YOU CAN

Friday, September 14, 2012

in response to http://spangbergianism.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/seventeen-points-for-the-future-of-dance/

First off, i just need to write some. I dont know how much of this is actually a response to this guy's list of heady claims, but, while reading it, I realized I need to voice all in my head about dance. 

These months, in San Francisco and Oakland, I have been much more reserved in my interactions with dancers here. I don't know them very well. I definitely don't call them or go for a beer with them after shows, or even go to shows with them, or talk to them. In fact, i spend most of my time alone or with visual artists and non dance-focused people. I am sincerely informed within my work in dance just as much by these others as I might be with dancers themselves. 

last night I was talking about the word dance and the term choreographer. Yesterday I was looking at Tere O'Connor's new blog, BLEED. I was think about his project that is somehow a trilogy or a tri-part project based on his ways of thinking or something. It immediately came across as "white man makes trilogy about his brilliant head."... I was kinda like, "what? there are 3 distinct ways in which your mind makes dance. and you can separate them? And you want to do that? And you think that is what dance should be sourced from? your own head." Do we think our heads are special in a way that makes us want to focus on the specialness? I am not sure that is effective. Also, I have always really loved O'Connor's work. Sometimes I realize though how locked into classical technique it is. How NYC it is.   And how NYC sometimes instills this slightly cheesy tacky crisp American-pop-ego into the dance that happens there and it worries me sometimes. 

And then there is the academia of dance. The other white male, younger, and his caffeine induced exclamations about the future of dance. "dance as we know it is a dead opera." "Choreography is not the art of making dances (a directional set of tools), it is a generic set of capacities to be applied to any kind of production, analysis or organization." 

#2, 3, 4, 7, 9 OMIT- it's obvious and old and unnecessary in his point making. #8 needs to be expanded on.

10. For dance to have a future it needs to engage in a process of deskilling, i.e. to cancel the proprietary understanding of technique in favor of individual or context specific constructions of abilities, over the generic sense of dance as a sui generis technology.

- I beg to differ. 

#11, why are you talking about architects and Fordism... it's too blablabla. What are you trying to say? Don't use the term Fordism- you sound like an idiot.

#12, great point. yes, I think we must consider ALL bodies. All elements. All parts. But in a society where non-human-body objects are the focus, where most people, who are not dancers, don't even consider the body and have much more awareness in the choreography of non-human-bodies, I worry that this idea needs to be complicated a bit in order to really function. BMC exists in response to the focus on everything but the human body- or at least offers a more integrated way of experiencing the body. Anyway, BMC is out-dated and Axis Syllabus is a much more developed methodology to consider. You might be proposing that we need to just be focusing on the relations of ALL bodies at any given time. To consider them with equal relevance. 

#13 really?

#14 You could have just written the last sentence. And anyway, we all know that. 

#15... 

anyway, I suggest reading the works of the female authors that presented some of these ideas long before this guy: for example, Anne Bogart or Judith Butler