(some information for heuristic purposes)
Zoe Chase Tsavdarides. Born in New York, grew up in Santorini, Thessaloniki, and South Carolina. Studied creative writing (Interlochen Arts Academy in MI), cultural anthropology (Reed College in Portland, OR), acting and comedy improv (Whole World Theater among others in Atlanta), moving into various forms of dance (butoh, oriental, African) and theater in its contemporary forms (physical, devised, performance/happenings) in various parts of Europe, largely/most recently in Athens, where I (for?) now work and live. Not quite a gypsy, not quite rooted; not quite Greek, not quite American; not-Not these things, either. Something beyond hybridity - a life of successive, at times competing, liminalities which inevitably undergird my work.
I consider the disparate approaches of academic anthropology and theater performance to be complementary, if not intertwined, in the exploration of the human capacity for expression and communication - for me, at least, the most fundamental field of inquiry. As an anthropologist I am interested in collectivities and systems (although these issues are perhaps beyond the scope of a single discipline), as a writer in subjectivities (perhaps, to elucidate, in the question of their very possibility), as a dancer, most selfishly and selflessly, in the mystical (which brings us full circle to the role of dance in what Schechner calls “efficacy”, also furnished by anthropology). I have read the French people (as best I could), and am bored by conventional theater, yet continue to enjoy text. I’ll bury the author, but only in sand, so I can dig him up again - it’s a corpse I drag around in my bag. Sometimes my back hurts from this weight, but that usually goes away with dance.
Over the years I have realized that thinking is bad for me, yet I continue to do it - perhaps poorly, at times sporadically, but, as the Greeks say, “the wolf changes fur, not peculiarities.” And as thinking itself has changed, from a cerebral, let’s say Cartesian, activity to a polyvalent, affective, and -increasingly- collective process, opening new spaces in the relationship between mind and body - (if we can indeed continue to accept these terms at face value), it is time for me to resituate myself, or at least to recalibrate the questions. Some days I think I am looking towards an anthropology of movement - (unsatisfied by ‘kinesics’) - something between an archaeology of response mechanisms and the ludic architecture of social parôle. But, nags one of the voices, is this so different from last century’s structure-functionalists with their spy-in-wartime fantasies of Decoding the Code, of ‘uncovering’ an underlying matrix? Accepting the world as a shifting matrix itself, I then correct to say that I am simply trying to keep abreast of the mystery of human presence, in its shifting permutations and with its ancient and universal power. Then I gag, of course: “ancient and universal power?” did I read this on the cover of a 70’s paperback? But the instinct cannot be far from what Barba and Grotowski sought in the ‘pre-expressive’ body, and an extension (perhaps I am riffing here, but there are space considerations) with the connections Ekman found between facial expressions and the autonomic nervous system of their observers. I came to performance as a space where these questions are excavated on the level of practice, and perhaps immodestly, offer myself as a vessel.
So I'll backtrack. I’m just a girl with some questions, and a felt obligation to make these manifest somehow - perhaps, these days, all there is left to be done.
What am I doing in this space, the Choreography Lab at Kinitiras?
For one, art is collapsing. Everything else is - why would “art” be immune? By this, I do not mean by dilapidation, the collapse of a barn; I am pointing to the collapse of its boundaries, which actually makes it a kind of explosion. I welcome conversations to this effect, and often have them - although they end up either being useless (“I am in partisan conservative denial”) or unnecessary (“I live in Berlin”). For me the visual arts have been at the vanguard of this transformation, perhaps because photography came before deconstruction; others have successfully traced this, so here I will merely remind that the colonization first of internal space, then the emancipation from the canvas, then the incorporation of time, have pushed what we once thought of as painting into the space of live performance, and now there is a push and pull with what was once known as “theater”- an observation itself already dated by at least a decade. I won’t even begin with multimedia technologies, which are interstitial and ubiquitous. But the first and obvious point is that craft is irrelevant, at least in its traditional conception. Having once trained as an actress, smitten by the illusion of constructing and inhabiting alternate selves, fascinated by the project of using a human presence as raw material, I realized with a small mourning that technique has gone the way of the blacksmith - the persistence of Hollywood notwithstanding. There are so many boundaries dissolving, so many edifices left crumbling - Baudrillard haunts the notion that we are forced to coexist with all manner of corpses, that our vista is crowded by vestiges of the past. No small amount of these remain lodged within us - cultural memory informs our responses, as muscular or cellular memory informs our dance. What once seemed to be a Frankenstinian splice-and-graft of trees from different forests, now reveals itself as a recognition of what has always been connected.
So here I am in a choreography lab in Athens, Greece, a place iconically reverberant of our most pervasive cognitive and sociopolitical structures - philosophy, democracy, law (to leave aside the implicated human body, in the birthplace of its trajectory through athletics and medicine) at the time of utter sociopolitical collapse, of schism upon schism. I’m not sure one would call this ‘irony’, but the context underlines the urgency of the work. What is the work? The work is defined by its process. What is the process? Ask me again in two months. Shall I broaden again, to touch on our generation’s negotiations with the world as we continue to find and re-create meaning?
The years I have dedicated to this journey so far are laughable, and, I can sense already, will prove insufficient in the end.
II. The Sessions - A diary, of sorts.
Week 1. Ana Sanchez-Colberg.
