Author: Theresa Madaus

So, you may have heard. I hope you did, because we were kind of pathetic and frantic about getting the word out. In an unprecedented move of professional dancerly-ism, Mad King Thomas had some auditions. 

Auditions, sounds nerve-wracking, right? Turns out they were fun! And weird.

Here’s the thing; we’ve never really done this before. Plus, this isn’t really a big auditioning town. We were worried. I swear we were more nervous than our auditionees. Nobody really knows how to deal with the strange dynamic of having to prove yourself/choose from amongst your friends. The Minneapolis dance-scene is like a sprawling dysfunctional family. It’s weird to put some of your cousins and sisters and step-brother’s uncle’s adopted grandchild in a room together and pretend like you’re the patriarch. No one will believe you. And besides, you no matter how removed someone is, someday in the future you’re going to see them at a family reunion and they’re going to hear from your Uncle Dick about the time you showed up to Great-Grandma’s 90^th birthday party wearing nothing but a hospital gown and a cheap plastic tiara.

Okay, I’m not really sure where that analogy went. But suffice it to say, HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY CHOOSE? We got a crowd of delightful, enthusiastic people in a room together, and we made them do silly things, they cheerfully obliged, we laughed until we hurt, they were all awesome in so many ways; how could we do anything other than love every one of them?

And we did love every one of them, in both auditions that we held, but we’re learning there is more to auditioning than just love. The tricky thing, the thing that makes this an audition and not a project, is learning to pick out the awesomenesses that are the right awesomeness for our current dance.      

It doesn’t help that we weren’t entirely sure (and we’re still not) exactly how we want to use this corps of people we’re trying to gather, how much of a commitment they are going to be required to make, and what the dance is ultimately going to look like. Last-minute construction is kind of a big part of our process. We work for a long period of time with lots of dramaturgy and not many promises, and then KABAM, there’s a dance. Working with other people means making promises before we’re ready. Which I’m sure is a good challenge for us, pushing our boundaries, learning new skills, blah blah blah, etc. etc. But right now I want to know, can’t we just take the audition and put it on stage as the piece?

On the plane the other day I was chatting with this pleasant, jovial man. He had an Irish accent, which made him seem even more pleasant and jovial. Everything was lovely, and then he leaned over and said, “I’m not a racist, but…”

I kept my face neutral while my insides squirmed. I thought, Oh no. I thought, What do I do? I thought, Just keep a blank face and a calm demeanor.And I did. He said some things about how it was hard because “The Muslims” were taking their (the British) jobs, and then proceeded to complain about the Polish and the Czechs as well. And I said some non-committal things about globalization and hard times being hard for everyone and stupid shit that was meant to be sympathetic but not agree with his xenophobic and nationalistic statements.We got through it and back on to inoffensive ground, and everything was polite. 

And here’s the thing. GODDAMNIT WHY WAS I SO POLITE? 

How is it that I have been so socialized to value politeness, to shy away from confrontation, and to ‘keep the peace’ that I fail to address racism when it is blatantly spread before me? When there is even such a handy and obvious clue heading up the statement like, “I’m not a racist, but…”? This is ridiculous. My first response should not be “stay neutral, stay calm.” There is no such thing as neutral. Calmness is a racist response to racism.Not that I had to freak out and get hostile on him, but I could have challenged him, been more assertive. I could have spoken my mind. Maybe nothing I could have said would have changed his mind, but I didn’t have to tacitly condone his worldview either. Silence is assent. Polite hitherthithering is even worse. 

I AM SICK AND TIRED OF BEING POLITE. I am such a good little middleclasswhitelady, and this is BULLSHIT. There, I said it in all caps. That’s not polite.  

We’re told not to rock the boat. We’re taught to conciliate. We learn to silence ourselves. And I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater- I know the value of politeness, I know the number of times when approaching with polite subservience, when withholding, when using extreme diplomacy, when being able to smooth things over has saved my butt. But when did it get to be the default? When did it become an end unto itself? When did I start sacrificing my integrity to politeness? Well, since forever. But I’m done.  

I value vulgarity. I value messiness. I value a little bit of conflict and a little bit of chaos and a lot of righteous anger. And I value being able to channel those powerful and rebellious tools into something productive, but sometimes you’ve got to play with fire if you want to burn some things down. Sometimes you’ve got to shake things up. 

I guess this is where the connection to Mad King Thomas comes in. I love that our work is vulgar, messy, chaotic, a little out of control, based in anger and love and mostly unabashed. I love that Mad King Thomas helps me embrace my better, louder self. Our choices are not only aesthetic, but political too. (Of course aesthetics are always political, as I ranted at length several posts ago.) I hope that we can construct our dances in such a way that the rebellion is useful.  

