You may know by now about this thing we’re doing, this epic undertaking that makes me cranky when I’m not working on it and happy when I am. We might have mentioned it. It’s happening in a little less than two weeks (oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit).
Since we’re too busy making it to blog about it these days, check out the Walker blogs for some stuff from us and our great Momentum colleagues. Or pick up the Walker magazine–the one with Prince on the cover, be still my heart–and check out our interview there.
p.s. I am SO EXCITED to have our picture on the Walker homepage:
We want extravagance. We want 80 pairs of shoes and dead fish and Astroturf. We want to waste less. We want 400 people. We want to be paid. We want to save the world. We want the world to be worth saving. We want to speak with our bodies. We want to sing a song our voices won’t reach. We want mystery.
We want to make the best dance that was ever made. We want to drink without being hungover. We want to save all dances from obscurity. We want people to laugh and we want them not to laugh. We want rhinestone body suits and ostrich feathers. We want to destroy capitalism. We want to dance to music. We want longer hamstrings. We want to resist temptation. We want to be disgusting. We want to get a date after the show. We want a parcel of wild land. We want to want less. We want a green Bible. We want to be loved. We want lipstick. We want snacks. We want clarity. We want to be naked in the rain. We want to be better people. We want to know why. We want to be virtuosic. We want tree frogs and glitter. We want to visit everyone. We want good weather.
(This statement created and disseminated without approval by anyone. Intentional obfuscation caused by unrelenting use of the plural first person.)
So, yeah, we spend a lot of time on YouTube, watching DirecTV commercials or clips of Metropolis or Shirley Temple singing the Good Ship Lollypop, or any number of other cultural detritus…it might be fair to call Crazy Tom a detritivore.
But sometimes, we read books. Here’s a little Guy Debord:
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The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money dominated society as the representation of general equivalence, namely, of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could not be compared. The spectacle is the developed modern complement of money where the totality of the commodity world appears as a whole, as a general equivalence for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the totality of use is already exchanged for the totality of asbstract representation. The spectacle is not only the servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the psuedo-use of life.
I don’t really get it, but I sort of do. The book is like a scent–I catch it sometimes but sometimes just feel like I’ve lost the trail. Spectacle as the general equivalence of what the entire society can be and can do. Money which one only looks at. Putting on a stage show means making a big thing to look at. How can we pull it out of only looking/listening/consuming? Or do we even want to do that?
Sometimes my inner little kid wakes up & says, “Holy crap, Tara, YOU’RE DOING IT,” which is to say I somehow became a Real Dancer, as in…a grown-up. Who gets paid. To Dance.
Times when I forget that include:
when I’m staring forlornly at my impossibly colorful Google calendar
when I’m standing in my living room mesmerized by Beyonce’s thigh for like three hours because I’m trying to get the Single Ladies moves right
when I’m wearing a cape and laying on the ground waiting for instructions
Hey! Look! It’s a Mad King Thomas dance you almost certainly have never ever seen before, called The eyebrow, or some expression of doubt or daring on their faces:
That’s Liz Schoenborn & Stephanie Stoumbelis. They’re so great. They jumped in to our totally confusing and aimless process with nothing less than complete enthusiasm and they performed the hell out of the dance we made with them.
(The most productive rehearsal for this piece involved five serious hangovers, a little bit of makeup from the night before and a bucket of Halloween candy. It generated the phrase “industrial glitter,” which is one of the most useful and perfect phrases of all time. I also hit my head really hard that day while acting like the NFL robot.)
People sometimes say only Mad King Thomas can perform Mad King Thomas work, which is untrue (although I feel flattered when I hear it).
The difference, as far as I can figure, is that when we make a dance on ourselves, it’s a really extended form of dramaturgy (as if I even know what that word means). We talk a lot until we find the bones of the thing, then we let performance tell us how the flesh hangs. We sometimes finish pieces earlier, which means we get to practice them, which occasionally leads to crazy things like polishing the work. But the basic arc is a lot of back end research, discussion and argument, with a relatively miniscule amount of work on the front end (what it actually looks like to the audienc). Mad King Thomas bravely dances on with only half a clue what’s happening elsewhere on the stage, but fully aware of why it’s happening.