ASC may be trained as a ballerina, but she speaks in jazz - a tumble of thoughts and ideas repeating themes, folding back, endless parentheses and punctuated by a variety of laughs, from the nervous and girlish to the full-on cackle, a veritable froth- at times intoxicating, at others an argument in retrospect for that third cup of coffee. ` “Dance is not a language,” ASC says, and, later in the session repeats it, either for emphasis or out of habit, so I dutifully write it down. This sounds like a suitcase worth unpacking - at least a distillation of thoughts I have not gone through. I take it to mean that dance is not to be viewed as any sort of symbolic system. Ana herself is not yet able to confirm or reorient, so I decide to process this on my own. (it turned into a separate essay - do you really want to hear it?)
On a practical note, we are introduced to the choreographic unit of “Task”, which is not the same as an “Instruction”: it is a restriction or statement of a problem to solve, which allows breathing room for the dancer as agent, not just a marionette executing orders regarding movement. You give a Task to a dancer, and then this evolves your perception of it, and then you take the same Task incorporating the feedback you have received, and then the Task might Evolve. Also, we start thinking about the concept of ‘reproducibility.” (I think about this a lot in another space; but I think that will bore you also.) These are terms I, the luddite in the room, have not heard before, but recognize it as part of the language as the Choreography MA’s all nod and just do it. Thankfully, Ana has inherited Pina’s respect for repetition, so sooner or later this is properly expanded upon.
To test reproducibility (Ana's editorial note: I said re-present-ability, to make present anew!), we are instructed to interact with five specific points in the room, and then transfer that interaction into movement. We then perform it for the group, twice. I find myself having two very different experiences in each iteration, and rush to the notebook afterwards to capture this experience. Here is what happened:
Take 1. The space is constant; I must return to it again and again, every instance of my presence has left a place as indelible as a statue, that coming back I must claim all the space that was not touched before, yet not trespass on my own traces. “I am here” because I recognize the space already occupied by my body (i imagine it leaving three-dimensional traces, like my body is a giant tube of toothpaste, a giant slug whose traces eventually turn to cement) and I avoid it - I cannot enter the same river twice, I cannot occupy the same space twice, I must continue to inhabit its different parts, the task is to consume every square millimeter of space in three dimensions until it is exhausted, but never trespassing on the domain of my previous bodies. The “now” me differentiates from the “then-me” by refusing to visit the same ground - perhaps a metaphor of progress, or of the disgust we show to of the already consumed moments after its consumption.
Take 2. The space itself becomes fluid and ever-changing; my insistence is to repeat myself, to do the same action, to ritualize the initial impulse; but the density of ‘ether’ keeps changing, from air to water to wet cement, and back; time swells and contracts, even flips over, so that I must change directions, move backwards. I cling to structures of movement, but they change so radically in context as to be unrecognizable. A walk past a textured surface, exploring it with my fingers, becomes a dance with insurmountable terrain as it grows to engulf me and I shrink to the scale of an insect. The act of hanging myself by the coccyx on a wall peg, once an action of grounding and identifying with the boundaries of the space, becomes a hopeless search for an anchor.
The juxaposition of experiences - arising organically in practice, now fodder for examination, makes me think, once again, that it is impossible to reproduce and explore at the same time. But this is life, isn’t it? We take the traces of our selves, extract what structures we can, and take them for a spin in the great unknown.
The other element that has surprised me is the latent uncertainty principle: you either know where you are, or what you are. You either conquer the space, with your occupation of it being sacred, or it conquers you - you can repeat yourself perfectly, as a machine, or imperfectly, with regards to your context - but since context changes everything, there is no way to reproduce meaningfully. “Faithfulness” to the original impulse, in this regard, can only become a museum piece, a relic, a piece of embalmed memory.
Oct. 11-13. Jean-Paul Zaccharini’s session: Clown!
I admire the seamlessness with which we “get in the water”: starting out with a circle, we energize group awareness by moving the action of focus, or the energy wave, in single modules and then in twos, threes and fours. The exercises move progressively, allowing us to grasp a basic element (rhythm, body dynamic) and then elaborate on this, to coax out other discoveries; before we know it, we are using everything we have, taking turns restraining each other, writhing as pinned animals. Then we step back, extract modules of movement, polish. Unfortunately for me, this involves counting, which, as it turns out, I am not that good at. I also realize that I am not as creative in creating interesting images as some of my colleagues are; I bemoan a lack of technique which by now would have given me a different ease in tackling ‘problems’, or pleasing the ‘third eye’ of the audience. Although I feel comfortable with sharing my vulnerability, and this does not, as perhaps would have been the case some years ago, cause me to shrivel up, seeing my limitations in this regard makes me think.
One would think I would take part in this segment with a greater relish- or rather that I would shine especially, having the clown element already working in several areas - being naturally goofy, not ever being raised with the idea of perfection, having done comedy, and harbored a lifelong fascination with fools (Nasrudin, Eulenspiel, et al). But I was reminded once again, how difficult it is to fail on purpose - encouraging, really, since in life I feel as though I do this all the time. Here JPZ had us work on failure recovery - that is, the art of incorporating gaffes into the “program.” It’s a bit which is comical if transparent, and utilitarian if the edges are artfully blended - it is both a strategy and a text.
October 18- lab time with Ana
Here is where the tire hits the road: we are finally to, drum roll please, take a task (a transfer of experience) and give it to another dancer in the group.
I am caught completely off guard with this, because I’ve been thinking of systems of interaction all week, and imagined a series of small group-behavior experiments. Instead, we have to pick ONE person, and pawn off a task for ONE person to execute. In pairs.
I find no way to easily ‘adapt my idea’, but instead hark back to our first exercise and the experience I had with my own personal memory of spacetime, and decide to use this.
Our “I am Here” exercise reminded me of something Lauren Berlandt “said to me” in her blog:
“The burden of personality, indeed, is in part to separate out habit’s active take-up from the ego’s task of protecting one from most of one’s self-experience.”
