dancedancerevolution2020

[dancedancerevolution2020]

A ghillie suit is a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble the background environment such as foliage, snow or sand. Typically, it is a net or cloth garment covered in loose strips of burlap (hessian), cloth, or twine, sometimes made to look like leaves and twigs, and optionally augmented with scraps of foliage from the area.

Gille is a Scots Gaelic word for a young man or older boy who works as an outdoor servant. "Ghillie" is a misspelling. The term "ghillie suit" may be a reference to the Gille Dubh (English: black-haired youth or dark-haired lad), an earth spirit clothed in leaves and moss in Scottish mythology.[1]

Military personnel, police, hunters, and nature photographers may wear a ghillie suit to blend into their surroundings and conceal themselves from enemies or targets.[1] The suit gives the wearer's outline a three-dimensional breakup, rather than a linear one. When manufactured correctly, the suit will move in the wind in the same way as surrounding foliage. Some ghillie suits are made with light and breathable material that allows a person to wear a shirt underneath.

A well-made ghillie suit is extremely effective in camouflaging its wearer. A ghillie-suited soldier sitting perfectly still with local flora attached to their webbing is nearly impossible to detect visually, even at close range. However the suit does nothing to prevent thermal detection using technologies such as FLIR. In fact, the warmth of the heavy suit can make a wearer stand out more than a standard soldier when viewed using these methods.

Soundsuits

Nick Cave’s best-known work is the Soundsuits series, costumes that completely cover the individual’s body. They camouflage the wearer’s shape, enveloping and creating a second skin that hides gender, race, and class, thus compelling the audience to watch without judgment.

The artist usually makes the Soundsuits from sisal, dyed human hair, beads, plastic buttons, wire, feathers, and sequins. He uses these everyday objects to construct an atmosphere of familiarity with the rearrangement of the items into understandable representations of both material and social culture. The pillars of his work are mostly race, gender, and identity.

To date, Cave has created over 500 Soundsuits since the first creation in 1992. Cave draws inspirations from choreography and dance, which blends perfectly with Soundsuits as they enable the expression of both one-piece and art.

The first Soundsuit & Rodney King

Cave released his first Soundsuit in 1992, a “demonstration” against the brutal beating of Rodney King. Cave recalls1:

It was a very hard year for me because of everything that came out of the Rodney beating. I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man – as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as less than.

I started thinking about the role of identity, being racially profiled, feeling devalued, less than, dismissed. And then I happened to be in the park this one particular day and looked down at the ground, and there was a twig. And I just thought, well, that’s discarded, and it’s sort of insignificant. And so I just started then gathering the twigs, and before I knew it, I was, had built a sculpture.

He used sticks and twigs collected from the ground and crafted them into an outfit that made sounds when worn. Cave pierced tiny holes at the base of each part and joined the twigs together with a wire. And just like that, the first Soundsuit sculpture was created.

Nick Cave said about the first sculpture2:

I was inside a suit. You couldn’t tell if I was a woman or man; if I was black, red, green or orange; from Haiti or South Africa. I was no longer Nick. I was a shaman of sorts.

For my thesis: 

Each suit will be similar but different. Each performer creates a persona, an alter-ego, or perhaps a magnification or fractalization of their own identity. What do you want to be? Maybe we want to disappear...

where I'm from..... an ongoing list drawing on all 5 senses:

- Smells from your childhood.

- Places in your home and neighborhood.

- Songs and stories.

- Tastes

(( "home" "childhood" and "neighborhood" all used in an expansive way to possibly encompass ancestors/future/sideways versions of ourselves)

- related and diverging is the prompt:

“My people _____” (fill in the blank)

and inspired by William Pope.L's Hole Theory (see below):

“I don’t have____” or “I am not_____”

“critic C. Carr emphasizes the significance of lack as an “in between space” in William Pope.L’s work: ‘Pope.L is interested in the troubling notion of embracing one’s “lack”, basing an identity on what you don’t have.’ Lack, by its very definition, is also an undefined space, ‘neither “this” nor “that”; but lack is also the “locus of possibility.”  