When we make work on other people, we suddenly get to WATCH it. It’s totally different and usually we get drunk with power. (Do it this way. Okay, do it backwards. Okay, do it faster. No, really faster. Okay, say it with a British accent. Now cry.) The piece gets more codified and rigid.
At this point the dance has become, more or less, an aesthetic object. Something we can look at and turn into something we find aesthetically (rather than performatively or emotionally) satisfying. A thing rather than a lived experience.
When we make work on ourselves, we don’t know what the “right way” is to do the dance. We’re out there singing and dancing with only our internal sense of the appropriate to guide us. No one says, “Not like that, like this.”
When we make work on other people, we constantly say, “Not like that, like this.” So our dancers DO have a sense of right vs. wrong. (Yuck.) That’s where we go astray. We reenact power structures and exert controls that completely undermine the basic promise of our work:
You already know how to do everything you need to do. Everything you have ever done has prepared you for this moment. You are ready.
All Sparkles, No Heart hasa big cast. Only three of them are Mad King Thomas, so I guess it’s time we figure this out. Luckily for us, everything they have ever done has prepared them for this moment. We just need to get out of the way.
Who:Tara King, Theresa Madaus & Monica Thomas, along with the skills and charms of: Ashley Akpaka, Heather Arntson, Emma Barber, Jessica Briggs, Charles Campbell, Sarah Jabar,Tom Lloyd, Nick LeMere, Renee Lepreau, Megan Mayer, Crystal Meisinger, Susan Scalf, Liz Schoenborn, and Stephanie Stoumbelis.
There will be sparkles. We’re doing a lot of reading and worrying. Please come see it! Mad King Thomas and Momentum! TOGETHER AT LAST
Do you know 30daysofbiking? It’s a bunch of people trying to ride their bikes every day for the month of April. It starts tomorrow! Because April starts tomorrow!
A big part of rehearsal last night was dedicated to figuring out where and how bikes fit into our show, because maybe not everyone in the universe thinks of the bike as the Great Liberator! But some people do! Right? When’s the last time you rode a bike? How was it? Seriously, I’m curious.
I mean, you knew it was coming, right? How can I not blog about the topic I think about most often right now?
Joey Brooks. Just kidding; who the eff is that? I’m talking about Justin Bieber.
(A note: I love a lot of things, Justin Bieber included, unironically. Yes, I am often embarrassed by this. I take pop culture and pop music in particular way too seriously. I like a lot of things I should hate, or at least question deeply.)
I saw Never Say Never 3D: The Director’s Fan Cut Sunday night and I couldn’t sleep afterward.
What is it about that kid? I mean, I can sit here and list the ways he has charmed me (and millions of others), but seriously, what IS it? He’s a force of nature, an animal, something that exists because it must. But if you delve into the specific case, you just get footage of thousands of people crying, hysterical, screaming, “I love you, Justin!”
It’s so super hard being Justin Bieber, guys. Seriously.
I’ve been that person before, kind of. I cried when I heard that Jon Bon Jovi had gotten married. I was five. He was 26. I’ve been in an arena, my body tense with excitement, screaming. I enjoy giving into the collective energy of that many delirious people.
But Bieber fans are different. They weep uncontrollably. They are obsessed. They can’t get enough of whatever it is he’s offering. What do they get out of it? I mean, eight-year-olds riot when he is doing a public appearance. Generally speaking, eight-year-olds don’t riot. They all look so sad, so pained in their worship.
Is it the desire for what he represents–A beautiful, sensitive guy to sing love songs for you? Is it a safe, sanitized way to feel and express all the loneliness and desire pent up inside of you? Is it cultural conditioning that lets you know you should want this? Is it the fame, the fact that he is untouchable, beloved by everyone?
