woah april-may: a short story (16 may 13)

So this month is rough.  There was this eye twitch thing that was going on all year that finally stopped, or I don’t notice it any more, but there is this new jaw thing, where it feels like it’s all starting to tighten on its own and my face is being stretched because my jaw is about to pull backwards in the wrong direction.  It’s the kind of thing comes from bracing yourself for things, for lots and lots of things.

Ok but first I should say that I understand that everyone is going through something.  We’re always all of us going through something, and when we are going through these things, we find out that if we talk about them out loud that everyone wants to talk about their things out loud, because no one talks about them out loud.  Because we don’t talk about things.  It’s not that there’s a problem with repression, that these are repressive cultures, and they like to keep things hidden.  Of course, there is repression, it’s a Victorian time where people talk about their leather masks and why polyamory works for them, but are very discrete about their feelings, because the body is not shameful, but emotions are, because something has to be shameful because I don’t know why because.  We don’t talk about things because we don’t have time, because we want to say, How are you? and hear something easy, so that we can get to the business at hand, and if we can’t get to the business at hand, everyone will get upset because the world will surely stop if we don’t get to the business at hand.

There’s all this: (it relates somewhere, or will somewhere down the road, but it all relates, because this is about relatives):  (bad punctuation; <yes>):

Last month my father went in for an operation to remove his bladder cancer, which returned, which returned and the doctor at the VA was not so concerned about (bad grammar) it.  The operation to remove said cancer was not successful at all, it had grown a lot more than they thought, more than the images could show, and there would have to be further measures.  So I’m at the VA with my parents on this morning a month ago, where there are images of the Boston Marathon on televisions in the background, images that make this country look like a lot of other countries in the world, except you can’t really talk about things like that at the VA because there are crusty old men who will get mad if you talk about those things.  And we talked to the doctor and we heard this bad news, and then we went home, and a couple of days later my dad is back in the hospital because there’s something else that’s very wrong with him, something more urgent than the cancer, which is apparently spreading very fast but the doctors are not concerned.  This is a minor complication, so they say, and it looks like he might not live for very long.  The kidney is not working right and there are other things that are not working like they should.  And for more than a few nights he’s there, and I get to spend one night with him, and remember waking up at 3 in the morning to a nurse from Puerto Rico putting a blanket over me and putting my phone and glasses on the table so they will not break.  There are beautiful things that happen in ugly places.

And somewhere in the middle of this I (WE, really, it’s not me, it’s we, I had a lot of help) submit my RDC1, and the semester is winding down, and this is a little intense, and there are these meetings with my critique group which are interesting but hard to shift gears for because usually I am at my parents’ house to help with things on Sunday nights and there are dogs in the background and people on skype complain about the dogs.  No offense taken, honestly, but this is important, there are always dogs in the background.

There are always dogs in the background.

And there is this afternoon with my dad in the VA where we are watching a show about LSD and military experiments, and it’s in the military hospital, and it’s kind of fucking awesome because of all of that.  This inspires me to start listening to the Grateful Dead again for the first time in over 15 years I guess, I went through a phase long ago, and this is obviously another phase I’m doing through, except really it’s my dad who is going through it.  But whatever is happening is also kind of happening to me.

I am thinking about the Borromean knot, and the place where the Orders intersect, between the imaginary and the symbolic there is a real here, and no one can live in the real, of course, and not this one, because it’s too close to the bone (cancer and dog pun, haha).

When I was in California, I started making arrangements for nfumbe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_(religion)), because the loan money is coming and I need this because Palo is going to be taking up more of my work in the next few years, oh but that’s complicated, very complicated to talk about here…but it’s a running track, because in Kongo cosmology, the dogs play a central role.  Between the world of the living and the world of the dead, there is the world of the dogs, is an old saying.  Dogs are like cats in some places, the ones that are in between worlds, because they live in the village and in the forest, the places of the living and the dead.  They’re always in the background.

My uncle from Wisconsin comes to town, with my cousin, and they are visiting my dad all the time, even though he asks them to let him rest and he really doesn’t want visitors right now.  This is my favorite uncle, from growing up, he had a painting show, Drawing with Ed, and has done a ton of watercolors, and we used to draw together when I was little, and he made me consider the idea of being an artist.  He finds it hard to understand what I’m doing now, but is very happy I’m still doing it.