[dancedancerevolution2020]

There is a notion of distance built into any instance of identification. If that identification is with an idealized image, that image is always external to the subject simply by virtue of its location in the visual register, even as that image is internalized...The body as it exists, for me, the corps propre, only comes to be once the ‘literal body’ assumes meaning through image, posture, and touch...predicated on distance” (Salomon, 23-25). Salomon argues that all instances of identification are predicated on distance of some sort, distance that necessarily leads to a “fragmentary and incomplete” body and psyche. What Salomon is talking about is how images and other things--what we desire to be like or what we desire to not be like, also become a part of and potentially affect the fleshy substance of our body.”

“A performance is a kind of love affair with the possibility of radically disorienting and undoing both the performer(s) and the audience. Judith Butler writes: "Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision" (Butler, 2002).”

- excerpts from my undergraduate thesis

[dancedancerevolution2020]

DISORIENTATION STRATEGIES

REPETITION

SPINNING

UPSIDE DOWN

ABRUPT SHIFT

INJURY

DISLOCATION

MOVING INTO SPACE YOU CAN’T SEE

...

[dancedancerevolution2020]

WASTE, EXCESS & QUEERNESS

“In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.“

_________

“The Poetics of Waste argues that before we demonize or disregard waste, we must first understand its often conflicting meanings in the contemporary moment and in the preceding century, when consumer capitalism came to dominate and define American culture. If, as Ezra Pound claimed, artists are the “antennae” of the species, picking up the signals long before the general populace notices them,1 then it is fitting that the poets and experimental writers of the twentieth century should be among the first to perceive the danger, and even more, the value of a waste that late capitalism has attempted to repress, much as it occludes the labor that produces the commodity fetish.

Schmidt C. (2014) Introduction: The Poetics of Waste Management. In: The Poetics of Waste. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi-org.colorado.idm.oclc.org/10.1057/9781137402790_1

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scores sent to collaborators

[dancedancerevolution2020]

Ni’Ja Whitson

tongues untied >> gesture, rhythm, how is pain shown onstage, connecting interiority to outer form

how do i talk about dance? i feel it in my body / where? how? what am i connecting to? what am i looking for?

formalism and trance state, something ecstatic in everything they make, feels like it comes from a deeply interior place

allowing and seeing difference, staying with

“Ni’Ja Whitson is a nonbinary writer and interdisciplinary artist whose current work explores their idea of the “vaporous body” through relationships among astronomy, cosmology, time, Blackness, Trans-embodiedness, and premature death. It is an undertaking where interrogations of dark matter and dark energy serve as portals to spaces of undefined phenomena that unequivocally co-compose the universe. The project asks: How do you see something you can’t see? What if Blackness refused to arrive and exists in the unarrival? “

walking and sounding. arrival and unarrival

“become-ing” “be-ing” ongoing-ness

resisting final form and categorization

how fascia forms by what we repeatedly do is a lesson in repetition. what do we repeat. let the repetition change you.

all that you touch you change, all that you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change, god is change

walking is a lesson in repetition. one step after another. walking without arriving.

walking as touching the earth and letting the earth touch you.

listening to how the foot contacts the earth

taisha paggett “i believe in echoes” (9 minute cut):

having the audience help her, support her

malcolm x speeches. afro wig

stillness. like an intervention connecting past to present

rhythmic breathing at the end instead of a “speech” thru the megaphone

visibility of scores. poetry of scores.

eavereachmore:

slow motion by the river. slow motion score. as a way to time travel, time warp, feel the non-linearity of time.

public/private

gifting

audience eye ritual to begin. how to ask audience to see differently? with different eyes

support, the emergence of a collective body

a sort of profound simplicity in how humans doing human things changes the space, changes the viewer, changes ____ over time

feet, sound, communication

periphery of vision, periphery of feet >> edges. driving. the sides of highways full of trash, attending to this space too. driving, working, the capacity of my body blunted. rest areas, gas stations. bringing pleasure and subversiveness to transactional, commercial spaces. 

