Poor gay things.
Biiiiicyle! Biiiiiicycle! Biiiiicycle!
This week I am not performing with Mad King Thomas for the First. Time. Ever. (Sort of.) Tonight, I’ll be in the house watching the incredible Joanna Furnans do my part, because I’m still healing (but! My scab fell off last night. Progress!)
The first time we performed Fish on Bikes: A Picture of Free, Untrammelled Womanhood, we were right after a dance by Ikwewag Waci/Terri Yellowhammer. It was our biggest show yet, a full house at the Walker Art Center, and I’m wearing an American flag string bikini and a bicycle helmet. Before or after the Ikwewag Waci/Terri Yellowhammer piece, there was an announcement that their dance was a type of blessing, and if I recall it, a prayer for healing.
Um. Yeah, did I mention the bikinis? It felt a long way from healing and making the world better, and I felt a little bad about that, but as I sat in the dark waiting for our cue, I did what I often do in those dark, quiet moments before performing. I tried to think of why I was doing this, and really, healing seemed like a pretty good answer (even though it sets off all kind of cynical post-modern atheist alarm bells). Maybe it’s a little about healing our sad and angry thoughts about our bodies. Letting all my jiggliness and all my love ricochet right on out of me and directly into all 700 people we performed for that night. My body works! It’s wonderful! It bicycles! It dances! Fuck yeah!
Now Fish on Bikes is always that kind of dance for me. A big party, a celebration, a dose of medicine that tastes so, so good, like blueberries.
Come see us! By us, I mean, Theresa & Monica & Joanna! Details here.
Mad King Thomas in Wheel Sexy Cabaret
What: Wheel Sexy Cabaret, a night of sexy, burlesquey, bicycley dances
When: March 1, 8 & 9, 2012, 10 pm
Where: Bryant Lake Bowl, 801 W. Lake St, Minneapolis
Tickets: $10 in advance or with a bike light, $13 at the door
We’ll be doing Fish on Bikes: A Picture of Free, Untrammelled Womanhood. You know, that awesome dance we have? The one with bicycles & bikinis & Queen’s Bicycle Race? That one. Come see us! And a bunch of other sexy bicycle lovin’ freaks.
AND…. GUEST STAR JOANNA FURNANS will be appearing in the role of Tara King. Come see Joanna totally kick ass at being Tara. She’s so good.
(It’s even better live. Really!)
Dance & Football are Basically the Same Thing
I watch football every week: Often three or four games, which is, like…a part-time job (whoa). In case that wasn’t enough, I’ve been watching sports documentaries, listening to sports podcasts, reading about sports…I really like football, is all I’m trying to say.
Recently I picked up a book called Blood, Sweat and Chalk, which felt… well, it felt like a dance history book.
At its heart, football is one person telling a bunch of other people how to move their bodies in space and time. It’s about creative problem solving and physical intelligence. It doesn’t exist once it’s over, which means if you didn’t see this moment when it happened, then you will never see it the way we did the day of the game:
Replace “football” with “dance” and “game” with “performance”, and you’ll see that football is dance. But football makes a ton of money and has millions of fans. Most people I meet will never see me dance or even understand what it is I do as a dancer and choreographer. I want to look at how football got where it is and what lessons dancers & choreographers could take from the rampant success of the NFL.
Football, a hundred years ago, was a motley affair. Teams dissolved mid-season when funding ran out. The schedules were messy, based more on where they could find a team to play than on any sort of rigid 16-game season. Some people were really into football and wanted it to exist, even though most people really didn’t care about football. Or even know about it. Teams got funding. The NFL was formed in 1920. Fans & athletes & coaches started proselytizing and collecting and solidifying. They wrote about plays and strategies, talked about execution and technique and intangibles. Over time, a lot of people spent a lot of time and money slowly converting the original game into a commercially viable activity, constantly thinking and planning how to expand their reach. More kids learning football, more people watching. The modern NFL isn’t a billion-dollar industry because God made it that way, or because of some natural progression to the most perfect & platonic version of sport. It’s because people worked their asses off to make a spectacle that people wanted to watch.
Because of the enormous industrial system surrounding the modern NFL, the billions of dollars and millions of fans, the entrenched media, the school systems recruiting talented young nobodies, the stadium-funding fiascos, the overall culture of trucks and violence and points, the utter lack of ambiguity, it's easy to forget where it came from. It’s easy to feel embittered. It's easy to feel like the NFL is on the farthest end of the spectrum from art. And it is.
But none of that is actually football. Football is in the brains and bodies of the players and coaches. It exists for sixty minutes once a week, sixteen weeks a year.
