The Paper

THE PAPER ISSUE 3

October 2009

The Newest Age

MARS SUNSET

Eleanor bauer

An excerpted sneak preview from the early working notebooks of Eleanor Bauer and Mårten Spångberg project which will premiere in autumn 2010.

The Newest Age celebrates the body as a constant problem on the outskirts of discourse, not to be framed but constantly set free! The Newest Age utilizes language as electricity, not control! The Newest Age is a machine designed to produce what the body desires: escape! The Newest Age is powered by motion! The Newest Age is a giant catapult aimed at the unknown! The Newest Age is of undiscovered languages and unreleased fashions! The Newest Age is bombastically unnecessary and yet completely irrefutable!

The Newest Age is conceptual on the level of experience! The Newest Age is the smartest thing that never made anyone feel stupid!

The Newest Age is both a rock ‘n roll concert and a Chopin recital, a fireworks display and a day at the beach! The Newest Age will bring you higher, baby, and higher! The Newest Age believes in the intimacy of emancipation! The Newest Age protects radical privacy and parallel universes! The Newest Age is for socialism built on individuation! The Newest Age is equality without homogeneity! The Newest Age is symmetry without sameness!

The Newest Age is a giant cipher for the infinite production of difference! The Newest Age is abstraction without subtraction! The Newest Age is nothing personal and yet full of personality! The Newest Age is communication without consensus! The Newest Age is the most dancerly (mis)understanding of The Newest Testament! The Newest Age is all beauty and only beauty!

The Newest Age is Dance!

Working on a concept of “onto-choreography,” that is, choreography as a performative definition of space and time, but also an ontological approach to the definition of choreography as a being-in-itself, we, Mårten Spångberg and Eleanor Bauer, wish to tackle the very is-ness of dance and choreography without falling into the trap of nostalgia for a time when “just dancing” was possible. Both of us are familiar and even intertwined with the arguments and procedures of the “conceptual dance” [sic] wave of the 1990’s, and yet both of us are more interested in dance and dancing itself than its deconstruction or displacement via methodologies or ideas imported from other media, artistic or theoretic.

When we say “The Newest Age is conceptual on the level of experience,” (Prelude) we mean that sensing and thinking are in doing and in the realness of product, that the product (the dance) is productive of concepts that are understandable through the experience of the product alone, and that what we want to get at is in the very experience of what we do while dancing. Everything we need to know about the dance is in the dance itself, and yet the dance cannot be produced from everything we know, but rather, take us further than what we know, in order for it to be productive of experience rather than knowledge. We are interested to work on dance and choreography in a way that continuously sets them free from linguistic understandings, agreements, and definitions. Without rejecting language and discourse, the method is rather to install a process that permits language to be continually inspiring and intensifying, constantly pushing the dance beyond our ability to negotiate it into a comfortable level of tractability, pushing us to invent new language to attempt to understand what we do. While we share proficiencies in and affinity for language and theory, our common point of interest in dance lies in the body being a constant problem on the outskirts of discourse, and our aim in this project is to keep it there.

It is not uncommon that people in the dance field who are concerned with the role of dance today speak of getting “back to dancing”. We are not interested in getting back to anything. We are not interested in going back in time, in referencing or borrowing from any period when one could imagine nostalgically that “just dancing” was either easier or more permitted, nor in using reference as an excuse or frame in which to make dance comfortable and known. We are not interested in putting dance in quotation marks. Rather than getting back, we are interested in getting on with dance by looking at where it’s been, where it is now, and devising a way of working that always pushes us ahead, out of what we can understand, what we can solve or imagine, letting the constant production of ignorance be a choreographic tool. In this sense, we will indeed be working backwards: rather than trying to arrive at something known by entering an empty studio with empty hands and working on what we can mutually understand, building something up from nothing until the premiere date, we start with a completely full palette, everything we know, think and want to attack in a fully constructed philosophy and practice, and then we work our way out of it, building a rocket out of known’s to send

us deep into the unknown.

From Gilles Deleuze to Biran Massumi, from Elizabeth Grosz to Alva Noë, contemporary philosophy and theory have been working to recognize and put into words the body’s pre-linguistic and proto-linguistic perceptual capacities and intelligences that make “the skin faster than the mind” (Massumi). Stemming from the poetics of Bergson on Intuition and The Creative Mind as well as the phenomenological writings on perception by Merleau-Ponty, a new generation of theorists is marrying the poetic and the scientific to get to the infallible core of such questions as “Is experience conceptual?” or “Is the visual world a grand illusion?” (Noë). New ways of delving into and defining a very old understanding of reality seem to conclude that experience is the only truth. Putting the body in a place of authority, and material existence on an even keel with immaterial principles, now is a moment, more than ever, that just dancing is not for the nostalgic, but for the forward-thinking.

That experience is the only truth is in fact not a new understanding at all, but a very ancient one, present in many eastern philosophies and religions. With cutting-edge thinkers affirming ancient wisdom by borrowing from a wide range of disciplines to prove their point, we see an academized acknowledgement of the complex relationship between the mind and body that has been the subject of science, religion, philosophy, and spiritualism for ages. With the New Age movement, we saw the complexity of this relationship and all of these sprawling disciplines made accessible to the masses via their amalgamation into a single movement that created a simple way of navigating these divergent histories: ‘choose your own adventure’. By spiking the cocktail of philosophical history with a heavy dose of individualism, the New Age appropriated all of the truths and knowledge of the past without the religious doctrines and dogmas that made them actually religious. In this way, the New Age movement avoided the attacks of religion while becoming an uber religion, a lifestyle philosophy, which included bits and pieces of every way of understanding and coping with reality. Deeming the individual a sense of empowerment by giving her or him permission to identify with or assimilate as many points of reference as he or she desired into his or her personal version of The New Age lifestyle, this one-world unireligion actually made the opposite of a free person able to think and experience for himself, but a person addicted to the teachings of masters by referring to all of them. The Mind-Body-Spirit wholisticism of the New Age resulted in numerous misunderstood or fabricated connections between sciences, religions, and philosophies, which is also what allowed a history of ideas to become a seemingly cohesive lifestyle, a world-view that could swallow and account for any anomalous outcropping of doubt or discovery. What was invented to create a sense of freedom for contemporary man’s dilemma of having too many dogmas to choose between became a prison of constant identification. What if the freethinking and empowerment of the New Age lifestyle were set free from reference? Maybe then experience could truly be experienced as the only truth.

In order to use what we know to access what we don’t, we have to be willing to experience what is. In order for the audience to challenge their knowledge of what’s been done in order to have an experience of what is being done, we must escape the frames of history, the theatre and the gallery that define how we perceive and experience dance and art. In order for artists to challenge our knowledge of what’s been done and have an experience of what is being done, we must constantly escape the frames of understanding that we share or that we can always create for ourselves and for each other. We must create a hyper-individualized situation in which the mind and body are permitted to think with each other and ahead of each other, never one holding the other back, in order to create a state of susceptibility to discovery of the very ancient, very newest, very obvious, very immediate, very apparent truth of experience.

The Newest Practice In the past 20 years of dance history we have seen a steadily increasing interest in somatic practices as a basis for dance. Replacing techniques imposed from external models with movement rooted in one’s own sensation and experience of their body, somatic practices (such as Body Ming Centering™, Feldenkrais, Klein Technique, Alexander Technique, Skinner Releasing, Authentic Movement, and Experiential Anatomy) along with ancient and eastern studies that emphasize energy flow rather than form (such as Qui Gong meditation, Tai Chi, Aikido and other Martial Arts) demonstrate a shift in interest towards more immaterial and experience-oriented sources for movement.

While all of these practices are rooted in different histories and cultures, they have a few common observable effects on dance: They support a levelling of access to movement which is less about expertise and more about discipline, less about goal-oriented results and more about process and attention, less about form and more about action. As long as you are working on the right things, you can be of any age, size, shape, skill level or background, and be just as “good” a practitioner as the next. However, when hijacked for the use of a choreographic process, these practices have very recognizable aesthetic implications. As a way of working and/or training, a palette of somatic and/or ancient practices produce a culture of dancers that believes in the sanctity of their own experience of movement and even the spectator’s capacity to empathize with that experience. This has been a key ingredient in a popular shift towards choreographing from the inside-out rather than the outside-in: with the use of somaticpractice-based scores, people manage a way to grant their body a level of authorship while having the score as an externalized authority to refer to. Applied practice as artistic production also allows for products that can change from one performance to the next, rather than repertories that are performed and repeated as historical documents of the moment in which they were created. Whereas there used to be a time when choreography and improvisation were considered contradictory terms, practice based work is included in a larger shift of an increasing presence of improvisation within people’s concepts of choreography, from “Instant Composition” to Deborah Hay to William Forsythe to Anne Teresa De Keersmaek-

er. This structural softening makes for works that can be very now, consider themselves continually updated, always present-tense.

But what about works that are very next, continually ahead of themselves, always futuretense? Can we install a process of thinking and working that forces us to chase the dance, rather than compose the dance? Can we create a method of choreography as the production of proto-territories? That is, instead of defining space and time in order to create the realm in which the dance resides, can the dance continually re-define space-time?

Working backwards to exorcise all that is contemporary is neither about accessing the past nor producing the more contemporary, but about producing a space and time where new and different are irrelevant, where there is nothing with which to identify or in which to assimilate oneself, a void in which the dance produces both content and context. In order to create a sensation of understanding that is more immediate than recognition, The Newest Age is about the continuous production of movement that has yet to acquire a name. For this we must imagine more than a piece, more than a practice, but something like a philosophy that accounts for a way of being, working, perceiving, moving and being moved.

The Newest Testament For The Newest Age, we are writing an original syllabus and doctrine for movement and choreography entitled The Newest Testament. The Newest Testament will address dancing, performing, composing, thinking, analysing, intuiting, watching, evaluating, and communicating, as it should be conceived as a complete handbook for the creation of The Newest Age. By articulating our principles, interests, and desires for the work into a nonnegotiable format of instructions, we hold ourselves up to our ambitions by making this document our bible for the working process, to keep us going when the going gets tough.

The purpose of the The Newest Testament is to use language as an intensifier for thinking, dancing and making dances, to use “language as electricity, not control” (Prelude). In collaboration, it is all too common to get stuck at the table being sure everyone understands in language what we are trying to do before we get out of the chair and do it, and after we’ve done anything, to revert to evaluation in discussion to be sure we are still all doing the same thing, or think we know what we’re doing. We wish to avoid this gravity towards the safety of what we know, and to avoid that our ability to articulate things in words gains authority or precedence over our ability to define what we want by doing what we want.