It’s always a balancing game. I’m learning to push. When to yell and when to hold my tongue and when to flip the middle finger. How to be wrong. I’m going to push and sometimes it’s going to be too hard, sometimes in the wrong direction. Good thing I live in the Midwest, where nobody’s going to push back, ’cause they’re all too polite.

Okay, you’re not going to see me running down the street, finger-guns blazing, flipping off the world. Sometimes I’m going to be the Midwesterner, and forget to speak up. But this is a call to question the silence, the status quo and the right times to be polite.  

It was laundry day today. I composed a special outfit comprised of the biggest lumpy grey wool sweater I could find and shiny purple lame’ leggings. Then I put on heels for good measure. Is it wrong for me to take so much delight in ridiculous outfits?
Probably. But I do it regularly anyway. Mad King Thomas has fueled in me an unhealthy love of all things shiny, gold, outrageous, or lame’.

And here’s the thing. It used to be ironic. Now it’s a little too genuine. It used to be a joke. I guess it still is a joke… a very serious joke.

Friends, let me introduce you to perhaps one of the most relevant words in my life: ‘post-ironic.’ It’s not the same thing as just being earnest. Earnestness is perhaps innocent and naive and genuine. It’s definitely not ironic- the tongue-in-cheek posturing and cynical laugh have faded. It’s that strange space where you’ve gone through the irony and come out the other side, feeling genuine and whole-hearted, aware of how ironic it could (or should) be, but somehow you can’t help your honest love.

Eighties pop is particularly ripe for this, I think because so much of it was made in earnest, with an aesthetic that isn’t afraid that people will laugh at the dramatic tone. Our cynical referential generation loves to scoff at the cheesey soul-baring, but eventually the synth beats its way into our hearts. One day you’re laughing at Bonnie Tyler and the next suddenly you ARE holding out for a hero, at the top of your jaded little lungs. And by “you” I mean “I”, clearly.

I probably experience post-irony most frequently with music, but it’s a concept that permeates my life. Honestly, it’s one of the best strategies for dealing with the wreck that post-modernism tends to leave well-intentioned liberal arts students like myself. Once everything is deconstructed, lying about in shambles on a floor of shifting truths and self-aware derision, there’s not a lot of space for earnestness. You get laughed out of college as a deluded essentialist, sneered at for your simplicity. Earnestness is too easy to undermine.

But it’s a bleak miserable life when you can’t love anything, when everything has to be picked apart and problematized, when heartfelt emotions are scorned as antithetical to intellectualism. Irony provides the humor and let’s us love again in a bleeding, broken way, but it’s a cynical existence.

Here’s where post-irony kicks in! You’ve picked apart the world, tried on the pieces in high-irony, laughed and nodded and made knowing winks, and now you’ve hung out there so long something else is bubbling up. There’s a space to engage with the complicated and contradictory nature of a constructed reality, not just wallow in the brokenness of the world. You get to enjoy things! and still value the critical deconstruction and recognize how fraught with problems everything is. But your laughter doesn’t have to have that bitter edge anymore.

Okay, so maybe we’re not talking about my laundry-day outfit anymore. But we are talking about my dance-making now. Perhaps Post-ironic is a term better saved for musical loves and clothing choices, but it gets at the contradiction that Mad King Thomas talks about all the time. Part of what drives us to make dances, and what makes us make dances the way we do. It’s a fucked-up, broken world out there. And we love that world SO HARD. It hurts to love something this much, and it hurts that what we love is so fucked up. We couldn’t love it so hard if we didn’t recognize how awful and fucked up it is. We’re angry, and it is in accepting- no, meeting head-on- that anger and disappointment that we can love and have the most hope.

As facebook says, “it’s complicated.” We choose to LIVE in the complication, dance from fragment to fragment, knowing that meaning will be made in between, and the need for stability will be diminished in the revelry and inquiry of a dancing spirit. No longer is the only question “What can we do?” Now we ask, What does doing look like? What decides can? Who are we and what is what? What can be? And how can we do to make that be come to be? Let’s scrabble it all around, embrace the mud, which we know is also gold, and roll in the mess because magic is in the making.

I saw Sarah Michelson’s show tonight at the Walker. Devotion.  I’m not sure I have much to say about it, but if I were formulating a response for facebook (because that’s what you do in this day and age) I would say “Devotion: like meditating while watching the Olympics in lieu of Easter mass.” 