Dance could be like football, couldn’t it? People have been writing about the execution of the single wing for the past century. They could write about the West Coast vs. Midwestern somatic improvisation scenes, and in fact, some people are doing this, but I want more. I don’t blame the writers and scholars. I mean, look at this great piece by Lightsey Darst. Can you imagine if she had a daily column?! If there were a Best American Dance Writing anthology that came out yearly?! If every show in Minneapolis were reviewed?
What if you had television coverage of the highlights, because every show had great documentation? Contrary to popular opinion, dance actually can be put on tv well enough. Here’s a secret: Football also sucks when someone in the stands records it on a shitty hand-held camcorder. So they don’t do that and pretend it’s enough. They use iso cameras and HD, which track the stars closely to catch the details, the awkwardly jiggling faces, the beauty, the agony et al. Check out Pina 3D and you’ll sometimes feel like maybe you really are there with the dancers, the sweat is real, the faces are real. It’s almost better than the real thing in some ways. You are closer than it’s humanly possible to be without getting creamed by a linebacker/dancer.
Dance could have that. I sound like I think we’re just being lazy, but we’re not. We need money to get this kind of equipment, these skills. We need rich friends. Watch Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? and you'll see billionaires who fund football teams…because they want to. Because they love football (or because they love money. Or both). Once you get the machine started, the right equipment and standards increase the audience & the desire to watch, ticket prices, all around support. Some companies have that support. What if everybody could have dance videos like On the Boards produces? Like Pina 3D?
Sports are, in some ways, easy. There are clear divisions and goals. The leagues have worked to reduce any strangeness, but it’s there if you look. Artists, on the other hand, tend to work away from clear divisions and goals (though not away from clarity or purpose). I’m tired of giving everyone a pass: Oh, who the fuck cares, the American people are drugged potatoes trying to make it through the day. Nobody cares about dance anyway.
Bullshit. Dancing with the Stars is huge. So You Think You Can Dance is huge. There are millions of competition dancers out there who have no fucking clue that there is more to dance than points & judges, and once they leave high school or college, they put dance behind them as if it were Girl Scouts. I was very nearly one of them, until I stumbled across Judith Howard rehearsing Ophelia and realized: Holy shit. There is something more than jazz hands here. And here we all are, making really great work, and not convincing everyone in the world to come see it because we, somewhere in our hearts, don't think they care. How awful and sad. The NFL started in the Midwest. It can be done here as well as anywhere.
Anyway, enjoy the hell out of the Superbowl! I will, even though I could care less about Superbowl XLIV: The Boring Version of Superbowl XVII. If you’re destined to go to a Superbowl party and don’t even know what a football is, this piece at the Rumpus will give you all sorts of feel-good things to think about during the game so you don’t kill anybody when you have to watch the 28th truck commercial.
Frogs on your face and your toes and clinging all over you with their sticky little feet.
For sports and games and arts and idleness and leisure. For complication.
For people who define themselves in many ways, or perhaps not at all. For growing tendons. For healing wounds. For glitter nail polish. For cell phone reception.
For resisting but also giving in. For being master of your own destiny, for being in the playoffs, for being the underdog. For learning. For generosity. For experts and specialists.
For one baby step at a time. For print and for web. For all the time in the world. For foam rubber pillows and nicknames and things I don’t understand. For Dana Scully and for Fox Mulder’s sunflower seed habit. For hexagons.
For people doing good work. For working for free. But more for working for pay or love or something else. For the way rules don’t really apply. For rotation & bicycle wheels. For Julyen Hamilton. For old photographs. For small town bars and for jukeboxes.
For long walks. For short, uneven walks. For calluses. For resting because you think you might need it, not because you know you need it. For love, which is forever, and everywhere. For yes. Yes for yes.
For selling out big time. For poetry and Brian Eno and how they fit or don’t. For snowflakes and CSS and cicadas. For my parents. For being brave enough to write down the whole sentence even if you know where it’s going to end, and for being brave enough to let that sentence die even if you went to all the work of finishing it.
For remembering that almost everyone is exactly like you, and almost no one is exactly like you.
The past few weeks
I hurt myself about four weeks ago–a growler fell off my table, hit a chair & shattered–and a very sharp piece of glass landed on the top of my foot. Who the fuck cares, etc. etc. I had surgery about two weeks ago to sew together the tendon that lifts my left fourth toe (the toe I’d wear a wedding ring on).