“As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation”.” (Braiding Sweetgrass) i’ve been thinking about injuries as creative sites . sites where we can’t go about business as usual. they are disorienting, they are full of story. i’ve been dealing with a minor but still painful shoulder injury the past couple of months that is the result of many years of repeated mis-use. after seeing a PT and a couple of bodyworkers i realized that i needed to do the work myself of healing my shoulder…nobody else could do that for me. i don’t mean that in a kind of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of way, but in a no one can know your body better than you kind of way. that self knowledge, self knowing heals. and that “healing” is magical/mystical/whatever you want it to be. our bodies our stories our experiences are so vastly complex and profound. moving the past couple of days i realized its like 95% gone and watching this accidental video of me warming up messing around with my arms i see a different person from who i was a couple of months ago.

a body is also it’s ties and responsibilities to the land (edges) “because they had given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us” (Braiding Sweetgrass)

where are you going and where have you been 

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“Pauline Oliveros said “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action,” and as I’m learning sound is an inherently embodied experience, I’d go further and say it’s directing attention to what is felt and what is touched” - Cy X

[dancedancerevolution2020]

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968)

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making.

A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.

[dancedancerevolution2020]

i don’t know what i’ve done these past two weeks. i’ve thought about that letter to the embodiment conference. i’m thinking about histor(ies). again. stories. Is it a story or a symbol? A portrait? A photograph with burned holes in it. Empty sleeves. ((Insert name here. ))

what stories get told. i’m thinking about digestion. what stories are digested and become a part of us. what histories, ideologies, teachers. dance as digestion. a magic show. a cooking show. what is in me? what is percolating? write it, draw it sing it, put it in your fridge. literally. childhood food memory. dad making canned chili and crumbling doritos on top with a grape popsicle to end. what am i taking in? what am i shitting out? shit. shit. i’m not showing you my shit. we’re deep in the shit. shit theory. potty humor. ok enough of that now. i watched miguel’s work. i’ve been thinking a lot about objects. thinking about archives makes me think of objects. miguel’s laptops, table, script, microphone. external organs. organs. the heart. the stomach. i was folding into my stomach, i kept folding and folding. i was laughing and crying at the same time. i felt like i was dissolving, i felt like the ocean. i felt like i’d be sad for the rest of my life, i felt like i was in love. the ocean sounds something like: haaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaa haaaaaa haaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa haaa haaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaa. my stomach sounds like: whohowhowhowhowho hooo who hwowhwowowhwo 

reflecting on falling after watching ralph lemon’s How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? the falling while the dancer is being sprayed with a fire hose, the film footage of police kicking and shoving people, Walter falling to earth in his space suit. an archive of falling. what is the different weights of different bodies falling? an archive allows for temporal fuckery. michelle boule dancing a solo from many years ago, with miguel sitting there in the present and his avatar and friend having a conversation that happened maybe a couple of months ago recorded. overlapping temporalities. queering the archive.

[dancedancerevolution2020]

falling edit

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wordplay

here-ing / hearing

hearing for the “here”. tell me when you hear me here. i am here-ing. creating the here. 

“marconi, inventor of the telegraph, came to believe that once a sound has been generated it doesnt die but simply grows fainter and fainter and given a sensitive enough ear and the right place to listen one could hear it forever“

fail / fall

[dancedancerevolution2020]

matter(s)(ing)

“This habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) is a “partition of the sensible”, to use Jacques Ranciere’s phrase. The quarantine of life and matter encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations, such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not “away” in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane as we speak.” -- Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett

“...‘third nature’, that is, what manages to live despite capitalism. To even notice third nature, we must evade assumptions that the future is that singular direction ahead. Like virtual particles in a quantum field, multiple features pop in and out of possibility; third nature emerges within such temporal polyphony.”-- The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Louenhaupt Tsing