This is not to say that we will not speak in the process, but rather to say that language is a choreographic tool, and if we are interested in getting to the heart of the matter, to the ontological is-ness of the dance, we have to use language to get us there without allowing verbal agreements and understandings to pacify our insecurity or curiosity. Understanding “choreo-graphy” literally as the writing of the dance, The Newest Testament is an act of choreography that uses language to trip-up the language brain so that it may stumble into the pre-linguistic and proto-linguistic territory of dance itself. Like a set of monkey-bars, The Newest Testament is a concrete construction

of all our ideas, there for falling off of and from swinging between, the movements they produce being their sole purpose.

Something that is not for consensus or agreement but a slippery and evasive doctrine that offers discourse as a source of healthy confusion, The Newest Testament is there to ensure that we don’t know what we are doing, yet trick us into doing it, using what we know to get to what we can’t yet imagine. Once The Newest Testament is written, we will alienate ourselves from it and approach the text as the authority for the working process, something to believe, attempt, trust, misunderstand, reinvent, apply, perform. The Newest Testament will also be published for distribution, but only after The Newest Age has toured significantly, as it should not be necessary for understanding the performance. If The Newest Age wants to be “the smartest thing that never made anyone feel stupid” (Prelude), it is absolutely necessary that the dance has everything the piece wants to be, and that any reading of The Newest Testament thereafter is understood as a separate and independent experience.

While The Newest Testament serves as our common ground, and it is something we will have written ourselves, in order for it to be a spring-board to discover what we do not yet already know, we must install triggers in the set-up of how we work to keep us lost, to promote divergences and misunderstandings, to keep us searching outside of the socially inclined tendencies of compromise or homogeneity. Therefore, we will each have private artistic advisors whose purpose it is to keep our respective ideas and movements connected to worlds outside of our process together, to support our individual spheres of imagination and personal ways of coordinating information, both physically and intellectually. As “The Newest Age protects radical privacy and parallel universes” (Prelude), the private advisors are not dramaturges of the piece itself, they do not see rehearsals, they do not speak to each other, they do not speak to the other artist, and they can be used for whatever kind of artistic support the artist desires, including speaking, dancing, reading, watching films together, and etc. In this way, The Newest Age is not a collaboration, but a shared laboratory for the production of curiosity and desire, a mutual commitment to the yet-to be discovered.

Searching for the newest of the new is a commonly shared impossible in the world today, in fashion, culture, technology, science, and the arts. While every “new” that seems to crop up is a continuous verification or rebirth of something old or already existing, notions of recycling, vintage appeal, re-vamped ancient wisdoms and neo-traditions, re-contextualized contents gaining new meanings and applications, or total disbelief in the new at all, are very familiar post-modern predicaments that society can’t seem to graduate from. If we consider Modernism a situation of celebrating the materiality of the object in itself, lets say, content without context, and we consider PostModernism the re-definition or re-mixing of content via contexts that produce new meanings, how can we get out of our Post-Modern dilemma, and what should follow? That is where dance comes in: what dance has the potential to do, as an art form of subjectivity and volatility that resists objectification a priori, is to deliver an experience of content asserting its power and influence over context, or content defining/inventing/rendering context. In this sense, dance itself contains the ingredients for the revolt of the object or content against the constant framings of PostModernism, yet without being a repetition of Modernism. So rather than needing to frame dance, offering ways to read, interpret or understand it by reference to its own history or by reference to something besides itself, we need to set it free, to launch it into its own bright future by creating a work where the dancing itself extends to context, produces new contexts, literally defines and re-invents its environment, the space around it.

To materialize this desire, we will work with environmental scenography that performs a relationship to what we do, is clearly an extension of the dancing, but also enfolds the whole reality of performers and audience together in a scene that is unrecognisable by any other means than as a production of movement. In this way, the dance produces the space and the space produces unknown proto-territories, together creating a futuretense of dance, and onto choreography as the invention of space and time. If one can schematize the history of dance in terms of gravity -- Ballet defying gravity, Modernism emphasizing gravity, Post-Modernism economizing gravity -- a possible next step and the most radical break from this defining relationship to verticality would be to do away with gravity all together. If the future of man is in outer space, perhaps the future of dance is indeed without gravity! Therefore, the question ensues of how to create a space with no orientation of up and down. www.issuu.com/thepaper

Editorial Picture this: A disorientated blonde, dancer, in a banged up burgundy 1987 Holden Commodore, drives straight down the centre of Melbournes Swanston Street (trams and taxis only). She hasn’t had enough lunch, or any dinner, so the one glass of red wine she drank at the theatre will probably put her over the legal limit. She doesn’t have her drivers license on her, lost her wallet in Paris early in September. Its 8:30pm and her headlights are not working, due to a faulty battery, and displayed in the window of the car are her 19 year old brothers probationary ‘P’ plates. As the Commodore bunny hops, due to a faulty battery, toward seven parked Victorian police cars, she holds her breath and braces herself for the whoop whoop slap of a fine and lock down.

Not so surprisingly, the Commodore hops its last hop, stops dead in the tracks of the 96 tram and obstructs traffic in both directions. Also not surprisingly, in the rear view mirror appear three burling boys sporting ‘afterwork drink’ grins and effortlessly push the nuisance vehicle out of the way, because Austrlains are “so friendly and happy and super good at sports” – Jochen Sandig at The Den, when asked about his impressions of Australian culture. She sits, sheepishly looks in the direction of the police officers and contemplates her next move.

It seems that either someone is robbing the bank or her prayers for invisibility have been answered, because not one of the fifteen police officers standing road side has even blinked in her direction.

She immediately extracts her self from the burgundy bomb and starts to walk.

Impossible! - you say. For such a law breaking, code violating, nuisance making event to have occurred and gone unnoticed by the authorities. It is Melbourne for crying out loud! - you would never get away with such a travesty.

And of course you wouldn’t and she didn’t because it is a fictional story.

It seems we are living in a city where not only is everyone walking the dog, but everyone is picking up their own dogs dog shit. And why? Not because I will step in it when dancing down the street, Justin Timberlake in headphones, unaware of shitty dangers underfoot, but because if they don’t they will, without exception, always get caught.

Credits

‘Getting caught’ seems to be the rea-

soning behind the ‘not doing’ of many a Melbournian citizen. In this fictional story the bedazzled blondes first thought was not for her fellow man and the safety of others, she did not, initially, consider how her actions would disrupt their Friday night plans. She was primarily concerned with possibility of getting caught.

When one is controlled, monitored and restricted by rules, regulations and codes of conduct it is interesting to question why we do what we do, and, more importantly, why we don’t do. How much does the law, written or not, take away from the ability to navigate ourselves through life using our minds to act and exercise common sensibilities and considerate thought.

This is not a suggestion to legalise the sending of text msgs whilst driving on the freeway. Doing away with law and conditions of society is not an efficient or practical way to consider change. If we can for a moment zoom in on the microscopic sized universe that is contemporary dance…. We survive, especially in Australia, through the institutionalisation of art. Institutions constitute decree, permanence and regulations that govern behavior and structure social order. This is the way it goes and although ignorance of such dependencies is encouraged, what instead should be considered is how one can work within established centre’s of power, on the ‘inside’, to initiate change, as well as insisting on continually challenging standardised conditions of production from a position of the ‘outside’.

The interesting question is how can we use established platforms of production to build new contexts for experimental conditions? And what happens when we displace ourselves from existing specificities of knowledge production and distribution?

If we consider the institution as a choreographic tool it raises questions of why we move, how we move and how can we develop new and innovative ways to create movement, not just in the studio, but how we navigate through the universities, state arts centres, city council funded festivals etc.

It is also important to question why we don’t move, what is obstructing our potential to activate change and what is reinforced when making work to be presented in exclusively curated international festivals, void of Spiegeltent atmosphere and where is Sasha Waltz by the way?

Editorial Team: Atlanta Eke and Coco Eke

Contributors: Eleanor Bauer, Deanne Butterworth, Megan Andrews, Mårten Spångberg, Jan Ritesma, Marcus Doverud, Tahni Holt, Ann Liv Young, Adam Erica Cardwell, Adam Broinowski

The Paper was inpired by The Inpex www.inpex.se

Distribution If you would like copies, please contact thepaper.miaf@gmail.com www.issuu.com/thepaper

Opinon Thinking About Institutions Jan RITSEMA 1. Lets first talk about the already existing institutions They all served us well But is their well well enough Thats the question

2.Talking about institutions sounds like wasting time The concept is out of time.

-The well organised solidity, this permanence, that it represents, prevents change, adaptation, merging, generosity, flexibility.

3. In the sixties we walked the big march through the institutes we democratisised them, but, we accepted the phenomenon, so, they stayed, the institutes worse: they multiplied and the new directors who emerged from close to the barricades of the sixties became the new enlighted authoritarians wrapping their power in a sick repressive tolerance, which made them resistant to any resistance or opposition. Their strategy of understanding revolt, even encouraging this, took every appetite for change away 4. Institutes became mastodonts, filled with functions with heavy salaries, and in the struggle to survive, the institute itself, its reputation, its market value,became more important than the service they were supposed to render 5. And of course not only the institute started to believe in itself so did the salaries.

Principles, techniques, professionalism. The salaries, like the institutes look backwards. To their past. To how they did it, to what they discovered, they systematised the ‘best’ way to do things, they knew, they knew how to do, how to make how to teach, how to show, how to serve Unfortunately institutes do not doubt. Institutes know, which makes them obstacles to change 6. Let us go for the impermanence. So, away with the institutes. But this is an illusion. Not possible. And most probably not wishable Let them be, but ignore them And Think about other ways to exchange, gain, distrtibute and produce knowledge and information -Think about the many different ways to access knowledge Think about if it is possible to do without institutes Think about the fact that information is not totally free accessible, that you have to follow procedures, pay entrance fees, be selected Think about if it is possible to do without organising knowledge transfer through schemes, modules, routes, linearity and schedules of fixed hours in fixed classes, opening hours or offices Think about on the contrary to make these processes floating, whimsical, uncoordinated, irregular and unrepeatable -Think about the amount of permanence you need -Think about the amount of impermanence you need Think about that it is impossible not to learn Think about that it might be possible to learn without being taught, without being instructed Think about that you can observe, verify the observation with what you know and notify the differences -Think about that this is a basic training in intelligence and a tool to independance Think about that we can and should have the say over what we learn and the way we want to learn this. (We don’t let the doctor do to our body what we don’t want to be done to it, why should we let the teacher or curator implant in our heads what we don’t want or in a way we don’t want this.)

Think about the fact that the knowledge you allow yourself to be affected by is as much a private terrain as you think your body is. It is never stated in any constitution, but...

Think about a constitutional right which grants you the freedom over the knowledge you allow to be affected by.

