While she and I chatted after the performance, she asked me why I had come to the performance. Did I know anyone in the show or had I seen any of the other performers' work. I had not, I replied. A look of what I took as surprise came over her face. Why surprise? That I would go see work of people I don't know?

Regardless of what was going on in her head...it is important for artists to see work. Yes, we all know this, but I think that we forget it. And I would venture to say that it is more important to go see work by people we don't know and aren't friends with. *** Birds of a feather flock together, so your friends probably have similar interests in performance, whether in tool, aesthetic or logic (2 out of 3 at least, another ventured guess). And seeing work by people unknown to you will broaden your horizons.

I have heard several choreographers on different continents and different sub-genres of contemporary dance say that they are tired of going to see work - they don't like what they see (so has performance been reduced to entertainment?) or they don't have time to see other work after their rehearsals/performances and seeing their friends performances (see *** above).

In summation - go see work and a lot of it!

Equal representation before law

2010-09-10T05:39:00.000-07:00

States are having financial trouble in all areas. One such area is funding for public defenders. After reading this article about the trouble in Missouri, I started thinking about lawyers and equal representation before the law. Party A and Party B are in a legal dispute. Party A is very wealthy and can afford a top law firm and all the research teams, expert witnesses, and investigative teams that come along with it. Party B is poor and not so well off, think small family farm fighting a developer. I am sure John Grisham has written a book about this.

Due to the financial divide, Party A is essentially getting better representation to the law than Party B. Unfair, no?

What I propose is that both parties put the amount of money they were going to spend on legal fees into a pot and then that amount is divided in half. Each party would then have, in theory, equal representation before the law.

Taxes for Veterans

2010-09-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

Some people argue that American foreign policy is largely governed by the United States insatiable thirst for oil. Please note we invaded Iraq to save them from Saddam, but haven't given as much of a concerted effort in other troubled locations - Rwanda, Somalia - to name a couple. And in our foreign policy efforts, we send many troops into harm's way. Then veterans come back home physically and mentally harmed.

What I propose is a 1¢/gallon tax increase on gasoline. The more gas you buy/use the more you pay. And these extra funds go to help veterans. I would like to see the right try to talk down the idea of increased aid for veterans.

The Three Stages of Creation

2010-09-06T04:13:00.000-07:00

There are three stages of conscious creation, though unconsciousness can factor into them.

They are exploration, experimentation, and execution.

I had a good description of the three written down in a notebook during a caffeine fueled frenzy after a Klein technique class at Labor Gras, but, alas, that notebook is AWOL. Here is a link to an earlier posting on the subject from '08

Their4, I will begin again.

Exploration is the first stage. It is search before the research. It is the hearsal before the rehearsal. It is the discovery of what exists around you, whether you are in the studio or sitting on the subway thinking about your project. It is discovery/invention of what tools you will be using in your project. Also exploration is the rejection of tools. A work of art is more about what it is not than what it is. Granted all types of infinities exist some are just larger than others.

Experimentation is the second stage. Once the tools have been selected/created, their relationships can be investigated. (Uh oh, passive voice) How do the tools interact? Are you using them as tools or have they become logics or aesthetics? Experimentation is also the stage in which you can begin to figure out more in what direction your project will go.

The final stage is execution - when the work is presented before an audience.

I would say that in the choreo/impro spectrum the size of the triangle is larger towards the choreo end and approaches a dot towards the impro end. But choreo could be made as something to experiment with during the execution phase, the logic of that piece then being more improvisational.

All three phases can happen at the same time or separately. In more traditional (choreo'ed) work, there is more linear progression from exploration to experimentation to execution.

Below are two pictographs about this triumvirate. One has the three on a Cartesian co-ordinate system and the other as a simple triangle, which can be mapped on to the co-ordinate system. I find that the co-ordinate system can be a little misleading as it implies a "0" in relation to the three elements, which as I think about it now does make sense, so maybe it is not so confusing. A work of art that has no exploration, no experimentation and no execution would be not. What would something that has an infinite amount of each?