One night there are several uncles, and an aunt, and a mother and a brother (this is all relative)  ((the kind of relativity that gives birth to Dada, and dada is in the hospital, and Dada is an orisha, one that comes to newborn twins, and therefore kind of rare)).  And a daughter, a mortified daughter who is thinking about turning 14 and this is all very complicated, a lot of death talk in the air.  In this room, on the symbolic level one might hear some of the uncles making racist jokes, and me and the daughter and mother and brother trying to disappear into our skin (on the imaginary), but of course in the Real there is this ritual about people gathering together to get ready to grieve, just in case. We don’t talk politics, and I decide not to tell them about my upcoming ceremony for my Palo spirits, and when they leave, my brother pretends to cry and throw himself in front of their car, because this gathering reminds him of something that made him comfortable when he was little (this is really awfully grim, good lawd).

My friend goes to California to see one of my godfathers, and while she’s there she texts me, and I’m getting annoyed because I am almost always with my dad in free moments now, and I don’t text my daughter all that much even and we’re close.  But she texts me to ask if it’s significant that she got in a fender bender a block away from his house.  I don’t know.  But it turns out that it is, because my godfather calls me later, and tells me, “She has death all over her, she got the sign of getting killed in a car crash, and you have to do something.”

Elegantly, it’s a ritual with my Palo spirits, and it’s complicated and secret, and there’s an order that I have to get into my head so it goes well, because it’s a little intense.  I’ll write about some of this later, because really, this is where the Lacan starts to come in.  When there are rituals where there are metaphorical things that have to be done to someone, tearing this away, cleaning this, etc., and the metaphorical things have physical actions that are puns for the metaphors, it gets dizzying.  The consciousness of the person being treated becomes whole by doing actions that are literal and metaphorical at once, and there are metonymic substitutes for death, ritual language is also structured like a language (and I’m reading the Dor book at the same time, which helps).  (I didn’t know Lacan would help, hahaha, but it does.)  This is in a closed garage, and I’ve been in this situation dozens of times, but not so much on my own, usually I’m part of a larger group of priestesses and priests.  Being alone kind of makes it feel too responsible, and a little more adult than I want it to be.  Because, among other things, it looks absolutely crazy, pots with dog skulls, rum and cigar, and it’s a little crazy I suppose, as crazy as psychoanalysis.  In this city, I don’t know anyone else that knows this ceremony.  Someone did it for me more than 20 years ago, but they’re long gone.

That’s enough, really, that’s plenty, really, for a month, really, but who knows why things happen like this.  It turns out that doing this ceremony turned on my reflex for remembering complicated rituals, and it would come in handy in a week when we start rehearsals on the new project.  But it also came in handy two days later, when my dog was hit by a car and killed, and I did a burial ceremony in my ex’s front yard.  I’d like to say that I’m that kind of father where seeing my daughter grieving was much worse than the pain I felt about the dog, but I can’t say things that I like if I know they’re not really true.

That’s a picture of Sunny the dog in the Underworld, about a year ago when Elli dressed her up, it was a gender performance.  This dog, I’ve been writing about this dog for a couple of years (since I first had her, really, she became my alter ego on Facebook, she would fall in and out of love like I did, and become charmed and disenchanted like me, and think about things that I thought about). She was the inspiration for my fake band, Doghead, in the performance/installation from earlier this year.  She was also the star of a video with Fredo, a boy dog (sorry it was so heteronormative) retelling the story of Kassandra in modern dog times.  I miss this dog terribly.  They say that those that we love become part of us, and we carry them with us, but it also seems like those that we love get a part of us, and when they go, we’re also a little bit less than we were before.

And a few days later, there’s this news that my dad’s surgery, the next one, is scheduled for the end of the month (May) and they have to do it because it’s growing fast, but he has a 60-70% chance of major complications, and that sounds like very bad odds.  And my daughter is grieving something very real for the very first time and I use the word very too much and I’m walking into her empty house and bursting into tears out of the blue still and it’s all way too much, and rehearsal is starting now and it’s kind of impossible.

Except.  The first rehearsal.  The night before I feel obi (coconut divination, oh it’s complicated) to Oshun and Yemaya to see if they’re ok with this, if we work with them and with spells, etc., and the answers are more positive than I’d hoped.  In the spirit realm, we’re clear to start working (but not in the Ethical Standards Committee realm, which is another story that hasn’t happened all the way through yet, not enough to tell it yet).  So…There are 9 people in the living room, and I’m talking about the theoretical underpinnings of this whole project, Lacan, Santeria, Palo Monte, phenomenology, performance art, video art, mediated versions of ourselves, and the mirror.  And there’s all these rituals of death, because it’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and I talk about grieving, and suddenly there is this very peculiar feeling that comes over me.  I’m talking too much, but there’s still so much more to say, so I say that, too, and all of this has been rehearsed, I’ve been writing about it for a couple of months now, and when I say it out loud, it’s not the typical scramble of complicated sentences that I get lost in, but this makes sense, and people are nodding, and they’re asking questions, and everyone seems terrible excited, and so am I.