Think about the crazy situation that society (read: you) pays heavily for institutes who have the arrogance to think that they know how to organize the way information is transferred to you, (by withholding at the same time a lot of information). Like in the internet all information stocked in institutes should be completely free accessible at any moment for anybody Think about the amount of guidance you need Think about how many teachers, curators ad institutes you need Think about, that when you need them that you should have the right to drop them whenever you like, and that it should not be the otherway around that they have the right to drop you.

Think about that the good will always stay good, with or without the institutes, and so will do the bad Think about that when one can change content and institute easily, more people might find a better way to explore and develop their talents Think about if your lack of motivation to produce knowledge is given by a lack of motivation as such or by a lack of motivation to follow the patterns the institute obliges you to Think about how inefficient the proclamated efficiency of institutionalised knowledge exchange is Think about if you exhausted all possibilities to gain knowledge by yourself Think about how much you can learn from others (when you trained yourself to ask the good questions instead of being trained to give the good answers) Think about how stupifying the institionalised ways of knowledge transfer are of these knowledge exchange factories Think about other platforms, islands, planes, gardens, woods, jungles, rhizooms to produce and exchange knowledge Think about that the powerful, this marriage of money and politics, built these institutes, filled them with bodies and more bodies, faces and more faces, think about that this was only another way to make them sleep, an other way to keep them stupid Think about the humiliations one has to allow to develop an institute begging in the offices of politics and money Think about that once the power was on your side, that you gave it away, but that it might be easy to get it back Think about that the power can still be on your side

Interest

Dancing –!Between Us Practicing a Politics of Presence Megan andrews

Prologue: My research engages with questions about the contemporary dance encounter, which I have examined from multiple perspectives as an artist and scholar. I question, following others to be sure, contemporary Western culture’s predisposition to a specific kind of visual engagement with the object environment, and suggest that this may preclude a mode of engagement with contemporary dance that is aligned with the live moving subject – the dancer.

[I am dancing.]

What are you looking at? Don’t look at me that way. I am not an object for your visual consumption.

The look, the gaze, the glance, the blink, [wink]. Flickr. YouTube.

Video phones. Flat- screen. Widescreen. The screen. The Scream.

[Scream!] Can you hear me? Are you listening? No, because listening takes time. It’s not as efficient, or productive, or conducive to consumption as is looking. Visual consumption. Eating images. Pac-Man eats the ghosts. Who are they? Who were they? Pac-Man grins. A screen smile. Greta Garbo. Silver screen.

Seduction. Screen memory. Veil.

Veiled origins. Who are we? I, you.

I, me. I, eye. I look back at myself – in the mirror. Who is looking? Who is there? A mere reflection. Insubstantial image. Ghost? Haunted – by spectres. You see them but there’s nothing there. Disincarnate simulacra. Specular spectacle. On spec.

Sight unseen? Speck. Fragment.

Pixel. Particle. Floating. Flickering.

Fragments of mind? Fragments of reality? Elusive. Invisible. What are you looking at?

At a time when Western society is super-saturated with images, when our relationship to the world, to others, is that of subjects to objects, consumers to products, we have developed what has been called an instrumental vision. The path of our culture – the path of modernity, science and technology – has predisposed us to a particular way of seeing. Advances in technology have enabled us to compress space and time, creating only the illusion of presence and continuity – control – at the expense, I think, of experiencing ‘with’ and ‘between’. The meaning of ‘with’, the meaning of ‘between’, I would argue, have been largely lost – or more accurately perhaps – forgotten.

So, what are you looking at? Bodies, space, time – subjects, motion, meaning – blurring, merging, shifting. Flow. Dancing subjects reveal the changing dynamics of space and time, and challenge our desire to arrest them as objects of our gaze.

Dancing invites us to reconsider our visual habits. Dancing is about ‘with-ness’ and ‘between-ness’. Live dance performance has the potential to remember these experiences to

us. How do we see meaning in motion? How do we see the ‘with’ and ‘between’?

1738 words (including opening and closing) © Megan Andrews, February 2008, Toronto In cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s 2003 article “Visual Essentialism”, she argues for the concept of visuality as a “new” object of study. Starting with the question, “What happens when people look, and what emerges from that act?” she defines visuality as “the act of looking and its aftermath”. Bal further argues that, “vision is itself inherently synaesthetic”, that the act of looking inherently involves other modes of perception and cannot be isolated or given higher status among the senses.

Further along in her essay, Bal draws on feminist criticism of the gendering of vision, and on the phenomenology of perception via Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to support her articulation of visuality as the “relationship between the seen and the seer”. In the case of dance, the seen (the dancer) is not a material object per se, but rather an experiencing subject or subjects.

Therefore, the dance encounter occurs ultimately between embodied sensing subjects (dancer and audience member). It can thus be understood as an intersubjective relationship. This relationship is constituted primarily through vision and can certainly be considered multi-sensory or synaesthetic. Using Bal’s theory then, which emphasizes a relationship through the visual, we can productively consider the relationship between the dancer and the audience as a kind of visuality of contemporary dance.

Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s work is also concerned with the sensing-perceiving embodied being and the notion of present attention. In her essay, “How can I touch you if you are not there?” from her book to be two, she discusses the way today’s communication technology affects our sense of time and space. Noting what she sees as the loss of a sense of everyday time, she critiques the way technological communications (screen culture, for example) interrupt the reciprocity of exchange in presence, thus making such genuine exchange impossible, because our incarnate, sensible selves are not perceiving together in these circumstances. In these technologically mediated encounters, we are not beings in presence with one another, sharing ‘with’ and ‘between’. By contrast, contemporary dance provides such an opportunity, for us to be present together.

Desire. Desire to grasp. Movement.

Always escaping. Meaning. Forever elusive. Immersed in the flow

of experience, we are caught in the current. Time races, space collapses … it’s a postmodern world.

Though bound in our bodies, we virtually fly. Yet presence is potent.

A sense of weight anchors us. Me, here. You, there. We dig in our heels against time. Shoulders braced, we lean hard into space. Together we create a possibility, preserving the fragile between-ness in which we might meet. Waiting, watching, listening, sensing, pulsing. Patience, hope, faith – perhaps a little love?

And something transpires. A dance moves through this between-ness.

Catching us on its wing. We open ourselves to the moment, breathing deeply. Falling, running, pausing, turning, soaring. Pacing, crouching, springing, leaping, lunging. A clasping hand. A tossing head. Reaching, extending. Wrapping and tensing.

Suspended … Arrested.1738 words (including opening and closing) © Megan Andrews, February 2008, Toronto Blackness envelops us.

Time rushes in, space melts away.

And we are left with a feeling – moving and moved. A different attention to body, sensation, imagination, each other. Residues, echoes and traces remain, bubbling within us, just beneath our skin, quietly.

The faint glow becomes dimmer, a hesitant memory. And then – extinguished. Mundane reality. The hum and buzz of the everyday returns.

[But we were dancing!]

You were, weren’t you? So was I. Though fleeting and shimmering it was not a mirage; we experienced something. And now, the desire to apprehend this experience, to savour it, know it, share it, remember it together. How do we handle such elusiveness? It is easy to submit to the seductive idea that contemporary dance subverts the desire to grasp it, analyze it and pin it down.

I agree that by its very nature dance proposes a powerful set of questions for historically patriarchal Western thought. In a system that expects a certain kind of categorical, objecttreatment of ‘art’, the subject of dance (the dancing subject) slips and slides out of reach in a kind of double disappearance, ephemeral in performance itself and phantom-like in the face of attempts at description and interpretation. Perhaps that’s why it’s so compelling, so challenging – and so easy to dismiss.

Though its presence may be potent, its absence doesn’t register. But I do not accept that we should give up so easily, or placate ourselves with the idea that each of us can have our own individual experience of a contemporary dance and just walk away. In the über-individualism of today’s postmodernist culture we celebrate difference, sure. But in order to recognize difference (our different experiences), we must come into relationship, not just a surface

encounter but actual depth of engagement – with others, with ideas – in and through experience. The double disappearance of the dancing subject thus requires us to redouble our efforts, to perpetuate presence by reiterating it again and again.

Languaging our dancing experience – this experience of dance, this relationship between seer and seen!– provides a way. Through the given yet flexible system of language that we share, we can speak this ‘withness’ and ‘between-ness’ of dancing together. Through language, we can make our experience of presence present again. We can know it, share it, and practice it together.

A kind of courage is required – on all sides!– for a genuine meeting, courage to enter the ‘with’ and ‘between’. This process involves openness, awareness, patience, respect for difference, the will to listen. Is this act of committed presence and engagement with difference a political act? Perhaps. I am talking about a kind of politics of presence here.

At its core, dancing involves embodied beings in space and time. At a dance performance, we choose to make ourselves present together in this same space and time: co-presence, ‘with-ness’, ‘between-ness’, relationship, Bal’s synaesthetic visuality.

If, as some theorists have argued, postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism, if we are spinning toward infinity, digitized and dissipated by the centrifugal forces of the market, then I argue that practicing presence is indeed a potent antidote.

1738 words (including opening and closing) © Megan Andrews, February 2008, Toronto Contemporary dance offers an opportunity, a place and a time, a moment and a space, safeguarded for us to practice this presence.

It is a way of coming into social relationship, a way of becoming, each and together. Between acceleration and stillness, between fragmentation and coherence – between us – there is dancing.

Epilogue: This essay reflects aspects of my doctoral research in writing from the inside of the dancing experience (as a dancer) and in mediating this experience through a kind of performative language, particularly through the dialogue form, somewhere between speech and writing, between orality and literacy. My work is informed by the phenomenological and psychoanalytic writing of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, and by the work of, among others, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ann Cooper Albright, movement theorist Rudolf von Laban and various postmodern critics including Frederic Jameson. Textual gestures also reference the work of Laura Mulvey, Evard Munch, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Harold Innis, Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan.

Megan Andrews is a Toronto-based dance artist, teacher and freelance writer/editor originally from Vancouver, Canada. In 1998, she initiated the Canadian dance magazine, The Dance Current, and continues as Publisher/Founding Editor (www.thedancecurrent.com). Her performance work derives from improvisation-based practice and she teaches studio and seminar courses in dance at York University. Megan is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst and a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture at York University. She is currently practicing Deborah Hay’s solo “At Once”, and plans to perform in Toronto in December.

Through a sensory mode of engagement, we can immerse ourselves in ‘with-ness’ and ‘between-ness’. This intimate reality in which we meet as embodied beings is in a powerful dialectic with the racing dislocation of today’s vertiginous virtuality. Dance can give us pause, allowing us to engage in our weight and our presence together as embodied beings.

This practice of active listening, of exercising patience and sensory attention, is the effort of true communication, a practice that seems to be sadly and sorely lacking today.

Through the experience of genuine presence and through the act of speaking and listening together, perhaps we can move closer to each other in some way. Perhaps we can grasp some meaning together, even as it must slip through our fingers. It remains for us to try, in presence and in re-presence through language. I believe this is essential in order to remember ourselves to each other. www.issuu.com/thepaper

Wish you were here...

BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS

Eleanor bauer

The Bagwell In Me ann liv young review by Elyse Goldberg Review of Ann Liv Youngs The Bagwell in me, Featured in Wish you were here.....see the first issue of The Paper Kurt Kren has noted, “No wound ever speaks for itself” We have Ann Liv Young to speak for the ‘wound”…

When thinking about Ann Liv Young, one must remember the early actionists in the 50’s in Vienna who moved beyond all social boundaries with their aggressive performance actions straight from the Id, shoved the world back at their viewers and defied all social expectations of decorum. Their torch is carried high by Ann LivYoung , a force to behold, whose newest production at the Kitchen,” The Bagwell in Me” is a daring and stellar work. She performs a kind of exorcism in which she acts as our ‘primal scream’. There are three major characters in the play whose story centers around George Washington, his wife Martha and a slave they own whose name is Oney. Young plays two roles as both George Washington and Martha, Ms.Isabel Lewis, a dancer and choreographer, portrays the slave ‘Oney and Michael Guerrero’s laconic character is a Jack of all trades.

BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS Is a solo on scale, volume, extreme limits and the grey areas between them; on pride and vulnerability, hubris and humility, visibility and subtlety; on the fragile braggadocio of living large when less is more but more is also unmistakably more.

Shape-shifting an empty shell of a human being, Eleanor Bauer invites the audience on a safari expedition deep into the superficial abyss of the essentially fictionalized personality of the entertainer. In (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS), self-expression drops the self and expression takes over: style is content, personality is material, and identity is relative/ irrelevant. (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS) is an old-school performance-art magic trick in which the performer herself disappears by immersion in and dissipation of recognizable forms and literal characters in order to disguise, exceed, transgress, and evade the perceived definitions and boundaries of gender, race, species, and all the boring polemics of subject/object, mind/ body and etcetera/etcetera. Juggling expressionism and constructivism, Bauer undergoes a maximalist and detailed exorcism of the recognition-based identity politics of inhabiting and communicating through a human body, joyfully shattering the frames that inhibit the great experiment and experience of being human as a performance of the possible, if only to reveal that things are not always what they seem.

“There was this one time after a performance in Amsterdam that a man came up to me and said ‘You are as if an icebear that dances like a swan.’ I didn’t know whether to punch him or thank him but ever since then, I’ve held this image of a swan disguised inside the body www.issuu.com/thepaper

of a polar bear as a kind of mascot and muse. There’s also Ferdinand The Bull, this children’s book I had when I was a kid, about a bull on a farm in Spain being raised for bull fighting, but he actually just wants to sit under the cork tree and smell flowers. Eventually they do put him in the ring, and he saves his own life by being too worthless to kill.

These stories relate in a way to a certain tough-shell imagery I deal with alot of the time, being a person of considerable scale in many ways.

I notice how much space and what kind of space a big strong mind and body is assumed to occupy, and how that force or impact is always in negotiation with doubt and vulnerability. The greater the sensation of potential, the greater the imminence of failure: I’m interested in that risk factor and the intensity it can create in performance. It’s not only animal stories I’m relating to, but a lot of pop culture, black male hip-hop culture, drag queen culture and feminist performance art culture. All of these extreme and varied kinds of performing have something important in common: they caricaturize the great paradox between marginality and ambition. Not wanting to sacrifice one for the other, the friction between the two creates a very particular and strong platform for social critique. As a performer, an entertainer, a woman, and an independent artist who constantly questions her artform but at the same time is expected to define her niche and defend it, I want to use these bold and brazen images and archetypes not only for their volume but for their fragility. Without shrinking, I want to deal with this dual confidence and vulnerability, to expose and articulate it in all of these literal forms, to give it flesh... or feathers and fur”

(BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS) is an empty promise, a preemptive lament, a flirtation with expectations, a wrestling match with potential. Whispering what should be shouted and singing what should be whispered, (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS) is a solo on scale, volume, extreme limits and the grey areas between them; on grandeur and vulnerability, hubris and humility, visibility and subtlety; on the fragile braggadocio of living large when less is more but more is also unmistakably more.

With the inherent melancholy of things on the verge of extinction - an endangered species, a disappearing dance, a nostalgic profession - Eleanor Bauer invites the audience on a safari expedition into the depths of the surface-oriented world of the performer. In (BIG GIRLS DO BIG THINGS), self-expression drops the self and expression takes over: style is content, any thing made visible is surface, surface is depth, personality is material, material is personal, expression is a form of abstraction, and to do is to be.

“In this ephemeral medium, where we make a profession out of impermanence, we are mascots of the hopeless sensation that one can build nothing. And yet, as if addicted to failure, we continue to fight against our own disappearance. Perhaps one can build nothing, one can prove nothing, and one can even say nothing, but one finds much greater challenges to be nothing. Instead of trying to building something out of nothing, which I think dance has a tendency to do, I want to start with the too-full palette of the performer herself as the something, and try to build nothing out of something by actively exorcizing all that something-ness. It’s a disappearing act based on absolute presence. “

The inception of this mind boggling narrative began when Young discovered her relatives, the Bagwell’s, owned slaves.

To explore his shocking fact further, she created a play revolving around the ever moral and genteel George Washington, who could not tell a lie when he chopped down the cherry tree. History lies and conveniently leaves out the sordid tales of ownership of human beings, objectified as flesh, traded for money, used for sexual pleasure and then tossed away.

Willing to look the revulsion of owning people straight in the eye, Young forces the audience to strip down as well, to drop their guard, to blow open that pristine portrait of George Washington and all the George Washington’s of the world who speak and live as hypocritical racists. George Washington’s shiny face is as tarnished as every other slave-owner and trader of flesh, a fact which still remains with us today. Not even a week ago we witnessed John McCain shooting his hand at Obama saying “that one over there.” He never would have uttered that if he was debating Kerry or any other white person. That is certain.

The story line is as follows: George Washington is having sex with his slave Oney, who he believes he loves. Oney has no choice, she has to have sex with her ‘master’ and Martha Washington wants to kill Oney. The choreographer, Ms Lewis, who plays the slave Oney, took great risks herself, while donning black face as a black woman, her character is bound, gagged, tortured, and literally raped on stage by the dildo wielding George Washington. She must swear undying love for Washington and depicts her desperate survival instinct for herself and her child. We think we understand the horrors of slavery from literature and films that depict slavery, yet Young made palpable the horror of utter vulnerability a slave must endure.

The point is made, showing that our society is still struggling with the “help.”

The ferocious veracity of Young’s message lunges at the audience as she sharpens her sword on a litany of words and actions, destroying all dramaturge decorum. In her startling visceral performance she does not let one complacently sit - we are active participants in this harrowing tale of lust, betrayal, danger, domination, slave trade, and lineage which still resonates. One of her trademarks in most of her performances is to break the narrative movement of the story by interjecting a different story. Splitting time apart, she vacillates between the historical scenes with George Washington and contemporary strip clubs. She unsettles the audience by blurring the boundaries between the real and the scripted, mingling impromptu commands into the performance, for instance, at one moment demanding her sound be fixed, or the music in her computer made louder. It is a hard act to pull off, but whereas others generally produce a contrived result, Young succeeds in creating a fusion of the real, the fictional, the imagined, the constructed, and the manipulated. By destroying the traditional play format, the audience is disoriented, our equilibrium overthrown, placing us in a vulner-

able position. She interestingly aligned the stripper disco to slavery, raising issues of the ‘body’ with regard to who owns it. The girls in strip clubs are paid to become objectified. Yet, they have a choice in most instances. The reference to another kind of flesh trade, for amusement and excitement, is an increasingly complex thread. Did she shock people, yes, did she titillate, perhaps, did she gross out to coin a phrase, maybe…did she scare the audience, yes.

In “Bagwell” Young destroys boundaries with the audience. I say destroy boundaries, because interacts is too cold and performed. Young moved from the stage into the audience with livid bold vehemence, fury and the look of a person obsessed’ . Her entrance into the audience was not gratuitous. This play absolutely called for those Actions, with a capitol A. It was mentioned that she assaulted her audience members in Bagwell. She did not assault the audience in this piece. The aggression was completely called for in George. if one is dealing with slave owners who could at the drop of a pin rape and pillage their work force, kill them, unexpectedly, have them live on the edge of terror- then Ann succeeded in making us feel afraid- in the safety of our seats. I saw the play on Friday- and she barely touched the ma who complained. I was sitting in his row and saw the entire “incident” her quick intelligence was able to not only step into the real universe and give him hell for hassling her- she was also able to stay in character as an “owner of human beings… As she stated to the complaining audience member “I own you are all my slaves.

It was breathtaking watching her switch back and forth between being George Washington and Martha… Speaking in voices… Breaking out of storyline to dance strip disco thereby throwing expected body rhythms off in the viewers.

In Young’s previous performance, at the Kitchen, Snow White – her actions were kept within the confines of the stage.

The story was a non linear tortured love rant- based on the storybook character of Snow White. Live is no Snow White.

Moving in and out of character she read love letters, sang songs of loss, laments the broken heart, becomes a late night DJ drifting into psychologically complex and pained narration. Ms. Young tries to understand human connections in all her works. She is our connection to lost loves, passion, and confusion. I read a review that implies Bagwell is a superficial and simplistic play that adds nothing to our understanding of slavery. One would have to wonder what it would take to wake this unconscious person up, given what was put before him on stage. Young’s play is a powerful treatise on the horrors of slavery (of all kinds- if one wants to stretch beyond the obvious) all oppression is tyranny– and psychological and community oppression, while polite can also kill the soul. ” Bagwell” exposes the troubles at the heart of global economies and politics as well as the minutiae of personal lives. I have also read that she re-use her ‘riffs’. All artists have a signature style.

If they are good, we come back for more. Sam Shepard does not write like Thomas Pynchon, Scorsese does not direct like Gus Van Zant, Pina Bauch does not dance like Ann Liv Young. Each of these aforementioned artists have identifiable strong styles, which is part of why we like their work and their content is dependent on the delivery. Form does follow function.

Young’s aggression was definitely needed to shake the audience and wake us up. A line in a song “Fake Empire” by The band The National, is “we’re halfawake in a fake empire”. Well we are half awake. Every now and then we need to get banged in the head to wake up in our fake empire. I am glad to have Young around for that. We are all so inured from genre films of blood and gore and sentimental documentaries of the horrors of slavery, which distance racism as if it has dissipated.

We are lost in our computers. . Young exposes the fear that one’s flesh, one’s very being, may be subjected to another’s whims. At any moment you may be murdered, raped, tortured. In fact, it also highlights the sad tale of torture the current administration continues to inflict on the detainees at the Guantanamo

Wish you were here....