The first pictograph has the term "Sprecta of Deliberation". I borrowed and expanded the term "Spectrum of Deliberation" from Nina Martin. I expanded it to Spectra" as I believe that there is a greater than one dimensional difference between choreo and impro.

I appreciate any thoughts and feedback on this subject.

The Rite of Spring

2010-09-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

Has anyone ever said, "Oh, The Rite of Spring...that's been done."? I doubt it and if they had no one would take them seriously. But seriously...how many times has the Rite of Spring been used by various choreographers.

But when we talk about drinking one's own urine in a performance...that's been done. And yes, it has been done. Someone somewhere sometime drank his or her own urine on stage. Maybe it was shocking to the audience, maybe it wasn't. Maybe the urine drinker wasn't even going for shock value. Maybe it was a metaphor for the nitrogen cycle on the earth or how everything that can be considered waste is really useful in another way or useful to someone else.

But if the original pee drinking premiere was going for shock value, s/he has not shocked me, as I have not seen the performance. Thinking about urine drinking does take the shock out of it. If in a Mark Morris Dance Company suddenly one dancer urinates in the mouth of another dancer..that would be shocking. If two performers at a venue such as CounterPulse in San Francisco performed a similar act...not as shocking. In either context the act of drinking urine would be less shocking if the audience knew about it before hand.

Removing the idea of context based on performers, venue, or foreknowledge the act of urophagia would still shock me. Maybe shock is not the right word...startle...surprise...But as I have never seen urophagia and never performed it myself, I would be starprised (new word, you read it hear first!).

- But it's been done. We, as the collective human consciousness, don't need to go through that again - to paraphrase and misquote a friend of mine. If this were true, about the collective human consciousness, then as soon as a group of humans have experienced something, the rest of humanity doesn't need to experience that.

At what point have enough homo sapiens sapiens experienced "x" enough that the rest do not need to endure/enjoy "y"?

Names

2010-09-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

Maybe I have written about this before, maybe not. I do know that I have thought about this a lot. A parking lot full of thoughts, a parking lot at an amusement park full of thoughts. A parking lot at an amusement park next to an outlet mall full of thoughts. Though the amount of thinking doesn't me that the transmission of these thoughts will be very clear.

Name of dance companies/collectives...More and more groups/people are using the forward slash,"/" after their name with a word or phrase to name their group. Just came across one today - Jesse Hewit/Strong Behavior. From what I have seen/heard about him Strong Behavior is an apt title.

There is also Jess Curtis/Gravity and Nir De Volff/Total Brutal. Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts also use the forward slash but in between the names of the two artists, not between the names of the artists and their company name. Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods is another example. As in her case and De Volff's the website is only the company name whereas in the case of Curtis the website is his name followed by the company name and with Hewit the website is his name without the name of the company.

Ultima Vez/ Wim Vandekeybus might be another example. On the ImpulsTanz website, the names are written with the forward slash but on the website no such relationship could be found. This leads me to believe that the use of the forward slash on the ImpulsTanz website was a result of a decision of the Austrian dance festival and not of the Belgian choreographer.

Why use the forward slash? Is the name of the company not enough? Or is the individual better known than the company? Or is this a return to the modern, i.e. glorification of the individual? First there were "royal" dance companies, then something like the Ballet Russe, not named after an individual but no longer tied to a monarch. Then came something like the Denishawn, named after the two artistic directors, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn (great uncle of Wallace Shawn...just kidding). Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Mark Morris Dance Company, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, etc..

Then came the format that added the dancers in the title - Sasha Waltz & Guests, Scott Wells and Dancers. This format somewhat puts the dancers and the choreographer on an even level, but still the dancers remain anonymous.

Then there came the random word/phrase format entering the post-modern, removing the hierarchy completely as choreographer/creator and performers are not indicated - Pilobolus, Goat Island, Lower Left.

