Okay, I’m back. Still waiting for the relief to kick in, but let’s just swim ahead and hope we hit shore before we drown.
The thing I’ve latched onto here is the thing I’ve latched onto elsewhere: the movement vocabulary. Or style. Or…something. (Not knowing what the proper terminology is can be fatal, but my arms are still doing the strokes…)
The solo that Mr Medlyn did that I mentioned last post is maybe the best way to get into this. It started from, I think, a baseball pitcher’s conventional rubbing of the ball in the mitt. It went from there into something like a fevered, panicked version of this — still attached to the reality of what we know (even those of us non-fans) but extended to parody or commentary. But then it went hogwild or apeshit…
(Briefly: how many times can we hear fuck and its relatives in an evening — and is that more than comedy?)
…and it, for me, exploded into a kind of movement that nearly approached trance-inducing. The way the movement became disconnected from the body as well as from any motivation, rationalization or impulse and sort of floated there in the light.
And I think to get there you have to get around the huge Wall of Art that goes up whenever there is a presentation of art. I don’t think this is a new thing, but I think that people have to find new ways of climbing, skirting, tunneling under that wall because even to see something twice or to know what you will be seeing is just another brick in the wall. The Wall that kills the life of the work.
It’s death, really. The way it is so inevitable, so unforgiving, so immediate and so final. It erases the life. The movement’s fascinating quality is in its surprise, its mobility of thought, its fragility, its ephemerality, its fleeting delicate presence that is so direct and beautiful (even heavy ugly art can have this fragile beauty).
And so to escape this Wall of Art that is Death someone has to continually reinvent the world (in dance, in movement, in performance…whatever). It is not easy, clearly. It is also not always recognized as a goal of art. But it also has nothing (or very little) to do with whether the work is enjoyable or not. But if it doesn’t escape the best it can be is entertaining or boring.
When I come back as God, I would make feedforward about 38% shorter and work for those moments of escape.
That said (’cause now it’s out of the way and can be seen for the useless, pointless and petty comment that those kinds of comments really are) there is a movement afoot that, in the best cases, skirts this Wall of Angry Implacable Death by skirting Art with pedestrian movement.
But not always that. There’s something more reality-based than that involved. True, sometimes the movement comes from everyday life, but sometimes everyday life itself takes part in the performance — not chance (or not only chance) but a version of reality that is brought into the performance that works sort of like a talisman or even a weapon against the Ancient and Evil Edifice of ArtDeath.
Which is kind of funny — but maybe that inversion of the relationship between art and life is why it has the potential to work.
Fuck fuuck FUCK fuck …. fuck
you can say that a lot. you can say it all night long. I’ve heard plenty of sporty and arty people say it again and again.
I loved the pacing and fuck yelling Neil did along the edge. The role of coach-leader-dictator-man in charge is present all over the place in art.
For me the piece functioned as a way of looking at art through the lens of a different but related form of expression.
Comment by Galen Treuer — 2/1/2008 @ 12:32 pm
wrong
Comment by Sally Rousse — 2/1/2008 @ 2:04 pm
Yes, Mr Treuer, fuck is a fine word and I was amused by the extended vocabulary lesson. If they had done a little more it might even have gone into the realm of the Beautiful. What I was wondering is whether such silliness was a byproduct or if it was intentional part of the creation — and either way how it fit. My impression is that it was a part of the attempt to escape the wall of death — along with the gold lamé and the rolled up newspapers.
I agree about the coach-leader-dictator-man-in-charge. And not just in sports and arts, right? Maybe some of the silliness is an anti-authoritarian gesture — sort of Dada? But more formal or something.
Could you elaborate on the “wrong” part, Ms Rousse?
Comment by Charles Campbell — 2/1/2008 @ 2:31 pm
To me portions of the Fuck were totally intentional and others were less so. It felt like an intentional piece, though not completely dictated. One of the things i enjoyed most (and at this moment personal enjoyment as an audience member is a pretty significant thing when I am going to see 3 shows a week) was the very specific ability for individuals to shine without derailing the piece.
The Wall of Death is an interesting idea. Are you referencing someone? I felt like the swearing functioned very similarly to the commentators. When I played soccer competitively there was a lot of swearing. It is part of the sport. It is part of the language. It is positive and negative and motivational. It is also very personal sometimes. Swear words feel good when it hurts.
Comment by Galen — 2/2/2008 @ 11:46 am
Yeah, like Mr Twain said:
The Wall of Death? Maybe Pink Floyd? Nah.
The idea that there’s a problem with experience and art is not a new one. I’m just struggling to find a way to talk about it in our current context. Because there is a lot of work going on in our fair city(ies) that uses (intentionally or not) practices I see as related to Mr Neumann’s that I feel are ways of breaking down expectations, habits of thinking and seeing, and preconceptions in order to allow us to change — to live, really. Someone should write a piece about this.) The Wall of Death (or any of its other various verbal permutations) is just what gets in the way of that. Sometimes its institutional (censorship, economic constraints, legal or logistical concerns) and sometimes its individual or cultural, but there’s something in this kind of movement that is opening up possibilities of dance, theater and “visual” art.
Comment by Charles Campbell — 2/2/2008 @ 9:55 pm