The task I give to Nefeli:
Define a space for yourself. Then occupy the space! You may never touch the same part of the space and you must touch as much of the space as you can.
Nefeli was very “adventurous” with this assignment, as Ana observed. I didn’t see any of the images I had imagined, and tried to amend the task to bring them back, something which I later understood to be a form of unfair tinkering - or rather, a closed approach to the process. I wanted the idea to be visible, if not descriptive. In my notebooks I wrote down a bunch of stuff, which I reproduce here unedited, although this may not be the most useful of procedures.
Introducing the biographical element.
How can we have memory without biography and vice versa: I don a prior self - what is that? like some calcified tube - create forms that are visible obstacles.
-allow each visit to be a separate event, like a cycle.
The question is not quite that of reproducibility: that is, by shifting the task from A to B, it is not going to be reproduced or repeated - it is going to be reborn through another prism. I’m not sure if the intention can preserve itself - if any two intentions can be the same.
Now use an older memory of yourself, and do it again in its mood.
1. Have a surprise encounter with your previous self.
2. One trip or many?
3. You have not seen yourself.
4. Κίνηση και ακινησία, γλυπτά του εαυτού. (Movement and stillness, sculptures of the self.)
More Lauren Berlandt, reading Bollas:
"In the case studies that follow his general description, Bollas posits a few different ways that a mood can be a regression of sorts: an affective stuckness in the present that re-enacts a childhood habit of defensive or adaptive response. I’m not too enthusiastic about theories that cast the present as an effect of the past’s efficient causality as though there’s been no middle, remediation, overdetermination, or history: for one thing, one may develop many styles of enacting a structure as one gets older. (I hesitate here because a psychoanalyst friend tells me that most people shrink their adaptive capacity as they age, claiming that stuckness expresses authenticity or self-acceptance. Oh well!). What Bollas writes here adds another whole worlding activity to the mix of what constitutes ordinary non-sovereignty (unintended enduring affect, in this case) so I’m pretty excited about that. I don’t think you can intend a mood in his terms. You can produce an affective atmosphere through behavioral prompts (like going into the classroom cheerfully), but that’s a different kind of thing than the recalcitrant affective response scenario that he’s considering."
Perhaps this mood stuff is throwing me off track, but I'm here now, so (yawn) oh well. Doesn't she write beautifully?
October 25 (notebook scribbles)
Because I cannot reproduce myself -
because I may only oppose myself, in order to see it -
so that I can only see the parts of myself that are already alien, already transformed.
Reconstructing the self as part of self-identity The self is already boring/destroyed.
2. Who follows who? The tension between memory and imagination, past and future. If the body walks forward and the mind looks back, we have a (physical) twisting motion, a corkscrew.
a movement whose momentum is that of resistance. At its critical juncture, the intention becomes unclear.
Rather, the direction becomes unclear.
Process (direction) how do we see thought in motion?
1. Directing, unfolding, as prefab furniture. moving towards light.
2. Traverse the space. reach the end and look back. [You are revisiting] Do not touch any of your previous space, but take on a different quality.
What are the qualities? (openness/purpose/failure/frustration/acceptance/cynicism)
If one flips a coin rapidly enough, the illusion is created that both sides are visible at once, that there is no division into sides, that some sort of unity has been achieved, if only by illusion. This is the reconciliation of space/time, and a resurrection of the uncertainty principle. The immediate rejection of prior self/selves: you, yourself, are a commodity towards consumption, that the spirit occupying your flesh is the ultimate and constant consumer, the customer, if you will, that your physical organs are nothing more than a lit cigarette, something created to be destroyed, and at the same time a kind of timepiece.
You are creating a corpse and then dancing on it.
Is it my responsibility as a choreographer to dig the grave as well? (a thought on “worlding”)
October 27-Independent Lab Time
Sometimes you just need to hear the obvious: Stick to the core of your idea.
Today’s work is about defining where you are at, without apologies. If I had felt that I would be judged, I would have stayed at home. ‘Work on your own’ days are what separates the men from the boys - (what a tragic phrase). Of course, attendance is down, and everyone is late. Still, those working on it really helped each other. I personally had an a-ha moment: one, that we really are charting a process, and that this is not just a gimmick, the method is to evolve the choreography through a ‘task’, which can end up being very visually different than what you imagined. Thalia was the guard rail on this one. She pointed out that if you actually just have a picture in your mind and then direct people to create that picture, you are not honoring the process. I knew this. I had agreed to it cerebrally. But today was when it really began to make sense.
I realized that part of my resistance to this wasn’t really that I didn’t feel there was merit to my task, but that I dove back into the world of ideas because I was afraid to dance, that I had drifted away from my body. Also, sadly, these days (rather since the accident and its neverending recovery process) I do not trust my own body as a dancer, and this leads me to the shallow shelter of the notebook. Yet my own discoveries here so far have come directly from the physical work: why not trust it as a source?
I realized that part of my resistance to this wasn’t really that I didn’t feel there was merit to my task, but that I dove back into the world of ideas because I was afraid to dance, that I had drifted away from my body. Also, sadly, these days (rather since the accident and its neverending recovery process) I do not trust my own body as a dancer, and this leads me to the shallow shelter of the notebook. Yet my own discoveries here so far have come directly from the physical work: why not trust it as a source?
To come through the other side, of the forest? this unknown? to safety whatever that means, I must have a list of five clear tasks, something between a machine and a decanter, that will allow for everything jostling in my apron: Victorian gynecology, children's sexuality, the mantle of society upon the muscles, Marxism and sport, Deleuze and the body without organs, mapping of our emotions, Baudrillard's floating corpses, Andreas bobbing in the sea. I have these things pressing against my skin from the inside, like so many parasites.