After two weeks of that, I’m more excited, and so are they.  Last night during a video shoot there was this breakthrough in developing this technique that I’ve been interested in, stolen from Godard and modified significantly, but the performers are describing their experience of being on film as crossing this line between thinking about the words and short-circuiting thought altogether.  And it’s very raw.  Hm.  This feels very good, this feels very promising, this feels like being under a spell.  I think we all might be under a spell.  I think this life is a long and very beautiful spell (so far).

I’m putting a link here to show a little bit of unedited footage, to give an idea of what’s happening in my living room.  The last section will be edited to the off camera voices are out of the video, but here you can get the echoes that are kind of nice for now.  And as of 15 May, I am…C

http://youtu.be/wIn78Yo-Lbc

another update with a title of the month (april) in it (17 apr 13)

This month, that is to say, the update for this month, may not be as extensive as last month’s, but not to say, that is, that it is not to say that the month was not extensive.  It did and was and will and that is what the moon is supposed to be.  I mean month not moon.

The month is made of mothers, because of the relationship between the month and the moon, and the fathers are made of days in the work week, unless of course there are differences, unless there is variance, unless there is an exception, in which case, this is not a status update like last month but more looking forward to next month.

Precisely.  Precisely I met with Dr.’s Gonzalez and Robinson and discussed the next and almost last draft of the RDC1, and that is due the 20 April, and the changes between now and then are small, and there is also the calendar, and there is also the form that we submit.  This is very good, it is moving along very quickly, really, and honestly I am enjoying the work with my supervisory team.  I like the conversations and the emails and the time writing in between.  During the last discussion Debbie talked about the possibility of relying on surrealism, because the link between psychoanalysis and the spirit world is already pretty solid in the historical movement.  And there was discussion about how Lucumí might serve as a kind of intervention in the text, along with the project in general, a kind of post-colonial subversion.  These all sound like very interesting avenues to explore, and I’m looking into them, some during the writing of this next draft, and some slated for afterwards.

From a recommendation from my crit group, I found a copy of the Death and Resurrection Show (it’s very hard to find, sells for between 800-1,000 dollars on the web, but it was in the library here because this department has some very interesting performance scholars who are responsible for building the most remarkable avant-garde library in the most unlikely place).  The basic ideas are terribly interesting (the relationship between pop and rock stars and the shaman), but I am finding that after just a few months in Dr. School, my knees get jerky with sloppy scholarship–an example, in one footnote, he instructs the reader to look in a book, “somewhere around p. 175, I think…”  ((oh but this is also sloppy scholarship, because I don’t have it here and am just quoting from memory))  (((it’s sloppy though all right all righty))) )…

A big turn: last weekend I drove out to San Diego to visit with my godfathers in Lucumí.  There was a personal reason for going, to get connected to the spirit roots and do some things at the ocean…

But also to get away from the energy here in Phoenix.  In March there was a succession of deaths of close friends, and I’ve been to lots of funerals lately.  Also, and this is bigger, I’ve been terribly worried about my father.  This cancer that went away in 2011 showed up again in January of this year.  I’m mentioning it here because I think it’s having a lot of influence on everything I do, how I see the world lately, and there are more times than I’d like to count where I’ve had an afternoon set aside to work and read and write, but have ended up in the v.a. hospital with him, or doing things to help them out at their home.  He had another surgery this week, and it was not successful at all, there’s a new cancer growing very fast, and he’s going to need to do some more extreme surgeries and maybe radiation.  I don’t really know, and probably won’t have a good idea what’s ahead for a couple of weeks, and it colors everything.

Ok, back to San Diego.  Getting away from death didn’t work (it never does), because a very famous Santero, one who specialized in brujería, was killed when I was there (not right there), and that colored things in a different way.  Warrior energy playing against the energy of the ocean, but they’re not foreign to each other, the mother in the ocean can be a warrior, too, and the warriors that live in the forest will sometimes lay down their weapons when there’s sweet music calling from the water.  But.  I did have the chance to ask the people I want to interview for the ethnography part of my work if they were willing, and they said yes.  And I called my contact in New York, and he said yes.  These are all priests of Oshun, by the way, the Orisha who rules over rivers, romantic love, and is really the one to talk to when you want to do a “work” (aka spell)…

So all of this reminds me of that story about Orisha Oko, the land, and Yemaya, the ocean.  They’re in love with each other, but they can’t live together because they destroy each other.  In a month of mothers and moons, lost friends and time staring at the sea, and everything has something to do with the father, who is calling me “bright sun.”  The elements are all playing out the roles they are supposed to be playing, but it’s very hard to recognize it when it’s happening, because it moves through my chest with the weight of the sea, and is perfectly natural and beautiful even if I can’t recognize it.

