ides of march update (15 mar 13)

First, an update on the writing.  I’m in the middle of the second draft of the RDC1.  Had my second meeting yesterday morning with Dr. Gonzalez, and am immersed in methodologies, gantt charts, and theories.  Spring Break has been working on this (for the most part), overwhelmed, but not after yesterday, and now the world is speaking in theories, people and things are moving in theories, a motorcycle is a theory, and writing in cafes is a theory with multiple speaking subjects and simultaneous texts.  The most exciting thing in my head is the narrowing down of the research question to something along the lines of: What is a performance under the spell of desire?  What is a performance like when the participants are under a love spell?

This makes me excited, a rabbit that will run away for four years at least.

Laura mentioned a metaphor for a PhD, where you are digging a hole to the center of the earth.  The bigger the diameter of the hole, the harder it will be; keeping it narrow is the only way to go, and I think you also have to want to be in the center of the earth, with a question that’s worthy of posing to the center of the earth.  Either way, I make an offering to OrishaOko, just in case.  It’s spring, it won’t hurt.

Next, because the world is speaking to me in a combination of semiotic/animistic hallucination, my ex mentioned something very useful.  Every doctoral project has 5 components: the question, the archive, the theory, the methodology, and the argument.  For an arts PhD, the archive is our own studio work (and body//notsick// of work).

And last, this, reflection on a performance from the first weekend in March.  This is written from the perspective of Ted from How I met your mother, oh my gosh, that needs unpacking.

In my first project, “Monsters of the sea,” we are combining the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with How I met your mother (and Friends), the love lost forever thing that keeps recurring.  It’s my favorite story today.  (and I think I also want to think about thinking about Tarantism, again from Laura, and how to score a trance dance…)….this is all related, in this post, where I’m writing about doing a solo performance that was a way of jumping into the river for the next project, but I did not know this was going to be so terribly terribly empirical, and that the water was freezing cold, and in the end, refreshing absolutely refreshing.  The link is here, but I’ll also cut and paste below, and add pictures, too.

Happy almost spring….xo,

CD

this got a little weird

This is a scene for an elevator, where Ted is trying to tell Robin about his recent turn to performance art (keeping with the Ted & Robin thing here because I can talk about things that are very personal and think that no one knows what I’m talking about, but it’s also going into a play, so it’s really just me making art and nothing more than that).  ((So stop reading into it))..  (((Honestly, I don’t know who that last comment was for, I think it was for me)))…
This is a scene in an elevator, and no one really looks who they are supposed to pretend to be.  It all looks a little fucked up.  Even the elevator is fucked up, it’s very old fashioned, one of those pre-electricity elevators, before stairs even, this elevator is really a rock.  Ted is talking to Robin on a rock and it’s very heartfelt so watch out, this will be terribly confessional.
TED: (this is a ted talk)  You would think, you would really have to think, or I would have to think, you know, being on a white sheet in a loin cloth in front of hundreds of people when it’s cold, rolling around and pouring blood out of my mouth and listening to headphones, that I would be a little, you know, “I think this might be the most self-absorbed thing I’ve ever done, and to anyone who doesn’t really know me, this would be, you know, crazy, that I look crazy,” is how I would think I would feel, except no, except not at all, except no, not at all.  There was something else.

I was Orpheus, a skeleton of him, missing Eurydice, and she was underneath the ground, and we were both dead and we were on the opposite side of the worlds, and it was about missing somebody, it was like that.  Don’t look at me like that, this wasn’t about you, I wasn’t thinking about you, not at all, except in this way of like, well, you’re a lot of people, you are a lot of people to me, and I was missing that, and while I was missing that, these other people were watching and they were seeing themselves missing someone in all of it, so it was one of those kinds of things, where you take on what they give you and return it in some kind of series of ritual actions and the blood is like a purging.  But it’s not real blood.  It’s not my blood, it’s not her blood, and it’s not chicken blood, although, of course, the people who don’t know me, they were thinking that it could be any of those things, and probably was something very dark, but really, it wasn’t dark, it was beet juice, which is healthy.  Because, really, maybe three years ago, it might have been chicken blood, but that’s not really appropriate for a park.  Not with kids and old people.

I mean, I will do these things, because this is what I know how to do, but I can do them so they are healthy, so something gets awoken in them, and something is cleaned in me.  This is exciting to me.  What we can do to each other in public spaces.  But the part I wanted to tell you, after I covered myself in small pieces of bloody cloth, covering and cleaning all of my wounds, I put my face on the ground, on the sheet on the ground, and that’s when I started to think about you, this was the first time in the performance that I thought about you.  Because it was a trance, and because it wasn’t a live human acting, it was all impulse, I started to chew on the ground, to try to chew the ground beneath the sheet, and my teeth couldn’t get a grip on the ground, and it was endless and fruitless and wasted, it was a wasted action, except not at all wasted.  Because it told me what I wanted to do, where my heart lives right now, I want to touch you with my mouth but there is all of this grave trappings in the way, and it’s a meal that I cannot have, apparently, apparently I cannot eat, I want to eat but I can’t eat, and that’s where I live.  Which will be either terribly disturbing or terribly sweet, depending on how you feel about me, and that’s something that I’m not allowed to know, apparently.  But for me, I know, I know that, and it’s not terribly revealing, really, to say that at the root of all of this is this strange recognition of a whole bunch of ancestors underneath all of this, under my clothes, under your clothes, we’re not unclothed but utterly naked in the presence of other spirits, those who came before, and for whatever reason, they are speaking, and they are speaking of holiness and that same fire of hunger that was there at the beginning of everything.  Except when you live forward in time, in time that moves forward, there are all the usual confusions that go with living in a body with memories and children and lovers and burials, except, the second layer of except is more than the first, except.  When you live in the circle, in time that moves in a circle, there is no death, only birth, one birth that leads naturally into the next birth, and I am starting to see for the very first time that these metaphors for birth really don’t refer to the physical act of birth, of being born, because our own physical birth is already a metaphor for something else, some very important secret that can only be answered in being born.

(Next scene: she runs from him, or she runs to him, or they meet for coffee on a nice morning and talk about the nice morning and all of those things would probably be ok.)