October 28
A little bit further down the road of respecting somatic knowledge.
I am afraid of going too far down the path of accepting a new
strategy of creating a physical piece, without matching it up again
to my own obsessions/processes/thoughts - the ‘beginner’s mind’
or lack of training in choreography training per se may help me be
more open, but I am not here as a remedial dancer, to ‘start over’
with a handicap in a new discipline, but to gain new ways (I really
wanted to say ‘tools’ here, but Ana has already stopped me) to
integrate. At this point, where the project itself is still wet, I
want to go back to the ‘source’ - what is the angle of my
inquiry?
Michael Klien’s lecture (I listened to last year’s on the blog,
as much as I could considering the audio is crappy both on the
recording itself and on my ancient laptop) reminds me of the
essential problem of subjugation, power, and transferability of
impulse. When I choreograph a piece, regardless of my way of arriving
to it, I am in essence telling another body what to do. I am reminded
of the problems inherent in translating poetry - that is, there is no
such thing, just an approximation. Is it interesting to take one task
and compare various forms of execution?
The issue of repeatability comes back. I am using another body as a
tool to execute my idea - yes - but it transforms through the body,
the body itself is creating and re-creating. Not an original concept,
but one we keep winding back to. It is not an issue of ‘broken
telephone’ - that is, a pure, formed idea that becomes corrupted-
perhaps in an interesting way, but corrupted nonetheless - by its
journey through other bodies. We have rejected the notion of Platonic
form - it floats to the Cartesian. Does Spinoza fit here? He’s old,
I know, but according to our revised epistemology, we must accept
that some forms of knowledge exist outside historical period, and its
resident field of ideas. JPZ had us play a game of physical broken
telephone, where impulses were gradually transformed by their
transmission; it was a creative game, meaning a generative one; dance
is something that takes its form through this process, not the other
way around. So it becomes by definition collaborative - another
“a-ha” moment, realizing the wisdom of “Task.”
I’m slow, I know. Bear with me.
November:
Image. I am in a field with tall, looming boulders, a dream Stonehenge. a body running through this obstacle course of boulders, wearing an apron, things keep falling out of it, some of these things I stop to pick up, others I don't even notice and they remain strewn on the ground, some of them start rotting, perhaps, during moments when my trajectory has slowed to a crawl, to that of a near-statue, I begin to sense these chemical sirens accumulating behind me, in various stages of decomposition, the ones further back, farther away, also giving off the most loudly rancid smells, overcoming the gentleness of the ones at my heels, much as the mothers have to make their shrieks that much more piercing from a distance.
Michael Klien, a process of rediscovery. November 2
Well, the dam has broken: Michael Klien has arrived, and with this a torrent of thoughts and ideas - a jolt of recognition. For the first time I feel that choreography is not a foreign land I am visiting, that it has come to me, the mountain to Mohammed, its relevance appears on the opposite side of my expectations - I must have thought it would help me make physical theater, and instead I am invited to see it as an examination of relationships, all the more salient to my inquiry. - but as a theory, that is, an inversion of our thoughts and structures. - that art is, in fact, a politics;
It is an intersection of intellectual affinity and good timing (props
to the curator) which provides the delectable and satisfying feeling
that nascent buds are lifting towards the surface at the moment they
form, that half-lit, tremulous constellations of ideas appear as
meaningful connections.
Fragments of Michael from the notebooks:
- Derrida, “the body in artificial relations.”
Notes, all from Klien:
- the difference between a choreography of salvation and a choreography of revelation.
- Dance becomes its own forgetting (Klien quoting Badiou)
- “the wheel that turns itself”; “giving the earth a new name every time.” (Ibid).
A suggestion for long period of time:
1. do not at any stage plan the next step Stay in constant movement.
Embody what you’re actually thinking. Engage the whole body at any
given time.
2. Calm your own noise. Stop and listen in, when you feel that
something needs to change. Don’t be still, just wait for the change
to come. Listen to your body, as long as it takes.
3. Cradling the unknown: the strategies to break our own pattern are
as important as strategies to get into the dance. Release the grip of
the rational mind into the larger mind. Dance differently. Make fun,
be silly, or it will be hard.
Your practice is your life. Use all your empathy. It’s not a
practice if it’s not every day.
Your conception of creation has to do with your conception of God.
I’m a passionate believer that choreographers don’t have to
create pieces at all - they can just be part of the process.
Nobody takes art seriously. Of all the arts, dance is just above
poetry.
Learning Strategies: Sedimenting.
1. You do something.
2. You choose something.
3. You repeat three times.
4. You repeat everything chosen so far you remember
5. Go to step 1.
Works to Grow and Develop
“The amount of trash we produce for the sake of producing” in
relation to the myth of creating one work a year. It’s much better
to have 4 works in your lifetime that you can be proud of.
and nobody says it has to be finished.
Work is work that is realms of ideas.
Thinkers on the edge of each discipline have a lot to talk about. If
you create a choreography that is a kind of mapping, remember the map
is not the territory. (korbinsky)
What are the portals that shift you from movement exploration to
dance?
biosemiotics: The sign, not the organic molecule, that is the basic
unit of life.
Inspired by this, I decide to ‘increase the leak’ between my
daily life and my work with this project. Part of this is allowing
some of my experiences and daydreams into this account.
Propagating Synaesthesia:
Two thoughts:
1. The stock market has been turned to music.
2. Everything is measured - to make the invisible, visible, the
visible, audible, the audible, haptic.
