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Violet

 There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.

There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.

But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

– Donald Rumsfeld

 I am curious what unknown Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods is venturing into with Violet that I saw at HAU 2 on October 30, 2013.  The program states that “Stuart once again ventures into the unknown.”  I would agree that she “has banished the socio-emotional issues that have coloured her previous pieces in order too concentrate on the kinetic and the abstract.”(from the program)  The other pieces I have seen by her, Replacement and Do Animals Cry, dealt a lot with social and emotional issues as far as I could tell.

Is Violet a venture into the unknown in terms of logic, tool, or aesthetic?  To concentrate on the kinetic and the abstract is not venturing into the unknown.  That realm of inquiry has been and continues to be heavily investigated.  Maybe the unknown refers to not knowing the results of a predetermined process.  As someone who also makes performance work, I am curious to know what the known knowns and the known unknowns are in this piece.  In other words, what was set(predetermined) and what was not(determined in the moment).  I am guessing that the upstage line of five dancers was known; that they would undergo solo states work was known; that the diagonal of  dancers from downstage right to upstage center stage was known; that the V shape of dancers was known; that the rolling clump of bodies was known.

I do not have an issue with elements, phrases, locations, etc. being predetermined in a piece.  But if the first sentence in the explicative text in the program talks about venturing into the unknown, I want that unknown to be defined.  Are the kinespheric processes unknown?  Are the spatial configurations that will arise unknown?  Is the sound unknown?  Or are they using known processes to discover something unknown.

However the piece is constructed and whatever the choreographer’s intentions may be, I appreciated the events on stage as they gave me a framework upon which I could lay some of my own questions about performance.  Simply put, I would say that Violet is a quintet of “balls to the wall” solos that are attempting to walk the fine line between ignoring the group and composing spatially with the group.  Watching the performance through that lens, I could think about my work with Lower Left.  The Ensemble Thinking work, as spatially clarifying and enlightening as it is, sometimes robs the dancer of a wild solo body.  The outward focus on the group’s spatial relationships can stultify the individual’s expression.  Violet, as I viewed it, is an inspirational, though not completely successful, step in the direction of co-mingling the wild low-brained body with a conscious and refined spatial awareness.  I say unsuccessful because several times I saw dancer’s “drop out” of their solo body work and shift their location to complete a line or angle in space.  Another point (and this might be a bit nit-picky) but the dancers used their right arms much more than their left arms to initiate and investigate movement.

The music by Brendan Dougherty does “produce a dense wall”.  At its loudest, which is a good chunk of the time, the music I found overwhelmed the dance.  Volume, in my opinion, is sometimes used for instant gravitas.  The dancers’ movement became insignificant beneath the weight of the sound.  At one point, a dancer screamed.  I couldn’t hear her through all the racket.  I could merely see the indication of a scream, a grimacing visage.  Quite an image if you want to use a social-emotional lens, even stronger if you add the lenses of race and gender – a white male making so much noise the scream of a small Asian female cannot be heard.  But we are in the kinetic and abstract so forget that interpretation.  Despite the volume, I enjoyed the music.

The large brown wall in the back looked like it was tacked on.  It was quite large but not large enough to envelope the theater/stage space and create a “space” within.  From where I was sitting I could not see enough of a reflection in it to give me another perspective on the events on stage.  The brown wall did, though, reflect the visible light spectrum nicely.  Everyone likes a rainbow.

In explaining the title Violet, Stuart says that “Violet is the last colour in the spectrum, before ultraviolet, before the unknown, before the imperceptible.”  Violet maybe the last color in the visible light spectrum right before ultraviolet.  But it is not before the unknown.  After ultraviolet rays are x-rays, gamma rays, and finally cosmic rays.  Granted everything after the violet is imperceptible to the human eye and therefore, in a sense, imperceptible.  Though we can sense prolonged exposure to ultraviolet rays after the fact – sunburn.  But is she saying that something known but not perceptible with our five senses is actually unknown.  Is the body the ultimate arbiter of known and unknown?  If so, then why have the loud music and the brown wall?  Let’s enjoy sweaty, spinal, rolling, screaming, walking, falling, running, shaking, flinging bodies for their own sake.

She is right, though.  Violet is a great name for a rock band.  Too bad these guys got it.
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carbohydrate food bags

I have spent the past several years trying to articulate the differences of the term logic, tool, and aesthetic.  A good friend and colleague has been struggling to understand what I mean by these terms and their boundaries or definitions.

G.U.T.

Go here for a some more info on them.

I have tried using movies as a way to define them and explain their functions.  Somewhat successful in conversation, but I think food might be a better way to do so.

Take pierogi.  They, as written on Wikipedia, “are dumplings of unleavened dough – first boiled, then they are baked or fried usually in butter with onions – traditionally stuffed with potato filling, sauerkraut, ground meat, cheese, or fruit.”

Does this sound like any other foods?

How about a wonton? From Wikipedia- “Wontons are made by spreading a square wrapper (a dough skin made of flour, egg, water, and salt)[1][2] flat in the palm of one’s hand, placing a small amount of filling in the center, and sealing the wonton into the desired shape ”  Again a dough outer layer with stuffing. Wontons are usually filled with ground pork and are “commonly boiled and served in soup or sometimes deep-fried.”

