Why am I picking on poor old Modern Dance? I wonder. But it just drives me nuts. I guess it can all be summed up by my friend Chris who observed: "Why are they always cracking out of eggs?" Don't pretend like you haven't seen this routine - a body compressed, perhaps squatting, receives some musical cue of "life force" and proceeds to unfold, rise, stretching and extending limbs into space ... and always with a particular quality of movement, ugh, that quality of movement is the worst. How to describe? "Sensual" (or gross) ... graceful, flowing, light or syrupy ... urging, questing, yearning ... and acutely "beautiful". There is an arrogance to the movement quality of modern dance that disturbs and bores me, in this premature assumption of "beauty" and the way "beauty" can really stifle an art form. Case in point: "always cracking out of eggs" - can we, as artists, strive for a little more in our expression than basic life processes?
Now of course the disclaimer is that radical concepts can be and are applied to dance on a regular basis - certainly folks out there are doing revolting, compelling, chilling and otherwise unusual things with their body medium. Of COURSE this happens, thank goodness. But there is a common form that is a plague among us, which thrives basically as a veiled Erotica Lite, an excuse to view young bodies in various extremes of pushing, pulling, straining ... whirling, leaping ... and always a slave to this unique Standard of Beauty, where all movement flows, strides, bursts, and whirls with smooth suppleness. This diatribe isn't against erotica, but the mundane Playboy-style erotica that "modern dance" mirrors - an endless repetition of the most inviting, the most presentational, the embodiments of Ideal which pretends seduction as it imposes arrogant distance. For the price of a ticket we are afforded a view of the human woodland animal of time immemorial, muscular, svelte, powerful, pendulous, with pointed toes and fluted fingers. Each of us is afforded a body, but only the dancer's body is allowed to approach a pure ideal of Body Beauty, apparently, and we are intended to be awestruck by the grace of their exertions. Well, I'm not buying it. I
watch these arrogant young people put on their arrogant young dances
and vampirically feed from the envious and awe-ful gaze of the cramped,
the withered, the limping, the cubicle bound. I find this effort to whitewash the body pretty distasteful and rude.
How about the Modern Dancer's portrayal of emotion? This is where dance painfully crawls out of the realm of theater. They could have stopped at pantomime, but someone had to turn on the music ... egad, the choices of music ... suddenly the actions of the everyday are translated BIG, grand, arms are FLUNG, heads are WHIPPED, hands are clasped over chests that swell as the dancer inhales, deeply, attempting to communicate the pleasure or pain of human experience through body medium; body responding to "life" as represented by "music". Well, the whole thing is just embarrassing! Really! I mean I can't be the only one acutely embarrassed, cringing and shrinking in my seat, can I? Please tell me you, too, have seen "confusion" or "anguish" conveyed by some fingers to the temples, eyes closed, head rhythmically tearing back and forth ... and just gritted your own teeth and held your own breath until it ended.
You know, the fault lies probably not with the dancers or the choreographers or the medium or the art form, but probably with audiences that don't really ask for too much. I mean Playboy is a big seller, you know? They wanna see good looking people do good looking things, and they want it to be neat - like, over and above the everyday world, but "nice", too: glorious, masterful, positive and essentially escapist. This modern dance I am railing against is the equivalent of Hollywood endings, reggae festivals, ice skating - slutty "art forms" that demand little and offer lots of soothing salve and mind escaping. Just let our bodies prance across your vision and stir your "soul" - you relax and take a load off. But why do I care? I must, myself, gravitate to art that I "like" - though it may be uncommon and slightly abrasive, it probably turns out that my soul is getting stirred in a very similar mindless way that humans enjoy or even require from their culture. I just come from a different planet, so I like different things. FINE - but not fine!