What is choreographing, then, if not to set problems in physical
terms, terms that the body can deal with?
I imagine a duet with a theremin, sort of an analogue Wii hack,
turning proximity into aural information. “Duologue”, I will call
the piece. I remember this is an instrument that can be made by
hacking relatively easy-to-come-by supplies, and look it up on the
internet, but quickly decide this is not a feasible project. I
realize I do not have enough techy friends, a potential issue.
(remembering my experiment with the traces-in-space, and MK’s Im
Fett): If time becomes space, inhabited by visions and/or memories,
then can space become time for someone else?
Does choreography become a kind of poetry of metonymy? taking a small
part of the system and tweaking it?
For this I must ask,
1) What is the necessary scale of this particular system? Are there
tipping points that move it qualitatively into another event?
2. What is the event I want the rest of the people to
witness/experience?
I imagine another piece, where the audience is interrogated directly,
where they arrange themselves spatially as a kind of confession. More
than making their bodies assume the (heretofore, dancer’s) project
of movement through space, the rhyme and reason of their positions
becomes a map of sorts, that is, making invisible relations not only
visible, but three-dimensional, dynamic. Of course, Boal uses this
structure, as does Johnstone -everyone who has a brother on the left!
rank yourself in relation to others! Putting bodies in relation.
Representation is power, and cartography is representation.
΅What is the relationship between body and society? I’m not sure
if this is the same question as ‘Is dance political?”
Now, the question, ‘what are the behaviors we adopt” is best
practically examined in theater, and the question, “how does one be
in the present” in improv, “how does a collective work in
everything from ensemble theater on the artistic level and film on
the functional level, it is choreography that calls into question the
relationship with the mind and body to politics. I am taken aback by
this to a degree, but I don’t know why I would be surprised, coming
from performance studies. Still, I feel a bit that coming to dance,
I’ve finally arrived at the deep end of the pool. For one, if
dance is to liberate itself from the choreographer, as Klien
suggests, the approach not necessarily a kind of aboriginal trance
state, but something of a contemporary analogue: the attainment of a
state in between worlds, between the constraints of social and
material structures, into the movement of the spaces within matter
itself, a frequency of energy that tethers itself only barely to our
constructed patterns.
Reading: Lepecki. {Bruce Nauman’s “dance-like steps”): How is this different from a created ritual, an ‘invented
tradition”? How is this not a nod to the mechanical repetition of
the body as a part of the productive machine a la Marx: If I get to
invent the ditty, is my subservience to it somehow lessened?
or do we project it into the value of “discipline,” that through
diligent repetition one can change one’s body and therefore their
fate?
_
Being alone - what does it mean? The transition from being alone to
being with another
-
At home, around the house, I don’t have a bathrobe or slippers.
Instead I tie a cord around my waist and make sure it drags around
the ground. I imagine the trace it leaves, would leave, if it were
wet, if it were a giant paintbrush, if I excreted my path like a
snail. What kind of trail would I leave? What would the colors be? I
cut off the end when it changes color, an urban-grit gray, and this
brings me even closer to the ground. The time scale is too long for
an evening-length performance, but as the cord becomes shorter, I am
being slowly being reeled back toward the earth.
I think about making this cord permanent. At what length would I keep
it?
I mention this because it’s an odd sort of
experiment/compulsion/exercise that seems to have insinuated itself
into my “practice”, yet I feel ambiguous about its relationship
to the work we’ve been doing in the Lab. For one, it’s a conceit,
not a task; I am not sure how to track the process of its arisal. A
constraint, yes; a visual convenience, perhaps, but it isn’t really
a task’s task. Then I think, why not test ingenuity with the use of
a convention?
There are many ways, technically, to shorten the cord without cutting
it. It could, for example, be tied into knots.
----
Another note to myself, which I don’t understand:
The clock has stopped. We can no longer look forward or backward. We
now have to look from side to side - to rubberneck.
Who’s going to hit me?
A cloud coming in that slowly becomes toxic? a hatchet from the sky?
[new and old ways in which fear enters, is sustained by, the body]
Affect is the source of all intimacy: it encourages people to dig
deep into their biological “souls.” (Panksepp)
Cognition: involves neocortical processing of information gleaned
from environmental inputs via exteroceptive senses. Cognitions
resolve raw affects into higher emotions.
Working with Michael Klien has been revelatory for me in many ways.
His work is available elsewhere on the site, so I will not try to
replicate what he says, but rather mark the points I found most
illuminating. First, it put into proper context (for me, at least),
the way in which choreography handles certain contemporary concerns -
how quaint “making dance” is when viewed in light of power
relationships, as well as the way it interrogates the relationship
between the intention of movement and the movement itself. What is
the source of movement, if not our minds willing it, in service to
the mind of others?
Second, the meaning of ‘dance’ - unmoored from our notions of the
boundaries of the body. Dance is a state that occurs in systems, or
rather at their limits. We were asked to ‘dance’, did, and then
to ‘really dance.’
For me, the question of what that means was asked in the first round,
and the second round was to step up what I had discovered. But the
first dance period was really a tour of possibilities, which was very
much cerebrally driven. “Listen to your body,” I told myself,
“follow it.” But my body is selfish: it only wants to stretch
this part that feels stiff, then that part. Dancing is not
calisthenics, I think, and then remember my butoh teacher guiding us
to ‘very selfishly, let your body do whatever it needs to feel
good, just move in this axis.”
The guilt of “being selfish” as a dancer is another point of
disjuncture between the “instinct” of the performer to speak to
the audience, vs. the notion of autonomous process where contemporary
subjectivity is vying for recognition. Is this a result of
conditioned obligation, as the construction of a role as entertainer?
or (something that would make it more than guilt, or make something
more of guilt itself:)the timeless, biologically informed,
functionality or ‘efficacy’ of affective communication?)
