yesterday morning

artist walking by

(As we were filming on Waialae Ave. I heard a voice say to us "I'm the artist who did that" --it was a very cool surprise as we were visiting our favorite places.  The photo above is of the kids with Ion,
the creator of this work they are standing in front of). 

Yesterday Jason, Soren, Dahlia and I went to some of our favorite outdoor artwork sites in Manoa, Kaimuki, and Makiki to help me get started on my 661 assignment.  I wanted to approach this assignment with a quote from our class reading in mind.  In the article Dance and Interactivity, Johannes Birringer discusses new environments for dance with an interdisciplinary approach and comments on how these innovated technological changes are broadening how we view, create and think about dance.  Birringer states that:

 Addressing "interaction" as a spatial and architectural concept for performance, therefore, means    shifting the emphasis away from the creation of steps, phrases, "combinations" of points on the body that initiate movement, away from the dancer's internal bodily awareness (widely encouraged in today's practices of yoga, somatics, experiential anatomy, body-mind centering and release techniques) unto her environment, to a not-given space but a constructed, shifting relational architecture that influences her and that she shapes or in turn shapes her. (p. 2)

I really appreciated this quote as a springboard for my project and wanted to have a strong emphasis on the environments we chose and then see how they in turn affected Soren and Dahlia while we were filming. 

do you dream in color?

This is a something I made in my video choreography class last semester.  I wanted to continue a study I had done a while back on the movement of the pelvis.  This work ended up being more about femoral flexion and as I began the editing process I played around with cutting the endings and almost endings of movement (inspired by the work of Mitchel Rose in "Contact").  I also decided, due to constant changes in lighting the day I shot, to play around with the colors on screan and make a study out of that as well.

I worked with two uniquely strong dancers Megan Brennan and Makena Harootian.

The Distortion, the Beauty, the Almost, the newness of the Simulacrum

5 Dec. 2014

Last semester while taking my Theory and Critical Thinking course with Professor Amy Schiffner and many other graduate students of dance, I remember quite distinctly class and after class discussions on what is real, what is reality, and the relationship the latter has to performance.  Names from past and present like Plato, Derrida, Marx,  and on to Judith Butler and Susanne Langer with her work “From Feeling and Form: Virtual Powers” and finally Gerald Siegmund’s work “Aesthetic Experience” that references Deluze come to mind and I start to remember my intense grappling’s with ideas about what it means to perform, represent something through art, reproduce work and emotions in a piece and make something from something else.  What is this “thing” that is made?  What is its relationship to other “real” things and reality and on and on...and I take a breath and relax my chest a bit. It will be OK.

Fast forwarding my life to this semester with introductions to ethnology, ethnography, performance theory and dance documentation I had neatly place my grappling’s with real and reality to bed for a time only to find that in a new context and setting they were waking up and my conversations must continue.  One of our class readings and discussions was centered on the work of David MacDougal and his work “The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnology and the Senses, Meaning and Being” and while preparing for class I read a passage that left a strong imprint in my mind as it states:

What is extraordinary about it is not its transmission of reality but its creation of a new mechanical image of reality.  If we simply wanted to see reality, it is all around us, but seeing a film presents us with a strange apparition, a photochemical imprint of the world...The resulting image does not so much transcend reality as produce an alien perception of reality, sensitive to unknown qualities. The surrealism of the film image lies precisely in making us aware of a reality beyond out knowledge. (17)

Descriptions like “Mechanical Image of reality,” “apparition” and “photochemical imprint” left me feeling settled as I reflected on my previous dialogue about real and virtual.  Again, I began to see that binaries of either/or and real/virtual were not sufficient in my mind and that as we create work whether in film, dance, theater or photography that hybrids and new realities are created and sometimes it can be a little everything.  This became my focus for my final ethnology project:  new reality placed near photochemical reality in a new space transformed and happening in time.