Bay Detention Camp.

Young, it can be said, lives in the spirit of the great line of eye-opening humans who make wake up ‘art’ such as Paul McCarthy, Marina Abramovic, Dieter Roth, Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle,Valie Export, Thomas Hirshhorn, or Kurt Kren who collaborated with the performance artists Günter Brus and Otto Mühl, Kren on a series of films made between 1964 and 1967 in which they fornicated and shit. Yes, that is appalling yet- these films were made to expose our ’shit’. They were a simple, powerful statements of the human condition. Pathos runs through “Bagwell”.

Young, whose elastic face can within seconds go from rage to angelic (she is quite beatific when she smiles) exposes the dirty raw horror of these actions as she defies good manners yet she embodies an enormous amount of vulnerability, which makes the rage so much more poignant and terrifying. In the last scene of the wild ride in “Bagwell” Oney sings a Sam Cooke song “Change is Gonna Come.” It was performed as a lament which brought some of us to tears after the relentless energy, disorientation and ‘fear’ that Ann so brilliantly put on stage. To be terrified and mesmerized, hypnotized and fulfilled, to be on the skin of your flesh and the edge of your senses- is something quite phenomenalgiven how jaded and unperturbed the art world has become with regard to performance and living on the edge, along with the world at large that accepts the death filled days of children and innocent people and only worry that someone who knows how to read might find their way into their backyards. I am not only speaking of America here. Polite is everywhere- Ann is not polite. Polite is boring, Ann is anything but…

And as I digress, I left out mentioning the other stars of the show, the audience and the tech people and of course The Kitchen without whom Young’s performance would not be able to be carried back out into the world.

The Bagwell in me: Description.

The Bagwell in me is loosely based on the specific love triangle that was normally applied to Thomas Jefferson but somehow, I know that George too acted on these impulses.

Martha Washington was a wealthy woman on her own, coming from a well to do white, southern family. Martha was able to purchase her own slaves not using Georges at all. Martha bought a slave named Onie so that Martha and George’s daughter would have someone to play with. George ended up falling in love with Onie and Onie with him.

Onie gets pregnant with George’s baby and they plot to figure out how to hide the news from Martha. The Bagwell in me explores the social dynamics in a love triangle in the pre Victorian era.

Bagwell also explores my own heritage heaving grown up in the south and coming from a white family, I am intrigued by this southern hospitality that wraps itself around the whole show. I was told numerous times by my great grandmother not to date a woman or black man. She is no longer with us, sadly but I always remembered her advising me on this. I have dated women and a black man for the record. This idea that my beloved own blood could be so racist and UN open is mind blowing. I wanted to explore this idea. How can people we view as good behave in such “bad” ways? What are these rules we set up for specific people, races, etc. George is a well respected white man fucking his black slave but is in love with the comfort Martha gives him. This doesn’t make sense, or does it?

Dog of all Creation An extract Blackout The stage is empty. The dancers enter in silence. One dancer enters and remains upstage right, the other dancer enters and remains upstage left. Both dancers make the sound of incense and it fills, purifies and clears the whole space.

Lights Up – Stage and Houselights Magnificently alone together in a sacred space the dancers travel towards the altar – downstage centre.

The dancer on the left travels a straight path, as she travels her right arm, held in a straightened and extended position extends incrementally upward.

The other dancer swiftly raises her hands to a full extension overhead before instantly dropping them – she travels a curly path to the alter, during this journey her left arm, held in a straightened extends incrementally upwards.

The dancers use the extending arm to balance and measure the space around them – the straightness of the arm and its gradual yet arrhythmic motion upwards functions as a counterpoint to any predictability in the journeying upstage.

Having reached upstage centre each dancer conducts a blessing with the legs upon the audience.

Each dancer emits a brief sound which calls to mind our sins in the same way a shepherd might call his dog.

By means of many small separate, articulations of the bones of the hands and arms the dancers gradually extend their arms to an open “T” position.

The dancer who travelled the straight path contorts violently in a bid to abolish symmetry – the desire to abolish symmetry carries her all over the stage where she leaves a trail of fire behind her. The act of abolishing symmetry also serves as fodder for a wind which blows her. This continues until she gradually acquires a form which eliminates the hazard of wind.

Through-out this action the dancer who initially travelled a curly path gradually brings her arms down to her sides.

Without stillness both dancers then adhere to a straight path which renounces sin noticing that inhabited space transcends geometric space. They travels from stage left to stage right and each step leaves an illuminated print where the foot has been – in the same way that light travelling through a stained glass window leaves an illuminated print.

During this a-rhythmic stepping journey across the stage each dancer spontaneously turns her head to the audience in order to hear what sounds the eyes of the audience produce – ‘speak to me only with your eyes, it is to you I give this to’ at particular moments both dancers can briefly draw the upper-lip towards the nose while turning her face towards the audience and drop the upper-lip while perceiving a rose petal falling from the sky past her nose.

Spontaneously – one dancer follows a curved path which takes her into the audience where she sits down and sings a rock song inspired by both the sounds she has collected from the audience’s eye-speak and the following text from an informative poster about hens, “avec ses deux ailes la poule pourrait voler longtemps si son corps était moins lourd” This dancer continues her song which simultaneously makes her light enough to fly, lifting her from her inhabited seated place to upstage centre, following an enlightened radiant path, with the

Fitzgerald and Stapleton

Comment Introductions Re- examining Structure

back of the body twice as illuminated as the front.

The other dancer follows this radiant path and is directly parallel to it, counteracting its lightness by perceiving darkness until they meet upstage centre to assume the position of the virgin and child. When two strange images meet they become stronger.

Blackout For further information on Fitzgerald & Stapleton visit: www.fitzgeraldandstapleton.com or contact: fitzgeraldandstapleton@gmail.com Company Biography: Fitzgerald & Stapleton is founded and directed by Emma Fitzgerald and Áine Stapleton. They have performed in Ireland, New York and Paris - they write themselves into impossible situations in order to transcend any aesthetics predilections that might narrow their ability to relish the here and now of being alive.

Their recent choreography ‘Starvin’, performed with eminent Dutch artist Jan Ritsema, premiered at this years Dublin Fringe Festival in Ireland. Their choreographic scores are published on www.choreograph.net - the online choreographic journal run by Daghdha Dance Company, Ireland. Fitzgerald & Stapleton will be company in residence at Chocolate Factory Theatre in May 2010.

Dog of all Creation

ERICA Cardwell

A foundation begins a house. Workers dig below the bottoms of our feet, mutilating the surface and inner clay with layers of stone and brick to stabilize the house for generations. Four walls rise connecting a labyrinth of rooms and passageways to separate wings of living space and modernity. Finally a roof encloses this hiding place to protect the inhabitants and provide a fortress against most elements.

Rebels, rule breakers, fringe dwellers deny all boundaries in search for eliminating most standards. Omnivores require various forms to satiate hunger. Is the work choice-less rebel art or harmless innovation? Omnivorous work is less collection or collaboration of “differing medium” but simply an aggressive approach to creation. Omnivore--taking the word’s definition and likening it to our personas. We return to our infantile genesis where behaviors, traditions, and identities were unlearned and we sought pure advancement and sharing.

This being the greenest level of humanity –a place of truly embraced nuance.

Tiny beasts that grow into finite monsters unaware of the bounded standards we live by. These standards are helpful for positive and negative differentiation concerning uniqueness, but these standards also cloud true opinions and enlightenment. Identities are created for us and we assimilate, gravitate, succumb into our herds of gender, race, class…. dancer, painter, writer, etc.

These roles have some importance and necessity considering the social flow Fitzgerald and Stapleton

and they all require certain qualities and gestures as signifiers. However this upward mobility transforms into a collision when we speak inside of these boxes or have trouble stepping outside of them to peak into another backyard.

Our work becomes enclosed in someone else’s walls. I refuse to fit my malleable presence and constant soul into finite structure. A diagram, framework, or guide is required but approach should be the variable.

I am my own institution. I am the approach. This is the institution of the rebel omnivore. I am the construct.

As artists and creators we possess a certain outsider scope. We have developed a distinct mind’s eye when connected to Western tradition and worldly function. We don’t live in your house. We have created our own. However, as we build our living fortress, relationships and work can become an unnecessary balancing act. The greatest part of this challenge is the desire for a viable workspace. We can create a home office, rent studio space, travel to residencies in remote locations and find ourselves productive and different-- post. But to take our work a step further, by removing what we understand space to be, what we understand our work to be and, instead slice the surface of literal spatial barriers.

The idea of SPACE: living floating debris in the universe.

“Disorientation begets creative thinking.” Benedict Carey New York Times, October 6, 2009 As overgrown beasts we rejoin these particles and collect our thoughts. To disengage set structure as I design the most productive workspace begins with elimination. Need to burn the box instead of stepping outside of it.

Thus, we begin simply. We dissect “time”. A month is set aside for a project. In it seven weeks can exist rather than the defining four weeks. Each week could be four days, with the day’s duration evolving as well. Some days could last for ten hours some could last for twenty-nine. Space will develop based on work’s routine.

Results could be unimaginable and even difficult to approach for the creator since the work came from a temporal space. Goals previously mapped suddenly produce their own schedules, miss deadlines, and present new accomplishments. You will be able to propose nothing and only experience –your work will begin to happen to you.

And what you do not know is the only thing that you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not - T.S. Eliot This allows your work to become a human entity –experimental and even decisive. Returning us to our curious early stages where we balanced on baby steps. I command my rebel omnivores to respect our work by creating our own clocks. Imagine time as a “palate”, blank and available for innovation.

Use this the connection of you, us, and them-- our art. Activate your Gemini and resist. www.issuu.com/thepaper

Interest

Interview Self Interview Eleanor bauer

Eleanor Bauer’s self Interview addressing her work At Large January 2008 The final installment. see previous editions in the first and second issues of The Paper THE POLITICIAN vs. THE PERFORMER: Herein lies the crisis of authorship: the artist can never be taken as documentarist/observer, but is asked for her editorial, opinion, position on the matters she presents. This to me is problematic, not because I strive for objectivity, and not necessarily because I (I as author) would like to or thing it possible to disappear behind the strength and thingness of the material itself, but that I would like for the material (especially now I speak of the Youtube material) to speak for itself rather than for people to try to decode how it is supposed to be speaking for me, or us, or the “message” of the piece. There is no message, only interest, and therefore I would like to be able to share my fascination with things as they are without standing between the viewer and those selected things.

I would like that my framing of those things offers no more than a window upon that which is accessible to them otherwise and an opportunity of time and space to contemplate them under a slightly different light.