In the spirit of things, I let my body chime in: this is not what it
feels like to dance, it tells me, next time can we just warm up
better beforehand. But why isn’t it, and how isn’t this different
from showing our vulnerabilities a la clown? Do they have to be
staged and controlled as entertainments? Isn’t the very sincerity
and vulnerability the key part of their power? To say there is no
difference is to create or accept a conflation of realism with
reality - surely that’s not acceptable. But if to present myself
to you as part of a system, though, shouldn’t I take into account
the energies around me? Doesn’t that include the piece of time
freshest about me, my history, my field of vision?
I remember a very dedicated Butoh dancer telling me that it took him
ten years of practice before he “finally learned to dance”; at
the time, it was like having a piano land on my head.
All right, so let’s say, for argument’s sake, I’ve never really
danced. But in pursuit of proximities, I find that I know when I am
‘in’ dance mode, but there isn’t a set threshold - lots of
in-between stages. Perhaps there is the thoughtless stage when you
are dancing uninhibited in whatever forms and movements come to you,
by training or imitation or whatever. Beyond that there is a sense of
going on a trip - of living something in your imagination. Often, I
fall into stories, and when sharing with others, can become
unfashionably narrative or descriptive- a subterranean element of
mime, perhaps, or facial expression - that I will do in unstructured
environments, but override when in the studio, when the movements are
framed as Dance.
I’ve been thinking that dance changes its time scale - from an
evening-length performance (dance as ‘piece’) to an ongoing
process, as we begin to step back and see different conceptions of
unities emerging from a broadened awareness.
Affect theory.
I’m not sure I’m in love with affect theory, but it might be a
crush. It feels a little watery sometimes, what with all the poets in
the room, and it kind of wants to be neuroscience but can’t, or
perhaps is a kind of gateway drug. And sometimes the entire
conversation seems a) silly; b) a rabbit hole, and/or c) the new
navel-gazing. But in that navel exists the world.
I know Bruce Nauman’s work is supposed to be interesting and/or
important for a lot of reasons having to do with the very idea of
designing movement. ..
“Nauman’s carefully executed actions - methodically and precisely
embodying and mobilizing a set of pregiven instructions - reveal a
commanding force in both language and choreography; better, they
reveal how the relation between language and choreography is one
mediated by force.[…] When Nauman dutifully follows the title as an
imperative organization of his mobility, he reveals the tensions and
title as an imperative organization of his mobility, he reveals the
tensions and cracks in “the relation between force and form, force
and signification, performative force, illocutionary or
perlocutionary force.”
Personally I am fascinated by the question(s) arising therein: is it
possible to really be alone? Can a highly specific prescription of
action, then, push against the solitude of time?
I want to return to the image of the athlete’s body just for a
moment to recall the high value we place on the visible effects of
specific, repeatable movement, over long periods of time. With echoed
mythology of ‘demigods’ at the Olympics, a body different than
that of ‘mere mortals’: the body of a swimmer is easily
distinguishable from that of a runner or wrestler or weight lifter -
the bodies on display during that spectacular bonanza are a gallery
of impossible extremes, crafted by 1) the professionalization of
leisure, in other words turning leisure into labor, and 2) the
division of that labor. The outrage that accompanies doping scandals
is an attempt to hold a certain line in place; it defends against the
notion that these grotesque, celebrated bodies could be a product of
anything but the sheer power of repetition.
If we take Klien’s invitation to accept dance as something big
enough not to fit into an evening-length performance. broad-spectrum,
then longform: the difference between a rigorous, structured sequence
of movements, as any athlete in training follows, is in a way
different from Naumann only in content and intention. But what is the
intention? Isn’t it to drill an intention into further iterations
of the self, to escape the present, the impulse behind writing? To
repeat a state?
Back to affect, and Berlandt’s desire… “ to discuss how new
vitalisms, animal studies, ecocriticism, cultural geography,
neuroscience and other fields converge around revised understandings
of the relations between mind and body, humans and objects, the
biological and the material.”
Neoliberalism and Affective Labor: a new realism appears not in plot
or representation or relations to objects as such but in relation to
time and movement as affective performances. How are we historicizing
neoliberalism in relation to affect, atmosphere, and mediations of
presencing?
The ambient rhetorics/ metaphorics of the economic crisis are
saturated with affective language: ebullience, depression, and the
one I find the the most interesting “greed.” [..] Economic
historians have long-debated whether the British empire was actually
profitable, yet the imagining of the drive to self-enrichment remains
the default psychological explanation for appropriation,
exploitation, conquest. I see greed everywhere as the vernacular of
critique across the political spectrum – the bankers were/are
greedy, public unions are greedy, governments are greedy. What is
greed, both categorically and substantively? Is the term being
calibrated somewhere between an appetite and a feeling? An
over-compensatory repetition compulsion driven by extremes of lack
and scarcity or a plenitude of desire? What are the antonyms of
greed? Need? Restraint? Self-sacrificing generosity? Overlaying
feeling and appetite in relation to greed there also seems to be some
idea of secular sin in a world of proliferating religiosity:
invisible hands are everywhere clutching, grabbing, pulling??
The more delicate the lace, ironically, of this ‘affective turn,’
is that it has in fact encouraged a new level of complexity in the
Marxist argument - and by this I mean a study of the material and how
it relates to the project of assigning values, calibrating meanings,
situating one’s own agency in a matrix of constantly moving parts.