Granted there is not a definite time line when one name format is used and another is no longer used. All formats exist now and companies are continually named in a varieties of formats. One company based in Seattle went from the post-modern format to the modern one - Phffft became Khambatta Dance Company. Why the change, I cannot say. Maybe the choreographer decided to go more "mainstream" with the name. Look at the names of the best funded companies in the United States.

So as asked above, is the use of the slash combining the choreographer's name and the company title a return to the modern?

How about something like - The Andrew Wass Dance Company and Dancers Project Dance Theatre/Non Fiction?

P.S.
Why is the word "dance" in so many dance company names? How many bands have the word rock or music or band or hip hop or rap in their names?

Styles of Dance

2010-08-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

Jazz dance has Fosse, Simonson ( the only two I know of) and I sure many more styles

Modern has Horton, Graham, Limon.

Ballet has Vaganova, Cecchetti, Russian, Danish, English styles, to just name a few.

Yoga has Vipassana, Hatha, Jivamukti, Svaroopa, Ashtanga, Bikram and...

Say Jazz, modern, ballet, or yoga and most people will have some idea of what you are talking about. Might not be exactly what you mean, but in the ballparl

Contact Improvisation, as of know, has one name. Yes, there are regional styles - West Coast, East Coast, European. But as CI is so young compared to the other movement modalities mentioned (how old is Yoga?!?), it has not been around long enough to change and become codified.

Eventually Contact Improvisation will become codified and that is just as good as it is bad. Codification can lead to clarity, but also to ossification. Codification can then also let practitioners of the form reject was has come before and discover new ground within a form. If CI does not expand and grow (some people might see this as becoming something else and the death of the form) it will stagnate.

I look forward to how many styles and flavors of CI there will be in another 38 years.

Investing in an Improvisation

2010-08-02T05:07:00.000-07:00

Language is a powerful tool. And as with all tools, it is empowering and limiting at the same time. After teaching at Dance Ranch Marfa BERLIN and performing as part of the performance marathon at Ponderosa, I have been thinking about the word "invest".

What does it mean to invest in an improvisation? To invest in material? Other terms for a similar idea are "t0 mine that vein" of material. Again the idea of "going in" is present. The idea of "going in" in relation to an improvisation is telling. Why do we need to go in, to invest in material to create and develop material? It shows an idea that to create and develop material we need to shut out and remove ourselves from outside stimuli. I can't think of a more limited place in terms of external stimuli than a mine. Why would we want to work/improvise/create from a place of limited awareness and options?

The idea of "investing in material" leads spatial static work. Going in...into a black hole that sucks you in. Somewhat dramatic of an image...

And if the rest of the ensemble is there to take care of the space, the composition while you and partner(s) invest in material, that leads to even further imbalance between the investors and the ensemble. The investors implode and the ensemble waits for them to resurface.

Take the word "invest". INvest. How about OUTvest? How would we outvest in material during an improvisation?

Why can't our awarenesses go outwards when we are mining material in an improvisation? Why isn't the spatial care taking of the ensemble the mother lode to be mined?

Some other nascent thoughts-

using the Four Winds in CI to explore spatial awareness.
mining the space metaphor relating to Cloud City in Star Wars

3 Types of Movies

2010-07-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

There are four types of movies-

1. I'll watch the preview of it.
2. I'll watch the movie on a plane.
3. I'll rent the movie.
4. I'll actually go to the theater and see it.

What does this mean?

2010-07-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

What does this say?

2010-07-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

Dance Styles

2010-07-13T22:50:00.000-07:00

...interpretive dance...innovative dance...discursive dance...informative dance...illustrative dance...instructive dance...demonstrative dance...explanative dance...interpretative dance...expositive dance...declarative dance...illuminative dance...elucidative dance...

What are you illuminating/innovating/declaring/explaining/elucidating in your dance?

Pop Quiz

2010-06-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

CHow = ???????

Swiss food!

Get it?

All Art is Sampling

2010-06-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

To follow up or expand (expound?) upon a recent Tweet - All art is sampling. When it comes down to it all artists take something whether that be a tool, a logic or an aesthetic from another artist. No one has every invented anything out of whole cloth.

