Category: Blog!

Sometimes I think the world is too much. Too wrong, too broken, too full of things I can’t fix but can’t forget.

This January has been rough for people. It is cold and it is dark. My friends, a lot of them, are sad. My brother is sad. My step-father is sad. If I spend too much time thinking I get sad too.

I read something and I carry it with me for days and often weeks. So sometimes I won’t read the news. I won’t check my messages. I won’t call my family. I won’t call my friends. I won’t return e-mails. I’ll show up for work and I’ll go to rehearsal, but mostly I’ll spend a lot of time in bed – a trick for surviving I learned once upon a time.

Things are just slightly too much so I’ve spent a lot of time napping and I’m behind: on e-mails, phone calls, travel plans, taxes, friends, sleep. I feel a little more alone than I’d like and I feel a lot more alone than I am.

Life is easier when it is warmer, when the weather isn’t trying to kill you. When your toes don’t feel like marbles rolling around in your boots and you are not worried about how you have totally lost them forever. Life is kinder when Mother Nature herself is not reminding you how powerful she is, and how you are just the jam on that toddler’s hands and not only can be easily wiped away but probably should, else the kid will get a rash, or maybe get some on that nice white couch.

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: 

Yesterday, the Moscow airport was bombed. 34 people were killed and 168 were wounded. Doku Umarov, a rebel leader, claimed responsibility. He said, “the war will come to your streets and you will feel it in your own lives and on your own skin.”

This summer Russia was on fire. The forest was on fire and the peat bogs were on fire. And they had record heatwaves and people were dying from the heat, and from drowning.

I went to Russia in August, but it was not bad where I was.

I performed. I stuck my tongue out and licked and licked and licked, and people pulled out their cameras and took my picture.

In Russia I danced amidst metal. I performed with a caiman. If that creature is not some sort of prehistoric god, I don’t know what is. I smiled too much, talked too loud, dressed too American, and looked too Jewish to blend in.

The caiman’s owner was a friendly, smiling man my age. His surname meant sunshine. He told me his father spent his life bringing light and happiness into people’s lives. He was determined to do the same. He brought me a clementine on a cloudy day, “a slice of sunshine,” he said.

He owned the saddest monkey I have ever seen. Tiny and depressed, dressed in a frock, she sat on a small table in the middle of a room, leashed to one of the legs. She looked miserable and resentful. She shared the table with a rabbit. The rabbit did not need a leash; it had no interest in jumping off. He gave me and the rabbit and the monkey cucumbers to eat. He would cut cucumbers for her so she could eat the seeds, her favorite part. She looked interested and anxious and excited when she was eating cucumbers. She made a mess of them. She got hostile when he took the cucumber remnants away from her but not violent. He wiped her down and dressed her up and she glared. When he finished she grabbed the rabbit to her, and held and held and held him. Comfort, I guess.

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.