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Sevgiler.

Gulgun Turker.

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Thanks Gulgun for sharing your experience. I’d like to start with your idea that “like is not a relevant term for this experience”. ‘Like’, though it is as manufactured an idea as any, points to bodily experience. With any experience we can ask of one another; “Did you like the experience?” “Did you enjoy it?” We can answer yes, no, I don’t know, or do as you have done and say Mu (a term from Zen that says that the question is meaningless). Personally I did not like the concert.

I read the things you read. Michelson challenges us to consider a space, its history, the various social/professional forces that bring it into being. We can enjoy briefly the geometries of her dance that collide with geometries of the architecture. These things can be read in 5 minutes and then what? Here I am. Sitting. Sitting for an hour as the same message is being repeated. Sitting is a fine experience. But I could have been sitting in any public space watching people move through an environment. What is special about this experience? Why pay money for it? The capitalist trajectory of this experience has to be considered as well. We did pay money. We exchanged a bit of our lives in the form of currency in hopes of reciprocation, that in giving money that took X hrs of my labor to earn, my life may be enriched in some way, that I may, at some point be able to say “I liked this work” or “I received something in exchange for my time and money”. I read what you read but I need help at this point. What is necessary about representing these trajectories? I suppose it is a kind of training ground for the critical theorist who can then practice recognizing the contingencies in which we all live. I suppose that this can be pleasing in the way that a puzzle is pleasing. But without some craft, some magic, some reason to care, I am left cold. When I go to a concert I want to leave with some wonder, instead of so much wandering.

I could go on and on. I’ve as much hot air as the next gal.

Some other issues:

The issue that many people in the audience have no experience reading work like this, were baffled and may never return.

The issue that there were some in the audience, “the in-crowd”, who looked on thoughtfully and read the trajectories and patted themselves on the back for being so sophisticated, while others were baffled, left in the middle of the performance etc.

Not that we need to be populist. I’m just saying aren’t we back to ballet here? There are those that know the steps (in this case the intellectual steps) to do and those that do not. Is there more to this than making some people feel sophisticated at the expense of others?

Thank you for your article. I think this forum is great and I did enjoy all this thinking. So I guess I got something from the performance after all. But I wouldn’t go again. I think we should not avoid the question of ‘like’. We all live in our bodies and, no matter what verbal codes we are spinning, it is all just spinning, unless it is grounded again in our lived experienced.

Thanks

MO

–perpich

The audience’s competition to appreciate, and the dispersal of knowledge about the work, certainly provoked some questions for me, many of which had to do with the substitution of one systematizing order (the structuring of familiar performance conventions) with another (the structuring of authorized and authorizing knowledge). What is challenged here among these audiences, these spaces, this ordering of discourse, for these prices? What made this possible?

~Nor

P.S. Mickey Mouse (who was one of our Ladies group) fainted last night right in the middle of the scene with the ‘dead’ girls. Then she got to her knees, rose again and walked slowly off. Amazing performance– but then again, she’s a competitive roller skate dancer in ‘real life’.