Even the first cavefolk to take a burnt stick and scratch a deer into the wall of her/his very humble abode, was referencing something s/he saw somewhere else. Granted the deer was not an artist, but maybe so. I am sure that there is a dead French philosopher who has written about consciousness and and the creation of art. But anyways...

Duchamp was a sampler. Did he invent the urinal and the wall? Titian was a sampler. Did he invent the canvas?

What prompted these thoughts was a conversation I had with a woman after a performance I was in this past Monday at Schwelle7 - living together during - instant composed evening at Schwelle 7. I had given her a card for the dance on film festival I am organizing, On The Wall. After clearing up some confusion about dates and times of the festival, I told her about one of the films I would be presenting, Allemande Redux.

She wondered how I could call this my work. Sampling, she said, is not art. Hip hop and rap I wondered about. Where would those art forms be without sampling? Nobody is successful as an artist using sampling. I was at a loss for words. Still annoyed thinking about it. At the start of the conversation she said that she didn't like Americans.

Why is it okay to say that you don't like people from a certain country when it is not okay to say that you don't like someone because of their religion, skin color, orientation etc.? Guess because those are more personal than what country you came from.

Anyways...everything is sampling unless you create a new aesthetic, a new tool, and a new logic all in one go.

Good luck!

Acocella Must Go

2010-06-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Below is a letter I sent to the NYer's editor

Dance critic Joan Acocella is behind the times in her knowledge of contemporary dance practice and does a disservice to your readers. Repeatedly, she demonstrates her ignorance of contemporary dance practice- most recently, in her review "Think Pieces: Return of the Judsonites" in the May 24th, 2010 issue of the New Yorker. In it she writes, " …improvisation, which by definition precludes any group pattern." This statement is woefully inaccurate and is so subjective as to be useless for the New Yorker audience. Early dance improvisation may have had no easily discernible group patterns for minds wanting to see easily accessible forms such as found in classical ballet. However, as with all artistic practices, knowledge of the genre contributes to one's understanding of works in that genre. Now, as dance improvisation has evolved and been more rigorously studied and performed, group pattern exists in complex, emergent and artful modes in concert dance improvisation. Granted that improvisational dance can be done poorly but it is not the definition of the genre.

The New Yorker needs more than one critic for dance. The other art forms have multiple critics writing about them in the New Yorker - Anthony Lane and David Denby for film; Alex Ross and Sasha Frere-Jones for music; Kelefa Sanneh and Peter Schjedahl for books - to name a few.

If the New Yorker's critics for other art forms wrote articles with the same "breadth and depth" as Joan Acocella did, the only books, films, and music your readers could know about would be John Grisham novels, Tom Cruise's latest star vehicle and whomever the latest teen pop phenomenon is. There is so much dance happening in the United States, and especially in its dance mecca - New York. It is time we hear about more of it and from more current voices.

Bags

2010-06-10T05:54:00.000-07:00

Since I have moved to Berlin recently, I bought a bike. A Checker Pig Maru. I dig it. Matte black, minimal graphics, pretty light frame. Enclosed gear system, Nexus by Shimano. So now I have to learn how to wear or what to wear while biking. My Jack Spade messenger bag is okay - small, simple, black, but it keeps sliding forward while I am riding. And it can't hold as much as my Osprey bag - Stratos 24. I really like that bag. Hugs the torso well and can hold a decent amount of stuff. Problem though is the visuals. For an urban bag it is too busy.

Jack Spade and Osprey need to team up and make urban bags. A dual strap bag, like my Osprey stays on the body so much better than the Spade bag. But the Osprey is too busy ( as I said above) too busy too busy too busy.

Take the shape of the Osprey and have the material of the Spade bag with a long top down flap with Velcro. Have a similar strap system to keep the bag close to the body.

just some simple thoughts...maybe I should look at ortlieb...