I’ve been thinking, not so much in terms of greed, but in terms of
appetites - a blinking light in a game of Mother-May-I, insofar as we
seem to view them alternately as sources of instruction, other times
as red herrings to overcome. It is unclear to me if they are a source
or a threat to what we might consider ‘sovereignty’ on a personal
or collective level. Looking at this notion through the prism of our
present (national) crisis and the narratives it seems to magnetize:
there is a smug Lutheran sense of justice that our demise represents
the vindication of those who do not give in to their appetites, just
as, on the other side, we seem to have fulfilled our promise of
becoming the ultimate object of consumption by the ‘other’. This
may have nothing, or everything, to do with dance, depending on who
you consider to be the dancer.
With all this in my head, I find it difficult to go to the studio. I
will sit down with the coffee and books in the morning, and then when
it is time to get up and leave, I’m like, “let me just think
about this while it’s churning and then go see what I can do with
it in the studio a little later”, and then it’s like, “well, it
would really be obnoxious to show up now,” and then I’ve stayed
home reading all day. I think I have to begin by intellectually
supporting a directed exploration. I also know that this is not what
I really should be doing. Obviously, I say, you really should read
and write on your own time and use the damn studio time, and the team
time, and not isolate yourself. I don’t know what exactly is
driving my behavior in this respect - my most charitable explanation
is that I am following my process, and that’s valid, and theory is
valid, and as long as I observe and document myself and my work, I am
charting a process that arises from my precious impulse of discovery.
I have considered, however, the possibility of fear.
This may be an aside, but I’d like to mention this as a possibly
fertile source of conjecture: in my thought and research, I have
occasionally been struck by a fuzzy terror of what I might discover.
I hesitate to mention it, because it’s hard to explain. But, there,
I’ve said it.
Second Sphere: The Other
Yolanda Gonzalez is here with Unterwegs, Stavros and Inni. They are
essentially teaching us demeanor, which has to do with the approach
of the body (and here ‘approach’ wears all its meanings). A way
to initiate dialogue, to inspire trust - here there is no theory,
just a model of interaction based on respect and learned through the
body.
--December 12 Third sphere: The world
What kind of society does one want, what kind of dance does one make?
Here’s something else I’m considering: in this rapid shift
towards inequalities, the division between the haves and have-nots
widening, the disappearance of the middle class, what have you - is
forcing to its edges the disparity between respective ratios of money
to time. What one’s worth is supposedly directly tied to how much
time of his life can be exchanged for what amount of which currency.
Flesh sold not by weight, but by the hour. Huge amount of ideas about
this, obvs. - and I’m trying to lift off the Marx pad. I am
reminded of the actual flesh trade - and the fact that sex workers
exist simply because it is the most profitable use of a living human
body, should it be at another’s disposal. This issue has been
percolating in my consciousness rather vividly since 2009, when I
participated in the making of a short film on sex trafficking, and
subsequently felt drawn to all sorts of related talks and society
things - like I had joined some sort of organization called, “People
Who Are Concerned About Sex Slavery in Athens.”
All these skip in and out of the foreground in a field that I have
always felt tied to and, by now, officially count as flowers in the
bouquet of obsessions slowly unfurling into so many circus silks: the
relationship of a society with sex, how this is expressed in its
customs, laws and practices; but more presciently, its policies
surrounding its own reproduction, either cultural or biological.
Obviously that last caveat leads to a discussion on education - which
we must attend to later, if we haven’t earlier - and to the window
onto immigration. Because ‘reproduction’ on a biological level
may be a hazard. On a relatively micro-level, it occurs to me that on
a very real level, the death of Greece we are mourning now is really
its inability to reproduce. It has always bemoaned its inability to
convey any traces of its glorious past - it’s a sore spot - but I’m
not talking about that, I mean that the cost of producing another
Greek citizen is just too daunting to set out for. The Greek state is
hostile to expectant mothers just as society holds motherhood on a
pedestal - yada yada - this is a paradox only outsiders and newcomers
are even inspired to discuss. Of course I recommend Chalkias’s
Empty Cradle of Democracy, with its intricate exploration of Greece’s
shockingly high abortion rates, about Greece’s bipolar attitude
towards its own reproduction. Why am I even talking about this? The
relationship of the body to the political system. And let’s not
forget:
Bodies can be vessels into political systems. My dreams are a jumble
of borders, wombs, and citizenship papers: the underground California
“citizenship farms” where Chinese women by the thousands fly in
pregnant and leave with their “American” offspring, all within
the confines of a tourist visa. Indian women rent their wombs to
women of the West, blonde, blue-e. Then roadblocks. “Papieren,
please!” says the policeman, at the entrance to the metro. But when
I wake up the metro is closed, and the policemen are gassing pregnant
women and grandmothers..
In this third-sphere work, the feminist implications go beyond the
kinds of ‘women’s issues’, not least because one cannot think
of choreography without the concept of reproduction. What do we
actually do about it, then?
I feel pressed to discover: my method of working, as well as the
content and direction of my work. One way of doing that is to do it
first and examine it later. But what do I do, if I don’t know what
I’m doing? asks the other half. “Why don’t we think about this
some?” Meanwhile, everything I read blows my mind in some small
way, and the cells have to mend. I am embarrassed for not having
thought some of this stuff before and wonder that nobody in the
anthropology department, even when had eaten our Weber/Durkheim
vegetables and were allowed to think about contemporaneity, suggested
some of the gems hidden in thoughts about dance. And choreography.
I guess that begs the question: how broad-spectrum do I want to be?
How much can I afford to be?
Well, I can have some guidelines.
