Tag: SODA

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Assume Perfection

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!

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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.

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Framing Statement

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.

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Text for The Range of Acceptable Outcomes

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?

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The Stage is a Test Tube

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.
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What do you see?

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.

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What is it?

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.

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

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.

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Personal Statement for SODA

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.