Logos

2010-05-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a logo for a friend's company. Not that he asked or anything, but it's something I enjoy. Find the variables I like, tweak them, re-arrange them. Try to use something besides Futura, my favorite font. Though Gill Sans is growing on me as is Santu(?), I think it is called. But something about licensing came up when I saved the file. Below are a few rough mockups.

The investigation continues...

Walking backwards

2010-05-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

I was in the studio today. Walked backwards for about 45 minutes. Thinking about chaos. When we (Lower Left) teach chaos, we tend to focus on chaos of the kinesphere, but rarely on location and vector/pathway. Space Haikus maybe, but never with the words chaos.

Walking backwards for an extended period of time allowed me to get past many crap tapes. It became quite a revelation to realize that I had yet been in a certain corner of the space and that I had not yet walked backwards with a certain section of the wall or a certain window in view yet. Also walking backwards leads to quite a pleasurable sensation in the feet. I experienced a familiar pathway in my feet but reversed. Quite a podiacal(?) enlightenment.

Could be quite a performance - walking backwards.

Walking backwards is a simple tool for finding chaos - chaos of direction, of duration, of location (which will not truly be achieved until we can teleport!). By limiting our options, we increase our awareness and thusly increase our palate. Or is it pallate or pallete?

A sense of ease and sense of chaos are not mutually exclusive. People stuck in habits can feel the swirl of chaos. Once we have an awareness of the chaos and the possibilities within do we achieve a sense of ease.

Training chaos is not to create chaos but to work within it and give us options.

Sub

2010-05-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

This current economic crisis is another example of people not paying enough attention to language.

Sub-prime. They were called sub-prime mortgages. Sub-prime. SUB as in less than as in lower, as in not as good.

As in subpar.
As in substandard.

Yes, the prefix "sub" can be used with other words and not necessarily mean less than as in submarine, subway, substitute (though, there ain't nothing like the real thing, baby! And what is a stitute?).

But pair the word sub with prime...

Below prime, less then prime, under prime…

Would you be surprised if the grade "F" eggs you bought were spoiled and gave you food poisoning?
Would you be surprised if you went to a no star motel and it was a dump?
Would you be surprised if you paid $15.99 for a flat screen TV and it didn't work?

If so, you have a future in finance and or politics in the US.

Quota

2010-04-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

Seems like FB and Twitter have taken all my mojo and I can't write any posts here. Sorry.

Well, maybe blogger.com could make an iPhone app...hmm...doesn't sound too hard.

Natural vs. Unnatural

2010-02-19T13:31:00.000-08:00

If the pope says that homosexuality is unnatural, does he not think that celibacy is unnatural?

Humans are built with sexual organs and designed by the Lord, so why not use them as the Lord intended?

How is celibacy any more natural?

Celibacy seems to me to choosing to go against god's wishes and not using sexual organs as the lord intended.

Instances of homosexuality have been seen in multiple species, not just humans.

How many other species have voluntary celibate members in them? Sure there are some ugly apes that can't get any action, but that isn't what I am talking about.

And self-flagellation, with a whip I mean, how natural is that?

Deficits

2010-02-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

Can someone please explain to me why when Dubya was running up the deficit (after he spent all the surplus Clinton left him) spending money on destroying another country no one was bitchin'.

And now when Obama adds to the deficit trying to build up OUR OWN COUNTRY, everyone goes crazy and gets mad at him.

Predicting the future

2010-01-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

I can predict 33% of the future.

I know when something will happen but not where it will happen or what it will be.

I know what will happen but not where or when it will happen

I know where something will happen but I do not know what it is or when it will happen.

Neo Classical

2010-01-19T06:36:00.000-08:00

from West Coast Dance Festival 's section of definitions

11. Neo Classical: Classical ballet developed to a new classical of abstract lines with

classical technique along the lines originated by George Balanchine or similar masters.

Ø A form of dance with less formal approach to body, arm and foot positions.

Ø Minimal use of props.

Ø Simple costume with no sequins or fancy trims.

Ø Flexibility of body without acrobatic tricks, can include splits & Handstand to the floor.

Ø Music from any era – instrumental or vocal – however classical steps must

Ø Be adhered to.