Tomorrow the doc unwraps the dressing and we get to see what’s under there! (For those of you playing along at home, this means Mad King Thomas has had 66% of his left feet repaired at the same place, from injuries incurred by freak accidents in Decembers of odd-numbered years. I’m buying Theresa a force field for Christmas next year, since they sold out of the anarchist-feminist revolution she’s been wanting.)
Growing a tendon. This means lying around, letting blood run out of my foot, and not using my toes. From doing this I learned: I love my toes. I use my toes unconsciously, as a person twirls hair around a finger without noticing. When I am nervous about falling or hurting myself (not infrequent on crutches), my toes flex–they intuitively express my desire to secure my situation. Maybe it is why we curl our toes when we are happy and in love.
Last week it was 47 degrees and I crutched outside. My mom brought out for me two chairs and some pillows. The sun shone on my skin and the wind touched me and I could have stayed there forever. I’ve been inside for 359.5 hours and during the 0.5 hours I was out, some guy with bleached braids and a terrible headband leapt out of a car, threw money on me, jumped over me, all while his friend filmed it. I asked over and over what this was for, and all they would say was: “For fun”. It was a fake excuse to not tell me what they were doing. “For fun” means “for us only, because we like it” when I feel certain what they meant was “for fun on youtube, but you don’t get to know because you’ll probably say we can’t do it”.
It taught me a lot about public performance and how NOT to do it, which is useful since all I want to do right now is make work out in the world, not in the black hole of the theater. How to be transparent about your goals and your end. People will be interested in what you are involving them in, and will want to see the final product, because most days, you don’t wake up thinking that a stranger will show up in your lawn and throw money on you. Now there will be a weird video of me, hurt foot propped up, unwashed hair and pajamas on, with that rude man and his money falling everywhere, and I won’t even get to see it! I just wanted sunshine.
What else have I been doing?
Playing video games–Minecraft, mostly–and thinking about why I play video games and why I want real life to be more like video games and if maybe it’s just immature of me to want the world to reward me so concretely and regularly. Getting frustrated that I made a diamond pickaxe that I promptly lost in a lava pit. Loving this game that allows me to obsessively smelt glass to build an enormous sun room and then feeling bad about myself that I don’t work this hard at actually making my life the way I want it. My friends have a server and I spend hours lost in the fiction that my friends and I have a whole earth to ourselves to do with as we please. (Which is true in real life, except there are seven billion other people trying to do the same thing.) What beautiful fictions we create, and how much I sometimes wish the world were just us and our whims. Why so many video games are horrific (Bioshock, Halflife 2 [I only play oldish games]) but why I like them despite cringing every time I come across another grotesquely mutilated body. How much I feel like I’m having a kinetic experience although I am in fact stuck in bed.
It seems we can justify doing anything for hours and hours as long as it becomes notable/unusual. A guy obsessively diagramming Donkey Kong vs. Steve Wiebe obsessively diagramming Donkey Kong so he can capture the world title. Me writing this blog entry vs. Vladimir Nabokov writing Pale Fire. I realized yesterday (I am slow) that I am ambitious and that from ambition I derive frustration and unhappiness, but also joy and a sense of accomplishment. I don’t look ambitious, maybe, because I am a hermit and I like stability, but I also strive always to live up to who my childhood self thought I would be. It’s a complicated goal because my childhood self was unable to decide where to go, what to do, what was worthy of my very best love. But as a child you know better than any adult that growing up means you get to do all the fun stuff, you get to make the world your own. Adults know better than children how much stupid work is involved in getting to do all the fun stuff, and you never know for sure if you’re writing Pale Fire or just a blog entry. Which is why we all play so much Minecraft.
I’m also pretty sure that my obsession with the real vs. the artificial just means that I’m getting old. Never trust anyone over 30.
What else? Pinterest. Scanning the internet endlessly for images that oof my brain, collecting them, allocating them. Join me if you like.
Daniel Waterhouse has been looking at a needle under a microscope:
“What think you now of needles?” Hooke asked.
Daniel plucked the needle away and held it up before the window, viewing it in a new light. “Its appearance is almost physically disgusting,” he said.
“A razor looks worse. It is all kinds of shapes, except what it should be,” Hooke said. “That is why I never use the Microscope any more to look at things that were made by men–the rudeness and bungling of Art
-Neal Stephenson, Quicksilveris painful to view. And yet things that one would expect to look disgusting become beautiful when magnified. … True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”
Hopes & Dreams & Money (one of these things is not like the other)
Here’s the deal. Mad King Thomas is working our three asses off to TOUR OUR DANCES next year. Target cities are Albuquerque, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland (in order of likelihood). We chose these cities for a lot of reasons, but mostly because they won’t have four feet of snow (sorry, Duluth.)
