Contact Improvisation has become a dance of the subject, not the object.
discuss
There is no theory.
There is no theory.
There is only practice.
What you do is your practice.
Whether you are sitting at a table or lying on the floor or doing push-ups or aligning your heels with your sitz bones or quoting dead lovers of knowledge, you are engaged in a practice. If you are repeating it, you are rehearsing it. If you are rehearsing it, it is your practice. If you are sitting around a table discussing the possibilities of choreography, you are practicing sitting around a table discussing possibilities. Why are you not stretching or sharing weight while discussing the possibilities of choreography?
It has been scientifically proven that those who sit more live shorter lives.
Do you want your practice to lead to a shorter life span?
one article
another article
a third article
This leads me to another point. Philosophy. Philo coming from the Latin for love and sophy from sophia mean knowledge or wisdom. Therefore, someone who loves knowledge is a philosopher. Anyone who is involved in a practice is therefore a philosopher. The more rigorous the practice the more rigorous the philosophy. Therefore anyone who has an interest, whether it’s comic books, ballet, baseball, anatomy, is a philosopher. He or she loves knowledge of a sort. It might not be knowledge that someone else finds particularly useful or valid, but it is still knowledge. Whether Green Lantern could survive an attack by the Silver Surfer is just as philosophical a discussion as an aesthetic and textual examination of King Lear.
A chef is a philosopher.
A soccer coach is a philosopher.
A hair dresser is a philosopher.
A rancher is a philosopher.
An eye doctor is a philosopher.
A second grade teacher is a philosopher.
A Shiatsu practitioner is a philosopher.
A forest ranger is a philosopher.
A stat quoting baseball fan is a philosopher.
A contact improviser is a philosopher.
This is the arch I’ve built as a memorial to my father.
Mastercard
Klein Tools 55-1/2 in. Grizzly Bar: $110.72
Bostitch 36″ Steel Wrecking Bar: $19.08
Craftsman 16″ Pry Bar: pries less
“ecosystemic feedback loop”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI]
I.E.P.
Something I wrote on the subway today about improvised performance, especially in relation to my project as part of my third semester studies at SODA –
Improvised Ensemble Performance intentionally has such a limited palette in relation to props, music, set etc. as each of those elements and the unnamed ones are all ways that we can distract ourselves from our existence. Think of cell phones, portable music and video sources on planes, trains and automobiles. We use those forms to pull us away from ourselves, intentionally or not. But consciously using the limited (yet infinite!) palette of shape, space and time, we are drawing our own attention to the barest form of our existence. We will not distract you, the audience, from your experience with sound, set, drama, overt story, magic, the space of appearance etc. We invite you, maybe challenge you, to experience what is happening before you.
A Quote
Dance [is] a practice that remobilizes language – Biba Bell, May 5, 2012
organistic or artistic
Is a performance an artistic event or an organization event? Both, but…and there is always a but…after the initial creation of the artistic event all that is left is the organizational event. Following this line of thought, could we then say that famous touring artists are not necessarily successful artists, but products of successful organizers?
The artistic feats of Cafe Müller, Glacial Decoy or Content with Content (to put myself in lofty company) happened but once, the initial birthing of them. But every other iteration of them is an organizational feat, not an artistic feat.
After taking a workshop here in Berlin about funding bodies and grant, and hearing about another workshop about international touring and funding, I began to wonder about organizing and creating. Creating something is definitely more fun than organizing something that is already. And as we all have a finite amount of time on this earth we can only do so much. Is it an either or situation? Do I have to pick one or the other? Or can I do both? It as of now has to be me doing both as no one is organizing for me. Haven’t sparked the interest of an agent or a funder to do that part for me. And I do not have the natural tendency to organize.
The creating of a piece has to come first, no? Not necessarily. One can apply to make a piece and then the funds to make it. But then should one wait to make a piece until the funds are there? I say no.
Often after I make a piece and perform it a few times, I lose interest in revisiting that idea or experience again. That road has been traveled and I do not want to travel down that path again. This lack of interest in repetition prevents me from creating situations(applying to festivals, etc.) to show my work multiple times. I would rather spend the time, money, energy investigating something new, making something new. At least when I make it I know that I will have some measure of success. By making something I do not necessarily mean a whole production with lights camera action and audience. But thinking and encorporealizing it for myself. Exploring those neural pathways.
Maybe then, moving to Marfa and building a studio will be a viable option for me.
Make, make, make. Let the organizers sort them out!
(or maybe this is all just rationalization for someone who can’t organize!)
Ahead of his time
We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature’s inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. -Thomas Edison, inventor (1847-1931)
Spirals
Below is the piece I made during the Erasmus intensive on Composition at my university this past fall, October 2011.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/33711374 w=500&h=281]