Ø Ballet pumps or pointe shoes to be worn.

Ø Neo Classical is not:-

Ø Acrobatic tricks.

Ø Rhythmic Gym or Calisthenics.

Ø Slow Modern, Contemporary or Negro Spiritual.

Borrowing Money

2010-01-03T10:41:00.001-08:00

I do not understand why conservatives object to borrowing money to pay for the healthcare of their fellow citizens, i.e. increase the general welfare of our country, but have no objection to destroying the huge post-Clinton surplus we had to and borrowing massive amounts to attack Iraq on false grounds. And the war in Iraq does not have a positive effect on life in the U.S.A.

From fat to fit

2010-01-01T21:43:00.000-08:00

Looks like the fans are in order of fitness.

The new decade

2009-12-31T14:48:00.000-08:00

doesn't start until the end of 2010.

C'mon, people...get it right.

Geothermal energy is a bad idea.

2009-12-15T06:31:00.001-08:00

a really bad idea.

First let us start with the idea that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Geothermal, as I understand it, involves tapping into the molten core of the earth for energy. This can be done in several ways. Some methods are more passive - using a heat exchanger to heat water to heat house and water. One place I have experienced this is at the Breightonbush Hot Springs in Oregon. Their sauna is right over an open geothermal pool, capturing the heat and steam that would be lost into the atmosphere anyways. Another method, enhanced geothermal system, involved drilling into the earth ( i.e. !!!WARNING Not using naturally occurring sources of geothermal energy WARNING!!!) and injecting cold water into the "hot dry rock." The water then heats, expands and is converted into electricity using either a steam turbine or a binary power plant system. This method has lead to earthquakes. Granted they were only 2.9. But man made earthquakes are not a good thing.

But what worries me is not the possibility of man made earthquakes, but the assumption that geothermal energy is a sustainable source. Sustainable in comparison to coal - less CO2 emitted and maybe more sustainable than nuclear power plants - no radioactive waste to deal with. But the long term consequences are much more frightening. And our collective inability to see down this road is what is really frightening.

The earth's magnetic shield, the magnetosphere, "provides protection, without which life as we know it could not survive. Mars, with little or no magnetic field is thought to have lost much of its former oceans and atmosphere to space in part due to the direct impact of the solar wind. Venus with its thick atmosphere is thought to have lost most of its water to space in large part owing to solar wind ablation. " The shield, which protects all life on earth, is generated by the Earth's FLUID core spinning. See dynamo field.

For this to work, the core must be liquid. And if we suck more and more energy out of the core it will cool. This will lead to solidification. This will lead to death of the magnetosphere. And this will lead to the death of everything on the planet. Except for roaches and those bacteria that live down near the vents at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, but wait, Mars lost it's ocean due to solar winds. So I guess everything on earth will die.

But, wait, you say - The Earth's core is so huge and we could never extract that much energy. Humans can't have that much impact on our planet.

Overfishing anyone?
Deforestation?
Global warming?

When humans started using petrochemicals for fuel, did we even have a concept of running out of them or that we would affect the atmosphere? We, as a species, cannot look that far ahead.

You heard it here first - Geothermal energy is a BAD idea.

New Website

2009-12-11T07:52:00.001-08:00

Coming soon!!

wasswasswass.com should be up some time next week.

andrewwass.com will still work and redirect you to wasswasswass.com

Public transportation in Upland

2009-09-28T23:09:00.000-07:00

Walking from my mom's house to Hangar 18 climbing gym - 1 hour and 30 minutes

Taking the bus from my mom's house to Hangar 18 climbing gym - 2 hours 17 minutes

any questions?

Macluhan vs. Johnstone

2009-09-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

Content lies in the structure (Keith Johnstone) = The medium is the message (Marshall Macluhan)

discuss

Missile Defense

2009-09-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

“Scrapping the U.S. missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic does little more then empower Russia and Iran at the expense of our allies in Europe,” said Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, the House minority leader. “It shows a willful determination to continue ignoring the threat posed by some of the most dangerous regimes in the world, while taking one of the most important defenses against Iran off the table.” - from the NY Times September 17, 2009.