How can I evade being put in the position of the politician, whose citation of any existing phenomena must be alligned and embedded in an argument or agenda other than pure observation and gentle, unencumbered analysis of what is? Perhaps the solution is to aim for as dry and clear as possible, as hands-off as possible a presentation of the Youtube clips, letting them stand as something like field-research, which is precisely what they have been. Therefore, rather than trying to sew together tricky connections, the material can appear as a sort of index or catalogue, organized as factually as possible towards an actual documentation of things which are going on out there and visible/accessible to anybody and everybody to varying degrees via the internet.

I want to address this issue of the material speaking for itself rather than speaking for you. First I think this is impossible. Because you chose the material, in some way it will speak for you at least as a (re)presentation of your interests.

Yes. No problem for material to present interest (of author(s)). Problem for material to be mouthpiece or stand-in for agenda of author. Now here I have to draw a distinction between existing material which is displayed as a document (youtube and video) and existing material which is taken on by the performers (live). Because here is the line where I think “existing material” cannot function as a ready-made and where the performer herself can neither function as a ready-made. In the sense that the material, because it is performed by a person onstage is in a position where it cannot speak for itself, but is in a heightened relation to the deliverer where the material either speaks for the performer or the performer speaks for the material.

Which is the main friction of the live performance element of AT LARGE: I am interested in how, in confrontation with an endless sea of over-saturated codes and referential feedback, one manages to create meaning for onesself, and I consider this a highly individual process on a basic level of subjectivity in communication and meaning production, but also a highly individualistic process as a product of an overall cultural climate I think “we” (globalized western civilization) find ourselves in today.

A note on we: I admit, as a U.S. American I probably have less resistance to this state of “cultural free-for-all”, considering that the individualistic consumer model of identity construction is largely a product of “American” capitalism and of the fact that U.S. culture is a culture so explicitly built upon the mixture and appropriation of already existing culwww.issuu.com/thepaper

tures in uncontrolled, unaccounted for and unintended ways, starting with the country’s rapid colonization by Europeans, followed by the importation of slaves from Africa, and by the early massive influx of immigrants through Ellis Island for the industrial revolution, all within a matter of less than 500 years). I note these obvious facts because I think older countries with more history, while they do participate in the cultural freefor-all and do engage with the speed of exchange, absorbtion, consumption and adaptation, also have an older, slowercooked national cultural identity or values whose traces are more indelible and indentifiable, more of a traceable thread in the mix than a BRAND of mixing.

So finally, the question of the material speaking for itself or speaking for the speaker is THE question of authorship, identity, and making sense of the world today which I think the live performance of this piece can tackle in a way that is specific to the medium of live performance. One form of this friction is in the topic of self-expression - literally how one manages to express oneself using all of these codes, and where is even a notion of oneself when we are dealing with a self that is post-social construction, some kind of monster of a drive to assert one’s individuality bred with a basic drive to belong which is insatiable and sliding, considering that that to which s/he can or might belong is multiple and shifting.

So I think my particular interest in using/recycling/quoting/adapting existing material is supported by a suspicion about ready-mades. I think ready-mades don’t exist in the performing arts, or are nearly impossible, precisely because of the performer, the distinction and potential of distance between the performer and the performed, and all the attitudes that can be placed between the doer and what is done. This to me is a medium, a rich field of play between context and content, where the performer provides context on her very own simply in the way she does what she does. By taking this field of multiple possible perspectives as an invitation to use/pass through more than less, the performer becomes a site of “at large”ness, the performer as an individual avoids being in the position of delivering the truth inside of this web of ideas and reference, and keeps the “at large”ness from condensing, landing, settling, or shrinking in her “her”ness.

Here again arises the difference between the performer and the politician: the politician must choose one position and decrease the distance between himself and what he says, or else he is fickle or dishonest. Why should the performer be held to the same standards of consistency or honesty? I am not interested in the theater as a place of getting to the essential truths, but a place to question what might be assumed or forced into the truth-box outside of the theater.

The impossibility of ready-mades and the use of reference/adaptation is close to my other impossibility in the performing arts which is abstraction.

What’s interesting to me is that all attempts and methods of abstracting the body can be identified within a genre or style or movement in the performing arts that are connected with different moments in history, fashion, other arts, cultural views. So rather than the possibility of true abstraction, we have several ways to signal abstraction based on different periods in time that abstraction of the body was attempted, codified, accepted. The thought that any movement is potentially abstract because movement itself is meaningless without the context to define how it should be understood is actually not true, because there is no context left unclaimed, unconnotated, and therefore no possibility of meaninglessness (besides in the bad sense, where such meaning has not been cared for and we are left with “meaningless garbage”, but I will not discuss meaning in not-deliberate art because analyzing the work of those who do not analyze it themselves to me is a waste of time and is no more or less

valuable than the activity of dream interpretation.) The impossibility of abstraction because of reference brings me to my interest in the unitard and other such “abstract” dance costumes - they are vestiges of a time when the costume was used to turn the body into a purely formal medium, and now they stand as signifiers that say “Graham” or “Cunningham” or “Nikolai”. So if what we are left with is an endless feedback of reference and recognition, wherein there is no escaping what exists, (this is what I mean by the contemporary state of over-saturated codes, which I think exists in all media including language) one had better be deliberate about how one appropriates and uses what exists, or, in my case, make that whole game of referral to context as content and as signification part of the game of meaning production.

This dancing.....

Adam broinowskI

I think that is part of what is desired from the audience with this piece. For them to engage in a game of meaning production with the performance.

Yes indeed. And for that to be active on many levels at once so that no element is meaningless, or just there to support another more primary element. i.e. there are no “just pants” - there are clingy movement pants, aerobic fitness pats, hip-hop pants, rock’n’roll pants, swing pants, hammer pants, street-wear pants (casual, dress, 40’s 50’s 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 00’s)... each of which signify a different reading of the action, a different context, which, when is developed enough as it’s own line of visual communication then becomes fully functional and autonomous as a potential field of play in the meaning production game.

So then the costumes that are worn outgrow their position as support of the action and can then weave their way in and out of alignment with the action, in the forms of agreement, confirmation, dissonance, conflict, compliment, displacement, etc. in relation to the body that is moving inside of them.

And this goes for every other media or element engaged, hoping that they all effect each other and the viewer’s sensitivity to significance and signification is pulled from several perspectives at once.

--You frequently mention or allude to a resistance to delivering a message. But do you think this is an invented pressure, I mean, do you think anyone is actually looking for a message?

Yeah, they are. As much as I think we are over interpretation in the sense that Susan Sontag has been read and reread since the 60’s, and as much as I think the majority of a capitalist society is all about experience in the sense even consumer-product relations are all based on experience today, I still have found that, with everything I have made (with the exception of “ELEANOR!” which is blatant and obvious and basically full-on didacticism excused by standup comedy) someone has always asked me “what are you trying to say with this?” or says something like “but what do you want from the audience?”. And this need for a message from either the side of the doer or the side of the viewer is not just about didacticism but about motivation - WHY do you want to make THAT thing. And sometimes there is a gap between the WHY and the WHAT, or the WHY is not evident or implicit in the WHAT. I think this is the very basic crux of this whole self-interview: that what I research or what I am interested in, and the products produced by that research or interest are NOT one in the same, and that the products do something else and function in another way. Therefore, there is always a wild goose chase, as performed in this text, of understanding that relationship and gaining some control over it.

PHOTO BY: Heidrun Lohr.

Adam broinowskI

Emma Goldman is famous for saying one or all of the following: If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!

If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.

If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.

Actually no text by her can be located to prove that she in fact did say it.

But whether she did or didn’t say it, I salute her.

And yet, what if I can’t dance? I hope that it could still be my revolution.

This dancing ‘I’ is not found through domination nor control.

This dancing I does not oppose in order to reconcile.

This dancing I is found through mutual recognition.

This dancing I knows nature not just slime, that it is neither threat nor separate.

This dancing I is in the land/space.

This dancing I does not build walls which are traps rather than houses.

This dancing I is not the moving image of a dead thing.

This dancing I is not luxurious in-

dolence desiring to be awed. This is collective activity. It is centrifugal.

It pushes power out to let this dancing I in.

This I does not dance for survival. It recognizes limits.

This dancing I is not I. This I dances those who have been forced to walk through the ruins and write the history of others in their own blood.

What have I done?

Drowned corpse painted, ‘the first murder of mankind’.

Never more had I power over myself.

Nor was I mine own from that time.

Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.

Now your bliss has appeared.

Neither fully sensible nor wholly incorporeal.

The body rises and the spirit descends.

Through the senses; to the outside is sensation, to the inside is imagination.

The body is light, the imagination is shadow.

The arrogance - we are here but to serve your image of the world.

This dancing I cannot be separated.

Column

Time Out, Long Live The Anachronism Mårten Spångberg

“This is so contemporary” hauls a bunch of middle-aged people participating in an art piece by Tino Sehgal. It’s fascinating, these individuals dance and skip around in the gallery space, baptizing themselves and the piece as contemporary, and in so doing the piece becomes everything but contemporary. The question is what it does to me, the spectator? For a moment, in the middle of the paradox: “This is so contemporary”, something occurred, I slipped out of history and into a relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction, through anachronism.

The other day a brand new text by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben showed up on the absolutely eminent, and probably completely illegal webpage a.aaaarg.org, where you can find tip top texts historical and contemporary on everything thinking. Agamben, to whom we have mixed feelings, writes in this episode called “What Is The Contemporary”, among other things relating to the here and now that to be contemporary implies a certain sense of inefficiency.

“Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time,” and the philosopher continues “are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are” and here it comes “in this sense irrelevant.” The contemporary, in its more radical sense, does not mean to be in time, to be fashionable, on the top 40 or in the magazine. No way, the stuff that ends up in the festival program is there precisely because it has slipped out of the contemporary with a one-way ticket to those ordinary things that can be evaluated. The contemporary is precisely that which is beyond good and/or bad, that has yet to gain a position in the landscape we call history, or perhaps even time. In the contemporary there are not fifteen minutes of fame, not even fifteen seconds in the light. The contemporary is brief, very brief, and this brief moment is scary, very very scary.

Why do rock stars drink and shoot up? Because they are under pressure, forced to go out there and make the audience experience the contemporary, the

now, that presence, night after night. I don’t think so. It’s not because they are stupid or “live the dream”. The real deal is that they are mourning, mourning the contemporary that made them and is forever gone. Once popular there is no contemporary.

The rock star engages in the selfmedication called Jack Daniels, and the manager adds social everything, including the blondes, which makes the situation even worse. What the star mourns can not be healed with party, conversation or good-company. It is the opposite; he mourns the exuberant loneliness of the contemporary. The contemporary indeed is a moment that lacks identity, where the individual is sovereign and hence not conditioned by any law. The contemporary lacks any orientation points, any addresses or stabilities. The contemporary is smooth and mind you, there’s not even a horizon. Sounds boring? Well, it is and it isn’t, the contemporary doesn’t concern itself with such categories exactly because they are based on valorization, comparison and forms of representation. The contemporary could almost be thought of as an Artaudian concept, because indeed the contemporary is cruel: it is absolute horror and absolute bliss. It’s death, orgasm and pure immanence.