Take the Maultasche, or mouth bag, from southern Germany.  On Wikipedia it is defined as “It consists of an outer-layer of pasta dough which encloses a filling traditionally consisting of minced meat, smoked meat, spinach, bread crumbs and onions and flavoured with various herbs and spices”

Italian cuisine gives us ravioli(not to mention the tortelloni and tortellini!).  Ravioli  “are composed of a filling sealed between two layers of thin egg pasta dough“.  From Jewish cuisine, we have the kreplach and from Russian cuisine, the pelmeni.  The dough of the kreplach “is traditionally made of flour, water and eggs“, while the pelmeni has less egg, if any.  There is also the Belarusian kalduny, the Ukranian varenyky,  the empanada from the Spanish/Portuguese speaking world, the Romanian/Turkish/Armenian manti, the Mongolian buuz, the Korean mandu (this page has a list of the varieties of mandu), the Tibetan momo, the Uzbekian chuchvara, the Georgian khinkali, which is eaten in an interesting manner, the Circassian mataz, the Indian samosa, the Chinese baozi and the baozi page has a list of all the different types of baozi, which brings me to another point which I will address later.  This listing of types of carbohydrate food bags is by no means exhaustive.  There are many that I have missed.

The cooking method and stuffing aside, these dishes are a flour based wrapper filled with other food materials.  They are more similar to each other than not.  Given the range of food in the world, I would say that they are essentially the same thing.

How do the carbohydrate food bags apply to the logic/tool/aesthetic triangle?

The logic of these foods, and food in general for that matter, is nutrition.  Food provides energy and material to build or repair cells.  More specifically, we could say that the logic of these types of foods is carbohydrate food bags.  The tool is the ingredients that make up each kind of carbohydrate food bag.  The aesthetic is how those ingredients are prepared.  Wontons, for example, are sealed “into the desired shape.”

In terms of savory or sweet as an aesthetic, maultaschen tend to be savory, while kreplachs are sometimes filled with sweet cheese.  Other aesthetic variations are fried or boiled carbohydrate food bags.  Aesthetic variations also exist in the thickness of the doughs used to create the food bags and in the size.  Maultaschen, generally 8-12 cm across, tend to be the largest.  There is a version of the baozi,  the ‘Dabao (“big bun”),’ which “measuring about 10 cm across, served individually, and usually purchased for take-away” is larger than the xiaobao  version, which measure only 5 cm across.

Shape is also a means for aesthetic expression in the world of carbohyrate food bags.  Samosas tend to be somewhat pyramidical.  Khinkali look like small hot water bags.  Ravioli tend to somewhat rectangular;  tortellini somewhat curved.  Momo are circular and similar to the khinkali but without the long top.  Please see the photos below for a few visual examples.

Going back to the baozi.  We could refine our definition of logic and say that the logic we want to deal with now is the baozi.  The tools are the ingredients that make up the baozi – a steamed bun (carbohydrate) made with yeast filled with meat or vegetables.  The aesthetic choices can be sweet or savory.  There is the Charsiu bau, which is filled” with barbecue-flavoured char siu pork.”  The Kaya-baozi is “filled with Kaya, a popular jam made from coconut, eggs, and sometimes pandanin Malaysia and Singapore.”  The Korean mandu also has several variations.  The “Saengchi mandu (생치만두),” is  “stuffed with pheasant meat, beef, and tofu” and “was eaten in Korean royal court and in the Seoul area during winter.”  There is the Mulmandu (물만두).  “The word itself means “water mandu” since it is boiled.”

Logic, with relation to carbohydrate food bags, could be defined as fried and savory.  This logic would be satisfied by fried meat filled pierogi, gunmandu, and geröstete maultaschen.  We could say that we want a logic of roundness within the carbohydrate food bag world.  Maultaschen would not satisfy that logic, neither would pierogi, unless you looked down the long axis.  Momo satisfy the round logic when viewed from above.

The above examples for logic might seem somewhat murky.  But I gave these examples to show tools,aesthetics, and logics are not determined by what something is, but more by how it functions.

The simplest way I know how to define these three terms is as follows –

the logic is why

the tool is what

the aesthetic is how.

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Was Wiesel a yogi?

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself. -Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (b. 1928)

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Every gun

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -Dwight D. Eisenhower, US general and 34th president (1890-1969)

I wish war mongers would listen to the words of Eisenhower, a Republican and a soldier.

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Surrender

When, through your practice of Ensemble Thinking, Viewpoints, Action Theater, and Contact Improvisation, you have reached a higher state of intelligence, and that mature intelligence makes you lose the identity of the self, you become one with the performance because you surrender yourself to improvisation.

When, through your practice, you have reached a higher state of intelligence, and that mature intelligence makes you lose the identity of the self, you become one with God because you surrender yourself to Him.  This is Isvara-pranidhana, surrender of one’s actions and one’s will to God. – pg 53, Tree of Yoga by BKS Iyengar.