Distance from Tehran to Warsaw -1877 miles
Distance from Tehran to Jerusalem - 975 miles
Why don't we put the missile system in Israel? It's closer to Iran.

Fair Health Care

2009-09-16T23:20:00.001-07:00

If the U.S government won't pay for its citizens healthcare, why should it pay for the healthcare of the politicians?

Blue Accords

2009-09-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

Live from Berlin, it's Monday night. Though when you read this it won't be Monday night. Though chances are 1 in 7 that it will be a Monday, but not the same Monday night that I am writing this. I was lucky enough to see two shows in this year's Tanz im August festival. I say lucky, not in relation to what I saw, but that I was able to get tickets. Seems like dance performances sell out here in advance. The tickets I got were for the Thomas Hauert/Zoo performance of Accords at the Akademie der Kunste performance and for the Juan Dominguez performance of Blue at Hau 2. I had never heard of these companies before. Availability determined my fate.

To be flippantly glib or glibly flippant (can one be flippantly flip?), I would say that Zoo's performance of Accords was Flocking 201 mixed with simulstart and a peppering of bad contact and that Blue was bad acting with few props. Should I describe the performances in more detail? Should a Danish professor include the cartoons in her book about the cartoons and how they incited the Muslim world?

The set for Accords was an empty stage with black panels hung in the back. Each the height of the stage and about 3 feet wide, they were spaced widely enough apart for dancers to slide on/off stage between them. The lighting varied from general washes to sharp diagonal bands to lighting behind the backstage panels (one of my favorite parts) to murky gobos. The costumes were tight primary color pants and shirts covered in black mesh body suits. Sound was a smorgasborg. Wish I hadn't recycled the program so I could tell you what the exactly range was. I remember classical music and the chirping of birds. Oh and Eric Satie. Thank gawd for Eric, because I was able to tell how far along we were in the performance. That is the only good thing about using a bunch of songs in performance, letting the audience figure out how much longer they have left, well that and to tell the audience how cool your iPod play list is.

The performance consisted of sections delineated by performers entering or exiting the stage through the spaces between the curtain. The sections were either simulstart/stop, flocking, or awkward partnering. Simulstart or simultaneous start is when the performers try to move at the same time. When engaged in this score, dancers tend to clump near each other and did Hauert and his dancers. Flocking is when people move in a clump changing spacing/facing with no discernible leader. Awkward partnering is skilled bodies coming in contact in an improvised manner consciously eschewing the CI movement paradigm. The tension in the hands and reluctance to full engage the hands on the bodies of other dancers lead me to believe that the dancers did not have much CI training. But I cannot be sure as the program did not have any information on the dancers themselves.

Three memorable sections:
1. The panels were lit from behind and the dancers ran them cross stage. It was like watching stills from a movie(French guy?Lumiere?), runners caught mid-stride.
2. Two dancers lying on the ground down stage left, light from above. Simple movements of limbs extending across and above each other.
3. All 7 dancers onstage dimly lit with a marsh(?) soundscape. Dancers would move with similar timing and flavor to the bird calls in the soundscape.

Why were these more memorable sections? I'd say the first one was the change of relationship to the set and the visual pop dancers appearing in bright light. The second because it was something besides simulstart/stop, flocking, or awkward partnering. And the movement wasn't as frantic allowing some respite from locorhea (movement diarhhea?) as can happen in improvisation and well choreography too for that matter. The third, though it was kinda cheesy and strawberry ice cream, 5, 5, 5, 5, I get it 5, but it was nice to see a more direct relationship between the movements and sounds. "The bird is chirping and I am dancing in the same rhythm, whee!!"

