November 17, 2009 at 3:23 am · Filed under Artworks, Link
Maurice Benayoun has been in residence at the San Francisco Art Institute for the kick-off of his new project, The Art Collider (TAC). After attending the final workshop this evening and learning a bit more about this new digital art collaborative network I have decided to enter the viral network of art creation with my next project. I am composing a third fragment (the first being my labrun performance at UC Berkeley in Fall 2008 and the second being my performance at the Milk Bar this past August 2009) that will be performed this December 11, 2009 representing the Berkeley Center for New Media at the CITRIS Gala at UC Berkeley.
Keep an eye on my project wiki for information! In short, here’s a brief and rough description of the project…
The conceptual context of this piece is based on accelerometer sensors. I have used wireless accelerometers in rehearsals to inspire and create the choreography. These sensors will not be worn in performance in hopes of demonstrating a spectral digital presence. I am working lately to explore the possibility for a digital tone without digital technology, so hope to explore this concept more by presenting this choreographic material.
Using a live camera feed I will input real-time performance information into The Art Collider (TAC). I will simultaneously take visual images from the collider that will be projected in the performance space. The dancers will respond to these images live. A second projection will display the visual representation, or “monitor,” of the interaction within the larger networked TAC.
May 5, 2009 at 11:18 am · Filed under Uncategorized
Although perhaps against blogging etiquette, I will re-post portions of my conversation on -empyre- to my blog this month. I hope that this entices some of you to join as the discussion is already proving to be incredibly interesting. Here are some thoughts of mine on digital mishap and physical stillness. See my last post for a link to sign-up to join in the discusion.
Hello all,
Ricardo, I am incredibly interested in the ideal of an “aesthetics of
failure” and agree that this pertains specifically to Lepecki’s
situation of dance and politics. I am hesitant, though, to associate
stillness as failure for the same reasons that Stamatia is resistant
to associate technical cut with mishap. If we associate stillness with
failure we equate stillness with a body that does not move. If I stand
still my body is still moving, both on the inside and on the outside.
Micro-movements become more apparent as my body awareness begins to
increase. I was in an Alexander technique workshop this past weekend
and we were discussing this very concept. So, I feel that in the way
dance often employs stillness the still does not result in the
non-moving. What is particularly interesting here is that I have
become more aware of this fact through my work with sensors. I have to
calibrate the sensors and their thresholds in order to act
appropriately with my movements because they perceive my
micro-movements much more accurately or specifically than my audience
would. The slightest twitch of a finger and subsequent shift of
tendons and veins in my wrist could send a sensor like an
accelerometer located on top of those tendons and veins into a great
deal of reception. Lepecki discusses the “betrayal of the bind between
dance and movement” as one that dance watchers including critics
perceive. Perhaps we can use a sensor to illustrate the moving affect
in stillness. I think, though, that this also disrupts the political
intention behind adding perceived body stillness to the dance
performance. It is here that we can locate your failure of politics
and an aesthetics of failure. By employing technologies in
choreography I think that we truly can move between failures of
politics as affect and clean techno gestures as effect within an
“aesthetics of failure.” I agree with Stamatia entirely that the
technical cut is an affect, but am still interested in how we work
with engineers who could consider our affect a purely technical
mishap. The clean techno gesture is effective, but in its gaps the
artist finds her affect. The artist can also find affect in
intentional cut, though, that I would associate with a cinematic cut.
I often program a cut into my technology to initiate an affective
presence. In this sense the affect does not rest on mishap at all and
we again move between affect and effect, gap and seamlessness,
movement and stillness. I am very interested in the in between here.
As we move we supposed move through or between points of perceived
stillness. When I dance with sensors and projections I am moving in
the in-between sensor, computer, projection and audience. In Dance
Forms we move between the different grids and boxes that Stamatia
brings up. The in-between provides affect for both physical and
digital affect. A perceived gap in technology, or a perceived
stillness in the body when it isn’t really still after all.
I am curious where this in-between fits theoretically, especially in
terms of D&G’s ideas of the machinic and body without organs.
Ashley
May 4, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Events, Thoughts
I am just returning from a weekend at UCLA for the 2009 Dance Under Construction conference. This year’s theme was The Politics of Choreography, Choreographing Politics. This graduate student conference has been moving from UC campus to UC campus for the past eleven years drawing graduate students focusing on any aspect of dance practice to share their research and engage in conversation. As MFA and PhD students in performance studies and dance converge for one weekend it is astounding the different scholarship that seems to hearken similar questions. Whether dancing, performing a workshop, or embodying a traditional academic lecture, budding academics recount different dances from concert dance, performance art and social dance to everyday movement as dancing. The state of this conference stands as exciting proof that current graduate students are able to get their degrees in dance as a rigorous academic field. I have begun to question, though, what this means. As someone who is in school with non-dancers I am consistently questioned and challenged as to my notion of movement, the body, ephemerality, virtuosity, sincerity and more. Scholarship in other fields that parse these concepts directly, or indirectly are what inspire my dance interventions and choreographic engagements. Once I enter a dance context, though, it seems that we often feel more comfortable using these terms in a contemporary dance context without considering not only scholarship on these topics outside of our field, but a long tradition of dance history that his dissected and deconstructed these and similar concepts. By no means am I suggesting that by existing within a dance only context we become less self-critical. I was pushed and inspired in many other ways this weekend as I grew to question my academic stance on performing lectures and ideas, or whether or not talking about dance in terms of capital and commodity is beneficial. Experiencing my own micro-choreographies and macro-politics in relation to technology has inspired me to question the long lasting effect of my research. How is what I am doing NOT merely a trend? William Kentridge often asks this question as he uses technologies that he feels make a long-lasting political statement as opposed to those that merely play with our instantaneous desires for digi-trends. So, the dance conference experience was inspiring and challenging. I only hope that we continue working both inside and outside of this community. Susan Foster reminded the audience at the keynote panel how the interdisciplinary status of this conference was so unique. I hope that in our academic inquiry we continue to embrace the interdisciplinary nature of our field by working outside of it, even as dance as a discipline continues to grow.
