Saturday, June 6, 2009
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
Hi everyone! I've been thinking about Luc's comment about the bed. People sure are getting short-sheeted, and all the yanking of the sheets has uncovered our base needs & base greed. I've also been thinking about the movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Have you seen it? It takes place during the great depression and follows people competing in a dog-eat-dog dance marathon. I love the idea of people dancing for their own survival. This gave me an idea: it would be cool to do an endurance piece--a very loose, avant-garde take on a sort of dance marathon in which viewers could come watch any time between X and Y. This piece could be "about" the collapse of the economy. Like in the movie (although I am by no means suggesting we copy the movie), the dance competition could UNCOVER the base, animalistic drives of the competitors. And the competition could involve couples dancing out their interdependence on each other, their responsibility to keep on going and not let their partners (fall) down. I've been working with the aesthetics of endurance in my own work, lately, and while I've had a mostly ironic take on it--with our short attention spans, endurance art becomes 44 minute karaoke--but i can imagine a reevaluation of the notion of time post-collapse. Would it be crazy to do a 4 or 5 hour piece? Anyway, this was just an idea sparked by Luc's post about the sheets.
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Dance marathons had quite a history here in Milwaukee... If I remember correctly Al Capone was involved somehow... Wild space did a very successful dance concert on them a while back.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of dealing with endurance in relationship to identity. I think that I get in a lot of trouble trying to hold on to an idea of my self beyond its usefulness. The present 15 minute work I'm working on for Summerdances has required I be in the theater from 8 to 5pm for two weeks... while the dance is short the process was exhausting. I have a special relationship with exhaustion: it allows me to avoid my life. I can get fully absorbed into working on a dance piece to the point where the world no longer exists... or it exists only through my deformed perception of it.
It makes me wonder about exhaustion and unhappiness and greed. How it might not be about trying to make money but more the ease we find in escaping the world by making money. One thing is for sure is that I usually don't let go until I am exhausted or hurt.
I like the marathon/endurance angle, there are a lot of ways we could approach that I imagine, and it certainly wouldn’t need to be too literal. I also like the formal idea of something akin to a performance installation where it runs for a long period of time and audience members are welcome to come and go at any time during that period. I like the idea of competitiveness and interdependence playing out in a twisted with/against back and forth: the dynamic of wanting to aggressively look out for ourselves, yet when it gets down to suffering we may also want to take comfort in the thought “we are all in this together". Dance ‘til you drop, but if your opponent drops first do you try and catch them? As Heather mentions how this plays out with partnering is perhaps especially interesting. This feels to me like our current situation in some ways (economically and otherwise). And I think Luc has just added another twist about how we deal with suffering in endurance. Maybe the degree of escapism we experience depends on whether the endurance test is self-imposed or imposed from a more external source?
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about a musical project that, if you are familiar with Steve Reich, is like a version of his phasing piece Drumming but where the musical material is text-based rhythms instead of rhythms played on instruments (this explains the basic concept/construction of his piece: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasing). In his piece, you start with 2 phrases in unison, then one moves out of phase and eventually arrives in a new relationship to the first creating an new third phrase. What I want to explore is if you can somehow do this with text, can you arrive at new meaning, as well as new rhythmic material, by essentially phasing word phrases to create new sentences. Anyway, much to be worked out but 2 aspects of this that might be relevant are 1. This kind of piece can and probably will be repetitive and long-form and therefore relentless in a way that might fit an endurance theme and 2. In the process of phasing there is a sort of musical equivalent to the tension between phrases and their ultimate dependence on each other as they eventually come back together as 2 parts of a new/larger whole. This is not to say this direction of mine couldn’t fit with other themes or that I couldn’t do something entirely different, but I am just trying to start seeing how it might fit with some things mentioned thus far.
Maybe meeting in person sometime next week since Summer Dances will be over??
It's funny because I feel that the present process for bringing tech pieces to the stage is an exhaustion based process. I just spent over three weeks including weekends in the theater getting ready for a 15 minute piece... The dancers are fine but I'm exhausted.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sold on a format that would be open like a gallery where people come on their own time. We calculate that about 400 people come to these events - more if we have a hook into something different (about 600 came to Summerdances 2009 this weekend). Dance is used to seeing the performance as an event with a start and end time. I'm committed to not exhausting the audience and giving them a chance to "reconnect" to dance. So much of what wisconsonite associate with dance is the usually fatal 3 hour long dance "recital" - these audiences know exhaustion and they have sworn never to come back to a dance recital ever again.
On the other hand, exhaustion in a dancer usually teaches them how to dance without effort. It connects them with what is "really" going on as opposed to what they are thinking about.
On a tangent: I like the idea of exploring in movement the phase shifting structure you exposed above. Especially as it engenders a shift in meaning. I can envision huge lines of movers and singers "phasing" with each other along the walls of the various KSE spaces as people roam through them. I wonder how we could give the sense that these have been going on for 5 hours without us having to actually do so. Or is your interest in experiencing the 5 hours yourselves?