Somewhere Michel Foucault writes that one should be happy if during a lifetime one has just one or two unique thoughts. I think Foucault was right, although up until now my understanding was that not even super smart people think unique things on a daily basis. But what if Foucault meant the opposite? Praise the lords that unique thoughts don’t pop up on a regular basis, because unique in its radical sense coincides with the contemporary, and the contemporary hurts. The moment when you do end up in the festival program or fashion magazine, I can assure you that the pain you will feel will be conventional, and your sole agony is of being kicked out.

Lewis Carroll granted the world some serious knowledge in his poem “The Hunting of The Snark”, in which a curious captain and researcher is about to set off on an excursion to hunt

the mystical Snark. Naturally a map is needed. After extensive inquires the captain returns and presents the map for his crew, that after having worried, now celebrates their captains faculties for bringing a map that is an absolute blank. Because, as they concur, conventional signs such as equators and poles, longitudes and so on, with certitude will not bring them anywhere remotely close to an adventure, even halfway to where the Snark hangs out. An adventure is a journey to you-don’t-know-where.

As the poem proceeds we get to know that the Snark is rarely observed and that narratives of encounters with the mystical creature is even more uncommon, not least because it is said that any person making eye contact with a Snark is transformed into stone. What if Snark is another word for the Contemporary?

Institutions can by definition not be contemporary, but are always out of time, fastened to history by clusters of more or less recognizable rules or codes of conduct. Yet, institutions persevere exactly as long as they are gratuitous for some kind of society or context. It is of course we, each of us as individuals and groups that grant institutions their existence, simultaneously institutions provide context for our existence, granting us identity and consistency. Without institutions, in a broader sense of the word, we wouldn’t be able to communicate, collaborate or have conflicts. So, as much as we find ourselves trapped by slow and heavy institutions reeking with bureaucracy and alcohol smelling paper turners, we should value our institutions for they enable. They are enabling constraints. Institutions provide us with a sense of consistency or safety that enables movement, dynamism, navigation: a safety that grant the possibility for differentiation.

Jacques Derrida (OMG, this piece is developing into a literal tsunami of name dropping), as the indecent post-structuralist that he was, proposes that nature doesn’t exist, but that there is only naturalization and denaturalization.

Nature as such operates outside discourse, outside culture, and

we humans have no access to it, and therefore nature cannot exist, or if it does we can’t know about it. Perhaps it is somewhat a shot in the dark to argue that institutions are non-existent (text indeed being one), but it might possibly be generative to consider, however paradoxical, that there is only institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. The alphabet provides a frame for a production that deterritorializes it, similarly to how the museum offers a frame for the possibility of transformation of aesthetic experiences.

It is in any case far to easy to blame institutions for anything at all, but as institutions propel some kind instinct to survive, which of course will become even stronger considering that sustainability also must apply to institutions, or worse: recycling, it can not not propose itself as a oneness, a unity. This, I believe, is crucial and a malady of the ignorant, if institutions are understood in respect of, so to say, Existence, i.e. as static and “eternal”, and as a one, what is left is only to lie down and die.

But if on the contrary understood as temporary and as constructed, i.e. a multiplicity, there is unlimited potentiality in both institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. It is all up to you or us, but remember it will be an easty battle because it is fought only, and this is axiomatic, through conventional signs, and remember again, institutions feed on, metaphorically speaking, fossil fuel (so passé), whereas you cultivate the contemporary, which is pure intensity.

past tense, the free spirit would flourish and institutions would let go of our lives. Today, some thirty years later, Michel Foucault’s words, however grand, have acquired new meaning and his words resonate like a neoliberal manifesto, a call for an unconditional individuality that needs no interventionist state, no institutional consistency. What neo-liberalism wants from us, and I mean in particular cultural producers, is minimal effort and maximum revenue. This is rendered through a minimum of institutional bodies, considering The State as an institution and consumption as its opposite, and, further, revenue as always already conventional and hence measurable. Thus neo-liberal governance is by definition in time, or, in other words, the absolute enemy of the contemporary.

Long live our institutions! They make possible the anachronism of the contemporary.

PS. This was the last ever column that I will write for The Paper. My texts emerge from far away and cannot even imagine imagining the local life of The Paper, but in my life it has lived, however short, with a fire that has made me a little bit more contemporary, if for no other reason through the anachronism actual between Stockholm and Melbourne.

Beware of those who complain about the evil of institutions, most probably they are sponsored by them, or being hired as double agent in institutional espionage. Those are the forces in society that produce institutions static, especially considered within a neo-liberal regime where complaints have been rendered a commodity.

In the late 70s the same Michel Foucault wrote a short note on, what he called, a new time of curiosity: a time when a ubiquitous social democracy would give us individuals some slack, when homogenization would be www.issuu.com/thepaper

Wish you were here.......

Tahni Holt On-going research:

A list is being compiled of your movement through the world in your words.

You are not alone. I am asking every visitor to my site (www.tahniholt.com) to take a moment and send along a sentence that describes a dance you have done in your life.

1. dance to avoid talking to people dance 2. pleasure to: seek, listen, stay in, undertand to an almost unstainable point the internal impulses, tugs, demands, heat, vibrations accompanied by emotional exposure. that is my dance 3. this friday is just to long dance 4. primal dance 5. I closed my eyes dance 6. leaping like an elephant dance 7. meeting a Francis Bacon painting in a crowded museum dance 8. bored with everything, everyone dance 9. struggle to kick an addiction dance 10. twitching in my seat, this dance is so good dance 11. out of necessity dance 12. i just got a letter dance 13. vacuuming dance 14. aggressively passive dance 15. hippie chick dance 16. iuhh dance 17. kitty thinks my feet are prey dance 18. what are you doing daddy? dance 19. dance that only exists in dressing rooms dance 20. wooden floor tap dance 21. i wish i could kick higher dance 22. reaching for something that has always been within dance 23. underwater dance 24. fake dance 25. break dance 26. TRYING TO SHRED HARDER AND FASTER THAN ANYONE dance 27. I have to pee dance 28. Every move I make in striving for ulitmate harmony dance 29. on going gestures, glides and slides of life dance 30. I can’t wait any longer dance 31. new bike shoulder scrunch dance 32. moving only one joint dance 33. i love you get out of my head dance 34. naked vacuuming dance 35. get it started, already, party dance 36. sporting those feather earrings dance 37. brandi alexander dance 38. expectation dance 39. fuck i am out of shape dance 40. scratching bug bites dance 41. deelay ceelay dance 42. uncomfortable, don’t want to be here, don’t feel pretty, don’t look at me dance 43. omg! that is a GIANT cockroach! dance 44. you can put crazy toppings on your pizza dance 45. i am really not alone dance 46. alone in my kitchen with joy dance 47. loud dance 48. necessity dance 49. humpin n bump bad lambadda dance 50. ragdoll dance 51. dream operator circa 1990 by keith v. goodman dance 52. finger snake dance 53. Potty dance 54. i still got it dance 55. leaping against the walls slapping the cieling with glee dance 56. grim fandango dance 57. ross angeles shuffle dance 58. never ending attempt to arrive dance 59. battuta angriff dance 60. clacker in a clown suit dance 61. ghost electricity howls on the bones of her face dance 62. pack unpack repack move dance 63. contrived dance dance 64. make the baby laugh makes me laugh dance 65. lost the baby, now in the hospital parking lot dance 66. bad shoes/zen dance 67. startrek = starwars = forever dance 68. pms dance 69. waking up and wondering what’s going to happen next dance 70. i feel guilty dance 71. i am in love with you and i know i shouldn’t be dance 72. tip-toe-twirl on the edge of the world dance 73. pigfoot dance 74. summer’s here & feels sooooooooo good dance 75. you make me think i have good news dance 76. drop down and get your eagle on dance 77. happy food dance 78. light and in all directions dance 79. building a circle dance 80. dig deep down and throw it up dance 81. he moves through me deep, intense.. im alive dance 82. coughing really hard dance 83. inside out dance 84. tempeh reuben dance 85. throw it out and grab it back dance 86. torches of fire dance 87. Jerash: Performed in Jordan at an www.issuu.com/thepaper

arts festival in 1983 dance 88. recumbent bike dance 89. girlfriends feet on top of my feet dance 90. event space dance 91. anything YES, YES, YES dance 92. stagnating dance 93. makin bacon dance 94. reliving and learning dance 95. fawn dance 96. everything dance 97. stuck in place dance 98. awkward make fun of yourself dance 99. rowchick dance 100. awake and tired dance 101. socks on smooth floor dance 102. in my kitchen, thinking of you dance 103. air is my skin dance 104. shivering on the sidewalk watching tahni’s dance 105. laughing crying screaming freedom restraint dance 106. being like water dance 107. boarding pass dance 108. cold footed linoleum floor dance 109. sweaty, beating, percussive dance 110. shake it dance 111. love dance 112. tree 113. SLIPPING ON MOSS COVERED, ABANDONED SIDEWALK, LATE AUTUMN dance 114. trying to impress a girl who knows I cant dance dance 115. carrying too many heavy things too far dance 116. riding my bike dance 117. it looked better in my mind dance 118. Whirling, stomping, whisking across the floor in a firm embrace and laughing all the way! dance 119. koyaanisqatsihands dance 120. wanting antarctic dance 121. tumbleweed downstairs laundry overload dance 122. death to all those who would whimper and cry dance 123. I used to do ballet dance 124. I can’t believe no one’s said “safety” dance 125. something in the way you move dance 126. cannot decide between life or death this morning dance 127. baby please close your eyes dance 128. antarctic dance 129. dissertation dance 130. soft spiritual cheerleading turning into possession casual party dance 131. wrong job because it’s not stressful dance 132. somnambulence dance 133. stiff neck dance 134. lymphopotmus dance 135. head weaving to watch and follow the beauty of a cardinal dance 136. keeping my head on my shoulders dance 137. impatient with websites that don’t immediately show me what I want to see dance 138. is it dental hugiene or is it death? dance 139. family/work dance 140. mediation dance 141. what the hell is brand voice dance 142. I have been work’in on on the railroad dance 143. eyelash dance 144. skating on ice dance 145. important thing is to love dance 146. Rimsky’s skating 147. peepee dance 148. painting a 14 foot ceiling w/ extention pole dance 149. the consensual ass kicking dance left, right, left, right, Left dance 150. floating dance 151. can’t get out of bed dance 152. new /old surroundings dance 153. martini shaker dance 154. a friendship forged in CanCun :) dance 155. absent and present and absent and present dance 156. knocking my knee, bruise dance 157. as still as possible dance 158. floor modeler dance 159. yearning for more dance dance 160. blue monday sprinkler dance 161. gggggrrrrRRROOOOOWWWWWRRRrrrrr dance 162. gggggrrrrRRROOOOOWWWWWRRRrrrrr let’s fuck already dance 163. picking up fallen writing insturments involving an explitive followed by medative crouching dance 164. alone in my zone dance 165. X Men claws up the spine dance 166. molly ringwald dance 167. space walk boogie dance 168. will never live this down dance 169. gracefully bumbling my way through life dance 170. make it stick limbo dance 171. finding my way home dance 172. the changing and flowering dance, late, but not never dance 173. remembering this differently dance 174. My daily NY walk, slipping between the leans and sways of those sharing my sidewalk dance 175. bap bada! dance 176. falling roughly dance 177. in between dance 178. I move through the wind, and the wind moves through me dance