April 19, 2009 at 10:15 am · Filed under Artworks, Events, Link
I will be setting up the UC Berkeley Graduate Program in Performance Studies 10th Anniversary and will stop at noon to move with my colleagues. Join in my friend Beth’s international public art performance and celebrate National Dance Week: Sign up to “dance anywhere” and post your dance documents online.
danceanywhere.org
April 4, 2009 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Events, Link, Theory
I will be leading this week’s New Media Working Group! Check out the invite/description below and share your thoughts! Join us if you’re in the area.
The New Media Working Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, April 9, from 2:30-3:30 pm in the Berkeley Center for New Media Commons (340 Moffit). Please join us to discuss Brian Massumi’s latest book, Parables for the Virtual, where he considers virtuality as it relates to movement. Paying particular attention to “The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image” and Massumi’s description of virtual affect in relation to Ronald Reagan’s account of watching himself move on television, we will discuss virtualities of movement.
Copies of the reading are available at
http://nmwg.notlong.com/
March 14, 2009 at 1:05 am · Filed under Thoughts
Tonight I’ll go to dinner with German dance dramaturg Anna Wagner. After her lecture last week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a conceptual choreographer who works with a dramaturge. As someone who enjoys theorizing through her artistic work, I’m curious about my need for a dramaturge since I enjoy theoretical research myself, or if dramaturge would actually encourage me to indulge my love for theory even more. Trajal Harrel works with a dramaturge as he creates his incredibly specific and successfully stylized work. Both Trajal and Yvonne Hardt, choreographer who works with Wagner, enjoy theoretical research themselves and have mentioned how working with a dramaturge only helps them specify their ideas and choreographic arch. I experienced how frustrating it can be to choreograph a solo when you’re the only dancer. I wasn’t able to watch the piece from start to finish, so couldn’t adequately follow my spatial narrative. It seems to me that Yvonne uses her dramaturg as a tool especially when she’s dancing on stage. Perhaps having someone who I’m working with and who intimately knows both my theoretical and choreographic impulse would help to be my eyes as I work through my own movements myself. Or, perhaps this is not exactly what a dramaturge really is…
March 9, 2009 at 3:24 am · Filed under Events, Link
I just found the “dtwmain” posts on YouTube. Thank goodness for Dance Theater Workshop and their embrace of the Internet as a positive force in the contemporary dance community. Check out their amazing archive of performance and conversation…
…some of my personal favorites:
MAP ME by Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vandendriessche at Dance Theater Workshop. Fall 2007.
Stephen Greco in conversation with Trajal Harrell prior to Quartet for the End of Time at Dance Theater Workshop. Fall 2008.
March 7, 2009 at 9:46 pm · Filed under Theory, Thoughts
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone on the phenomenology of dance as re-languaging. A liminality between the two faces of an object: presence/absence. I’m curious how this does or doesn’t relate to a relationship between the real, or more apropriately physical, and digitally virtual (as opposed to S-J’s physical virtual force).
March 4, 2009 at 6:47 pm · Filed under Theory, Uncategorized
Technologically, when we digitally loop materials and we program loops into our network we complicate the possibility for what Gilles Deleuze calls the “following present,” or repetition, which is where he locates the virtual. In the case of Deleuze, the virtual characterizes a very physical presence, repetition. This virtual presence as a physical quality as opposed to digital reality is one that philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone uses to philosophize dance in her book, Phenomenology of Dance.
Lest we forget that although these considerations of the body and the real in media driven movement and looping are repetitions of well-articulated theories on the body and the real, our experiences of Deleuzian repetitions in everyday action are nonetheless confused and complicated with the introduction of “new” media and digital presence. For this reason I’m interested in how my research on digital environments are pre-established concepts in a new context. I will, therefore, ground much of my research in a historical situation of dance experience in relation to the body and the everyday with the hope of locating a new articulation of these terms; or perhaps new terms altogether.
There is space in dance scholarship to move through experiences in relation to digital limitation and/or distraction and phenomenological experience. The digital is no longer so “new” and technologies have forever mechanized movement practice. So, rather than forget previously articulated ideas, I hope to consider contemporary technologies and dance performance in relation to a historical theoretical perspective.
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