Because: dance is pretty awesome. Bodies are pretty great. But there is a whole heck of a whole fuck of a lot of shit that you can do with a body in front of an audience of bodies for the purposes of entertainment and communication and expression that are not this form of "modern dance" that I find so embarrassing, limited, and moronic. There is so much potential to a body in space being observed by other bodies in space - why resort to boring old grace and beauty? Much like my extreme disappointment with the dance form "Contact Improv" - which sure sounds like infinite possibility, but actually ends up being a fairly limited format - I am impatient for all of these "modern dancers" to finally get fed up with being so goddamn graceful and exquisite and really start to use the medium for something more than an ego trip. Ahem.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
In Defense of Superstition
Superstition does get knocked a lot. What is the critique? That it is not rational enough? Certainly there is a hand-me-down field of superstition that warrants the criticism. Friday the 13th, for example - how many know the origins of this, why we are instructed to feel ominous because of it? Many real energetic centers of doom-feeling have lost their power and relevance over time, but hang on symbolically in human being "irrationally" enough (without knowing why) that thus entertaining any particular paranoia regarding invisible connections to dark forces seems dumb.
But what about superstitions that are superrational?
Here I am defining superstition as: the belief in persistent dark or evil forces that seek to progress one's own undoing through some chain of events. I guess a lot of folks get stuck on the word "belief", but we cannot deny the perpetual presence of chaos, decay, collapse, death that are endemic in time and space. These are the "dark forces" that any human not otherwise charmed senses from time to time, creating our very understanding of the external reality existing beyond personal control. But to impart that forces could exert intent or consciousness is of further difficulty in any "defense" here - such is the struggle in describing the invisible, metaphysical realm, and that is the disbelievers' eternal edge.
Belief itself exists. Do you believe in belief? Not necessary. What we call "Belief" stems from a valuable human power and ability of attention. That ability forms the cord by why which certain dominating forces (for lack of a better word; often economic in nature) can grab our attention and manipulate us like marionettes. It is the same cord that the faithless depress in perpetual drunkenness and which the faith-deniers sever, losing their connection to the vast and rich invisible world around us. O! Invisible All.
But what if our belief could fashioned scientifically? With rigorous observation we could watch the patterns of life and death and all in between around us, as Shakespeare. You would have to exercise your belief first - again, belief being itself established and not requiring "mere belief" to exist, unless you were interested in chasing some rabid fractal down through a realm of mirrors. Fine for a sunday afternoon, but we have to get to work here. First you would have to believe in the possibility of some relatively subjective (ie pertaining to you, the ultimate subject) cause-and-effect chain. I think that science can and absolutely should exist with total acceptance of subjectivity and quit this charade of objectivity, but that is another essay. The point is that you are an infinitely small viewfinder in the scope of All, so you are only ever going to get little scraps and bits of information that only you, in all your glorious tiny subjectivity and infinite variety, are afforded. Comparing subjectivities is eventually encouraged, but the first step requires a certain amount of faith in the things that are being revealed to you, in the order in which they happen. A well developed belief-ability is observing not for the purpose of matching up just any old concepts, but to actually perceive or detect a kind of actuality (truth) and likeness in the natures of coinciding objects, weather, and human circumstance, and potential connection among these things. Following clues, if you will. Putting attention to suspicions.
This incoherent map of intent reveals an eventual destination, which is the manifestation of the power of belief, which is "it works". Any active user of belief can tell you about the presence and function of belief in their life. Again, in this process, subjective testimony is not to be doubted. It is actually all we got. What we need to be rigorous about is To What End. A human can represent utter subjectivity, but when faced with The Other, needs to be kind of vigilant and ruthless about accurately reading externals - especially in present age, which is just loaded with seduction and facile suggestions that require the borrowed human energetic attention to thrive (often the machinations of mere men). Truth must be decoded, and then thus the only trustable source is your own code, inasmuch as you are trained to be attentive and demanding your truth.