1. The work must have strict guidelines, but an uncertain outcome.
“Strict guidelines, uncertain outcome” - it hasn’t been so long
since Huizinga - we are describing a game structure.
The difference between being with one, being with two, being with a
hundred - with a thousand, with a million -
at which point does one become alone again?
Is this different from the first kind of being alone?
Now I’ll say something else:
Failure to be in the ‘now’ is an inability to commit.
The wording isn’t quite bumper-sticker quality, but the concept is
simple. To commit yourself is to be there fully, to put both feet in,
to risk. JPZ’s segment on putting self-risk on display in physical
terms illuminates how much more meaningful a depiction of failure is,
the more there is at stake.
---
Extracurricular Activities: A Visit to the “Circus.”
Perhaps in homage to this idea, Zoe A and I take a field trip to do
aerial silks at Circus Dayz, where, intentionally or not, the
gracefulness of the trapeze artist is foregrounded by the comic
persona reaching and falling, trying and failing - backgrounded,
literally, by the gaudy colors of parachute silks and a couple of
stray dogs. The second time around, we run into Nefeli, who gives us
the impression she’s been doing this the whole time.
I cannot move my arms for a week afterward. Baaby steps.
I continue to be heartened by the positive and generous energy the
girls are giving me, even as I turn out to be an unreliable team
member. Aphrodite, Thalia, and Sandra especially. Sandra and I share
something ineffable, and it makes me consider the idea of dialectical
relationships as a kind of duet. I decide to include a mirroring
sequence in the performance, which I now see as a kind of exposition.
Process on the Lab, Tues 12/13
Kyriakos is fabulous. I cannot help but think, as he tells us to
commit to your convention, and see what happens, do not tinker with
the results, that once again it is the right voice at the right time.
Commitment! I feel still like I’m slaking around the edges and the
dread is kicking in. I’ve come late to do Eleni’s dance with the
rest of the girls, have Sandra waiting for me to do my tasks, which I
still don’t know, exactly, how to hammer into lectical essence; I
feel a little like a black sheep coming in, swirling with
uncertainties. Somehow, Kyriakos reassures everyone at the eleventh
hour - another little miracle, which makes me marvel at the
architecture of this lineup. He makes the metaphor of overlaying
transparencies, to discover new patterns and synergies - not
maximalism, exactly, but a new way of seeing accumulation as
connectivity. Trust the process!
So I decide to treat everything as though it were exactly as it is
meant to be - meaning that all the raw materials, my own doubts and
looped esoteric reactions included, are there, indivisible elements
of the work to be revealed. How else to say it? The ‘art’ is a
small part of the work. Or, not to get confused with semantics: the
art swallows the ‘work’ itself.
All right, if this is to speak to my life, then I will speak to this,
the fear of being late. Am I too late? Too late for what? Can you be
too late for yourself? What functions as a delay pedal?
Mood, according to Bollas.
And this is something we pass on to each other.
At some point, there is a tipping point, and we come to a moment of
collective vibration. The boundaries are reassigned. A fleeting
configuration that pulses lightly, then dissipates like a mirage.
Backyard, in the bathtub. I am splashing around in some sort of
colored muck, with flippers and a diving mask, which has a camera in
it. (It’s on my list of gadgets.)What I see, the feed in other
words, is projected in the room behind the dancers. I gradually leave
the bathtub and come up to pressed against the windows, smearing the
pane. around my waist is a long rope, also covered in this substance.
An ugly, shivering body in the middle of this beautiful studio. I
would like the other dancers at this point to put down newspapers,
dancing between fascination and disgust. My cord leaves a trail, wet
paint, which is then cut incrementally.
Yes, but is this the
I may not have a theremin, but I bet Kyriakos can arrange a sound
that is proximity sensitive. (Postscript: He does.)
Can I truly be alone with other people in the room? And then, out of
this solitude, to connect? (Postscript: I do.)
Presentation
A stir is created upon the announcement that Kinitiras, unlike last
session, will charge admission - seven euros(!). I do not get into
the debate, as it is quickly established that this is not under
negotiation. However, this rather fundamentally changes the nature of
the final event, from a coming-out into the local world of dance, to
a show-and-tell for diehard supporters and intimates who are
obligated to come. A palpably different audience, different energy,
and ultimately different function. On one level, I find this
disappointing - not only for some of our artists who had considered a
buzz-filled debut part of the package, but as an undermined sense of
what I had applauded, last spring, of a certain kind of savvy -
creating an event that was essentially not only a sounding board for
works in progress, but ‘free’ (meaning pre-subsidized) marketing,
for the venue and the program. The fact that we could now be
perceived to be selling dough for cookies was a signal, for me at
least, that this would probably be the last Lab. On the other hand,
there was not going to be the same rush of eyeballs to the site, the
same level of engagement from the arts community - this returned the
project to a low-profile incubator, which, for my purposes, suits me
fine: it allows me to treat this final presentation as a personal
exposition of my journey through the process, not necessarily a piece
of work that exemplifies it. Appropriate enough. So I decide to keep
some elements that are really ‘inner winks’: the endless pages of
theory, and articles, that undergird my thinking, yet eventually
disappear into a moment at hand, one where I am outside looking in,
wearing my history, traces of my journey literally in my pores, wet
leaves and soil which, magnified and gradually warmed by the lights
as I stumble in and begin moving, adds an olfactory element to the
performance - smell, always the sense of memory. My isolation, a
simoultaneous presence and absence, an awkwardness seeking points of
contact and eventually becoming acclimated and transformed in the
context of the rest of the environment - all these elements were
there, as if waiting, in this sacred space and time, to be revealed.
Final sharing, December 2011
