Questions, Desires, Ideas In the Works...

10 July

- 2019 -

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

• How can I inspire and sustain more dancing for myself, and how can I infect the audience with the passionate desire to dance?

• As discussed by Arno Boehler of Jean Luc Nancy’s articulation of what a soul is (a body’s capacity to be simultaneously inside and outside itself, or responsive and world-wide), what decision-making processes and power structures (especially with collaborators) are required to best facilitate choreography and composition from my intuition-led, dance performance desires that can be legible and affective for an audience?

• What is my relationship to control in terms of meaning-making through dance performance?

• How can other materials and mediums (i.e. sound, painting, fabric, writing from the 301) support these endeavors?

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

I want to make an hour-long dance performance that embraces improvisation as the motor for developing choreography and composition. My desire is to continue dancing deeply present and responsive to the moment and to infect the audience with the impulse to dance and/or open their hearts. Although the performance will primarily be a solo, the process will be highly collaborative (akin to a devised theater collective), and this may be reflected in the performance itself. I plan to continue working with materials such as (but not limited to) fabrics and action painting as well as with a sound artist, to deepen my relationships to these mediums in the context of structured improvisations and art rituals. The performance may contain intense subject matter, nudity, and explicit sexuality though its aim is to channel and direct all energies through transformative dancing. I would like for the performance to end in a bonfire of burning a wooden birdcage and/or a dance party to a live DJ.

401 DRAFT PROPOSAL 

RATIONALE

The third semester research helped me get to place where I could more readily access a mode of dancing, improvising and performing in the moment that is led by a feeling and intuitive sense rather than controlling my dancing through slower, reason-based decision-making processes. I feel this allows me a new landscape of expressive range and potential to inhabit—like realizing that I have the capacity to fly and the existential yearning to fly and that I just need to keep developing those physical, emotional, energetic and intuitive abilities. As my research is currently located in the context of European stage performance, my question moving forward given the fact that I’m learning to trust a process of improvising and going with an intuitively-led flow is: how can I choreograph movements and situations and compose structures in a way that is more legible and affective to an audience? This question implies a desire to go deeper with all of the different elements from my 301 presentation. I want to stay longer in the dancing or find myself longer with certain worlds and bodies I pass through while performing. I want to continue building upon my understandings of working with paint and fabric. I especially want to examine a complex range of questions in terms of the role of sound for myself and an audience and my relationship to dancing to known (like pop) music, live-composed sound, and silence.

METHODOLOGY

Similar to the third semester, the work will happen mostly in the studio dancing and improvising and experimenting with materials. Working in the studio as much as possible with collaborators and mentors is key as I want to develop my solo dance practice through a space of collective creativity and a space of being seen by others. I want to cultivate the ability and confidence to inhabit the role of the soloist/lead character yet still be able to give space and focus to other bodies and expressions. My collaborators and mentors will be outside eyes, give inputs and directions and feedback, and also creatively participate themselves. Periodic showings will allow performance situations and compositions to be tested in front of practice audiences.

I may work with explicit sexual engagement with partners both alone and with outside eyes.

I will host open dance jams in the bigger studios to practice dancing and opening in a collective field.

I will take dance trainings through classes and one-on-one exchanges rs as a way to keep grounded in the body, responsive to outside inputs, and open to sharing my own tacit, embodied knowledge.

Documentation for the workbook will mostly rely on long-form journal writing and possibly take the form of a website catalogue of entries.

Other research will involve looking into collective theater groups for inspiration like Contraband from San Francisco, The Living Theater from New York, and Teatro Oficina from Sao Paulo.

Read “Being Singular Plural” from Jean Luc Nancy.

Inspirations and Ideas:

• Tanzwut by Anne-Mareike Hess, at the end of this dance piece I have an intense solo where I reach a physical edge of exhaustion and energy. Marc Lohr made the sound, and it called me to rise to that level of activity and desire for a higher state.

• Improvisation in Beijing by Allen Ginsberg (21.10.1984)

• Teatro Oficina – Collective theater company in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

o They use a wide range of art mediums, media, and performance styles in non- frontal and ritualistic ways.

WATCH AT MINUTE 16

I want to dance ecstatically like the naked guy and in an environment and community like that.