179. w/ david bowie (every night) in red dance 180. I can see my bone, I cut so deep dance 181. walking down the hall dance 182. world is my oyster dance 183. the repellant dance, though I forget how it goes dance 184. on a lover’s singing voice in the desert dance 185. trying to flirt dance 186. learning, unlearning, relearning dance 187. Two step dnace 188. i’m juiced up dance 189. surrender to the sweetness dance 190. concrete floor in my vertebrae dacne 191. i gotta pee, and i can’t get across the street because of traffic dance 192. carnival free pleasurable dance 193. i finally got off the plane! dance 194. where do i go from here dance 195. booty shake!!! dance 196. worship dance 197. when is my girl coming home dance 198. anything nothing dance 199. children of the world dance 200. happy to see you dance 201. sunday morning dusting dance 202. endless ocean endless sky dance 203. shuffle with wet feet on a towel carrying a teakettle with steam coming out dance 204. eggshell dance 205. my pet dog likes to dance 206. toucan dance 207. um and that yes dance 208. getting out of my chair slowly and then falling back down, my limbs made unremarked and felicitous music dance 209. cut it out dance 210. fawm dance 211. suprise cut myself while slicing bread, and it may be bad, but too scared to look yet dance 212. feeling life in the belly of my being dance 213. its the end of the day and i haven’t danced yet dance 214. piling my head with my to do list dance 215. i just got laid dance 216. a wednesday, have to get out of bed dance 217. around the kitchen making love dance 218. can’t sleep, loud wind full moon, can’t sleep dnce 219. walking down the hall and back dance 220. did I scare you because I scared myself dance 221. feels good but doesn’t look good dance 222. i just had the best meal of my life dance 223. shifting self identification dance 224. denial dance 225. whipping cream dance 226. being better me dance 227. happy stomping and jumping in your place dance 228. mom-constantly-distracted dance 229. the dance between feeling loved and not loved dance 230. elephant in your pants laughing hysterical dance 231. walking on an empty stomach dance 232. i’m about to getmesome dance 233. it’s all so clear to me now dance 234. bend way back dance 235. the egg beaters dance 236. at weddings, the robot dance 237. losing yourself in love dance 238. I can’t stand people who can’t laugh at themselves dance 239. early labor get-this-baby-out-of-me dance 240. limp tongue and scratchy fingers, grumbly belly and angry legs dance 241. ooff dance 242. sesame street frolic w/flexible hips dance 243. first time dancing to prince with my mom dance 244. clean snow off and out dance 245. the if I don’t dance I will be numb dance 246. my family bites each other dance 247. empty grocery store isle with my lover and can’t remember what we’re shopping for so let’s dance dance 248. ancestral pride dance 249. shalanga-lang dance 250. in love with your ex dance 251. I’m bad because I just ate a hot dog dance 252. question dance 253. i can see your lying and you can see that i can see your lying dance 254. g dance 255. mustard dance 256. going to somewhere? dance 257. # here here now now dance # dance 258. the paint’s alive dance 259. here here now now dance 260. snowed-in dance 261. right leg kick front then back, steam engine arms, balance and jump dance 262. tired of death dance 263. butterfly in my stomach dance 264. sexy dance 265. deny dance 266. am i being ironic or am i actually hitting on you dance

267. loving the legs dance 268. walk like you mean it dance 269. walk like you really mean it dance 270. booty dance 271. lonely in a cloud dance 272. tit dance 273. morning sickness shuffle dance 274. release the tension shake-down dance 275. pretending you can’t see, knowing you can dance 276. darkeness increased, i’m sick, i’m sick, i’m sick; it is a horrifying dance 277. crazy arm flailing, thom yorke crossed with michael stipe dance 278. i’m in my living room and I can dance however I want to dance 279. moment of utter release dance 280. please fuck me after we do the disco dance of death/life dance 281. craigslist addict dance 282. i’m alone in my room playing a ukulele and pretending to be a rock star 283. evolution of adam and eve dance 284. too much coffee dance 285. so low you rip your jeans dance 286. kissing the sweat off of your neck dance 287. juggling romance, love, and inspiration dance 288. Molly Ringwald Carpet Dance 289. bottomless pow slash dance 290. re-live last night dance 291. relieved that the storm is over dance 292. skeleton dance 293. we win the battle as long as my arms are raised to the heavens dance 294. (waiting for the) bus dance 295. orange dance 296. default dance (oddly for me, jogging in place) dance 297. mourning dance 298. faking it till it becomes real dance 299. i stepped on something mysterious and gross dance 300. I survived the day dance 301. the dance of get up and go scurry and settle down, burrow in and nourish, connect and commune, give give give recievcievciev dance 302. it starts at my hips and i can’t stop it dance 303. meeting a new person dance 304. right here in the center, movement began dance 305. broken ankle hop and crutch dance 306. two headed: nice person/rage dance 307. drop, look, hand dance 308. stepping into liquid dance 309. giddy and happy just before i come down with a cold dance 310. boogie nation dance 311. an incredible talent dance 312. p-funk, flashlight, the mothership connection dance 313. get it all out dance 314. i have never felt so free dance 315. excited grinning jumpy dance 316. are you kidding me?! this is SO GREAT dance 317. if i stop dancing the world will blow up dance 318. lost in manila dance 319. I’ve lost it dance 320. borderline dance 321. really it all seems like a dance, especially when you notice it dance 322. trying to dance like that girl across the room dance 323. healing dance 324. I really don’t want to be dancing right now dance 325. bouncing the crying baby dance 326. burst of light dance 327. sun dance 328. the chameleon dance 329. geez I need to pee dance 330. make the coffee dance 331. waltz of the charm school instructor of the Bride of Frankstein dance 332. burping dance 333. the dance of waiting to dance 334. floating through deep powder 335. sometimes you hold it together so long you actually think you‚Äôre okay but then one evening your chest sinks through the floor and all you have left is the dance you just danced dance 336. i can’t dance dance 337. wake up and stretch like a kitty cat dance 338. avoidance dance 339. Sevilla Buddha Bar dance 340. listen to your cold bones dance 341. feeling more like i do now than i did when i got here dance 342. bored dance 343. I am terrified and shaking dance 344. happy dance 345. waiting for tri-met dance 346. asleep/awake bike in a trance dance 347. wet noodle popsicle dance 348. accidental tammy faye bakker memorial dance 349. eating real good food dance 350. bathroom is full dance 351. potty position! (like second position in ballet with hands on knees and pelvic thrusts while counting one..two!) followed by the Solid Gold!opening dance from the 70’s dance 352. chronic tv dance 353. splendour dance 354. anything but safety dance 355. Now missing Maracas being shaken by a jerky and malfuctioning showbiz

pizza robot dance 356. Invisible maracss being shaken by a broken showbiz pizza robot dance 357. starburst dance 358. my feet still reside at the bottom of my legs dance 359. fucking dance 360. can never jump enough dance 361. I don’t speak your language but I can still dance with you dance 362. listening to the tomato sliding across my breast dance 363. cloud geometry in technicolor dance 364. new pants dance 365. she said I am a spastic dancer dance 366. climbing an apple tree and reaching dance 367. gazing across the room spiraling around each other until we touch dance 368. spunky no time dance 269. stevie nicks dance 370. spontaneous release of flesh and bone in a moon lite dance 371. i miss adam dance 372. dreamy etheral dance 373. what’s over the rainbow dance 374. backbend dance 375. fast & fierce dance 376. arrow of light dance 377. pushing through water dance 378. sfffsfsf dance 379. ohmygod dance 380. i am sitting dance 381. awkward moments dance 382. string dance 383. dance till you fall to the floor dance 384. i have never danced in my adult life until now dance 385. i’m sure we can find a way to get a little bit closer dance 386. I learned it from my crazy uncle and now I repeat it because I’m about to become the crazy uncle dance 387. flying by the seat of my pants dance 388. sucking my stomach in dance 389. flying down the hill with the wind on my face dance 390. it made my hair fly dance 391. blowing your dress up over the heater dance 392. want to be a runner dance 393. misdirected dance 394. one with words from my past that were believed to be a poets dance 395. no dancing dance 396. slow, tired, anxious, crawl up and hands reaching dance 397. my jeans just got out of the dryer and they are too tight dance 398. it made my hair fly dance 399. today is going to be a better day dance 400. poodle dance 401. monologue dance 402. sitting at my desk in my office listening to jamming music dance 403. i am so in love dance with the sit on top dance 404. naked goat dance 405. no one’s home dance 406. the liquidity of identity dance 407. skank is the animalistic warrior unleashed dance 408. not thinking what im thinking while i watch you dance 409. happy-to-be-eating-this-reallygood-food dance 410. second thoughts about her dance 411. dance you can’t dance 412. waking the body dance 413. rusty zipper dance 414. music is too loud but I really want to talk and connect with you dance 415. I wont eat 5 ice cream sandwiches today dance 416. morrocan breakdancers teaching moves dance 417. i am not in love with him anymore dance 418. she’s so hot- i want her to think i’m hot dance 419. puppytwist dance 420. oops-i-crapped-my-pants (true story) dance 421. so excited, can’t do anything else but dance dance 422. out dance a crazy girl hogging the floor dance 423. wiggle-butt dance 424. trying to catch the feral cats dance 425. angry faced morning dance 426. the need to make Leigh laugh dance 427. riding in the most beautiful morning and losing my breath in it dance 428. fill in the blank dance 429. prom, trying-to-not-get-a-boner dance 430. separate body pary simultaneous dance 431. buried under a memory of happiness dance 432. where am i going dance 433. soulcessation dance 434. trouble dance 435. sick to my stomach I love you that much dance 436. grandfather death dance 437. Pat Benetar “we are young no one can tell us we’re wrong” dance 438. mega soul crusher dance