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.)

threshold subject altarego1 (26 feb 2013)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvNJ3rKFhCk&feature=youtu.be

update: progress and progressions (14 feb 2013)

From the winter residency until today, this is what has happened so far.

I’ve completed the registration at Plymouth, and am officially enrolled.  Today, I had my first official conversation with my DoS, Laura Gonzalez, and my Second Supervisor, Deborah Robinson.  We hammered out a plan for proceeding (beginning), and these are some of the outcomes:

I am going to be submitting my RDC1 at the early part of the deadline, at the beginning of April.  In the next 10-12 days, I will be putting together a first draft.  I will be uploading some of the versions of that here, particularly the prospectus.  In that spirit, then, I have some revisions to the narration for my initial proposal, here:

Danowski/Thesis Proposal

I am proposing a project with the working title, “Thresholds: Desire and Sorcery in New Media Performance,” for my thesis work at Transart Institute in conjunction with Plymouth University for my PhD.  I will be investigating the nature of subjectivity and objectivity in new media performance art, and asking questions about how these performances “perform.”  Using a practice-led inquiry to find my way in to methodologies that are phenomenological, ethnographic, and psychoanalytical, I am seeking to define a new model for mediated performance art and theater.  I want to look specifically at the site of the projected media image within multi-media performance works, and focus on performative moments where there are intersections between live and recorded images of the same performer, or places of thematic, visual, or auditory repetition.  Theoretically, I will be drawing very generously on the theories of Jacques Lacan, attempting a Lacanian analysis of performance and perception, and drawing generously upon Judith Butler’s articulations of Lacan’s notion of desire in contexts of performativity.  I will also be drawing upon theoretical notions of Narcissism in contemporary Body Art, and consider the mirror of Narcissus to be potentially analogous to Lacan’s mirror.  Specifically utilizing the framework of Amelia Jones, I want to investigate the relationships between performer and spectator in terms of object and subject, and explore these relationships with an urge to complicate them.  While the artists of the last generation were concerned with re-invoking the subjectivity of the performing body, I am looking to explore the same concerns and complicating them by asking questions about the space of media as the central site of desire.  At the same time, because the body is still a formidable site of iteration, I will be looking at how the live performing body works in conjunction with its recorded image and text, and looking at their intersections.  The site of the media, then, becomes a kind of crossroads between live and digital.  In this regard, it becomes the mirror of Lacan, as well as the mirror of Narcissus.  

 I am also looking at the radical potential of performance to capture, enchant, and charm, and push moments to where performative desire becomes something like sorcery.  I’m wondering about the ways in which African sorcery and the Western scientific tradition might overlap, mirror each other, and perhaps inform each other in unsuspected ways, particularly in terms of how a performance might work.  The mirror of Lacan, and the mirror of Narcissus, are also present in Kongo and Yoruba cosmology, and I will argue that they are not mutually exclusive, and may actually contain a dialogical potential that would be useful for developing a theory of performance that can be best understood phenomenologically.  I want to theorize about the projection screen, the media image, and the sorcerer’s mirror (metaphorical and sometimes literal) as the spaces that can potentially and radically re-configure the notion of subjectivity and objectivity.  I want to articulate a theory of art in new media, and create a body of work from this same theory.

My studio work will involve the creation and presentation of several new works of performance.  These works will vary between 5-70 minutes long, and each will be constructed over a period of four to six months.  Each one will focus on a specific research question, and the questions will evolve from performance to performance, in order to allow for a flexibility of inquiry that will build on the research findings from the previous project(s).  The content of the pieces will consist of different retellings of stories from classical mythology (underworld stories, enchantments and love spells, stories of death and rebirth), reconfigured for a radically contemporary speaking subjectivity.  I will be working with a group of collaborators, developing the works based on obsessions, desires, ideas of narcissism, desires to perform enchantments, etc..  We will be presenting these works in intimate spaces, living rooms and small galleries, with the intention of performing them outside of Phoenix and outside of the United States.