Who am I kidding “would” – that’s what I will say when I’m done writing this blog and and I lose myself on facebook. But I don’t want to lose myself too much. I like this place I’m in- that strange high alienation that made me not want to talk to anyone after the show, that sense of otherworldliness. 

I loved it. I wasn’t always sure during the show. It was a show that required patience. It was a show that required over two hours of attention. It was dense.  But I found a state, much like my experience of L’Effet de Serge, of taking in, of absorption. Only unlike L’Effet de Serge, I was also viscerally engaged. I felt the exhaustion, the burn, the elation of the enduring performers. The intense, almost vicious repetition. I hit a point where I kept thinking “This is devotion. This is devotion.” The harshness, the dedication, the holy striving, constant giving and giving over. Endurance is an act of sacrifice. Devotion is a measure of burning away what is human to reach a more pure humanness.

The piece ended with a statement, in the midst of other rambling narrative, “We are perfect.” “We are perfect because we are not perfect.” (Or maybe “I am perfect because I am not perfect?”) The epilogue monologue was maybe the only thing I’m not sure I liked (or the only thing I seriously questioned) but it did underline that essence of the dance. The contradiction of human perfection. Adam and Eve had to be kicked out of the garden. Pain is evil, pain is necessary to understand bliss. And yet Eve has to imagine a ‘what if’ – never being kicked out-  the impossibility of perfection.

This is a dance that will stick with me. It was whole. It was artfully crafted. It was a dance that had to be a dance. It was light and set and sound and mind and body. It was full of precise movement and inhuman feats and willowing text that distracted from the movement as the movement distracted from the poetry of the text. It wove and repeated- the phrasework itself, and the music, but also the chapters from the first long section of narration. I heard the story through the rest of the dance, newly, echoingly.   

I remember the buzz that skittered around facebook when Charles Campbell quoted an bit from an interview with Sarah Michelson (as quoted on the Walker blog) on his status-  “I’m trying to make dance that’s inaccessible, because the more you make it accessible the more it seems unnecessary.” A provocative statement that spun into many different interpretations in the wooly world of facebook opinions. But watching the show today, that quote came back, and I understood it in the context of her work. This show spoke to me. I understood something that I cannot understand, not in words, and maybe not at all. But something interstitial, something reaching for meaning and being meaning at the same time. A contradiction of beauty and humanity and all those words that floated through Devotion.

And that my friends, is why I love dance.  

I heart Amanda Fucking Palmer. (And I am forever indebted to my friend and fellow dancer Mandy for sending this video to me.)

I am a little sad, however, that this song is super pro-pubes/anti-shaving, but then all the models who are wearing the many awesome merkins clearly had to shave their pussies in order to wear them. What what?!? And AFP herself is wearing a super high-cut 80s style cootch patch that (awesome as it is) she must have had to do some serious hair removal for. 

It’s funny, the politics of pubes. As far as I know (and I’m not citing any sources here, people) merkins were originally sported most frequently by prostitutes who shaved their pubic hair to avoid unwanted critters, but added the pube wig to look attractive again. Funny how now a naked cootch is considered attractive. I don’t know if it’s our pedophilic, youth-obsessed culture, or our value in high-maitenance style, or what.

I’m reminded of a story some friends told me, about their friends in Cirque du Soliel- I forget what it’s called, the risque one. And how when the erotic Cirque du Soliel traveled to Canada, they weren’t allowed to show pubic hair. So everyone had to wax or shave it off and then wear merkins. Because fake pubic hair is okay, but real pubic hair is somehow dirty, or pornographic, or too intimate. WTF?

And I know I’m splashing this all over the internet, TMI-Turkey up in here, but I think it’s part of a healthy culture of hair resistance to talk about this shit. It makes me sad- I’ve spent years working really hard to accept and enjoy my hairy body, years of embracing my hairy legs and hairy armpits, sometimes militantly, years of making a conscientious effort to not shave, and I’m finally happy,  comfortable in a place of being able to choose to shave or not to shave, but I still don’t feel comfortable sporting a swimsuit with pubes sprouting out. Gah! Fuck you, world.

That said, and speaking of awesome angry female singers that I love, Peaches has this crazy video that makes me happy. The shot in the Amanda Palmer video of the long wavy pubes made me think of this: 

I went to the workshop hosted by the performance/film creators Berlin at the Walker a few days ago. It was mostly a presentation of their projects with permission for us to interrupt at any time to ask questions and go off on different tangents. 

The question of documentary vs art came up. One man was very invested in distinguishing between ‘normal’ or ‘real’ documentary and what he considered Berlin’s film Bonanza to be- a work of art that used non-fiction subjects. He mostly saw the difference in the way they edited, what they chose to include or not, how they carved away information to create a piece of art versus showing all of the important information. Essentially he was getting at the fact that they weren’t objective (and were perhaps even manipulative), and he thought of documentary work as objective. They were more concerned with the making of art than the presentation of facts.