• Existential by Diego Oliveira

o Grounded energy, fancy footwork and legible forms is what I would like to cultivate in my dancing. I tend to flow, but I don’t often stay in one place or position for enough time to explore its parameters, qualities, etc.

I was so inspired by this show!!

I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, and I want to breathe freely.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman gave world permission to speak with candor.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman opened up poetry’s verse-line for unobstructed breath.

I write poetry because Ezra Pound saw an ivory tower, bet on one wrong horse, gave poets permission to write spoken vernacular idiom.

I write poetry because Pound pointed young Western poets to look at Chinese writing word pictures.

I write poetry because W.C. Williams living in Rutherford wrote New Jerseyesque “I kick yuh eye,” asking, how measure that in iambic pentameter?

I write poetry because my father was a poet my mother from Russia spoke Communist, died in a mad house.

I write poetry because young friend Gary Snyder sat to look at his thoughts as part of external phenomenal world just like a 1984 conference table.

I write poetry because I suffer, born to die, kidneystones and high blood pressure, everybody suffers.

I write poetry because I suffer confusion not knowing what other people think.

I write because poetry can reveal my thoughts, cure my paranoia also other people’s paranoia.

I write poetry because my mind wanders subject to sex politics Buddhadharma meditation.

I write poetry to make accurate picture my own mind.

I write poetry because I took Bodhisattva’s Four Vows: Sentient creatures to liberate are numberless in the universe, my own greed anger ignorance to cut thru’s infinite, situations I find myself in are countless as the sky okay, while awakened mind path’s endless.

I write poetry because this morning I woke trembling with fear what could I say in China?

I write poetry because Russian poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin committed suicide, somebody else has to talk.

I write poetry because my father reciting Shelley English poet & Vachel Lindsay American poet out loud gave example - big wind inspiration breath.

I write poetry because writing sexual matters was censored in United States.

I write poetry because millionaires East and West ride Rolls-Royce limousines, poor people don’t have enough money to fix their teeth.

I write poetry because my genes and chromosomes fall in love with young men not young women.

I write poetry because I have no dogmatic responsibility one day to the next.

I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.

I write poetry to talk back to Whitman, young people in ten years, talk to old aunts and uncles still living near Newark, New Jersey.

I write poetry because I listened to black Blues on 1939 radio, Leadbelly and Ma Rainey.

I write poetry inspired by youthful cheerful Beatles’ songs grown old.

I write poetry because Chuang-tzu couldn’t tell whether he was butterfly or man, Lao-tzu said water flows downhill, Counfucius said honor elders, I wanted to honor Whitman.

I write poetry because overgrazing sheep and cattle Mongolia to U.S. Wild West destroys new grass & erosion creates deserts.

I write poetry wearing animal shoes.

I write poetry “First thought, best thought” always.

I write poetry because no ideas are comprehensible except as manifested in minute particulars: “No ideas but in things.”

I write poetry because the Tibetan Lama guru says, “Things are symbols of themselves.”

I write poetry because newspapers headline a black hole at our galaxy-center, we’re free to notice it.

I write poetry because World War I, World War II, nuclear bomb, and World War III if we want it, I don’t need it.

I write poetry because first poem Howl not meant to be published was prosecuted by the police.

I write poetry because my second long poem Kaddish honored my mother’s parinivana in mental hospital.

I write poetry because Hitler killed six million Jews, I’m Jewish.

I write poetry because Moscow said Stalin exiled 20 million Jews and intellectuals to Siberia, 15 million never came back to the Stray Dog Café, St. Petersburg.

I write poetry because I sing when I’m lonesome.

I write poetry because Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I write poetry because my mind contradicts itself, one minute in New York, next minute the Dinaric Alps.

I write poetry because my head contains 10,000 thoughts.

I write poetry because no reason no because.

I write poetry because it’s the best way to say everything in mind within 6 minutes or a lifetime.

o My wish to dance transparently and shape-shift to the evolving landscapes of my dancing is similar to how Ginsberg views writing. There are infinite reasons to dance or ways that dancing can be. What comes through his writing is the desire for expression, and through this energy emerges many possibilities and reasons for writing. I want to cultivate this same urge in my dancing.
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