In terms of the broader context, the roots of this work are in the historical avant-garde, particularly in Symbolism, Surrealism, and Dadaism.  I use some of the basic tenets of these movements to create work that is entirely contemporary, reflective of pop culture and re-mix sensibility, but on a deep level contains traits of esotericism and mysticism (particularly drawing on Afro-Caribbean religious systems).  This mix of strategies and aesthetic roots speaks of a muti-vocality and transcultural identity that seems particular to the Americas.  In effect, then, the work finds its context in re-imagining historical forms, Body Art strategies of the 70s, and contemporary media technologies, to make a  new form that has resonances in 19th century literary theory and 20th century post-structural identity theory, but has a distinctively 21st century grounding.  

 I will be creating each of these works utilizing the methodologies that Ana Mendieta found useful when she was a student at the University of Iowa.  She took an approach that made work through a series of three phases: Planning, Execution, and Documentation.  

For my work, the planning stage for these pieces will consist in first finding an appropriate chain of common obsessions and concerns among the collaborators.  Through this, we will weave together a loose framework that will start to resemble a story that we want to tell.  Once we have this in place, I will look for an appropriate underworld myth that can contain all of our concerns.  At the same time, I’ll also be looking for extremes in pop culture references, to make a space where there are contemporary parallels, a performative present, as material for the live action.  The space of myth will be the material that will become the content of the video.  In the execution, we will be working together to make a theatrical performance where the digital and the live come together.  The space in between the live and the mediated will be the site where I will create fissures between representations of gender and identity, and invoke and disturb desire (both desire of the performer, and the desire of the spectator to see themselves both reflected and hidden).  This space is necessarily ephemeral, because it is that same space where a spell (or, in terms of Afro-Caribbean cosmology, a kanga, a work) becomes enacted.

In the documentation, I will be recording the performances as combinations of live and media art, so that there can be an archive of the work from which to formulate my final ideas toward developing a new theory of art-making.  I will also have to include supplementary materials, specifically in the form of interviews from the spectators, so that I can gauge how their own subjective experiences engaged with the works.  I will also include material from the collaborators, so that their own subjective experiences can enter into the equation.  I suspect there will be surprising relations between the experiences of performers and spectators, and I am hoping that there will be moments where the subjective experience becomes something quite unusual, quite other, than the usual experience of performing or watching. 

I’ve been discussing some of the theoretical concerns in the description above with the collaborators, outlining this as the first project toward this degree.  The working title for the next performance is “Monsters of the Sea.”  I’ve contacted all the potential participants*, they all said yes, so we met at a hookah bar to discuss the project in detail.    We’ll be discussing and meeting occasionally for some preparatory ritual work, but the rehearsal process doesn’t begin in earnest until mid-April.  So this means that writing the RDC1 will come just in time, and will be written with the intention of serving its administrative purpose, but also for outlining a methodology of working.  Theory and practice going hand in hand.  Lovely.

*I’m not sure if I should say “participants” or “collaborators,” and am almost tempted to call them “co-conspirators,” like I did a few years ago.  I want to acknowledge their own subject positions within the work.  There is some fluidity in terms of the authorship and construction of these texts for media and performance, and I want to allow for as much agency as possible.  At the same time, it’s my vision, ultimately.  I need to refine my discourse here.  I have a knee-jerk reflex to talk about myself as a kind of Joseph Chaikin-like director, where the authority of my own position is destabilized, in good 60s hippie theater form.  Except.  In practice, it’s much closer to Kantor, leading the actors like a director in a traditional sense, only with the strings and the lights and the chords in full view, so that part of the process is to make visible this power relationship.  I’m very much in favor of working toward that end, in the second example, and want to consider how to talk about a hierarchical relationship that questions itself but still retains its most useful functions.  And, of course, reflects my own biases (I really get frustrated with work that is really devised and company-created, even though I pretend otherwise).

The last thing I want to mention is that I will be playing with voices in the documentation of this.  This voice here, more or less coherent, the one that is trying to communicate discursively (sometimes a little playfully), and the one/s that are much more subjective, in order to work with the radical subjectivities that this project seems to demand, from the inside out.  Those will be documented in other formats, some writing, lots of voice, video, scribbling, etc.  More to come on that.

And a working bibliography is on the way very soon.

all right all righty (13 feb 2013)

This is a test, really, something like a test although not exactly a test, but if not exactly, then what exactly? Is the exact question I was thinking, I thought to myself, “Exactly, exactly that and nothing more.”  And then it occurred to me that I would perhaps soon start writing quotations, ‘differently,’ than I had previously, and start using more adverbs, and, as if that weren’t enough consolation, start saying “cool” (read, ‘cool’), less often.  And add more ‘u”s to words, like colour, and houver, and Christoupher Danouski(ly).  Exactly.  This is from last month, when I was Iggy Pop.