Certainly this power-known-as-belief can be harnessed and utilized. In the realm of superstition, we can have legitimate fears and paranoias. We can foretell them by antecedents, as if we are reading the sky for weather ... We can observe the old mysteries of black cats and cemeteries with a light mind, feeling the accurate prickle... We can notice objects, symbols, names that tend to creep out at the worst time, keep an eye out for their recurrence, and be cautious in calling their attention. It is right and natural to bristle, because as a human body you are utterly fallible to the forces of chaos and disaster, and hopefully have retained at least a shred of the instinct to self-preservation. But we need not be frightened or crippled by fear - we can take an active involvement in our own superstition.
Develop your own superstition today!
But what about superstitions that are superrational?
Here I am defining superstition as: the belief in persistent dark or evil forces that seek to progress one's own undoing through some chain of events. I guess a lot of folks get stuck on the word "belief", but we cannot deny the perpetual presence of chaos, decay, collapse, death that are endemic in time and space. These are the "dark forces" that any human not otherwise charmed senses from time to time, creating our very understanding of the external reality existing beyond personal control. But to impart that forces could exert intent or consciousness is of further difficulty in any "defense" here - such is the struggle in describing the invisible, metaphysical realm, and that is the disbelievers' eternal edge.
Belief itself exists. Do you believe in belief? Not necessary. What we call "Belief" stems from a valuable human power and ability of attention. That ability forms the cord by why which certain dominating forces (for lack of a better word; often economic in nature) can grab our attention and manipulate us like marionettes. It is the same cord that the faithless depress in perpetual drunkenness and which the faith-deniers sever, losing their connection to the vast and rich invisible world around us. O! Invisible All.
But what if our belief could fashioned scientifically? With rigorous observation we could watch the patterns of life and death and all in between around us, as Shakespeare. You would have to exercise your belief first - again, belief being itself established and not requiring "mere belief" to exist, unless you were interested in chasing some rabid fractal down through a realm of mirrors. Fine for a sunday afternoon, but we have to get to work here. First you would have to believe in the possibility of some relatively subjective (ie pertaining to you, the ultimate subject) cause-and-effect chain. I think that science can and absolutely should exist with total acceptance of subjectivity and quit this charade of objectivity, but that is another essay. The point is that you are an infinitely small viewfinder in the scope of All, so you are only ever going to get little scraps and bits of information that only you, in all your glorious tiny subjectivity and infinite variety, are afforded. Comparing subjectivities is eventually encouraged, but the first step requires a certain amount of faith in the things that are being revealed to you, in the order in which they happen. A well developed belief-ability is observing not for the purpose of matching up just any old concepts, but to actually perceive or detect a kind of actuality (truth) and likeness in the natures of coinciding objects, weather, and human circumstance, and potential connection among these things. Following clues, if you will. Putting attention to suspicions.
This incoherent map of intent reveals an eventual destination, which is the manifestation of the power of belief, which is "it works". Any active user of belief can tell you about the presence and function of belief in their life. Again, in this process, subjective testimony is not to be doubted. It is actually all we got. What we need to be rigorous about is To What End. A human can represent utter subjectivity, but when faced with The Other, needs to be kind of vigilant and ruthless about accurately reading externals - especially in present age, which is just loaded with seduction and facile suggestions that require the borrowed human energetic attention to thrive (often the machinations of mere men). Truth must be decoded, and then thus the only trustable source is your own code, inasmuch as you are trained to be attentive and demanding your truth.
Certainly this power-known-as-belief can be harnessed and utilized. In the realm of superstition, we can have legitimate fears and paranoias. We can foretell them by antecedents, as if we are reading the sky for weather ... We can observe the old mysteries of black cats and cemeteries with a light mind, feeling the accurate prickle... We can notice objects, symbols, names that tend to creep out at the worst time, keep an eye out for their recurrence, and be cautious in calling their attention. It is right and natural to bristle, because as a human body you are utterly fallible to the forces of chaos and disaster, and hopefully have retained at least a shred of the instinct to self-preservation. But we need not be frightened or crippled by fear - we can take an active involvement in our own superstition.
Develop your own superstition today!
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