                As I contemplated the steps of my project and the performance that would unfold I knew that space would be crucial.  I needed to recreate a space that allowed darkness and transformation in a short amount of time.  In her book The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making Andrea Olsen states that “[s]pace shapes the body, and the body shapes space…[f]rom a dancers perspective, space becomes place when you inhibit it with attention” (104).  Space and place have always played distinct and important roles in my life and for this project space and place remained key components.  I needed the space to have an intimate relationship with both the dancing bodies and the dancing bodies on the screen. Yet, during my beginning phase of this project the only intent I had with space was that of intimacy and darkness to provide an atmosphere for the dancers to move with a screen behind them.  They needed to frame the space and allow the viewer to see both at the same time so that my investigation of the two forms side by side could occur and a new hybrid reality could emerge and take the space provided it.

                One day while discussing the project with my sister, Charla, she suggested I look into Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and sent me a video.  As I  considered the meaning of the cave and the subjects who could only see the shadows on the cave wall in front of them as their reality I was struck by the beautiful profundity and images I could draw from.  One of the subjects who had been a prisoner his entire life is able to leave the cave and experience reality outside the cave and eventually return and visit the cave again with new perspective and experience.  I found great inspiration for my installation and decided that I would create a cave-like atmosphere for my showing and also make references to the fire behind the prisoners that allowed for the shadows before them so that I could also refer to the source of the projection (i.e. shadows).  Following the allegory entirely was not my intention but to implement the essence of key aspects as I created a space for reality and hybridity/photochemical reality to interact and be present in the same space. 

                With footage of dancers compiled and material hung throughout the mundane space we use daily for lectures I was beginning to feel the makings of hybridity juxtaposed with reality and I was feeling the making of art.  My process was taking physical and tangible form, my research was going to be visible through my performance and the documentation of my process.  In this particular work my process was my performance--an experiment put on “stage.” Exploring and investigating were fused with performance.  I realized after the class showing that this was quite a big step for me and that the completed parts were my transformation space and place and the photochemical reality on the wall.  My finished product was the environment I created and it was made for the exploring and investigating on real, reality, realism and their intersections with hybridity and perception. 

                My process performance left me many things to consider as I rework and recreate and I’m grateful for the space and the safety to share my questions and creative designs with my classmates.  As I consider my recent work and my process I think I’m starting to understand the meaning of and importance of performance studies and the work Dwight Conquergood.  In his article, Performance Studies:  Interventions and Radical Research” he states that:

[t]he promiscuous traffic between different ways of knowing carries the most radical promise of performance studies research.  Performance studies struggles to open the space between analysis and action and to pull the pin of the binary opposition between theory and practice.  This embrace of different ways of knowing is radical because it cuts to the root of how knowledge is organized in the academy” (146).

He goes on to describe the difference between empirical observation and hands on active participation.  The latter became very important in my work for this class and I found that the intersection of theory and practice were constant as I considered my process, my investigations, the reasons for representing components of my piece and how I approached performance.  Finally, this project and the contents of this class further opened a space that is growing within me to accept and embrace the myriad ways of knowing, perceiving, seeing and being. 

Works Cited

Conquerwood, Dwight.  “Performance Studies:  Interventions and Radical Research”. TDR (1998) Vol. 46,

No. 2 pp. 145-156. The MIT Press, 2012.

Olsen, Andrea and Caryn McHose.  The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making.

                Wesleyan University Press, 2014.

MacDougal, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnology and the Senses. Princeton University Press,

                2006

Hybrids

The dancers that were live have now become photochemical realities within this video and join the first video images of themselves.

Simulacrum

part 3-a

Word search: hybrid, composite, mixture, essence, simulacrum

My experiment unfolded today and I have mixed feelings about what took place.  I tried to do too much and didn't feel a part of my work.  After class I was pretty disappointed but that feeling has left me now and I'm happy with what I tried to accomplish.  I've decided that what I made wasn't for me entirely so I can move from the disappointment and let what happened be what it was.  It was a space I created to ponder difference and also include others in my process. This project was a learning experience for me.  Here are some things I'd do differently.

1.  sit in the cave the entire time
2.  let the space have silence...?
3.  ask for help in documenting when performance is happening (though I did have fun filming too).