Here's Jana Perkovic—the guerrilla semiotician—discussing pretentiousness.

http://guerrillasemiotics.com/2009/05/pretentiousness/

I am hoping she'll sort out self-indulgence* for me next. Actually, I sound cynical, but I am not at all. I enjoyed Jana's 'taking back' of the word, and her discussion of failure reminded me of Steve Paxton from Materials for the Spine:

I believe that the important work is accomplished in the multiple failures to accomplish the idealized form – tiny back-to-the-drawing-board moments between attempts. The dancer has tried and been found wanting. With this awareness they seek new approaches. And the real work and value of improvisation has begun.

* The grand-daddy of put-downs with respect to making work. But where are the lines? When does work cross over into indulgence? Is it about lacking in vulnerability? Or being too vulnerable? Help Jana help!

http://www.curating.info/archives/205-For-What-and-For-Whom.html

The term 'curating' has definitely been picked up to describe almost any activity that involves choosing one thing over another.

Michelle Kasprzak in an email to the NEW-MEDIA-CURATING listserv.

Perhaps the demise of people whose role it is to trace links between, across and through culture is inevitable?

Honk if you agree.

I'm a dancer. That means that when it comes to performance it's my senses and the way I've trained my senses, I guess the fact that they can be trained at all, the storage of information to be released in performance. That is my palate. As though feelings were colours that could be mixed and liberated ... liberated at the time of performance.

Steve Paxton, Material for the Spine: Sensation and senses: weight of sensation

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,,25450222-2862,00.html

The strangest thing (other than a slight feeling of 'success' for being damned by a tabloid) is that funding bodies encourage the 'double dipping' across multiple funding bodies.

No mention (on the pdf) that "Inert" (wacky project) was funded by Arts Victoria in 2004 and 2006, and then by the City of Melbourne in 2008. That's actually $40k AUD of public funds over 5 years of development, and involving 5+ different artists, 137 performances in Melbourne, and screenings of the film in Scotland, England and France. This might be considered value for money, but I hope I am not sounding too defensive!

The larger story is perhaps about how we devalue things that are not designed to make money, when perhaps (particularly given the wonderful display of stability and honesty in the 'free market' lately) endeavour that is not about profit or market should be prized.

I am involved in making performance and screen work because I believe it is meaningful; not in a world changing way, but with small, delicate (and often wobbly) steps. This is not so wacky.

Here's Efva Lilja (again):

I sometimes get so dreadfully tired of the fact that significance is only assigned to that which fulfills some obvious function. As a result, art becomes aesthetics, entertainment, form ... Function becomes synonymous with meaning, or with what can be explained.

(from Dance – For Better, For Worse, p.38)

Productivity is very much in focus when it comes to contemporary work for the stage, as are quantitative assessments based on the number of performances and the size of audiences. 'Knocking out a hit show' – the very idea impoverishes the content and blocks off possible paths to development. Performances become trade goods, adapted for the market. Work fast and simply and it will be cheap, which means many people can see it. But what will they see? What do you? (p.26).

(p.26)

By the way, Elizabeth just landed in Melbourne and happened across a copy of the Herald Sun (or The Hun as it is known there) that contained this exposé. And she thought she was getting away from me.

Why must everything be explained, or be possible to translate, why pick it all to bits—as though it were only a camouflage for something else? MADNESS. We hide too easily behind all the words.

Efva Lilja
Words on Dance, p.11.

from Anamnesis shoot
Dancehouse, Melbourne
December 2008
Images by Cobie Orger

One because the lines interest me, the other because it is a bit strange.

   

Click here to download:

dancing_lines.zip (1371 KB)

Turbine Hall is vast, almost as high as it is long.

From the café we are guided down the long ramp, given cushions, and enter the Hall. The audience surrounds the performance space (except for a narrow 'entrance' at the far end from which the dancers come and go), and in the space there are many many plumb-lines (described as pendulums in the programme), weighted by cone-shaped metal 'heads'. They are effectively conical arrowheads, willing the lines downwards, and stopping about 30cm from the floor. Each set of (perhaps) 10 cones is connected to a puppeteer-like rig, set amongst the lighting rig.

The geometry of the space is striking, and in it the 16 dancers are already busy with that relentless angular freneticism so typical of much of Forsythe's movement. On the walls are digital clocks, counting upwards as the natural twilight filling the hall is gradually drowned out by a very simple lighting design (profiles directed as downward as the plumb-lines). The sound sparsely echoes throughout the hall: simple electronic harmonics calling and responding to each other.

The dancers are very clearly engaged with particular tasks directly related to the geometry—and movement possibilities—of the pendulums. Occasionally they brush too close to a weight, and gently correct their own 'mistake' as if they are responsible for resetting the drive of the pendulum towards stillness. At other times they very deliberately (and gently) set large areas of the weights into motion. That they are following instructions (or a 'score') is very clear, but what these instructions are does not seem important to me.

Dancers come and go, sometimes for a rest (out of sight), other times to stand and watch.

And that is it.

Over the 90 minutes (30 minutes shorter than advertised), the tone of the work barely shifts, the audience wanders about (or not), and ... that is it.

But, as in much of Forsythe's more 'formal' work (so different from Decreation for example), this deep simplicity inevitably reveals a mesmeric complexity. The drive of the weights towards stillness is framed by the dancers useless attempts to keep moving, or to resist gravity's pull to inertia. The physiological inevitability of their fatigue becomes increasingly apparent, whilst their weighted witnesses keep pulling: pulling downwards to stillness. At times, almost the entire room of weights is tilted off vertical—the slow pendulums of time—as if the dancers have made Turbine Hall itself sway to and fro. The scale and gentility of these effects is remarkable.

Forsythe himself is standing behind the audience across from where I am sitting. Occasionally, he calls a dancer over (or even off the performance space), gives instructions and then sends him or her back into the 'playing field'. And it is a very much like a coach calling an errant player from the field, loading him with new instructions, and firing him back 'out there'. The dramaturgy of this act is puzzling and I am still not convinced Forsythe expected to be noticed doing this. Combined with the design of the puppeteer-like structures for supporting the plumb-weights I find it hard not to think of Forsythe as a kind of Petrouchkan puppet master, willing his puppets into action, demanding that they resist the fatigue, and somehow overwhelm the relentless march of the plumb-lines towards the centre of the earth.

One more thing. At approximately 60 minutes into the performance, the building had a power surge of some kind. The music stopped, the clocks stopped, and some of the lights went out. I glanced at Forsythe at this point and he hardly skipped a beat, but the flurry of activity at the other end of the hall suggested that this was definitely not planned. It was a shame in so many ways, not least because it broke the company's play with—and the audience's meditation on—time, with their inevitably dying dance amongst, around, and against the geometry and physics of these long long arrowheads.

Note: Some images (taken on my phone) are here.

Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time
The Forsythe Company
Turbine Hall
Tate Modern
London
30 April 2009

From performance this evening at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.

               

Click here to download:

Forsythe_Companys_Nowhere_and_.zip (3361 KB)

I can smell out a lie, the kind that underwrites a life, even if it has been camouflaged in a work of art. It is something you can feel when all honesty is lacking in the way you are being addressed.

Efva Lilja, Dance: For Better, For Worse

This blog is becoming a series of quotes ... apologies

To live is so startling; it leaves little time for anything else.

Emily Dickinson