I liked all the pieces that made up Feedforward. Eve Beglarian’s trombone score, a great mix of high school fanfare, cow noise, and ominous color; Karinne Keithley’s funny text; Kara Feely’s costumes, track suits dotted with sketches of glitter; the overall visual design, credited to a slew of people. I liked Neumann’s choreography–the slower bits more than the sport collisions, actually, the aestheticized tennis strokes, the ballet arms that flick or pop to something different, the deliberate strokes.
And I especially enjoyed the performers: Nead Medlyn and Matt Citron’s perfect comic timing, Andrew Dinwiddie’s solemnly hip-wiggling referee. Among some more conventionally beautiful movers, Taryn Griggs stood out. The beauties (long-limbed, athletic types) sometimes go right through their well-extended lines, but Griggs fills hers out. She has that quality which is often called intention: she appears to have generated the movement herself, to be making the decisions just as we watch her. I hear that Griggs is moving to town this summer–lucky us.
So I liked it all, and I mostly enjoyed myself. All the same, I didn’t find a coherent whole here, or anything particularly inventive on the large scale. A lot of desires and ideas appear to have gone into this, with the unfortunate result that the various desires and ideas overlap and erase each other. For example, I wanted to concentrate on the dancing but the voice-over had me more on the lookout for the next joke. I can imagine plenty of good things emerging from this, as the various collaborators either go their separate ways or pare down their joint art, and I had a perfectly enjoyable evening watching Feedforward, but I didn’t feel that chill of encounter, of change.
8 Comments
Leave a comment:
Keep up to date:
With an RSS feed for this post's comments. If you leave a comment you may subscribe to comment notification emails.
I also did not find a coherent whole. And I have been asking myself if this was not my weakness and not the piece’s. Not that I missed an existing coherent whole, but that there wasn’t one because the “whole” was sort of like the set: large, white, flat, marked, and receptive to the accumulation of a seething multitude.
I like your comment about how “various desires and ideas overlap and erase each other.” This sounds so much like my life that I am struck in retrospect by how true to life feedforward was in that respect. I think that this disruptive instability was what allowed me to have that near-sublime experience during Mr. Medlyn’s crazy hand dance.
Oh, just thought: no one has talked about the name yet and how that might relate to the piece…
Comment by Charles Campbell — 2/3/2008 @ 12:34 pm
I thought perhaps feedforward was both a play on “feet forward” (kind of necessary for running, etc.) and the feed line as in t.v. or other transmitted telecommunications. I thought of it during the responses from the “athletes” at first lines fed by their coaches and p.r. people (”Just here to play the game. I’m here for the team.”) to the more pathetic responses later on (by Medlyn, mostly, the “I think it’s I think, think, I think it thinks….”).
Then there’s the football position, also soccer (Center Forward).
Comment by Sally Rousse — 2/3/2008 @ 5:40 pm
It sort of fell apart at halftime.
The first half was inventive, romantic, self-possessed. Then it got self-conscious, performance-driven, and the cultish personalities of the commentators (performers?) dominated the play. I thought maybe Neumann was simply showcasing his favorite performers.
Maybe the shift (halfway) was the phone-in sequence, when the table was moved toward center. Maybe it was about the commentators all along. Or the media- feed forward.
In the end, he sidelined the athletes, sadly, and put a mouthpiece on the mound. Why were they watching that pitch? Why were we? beautiful and bird-like though it was- Why the Moon?
Comment by Melissa Birch — 2/3/2008 @ 6:27 pm
I was thinking of Feedforward as the opposite of feedback. Or the opposite process. Whatever that adds up to.
Comment by Lightsey Darst — 2/4/2008 @ 11:48 am
Got a feedforward def at wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedforward
I can see that. Partly in the verbal efforts to control/maintain a system of describable movement (which keeps escaping), partly even in the floor design, partly in the movement’s relation to sports.
Comment by Charles Campbell — 2/4/2008 @ 2:10 pm
I thought, Moon - big white sphere; baseball - small white sphere.
But for me the interesting part of the moon was its bouncing around — as if the fabric of all we consider given is shifting under our feet and gravity, space, matter, physics, (movement), (and our ability to make sense of the universe through these things) remain in a state of uncertainty.
And maybe this requires the “feedforward” input.
Comment by Charles Campbell — 2/4/2008 @ 2:34 pm
So I’ve been thinking about the definition of “Feed-forward” per Wikipedia and the more I think the more interesting it seems in relation to this piece.
Particularly this last bit about “novel disturbances.” Maybe I’m taking this too far, but wotthehell (as mehitebel says) — performance inspired train of thought. Maybe the piece was a system (a set of parameters, relations and outcomes) that between the movement and the text, the commentary and the activities (including music, movement, sound, image, etc that switch between the one and the other), establish a certain state of performance — a state of being. And that disturbances in the system (since it was not completely controlled, not completely choreographed) were “tuned” by this feed-forward system.
Okay. And then what happened was, the “half-time” show was a set of novel disturbances (different each night) that exceeded the capabilities of the feed-forward system and consequently altered the state of the performance. Then these disturbances were, in turn, brought under control by the feed-forward controls (for example, the airhorn). But the system itself had changed (the differences between the first half and the last).
A highly optimistic perspective on systems, I think, but this framework gives the performance an interesting twist for me.
Comment by Charles Campbell — 2/5/2008 @ 9:07 pm
Definitely. I kind wish Neuman or someone from the cast could confirm or expound on this.
Comment by Sally Rousse — 2/5/2008 @ 11:17 pm