It reminded me a lot of Fame, by Tom Payne. The New York Times review provides a quick summary of what it’s about.
I lent it to Monica so I can’t quote from it, but Justin Bieber as virgin sacrifice rings true. A large undercurrent of the narrative is whether or not he’s normal and what fame is doing to him–and a tense look forward: Will he be the next Britney? Or Michael? We’re shown home movies of his earliest perfomances and we’re meant to see that this kid is different, special. He was made to be world-famous at the age of 14. He deserves the acclaim and we (the public) get the rights to him, forever more.
His vocal coach says to him, “You gave up normal.” You gave it up. You sacrificed what you had before: Hockey games, roughhousing in your grandparents’ home, screaming and yelling with your friends. You gave it up. And the gods gave you 10,000,000 beautiful, lonely girls holding their hands up in the shape of a heart, singing the words to your songs.
But you have to keep sacrificing. You have to rest when your voice is tired. Drink wheat grass juice. Be gracious to the people who hound you. It is Olympian in scope. When I look at my life as a choreographer (I have been moaning over how HARD it is, why don’t people UNDERSTAND), the scale of sacrifice is so minimal. I get to make the art I want, on my schedule. I don’t have to drive to every small theater in the country and shill. I don’t even have to be skinny or beautiful. Making dances makes me feel better about myself and the world; I don’t have to worry about 10,000 girls crying all night because Tara King cancelled the show. (Results may vary for other people named Tara King.)
Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going on about. I don’t really get fame. I don’t know that anybody does.
Reminds me of a joke I heard recently. A man in a bar says, “Look out that window. You see that school? It’s a good school. I built it with my own hands, paid for the bricks so the little children would have a place to learn. You’d think they’d call me a school builder.” He orders another drink and says, “You see that bridge? I built that bridge. Needed a safe way to cross the river so I did it. You’d think they’d call me a bridge builder.” He drinks some more. After several beers, he looks up and says, “But you fuck one sheep….”
Notoriety wins every time.
(And there lies a door down the road to my thoughts on Michael Vick, crime, and forgiveness…a door that will stay closed for now.)
I wonder, also, about the way Justin Bieber being a boy changes things. Certainly when Miley Cyrus hits the stage, there are 10,000 girls singing rapturously along, too. But I don’t think Miley gets chased down by screaming hordes. I don’t think her mom gets assaulted by little girls.
Is it that women are allowed to lose their heads, to go wild and get a little violent, where men are not? Men have to remain aloof? I don’t know. I do Miley Cyrus looks a lot older than she is. Coltish teenage women have no place in the cultural imagination. Coltish teenage boys (particularly when devoid of any threatening marks – stubble, acne, deep voices) tap into something deep, emotional, semi-religious, viral, visceral, violent.
Yeah, sure. I wish it was me. I wish that the things I love to do were beloved by the world, supported with a huge crew and millions of dollars. As a friend said, “I want someone to steam my costumes.” There’s nothing like coming off a show that you killed, the feeling of connection with the audience, the feeling of being bigger and better than yourself. And it doesn’t get much bigger.
And yeah, I wish our shows provoked the reactions that his do. I’ve been in a crowd of screaming, singing fans, sweating and dancing together. I’ve gotten lost in a euphoric haze at a rock show, been expanded beyond my edges, lifted to a place of reverie and joy.
Of course, one of the joys of contemporary performance is that it can and will fail (as Jerome Bel talked about at length in Pichet Klunchun & Myself). Justin Bieber’s music can’t fail because it’s generated from pure calculation.
But when contemporary performance succeeds, the feeling of being changed lasts longer and is more memorable. At least, I can talk about it afterward, more coherently than, “It was awesome! Everyone was so stoked, man!”
But I miss the kinetic experience of standing in a crowd of people who are too close together, bodies moving because they can’t stop, voices rising in a chorus–I want to know how to bring that to the dance audience. I want to know how audience participation can go from awkward to transcendent.
And, I really want to watch some more Justin Bieber videos.