Here’s what my barely-repressed post-modern soul wanted to shout: documentaries are always subjective! There are always choices being made- in the framing, in the editing, in the very first steps of figuring out who to talk to, where to film, how much to pursue, what questions to ask. There are always agendas being forwarded, specific views being presented, material being manipulated. And these choices are integrally tied to aesthetics.

We have a specific aesthetic, a certain process, a set of familiar questions and a style of presentation that we have learned to view as ‘factual’, as ‘real documentary’, as an ‘objective presentation of Truth’. But what we have made invisible is that that is only one aesthetic, one approach, and that is is as heavily laden with agendas and choices and subjectivity as anything else.  Let’s remember post-modernism 101: objectivity does not exist. 

This distinction between ‘art’ and ‘fact presentation’ is denying the reality and power of aesthetics- a lie that only art is concerned with aesthetcs and documentary is concerned with content. Part of what makes a documentary powerful is its aesthetic- the aesthetic that allows it to pass itself off as Truth. The style and design that signify expertise, emotional distance. The design that does its best to make invisible the will of the documentarian, the choices being made. Aesthetics drive documentaries as much as they drive fiction, or art, or performance that is aware of and playing with it’s aesthetic choices. Which is why it’s a stronger decision to acknowledge those choices in the work- and the best documentaries and performances do.

Choices and questions

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 2011-01-24 18:36.

Yeah, exactly. I’m all about acknowledging choices and taking responsibilty for them. I also think the more broadly you can think about what you’re doing, the better the work will be. So with regard to mein Herren Berlin…

Why was this not something that was just as well served by showing in on one screen in a theater that accomodated more bodies? Was there a point to the five screens and tableau that actually served the purpose of the work beyond small aesthetic reinforcement?

Hours of discussion turned up no promising leads on this end.

Charles Campbelld

Charles!! YOU WIN. First

Submitted by tara_mkt on Wed, 2011-01-26 10:58.

Charles!! YOU WIN. First non-MKT commenter.  Thanks!I have to agree the format seemed unnecessary.  The best thing I can say for it was that I felt like I was sititng in an old-fashioned history museum, which could have been interesting (although it wasn’t, at least not for me).d

invisibility…

Submitted by tara_mkt on Mon, 2011-01-24 14:39.I think their workshop was called something about the art of invisibility.  I felt the film was weakened by the attempted absence of the narrator/maker.  Did they address their interest in invisibility much during the workshop?  I just wonder what impact they intend for it to have.  Still trying to get into this one….d

we’re reading aesthetics all the time

Submitted by theresa_mkt on Mon, 2011-01-24 13:31.

 I’m reminded of this line from an Ani DiFranco song: “Because we know the difference between the font of ‘20% More’ and the font of “Teriyaki.”

funny

Submitted by monica_mkt on Thu, 2011-02-17 23:53.

I’ve always hated that line because I don’t get it.

Guys!

I saw a show! I really liked it! Then I wrote about it! 

You can read about it here, on the Walker website.

Mad King Thomas is blogging about the shows in the Out There series, so each weekend in January one of us is posting an overnight observation. We love Out There! It’s a pretty sweet deal, ’cause guys, they let us watch the show for free! I mean, it’s pretty sweet until you leave the theater and realize that you can’t go out for a drink with your friends, and that you have to go home, but you can’t even go to bed ’cause YOU HAVE TO DO SOME WRITIN’. That part’s hard. Guess nothing is for free y’all. For realz. 

Anyway, I loved the show, and I recommend anyone seeing it. I’m going again tonight! Gob Squad’s Kitchen at the Walker! Then maybe go to the Walker blog and leave YOUR impressions?

Related to the search for “how to talk about our work”: 

Here is a link to a page that Tara found on the great wide intarwebs. It’s a bunch of excerpts from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” It made the think about how Mad King Thomas is sometimes and sometimes not playing with a camp aesthetic. It’s certainly a word people have used to describe us before.

I also ran across this definition of burlesque, which people have not used to describe us before, but which I think is relevant – specifically the first definition, but maybe in multiple ways:

1. A literary or dramatic work that ridicules a subject either by presenting a solemn subject in an undignified style or an inconsequential subject in a dignified style. 
2. A ludicrous or mocking imitation; a travesty: The antics of the defense attorneys turned the trial into a burlesque of justice.
3. A variety show characterized by broad ribald comedy, dancing, and striptease.