Touring is exciting because our dances are best LIVE. You know how some musicians kind of suck on recordings, but make your fibers tingle when you hear them live? It’s sort of like that. We’re working on our studio skills (by which I mean we’re learning how to get good footage), but in the meantime, it’s time to take this show on the road! As part of “touring”, we want to:
- Give workshops! And take workshops too!
- Spread the awesomeness gospel!
- Go on bike rides in cities all over the US!
- Make site-specific dances and put them on YouTube!
- Perform our dances, alongside the work of some other fantastic local people!
But it turns out touring is expensive. You have to get to the place, you have to sleep somewhere, and eat, and pay for venue costs, and nobody comes to the shows because they’re like, “Who the fuck is Mad King Thomas?” and then you have to buy beer after the shows because you are sad that nobody came. Which is why we’re asking you, today, to help us by donating a little bit of cash at this page:
If you give today, we get 98% of the money donated. Tomorrow & ever after we get only 90%, so it’s slightly more efficient to give today.
Thank you for any money you may give, and thank you also for reading our blog even if you DON’T have money to give. If you have connections in any of our tour cities, let us know! We’re still looking for venues, places to stay, bicycles to ride, and more!
Huzzah!
Jérôme Bel
Tonight or tomorrow, go see Cédric Andrieux, by Jérôme Bel, at the Walker. I saw Bel’s The Show Must Go On in 2004. The room was crackling with an intensity I’ve almost never felt watching a performance. People danced in the aisles! At a serious dance show!
During the talkback after the show, I learned that I could actually use all the baggage an audience brings as a choreographic tool, even though you can’t possibly know what all that baggage is. Bel said he used extremely popular songs BECAUSE of the associations people would bring to each song, not IN SPITE OF them. This strategy agreed with what I knew from my competition dance days and disagreed with what I’d been learning about dance academically and artistically. It became a fundamental part of how and why I make work, and allowed me to start building a bridge across the chasm between my shiny, sexy, fairly stupid dance lessons and my newfound interest in weird, conceptual, sometimes way too unsexy art.
Justin Jones interviewed Bel, in anticipation of the show this weekend…it’s pretty great! Also, you can see another of Bel’s dances, Veronique Doisneau, in its entirety on YouTube. Here’s the first part, to get you started:
…it suggests too that pain is brief.
It is okay to be goofy, it is okay to be funny. Tears are good but they are always archival, they pull us back and down, they mourn, they seek to repeat, but laughter throws us forward, levity raises us, the body opens. Laughter is always unruly. The goofy is the body’s blooming in the mind. Let us laugh so hard we disrupt the tragedy! It’s hard to think when we laugh and that is one reason, once it was invented, we could not live without it. It is a way of sleeping while feeling intensely awake. The body is jostling itself into rejuvenation. …
We laugh not only at the fantastical but also at the truth that is shown to us out of place, devoid of decorum, in disjuncture from our expectations of ettiquette, of consistency. To laugh always takes us to the site of rupture, it may be how our body is attempting to educate our consciousness of the moment of its death. Laughter is always brief in its triumph over pain, but in its intensity it suggests too that pain is brief.
-Dean Young, the Art of Recklessness
I’ve been devouring this book. It’s a book about poetry that seems to get this chaotic, violent, benevolent thing called a body and how it and the mind get together and make birds. All I ever want to do is post every second or third sentence, just say, “Look! There it is! He’s got it! That’s how it works!” It feels like he’s seen into my brain and composed this book as encouragement, inspiration, critique and explanation. To being more recklessness. To finding broken things. To making. To dancing freakingout poems.
All Sparkles, No Heart … a last, dying gasp
I can’t believe we’re already three weeks out from All Sparkles, No Heart. I don’t get to see any of our cast members on a twice-weekly basis, I don’t have to worry about gold lamé fitting anyone. It was a big glittery fiction, and now it’s gone.
I planned to have a blog entry up during the show to ask for audience feedback, reactions, anything. I obviously failed, but your thoughts are still welcome (you might say we crave them). What images stayed with you? What questions did you have? What associations did you make? This is why God made comments sections on the internet!
In other news, we’re part of this year’s Choreographers’ Evening at the Walker Art Center! Wheee! It’s a snippet we cut out of All Sparkles, not because it wasn’t worthy, but because it refused to be part of a larger work. Seriously, we couldn’t make it fit. Thankfully, Mr. Schlichting allowed it a chance to see the stage, this November. Come and see!