What was Hauert trying to reveal to the audience? Listening skills? The performers had rehearsed a lot and it was enjoyable to watch the skilled bodies move simultaneously. But their energy was too inward, too much into the group. Can a group be tuned and aware with out everyone having to look into the center? One woman who came out and did a solo (that was too short) was lithe and rubber limbed and able to go in an direction with ease, drawing support from all facets of her body. Too short in that she was joined by another dancer for a close range let's look at each other and smile simulstart duet, "show the audience what you are feeling, that you are having a good time" It was also enjoyable to see the melding of flocking and simulstart, different dancers taking the initiative to change to facing or the vocabulary. And as nice as it is to see an improvisation stay within a world or a frame, I felt that this one went on too long. But maybe Hauert was using the boredom created to make those three sections pop. I think a little less boredom would have made them pop just fine.

Blue by Juan Dominguez as I stated before was bad acting with a few props. Or maybe it was avant garde dancing with a few props, or maybe it was advanced guard singing with a few props, or maybe it was fortgeschrittene Wache welding with a few props. In these post-disciplinary days (a term I learned about recently from a friend who learned about it from the Art Institute of Chicago), I can't say for sure what it was - dance, singing or welding. But as Blue was part of Tanz im August, Blue with be viewed as dance for the purposes of this diatribe...I mean review.

The recap - 4 people standing on stage, 2 women hugging center stage, a man stage right near 2 cases of water bottles, another woman stage left. A black curtain arcing from upstage right to center stage. Full white lighting exposing the walls, pipes etc. And they kept standing, and standing. Yep, I must be in Europe, the piece is starting with standing. Add in self conscious smiling. Another man enters. The five dancers (welders? weavers? clowns?) clump together, hold hands occasionally kiss each other on the check, shift position. A piece of cheesecake enter the scene and two women eat it with exaggerated enjoyment. "Show the audience what you are feeling and tasting" I imagined the choreographer (director? conductor? therapist?) saying. Pants are removed, shirts exchanged, a wig appears on the bald guy. Someone leaves stage, the performers start laughing uproariously as one of them enters with a piece of black cloth. Fingers become horns and a bull fight ensues. An iron board, a TV and a large piece of iron that is used as a couterbalance enter the stage. More laughter. Someone pulls up the white marley and crawls under pretending to go to sleep. More laughter. Sexual innuendos appear - A man sucking a plastic bag, rubbing his ass crack on the corner of the wall, a woman rubbing her nipples on a rope. Another woman humping the crack between two marley sheets. "We're doing the sex thing. Wink Wink." A woman thrusts her left breast repeatedly into a boot. Rubbing each others noses, a duet goes between recognizable and silly sexual acts. The five dancers clump together each touching or groping at least 1 other person. As soon as the nudity appeared about 15 people started to leave. Not sure if it was because of the nudity or that they finally had had enough. Enough of what exactly? Watching five people "experience" things in an exaggerated manner? After the mock orgy, a ping pong ball appeared and the dancers(?) formed a circle. Throwing the ball back and forth the performers screamed. One by one they left the stage. Oh, I think I forgot to mention the part when the water bottles were rolled across stage. This, too, was seen as hilarious.

The audience half heartedly clapped. I booed. The performers did not reappear. The audience clapped louder trying to get the welders(?) back on stage. They did not appear.

My main objection to this piece was that there were no boundaries. Anything could have happened and it would have fit in the piece. Maybe that was Dominguez's point. Anything goes. In the program he wrote - Reversing the temporality of events, putting them out of context...- Yep, I guess that is what I mean by boundaries, the events had no context. He also wrote - ...prolonging the pleasure...exaggerated manner...- Was that the faux sex and exaggerated enjoyment of the cheesecake? -...tracing the amorphous... - sounds impossible - ...imagining reality... - why bother? it's already here- - ...transforming curiousity...astonishing more -

AHHH, THIS REVIEW IS GETTING TO BE WAY TOO LONG AND LOSING FOCUS...

(hmm...sounds like the last piece)

Beauty Contests

2009-09-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

In the 1930s, financial markets, for obvious reasons, didn’t get much respect. Keynes compared them to “those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.” - from the NY Times.

sounds like an apt description to me