edmonton 2012

 

 

Three veils of different shades of blue,

Layered so that you have to take in all three at the same time.

They are layers whose very presence metaphorizes the composite and multiple natures of this space, its history, its mission, and its misguided uses.

Those veils hide without hiding what is behind … what is behind is visible in transparency. They tantalize the viewers with a promise of “what could be,” a treasure, the key to understand the nature of this space, perhaps the very appearance of a performer who is waiting behind this made-up curtain to entice us with his sensuous body.

I wonder whether it was the color that attracted me to those veils … the heavenly blue … or their silky texture, which responds to wind and breath so willingly, almost lovingly. Maybe I was drawn here because in the midst of hard surfaces and cluttered spaces, the hopeful color and its mobility invited some sort of understated and flawed hope.

 

 

 

Re-writing: there is communication in words because they anchor significance to reality and identity. However, one should be proactive in locating meaning also in silence and movements and attune to different ways to bridge the chasm between the individual and the world, to mediate what we know and what we hope to know in the future.

Moving away from the failure of objectivity and learn to embrace ambiguity and impreciseness as qualities I can use in my research as a human being (first) and a scholar.

Jacques Derrida called it the ‘interval,’ the space where one negotiates the presupposed totality of language with the very awareness that our vocabulary is arbitrary, that it does not make sense in itself but only in relation to a complex system of signification. “What is” is only understood through “what is not” and “what is similar” or “what is different.”

There is more to dance and writing than movement and text.

There is more to the two of them together than their mere addition.

I feel one must reconfigure a completely new way to articulate their differences before even thinking that they can become one practice.

How does dance mirror the syntax and grammar of language? How does a visual text compare to a written or verbal one? What happens when the audience experiences them together? I find that those are questions one must answer to start unpacking the full potential of the relationship between movement and writing.

I feel that I have to let go of my anxiety for words if I want to approximate an answer to those questions. More listening and less talking! Approaching the third space.

 

 

 

So many ways into the construction of memory. I did not know someone’s green sock could be so devastating; that it could trigger such a wealth of childhood memories and end up being embedded forever in my memory, his memory, and her memory.

Are memories ever truly ours? Perhaps not.

One other thing that emerged as important to me from yesterday’s session was the question of whether observing movements/dance and writing about the experience is always predicated on a narrative, a vision of ourselves that is necessary to sustain our shaky identity. In brief, do I always see what I want to see? Am I open to discover something I did not know? Is it even possible to discover something I have not already either experienced or thought of? I would like to think that true epiphanies are possible. I dare to say I experienced one yesterday when for a few seconds I contemplated the interconnectedness of three people’s memories. A big revelation for someone who has always believed in individuality, in a materialistic view of how our past shapes us forever and conditions once and for all who we will be. A hope for true communion?

I do not know. Eugene O’Neill was probably right when he wrote in Long Day’s Journey into Night that “the past is the present and the future too,” but perhaps the past carries transcendence when it is made to befit my world as well as other people’s….

The space is moody; it is turning on itself; it breathes and incorporates us. I disliked it at first but now I recognize it as familiar; it contains similarities to other spaces I have occupied before and it already suggests spaces I would like to occupy in the future.

I guess the biggest revelation must be the exhaustion I feel in reliving/rewriting my/our memories. Emptied, tranquil, melancholic, sad, all at once! On the brink of discovering new and exciting avenues to approach movements, space and memories … terrified it might upset the way I look at things. Is this what they call drama therapy … dance therapy?

 

 

 

Yesterday

Today

Less Objective

Almost no words

Warmth, sleep, pulsation, elevation.

The practice becomes immanent

Transcendence just is … no words to describe it … for now.

 

“Incertitude”… I love this word, its trickery, its playfulness. It confounds you; it makes you think of “insert”, the violence of pushing in, the active verb whose very meaning is predicated on the passivity of an object … But incertitude tricks you. It is not a word and it points toward the very impossibility of insertion, of action. Instead it suggests the lack of certainty that stops all activities, the failing of absolute meaning. Incertitude invites a deferral in time and the space for meaning to manifest itself on its own conditions.

Pausing, reflecting, staying open, sleeping and dreaming of a desire you still do not know you have.

A renewed faith that being is possible, that absences will be filled, that meaning will surface when the noise ceases and the mind becomes receptive.

The space resonates with echoes of our presence; its voice is uncertain still, but it is gaining strength. More time is needed … until we know.

 

 

 

Slaves to the sequence; to the teleological trajectory, to the comforting agenda that one thing (anything) must lead to something else; that the steps one takes are all intrinsically connected to a goal and, above all, that if any of the steps in the sequence are missing the whole goal will be compromised.

This week taught me that the sequence is not that important,

That one can think and communicate un-sequentially

That dance does not follow words, and vice versa

That memories are individual and collective at the same time

That memories are constructed diachronically and synchronically every time we conjure them up

That they change the archive of the past and construct narratives with or without a trajectory

 

My idea of the writer archiving the performance cannot work the way I thought it would… The writer cannot objectify or reified movements as they happen in front of him because movement refutes and rejects the logicality and narrative trajectory of the sequence … And this is good, I think. The writer must articulate a new idiom in conversation with the witness and the performer. This conversation will keep the ambivalence of all verbal and physical exchanges by uttering a layered text that draws on metaphor and imagery, and divorces itself from semantic stability. The language of in-betweeness involves who is on stage and who is not in an experience in-the-making; it does not intend to codify, archive or define but could, at times, without wanting to do so, illuminate specific aspects of the performance. However, it will do that effortlessly, without soiling the abstractedness, spirituality, or even triviality, of the event.

 

What is this language good for? What can it do for the scholar, the dramaturge, and the performer? I can’t list all of the answers but I will try to sketch some of the possibilities:

·  Strengthen the notion of spatial layering and the imaginative potential of the space in retaining and generating memories

·  Imprint memories onto a body that is no solely individual but also collective (Lin’s green sock)

·  Highlight how words (their sound, color, lingering meaning) can approximate movement. My idea here is that both words and movements can be defined only as what they are not which reiterates their ambiguity and always points to an interval, a deferral in time and a distance in space … their meaning always somewhere else and at some other time.

·  Coin an idiom that in its quintessentially elusiveness opens up a polyphony of significations

·  Bridge the gap between scholarly discourse and physical practice

 

What else have I learned this week? How can I answer my own research question that by observing the body move on stage, and in real time, the scholar can discover a new language to talk about past performances? I am not sure I have a definite answer to this question, but I know now a few things:

1.     This language cannot be restrictive, it needs to account for creativity if it wants to speak to “what it must have been like” to see a historical performance, may it be commedia dell’arte, Shakespearian acting, etc.

2.     it must interpret the historical data but also incorporate a performative investigation of such data

3.     it must draw on metaphor, metonymies, poetry, images, allusions, comparisons

4.     It must abandon the language of certitude, the absolute chimera that the past is knowable to us as it happened. This language does not have to be prescriptive but embrace fully the incertitude that comes from both re-writing past and teaching it.

 

A new awareness of how we remember: Construction; reconstruction; reduction; merging; creation; co-creation; selection; rearrangement; re-sequencing; silencing; deleting; mending; healing; stitching; editing.