Tag: performance

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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!)

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Looking at Rembrandt

 The quotes below are from an article on brain scans on people who are looking at Rembrandt paintings.

Some snippets below –

“Brain scans revealed how much the enjoyment of art is influenced by the information given to the viewer.”

“The study showed the strength of suggestibility in such artistic responses.”

“The pretension-puncturing experiment suggests that the appreciation of art is strongly linked to the accompanying information – rather than an objective judgement.”

“This warm glow of aesthetic pleasure was absent when the viewers looked at an image they had been told was fake. Instead the brain activity was associated with strategy and planning, as though the subject was trying to work out why this was not an authentic painting.”

This shows how context can be made to increase or decrease viewers’ enjoyment of a static object.  Is this a good thing? 

What does this mean for live arts?  Could audiences be told that the piece they are watching is a fake Bausch, or a fake Cunningham?  Or do a piece as faithfully as possible by someone else and call it your own?

How much does it cost to rent an FMRI?

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Form and Content

Theater is that in which the form and the content are different entities.

In dance, the form and the content are the same entity.

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Performance Nutrition

What humanity needs to ingest to survive evolves very slowly.  As our ancestors before us, we are still eating proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins, antioxidants, etc to survive.  Humanity’s needs in the arts evolve slowly, too.  Witness the fact that Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s plays are still produced. Song of love and loss are recorded still.  Instead of using harps, musicians now use laptops and keyboards.

What evolves faster in terms of performance ingestion is the tools used to create the fodder for consumption.  New ways of moving, making sound, lighting the performance space, modes of covering and leaving the performing form uncovered evolve faster than what is done with those tools.

Inevitably these new tools are used to in performances that return to the basic needs of the audience.  After a deplorably short time, the exploration of the new tools is dropped and their use is co-opted by the need to explore the human condition, to create theater.

In other words, the tools and aesthetics change, but we come back to the same logics again and again and again.

Just as the nutritive needs of human will basically remain static so, too, will the performative needs of humanity.  It, therefore, behooves us to investigate the tools themselves and not their use in relation to humanity and the human condition.  Only in this way can we expect the arts to evolve

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Meaning

The search for the meaning of what is happening on stage is the act of demeaning what is happening on stage.

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A bunch of blind spiders creeping around

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 we 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?

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Fear the Obvious

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.

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Emphases in Performance

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.

(everything is dance)