Too bad if we put burlesque on our promo material people will keep showing up asking “where’re the naked girls?”

So it is always a struggle to try to explain to people what it is we do… 

When I tell people I’m a dancer and choreographer, I usually get a response something like, “Oh, do you watch ‘So You Think You Can Dance’?” or “What kind of dance, like ballet? Tap? Jazz?” 

This makes me laugh. And die a little inside.

And when I try to explain that it is not really any of these, and more like an amalgum of theater and dance, it only brings to mind musical theater or, God forbid, one woman asking if it was like liturgical dance. 

I don’t want to call it performance art (as that usually calls to mind cliches of naked people pissing onstage and throwing it at the audience or pouring chocolate on their bare breasts and having a lizard lick it off… both admirable activities, but not what we do). Saying we make theater suggests more narrative than we provide, and also, none of us really have theater training. Our identity is wrapped up in a history with dance, a dance community, and a dance sensibility, so while I feel happy for people to attach additional labels to what we do, I can’t let go of the dance identifier.  I feel better when I describe it as satiric or social commentary dance, though I’m not sure that’s any clearer, and I always end up following it up with a description of that time I fellated a unicorn horn, or ate a tofu dog out of my own underwear. (Now it does sound like performance art!) So I’ve been trying to come up with a sentence that puts together the right randomness to give a messy but illuminating picture of what Mad King Thomas makes. 

“It’s like if you take a classical ballet, chop out the dancey parts with lots of people, put the everybody in gold lame and replaced their toeshoes with monster claws, then have them spout Oscar Wilde quotes while waving bananas to the music of  Queen.”

No? How about:

“Take one bad pop music video, throw in some post-modern posturing, insert random dialogue, pour on the irony, stir in plenty of irreverence a strong dose of anger, a hint of earnesty, and complete with a dash of sparkles.”

Neither of these clearly encapsulates Mad King Thomas dances in a witty thrity-second speil that I can deliver to strangers at cocktail parties and in the elevator. I need help! Suggestions?

I feel like a blog needs an introduction. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I don’t understand the Internetz. I can has cheeseburgers.
So what is this all about? What is it here for and what am I doing?

Mad King Thomas has had to discuss our mission statement lately. It seems like “Making Things More Awesome” isn’t quite clear enough. (I mean, come on folks, that’s pretty self-explanatory, right?) So we’ve been talking about what it is we do, what we want to do, and what we care about. One thing we’ve mentioned (which we’ve known for a long time) is that our work exists as part of a discussion, and one of its functions is to spark more discussion. If I were back in college I’d say we’re interested in adding to the discourse. Hell, I don’t have to be in college to say “discourse.” Discourse discourse discourse. That sounds dirty.

We’ve also been talking about our approach to dance, which is what I like to call “the kitchen sink approach.” Anything could go into the performance. Talking, eating, posing, on-stage costume-changes, bananas, farting, pop music, silence, poetry, cardboard sets, elaborate Victorian furniture, overheard conversations, ping pong balls, off-key singing, and, maybe, if we’re feeling truly adventuresome, some dance moves. Whatever moves us, whatever forwards the exploration of whatever subject it is we’re interested in.

If thinking and talking about the world is the idea- the things we love and the things we hate, the problems and mysteries- if making the world a better place is our motivator, why stop at performance? If we believe in collaboration (and we do!) then why stop at our three heads. Let’s get the world in on this thing! Let’s ask the Intarwebs!

So we’re putting our process online, in hopes that others will chip in with their thoughts, and in hopes that people who are interested in hearing and thinking more will find some of it here. Usually we sit around in our living rooms and talk about our dances for months before we make them. We’ll still do that from the comfort of our living-room-rehearsals, but now we’re also committing to putting some of our thoughts out (at least once a week!) into the vast series of tubes that Al Gore was kind enough to invent for us.

Ultimately what will this blog contain? Sometimes essays or personal narratives. Sometimes photos. Sometimes rants. Sometimes links to articles or YouTube. Sometimes long stream-of-consciousness mental vomits. Sometimes just a couple of sentences. Sometimes stories. Sometimes reviews or impressions of shows we’ve seen. Sometimes images or ideas. Sometimes found text, poetry, quotes. Sometimes discussions about feminism. Hegemony. Theories of Oppression. Queer Theory. Bicycles. Sustainable living. Performance. Art and art-making. What makes dance. What makes us mad. What makes us swoon. What sustains us. Uncensored blatherings that will make us un-hire-able in any respectable setting. Anything else we think of. Sometimes a shout-out to our moms. Hi Mom!
Pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. Maybe that too. We hope you’ll enjoy, comment and come back!