There are many things I am thinking about these days. The CDA (Canadian Dance Assembly) conference in Ottawa, the FTA (Festival TransAmeriques) in Montreal and the CDF (Canada Dance Festival) in Ottawa. Two weeks of seeing over 25 shows, conversing with colleagues from across Canada and a few places beyond our borders, engaging with people who may or may not buy our work. Exhausting late days that begin early in the morning. I love it. Ours is a large country that rarely allows our small communities to meet face to face, so that you can touch the artist, see their body language, hear the timbre of their voices . All the Web 2.0 in the world pales in comparison to the flesh to flesh encounters. 

I think community is a word that needs attention. Blurry ideas about what it is.

Institutions are feared because they appear to grab the lion's share of resources and are blind to the core workers in the field. How can we build new models that simultaneous support the big and small ideas through the filter of a lead-artist's eye?

Post-mortems are good. They remind us of the reasons why and re-kindle language lost since the doing of the thing they remind us of. They re-generate energy.

Holidays are also good and I am about to embark on one. If the spirit moves me (which Vancouver has a tendency of doing) then more to come.

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I'm going to do some workshops in Europe this summer and will try to blog from there - but I also thought I'd put up some links before hand.

Stop 1- Vienna
Impulstanz - major festival with great training component. I've applied to take a Coaching Project on creative writing and dance with Jonathan Burrows (and more) and Adrian Heathfield.

Stop 2- Frankfurt
Tanzlabor_21 - International Summer Lab - Taking a workshop with Hooman Sharifi (more) and Bojana Kunst.

See also:
Maska - an arts organization in Slovenia that has a very compelling mix of production, seminars and publication. Bojana Kunst, one of the workshop co-leaders in Frankfurt is a frequent collaborator.
Unbound - an online store for books, dvds, and limited editions. All in pounds, but appear to ship to Canada. Read Full Post...

Dance and Writing

From If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution.
André Lepecki reads 'Bodies of the text,' a collection of essays on dance, the body and feminism by Jaques Derrida, Susan Foster and others."
First published in:Ballet-Tanz, August 1995

Thus, the currently and broadly-accepted notion shared by dancers and choreographers, but also by scholars and critics alike, that the art of dance is essentially one that has a privileged and mysterious relationship with the unspoken, the un-utterable, which what is beyond or before language, is historically deconstructed by Foster. Dance was not always the art of what cannot be spoken, and the radical implication of Foster's essay is that this recent divorce between dance and meaning (the gestural and the verbal) also shaped the current relationship between the dance writer, the dance critic, with its object of study. [Emphasis mine]

A couple times at the CDA and other places recently, I feel like I see the edge of the (often sublimated) belief that dance is the "art of what cannot be spoke" and therefore also what can not be spoken about, something I just don't believe. It seems also related to the "dance is universal" – which I also have trouble with.

Yes, dance is about the body and how they move through and occupy space – and yes we all have bodies, but the way we understand and move them is largely constructed by our histories and influences.

And - that's totally fine. It's good even. "Universal" is too often code for "dominant" and "un-utterable" for "don't think so much."

And it's hard to talk and write about dance, but not impossible. And the trying is very important, since it's a part of moving any form forward.

It always good to find that some of the idea's that we take for "always have been that way", weren't always that way. That there was a kind of social decision to make them that way. It means there can be a kind of social decision to make them another way. Or 8 other ways. Read Full Post...

CDA - Internet / Technology 1

In this post: | Writing / Copyright /Internet | RSS | Good Sites |

All of this is a little off topic in some way, but I also feel is connected. Maybe that part of contemporary means paying attention to current tools and making choices about which ones are right for what you're doing. Not that we all have to be cutting edge internet strategists, but that change is happening, there is an event that we are wrapped in and we have to take account of it.

At the conference I felt like an internet cheerleader, and in some ways I am, but I’m also suspicious and don’t think it saves us in any way - the work still has to be good and rigorous. But it really is doing interesting things to distribution systems. And I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but it is a change.

How much time are we willing to spend on this? Does it distract from or help the making of the work? Beyond marketing, what can these tools do for the making of the art?

And how does live performance (and all artists) deal with the change in power and authority made possible by the internet. (Francis Ford Coppola in 1991 predicts Youtube, and now is on Youtube.)

Thanks to Allyson (Allyson, what's the company site that you mentioned at the panel?) and Ella.

And please add thoughts or further links in the comments section.

Writing / Copyright / Internet

Cory Doctorow
[A name I mentioned a bunch as someone who gives large chunks of their writing away, and has made a career of it.]
– Article about “Artist rights” -
[Includes some very good comments that make the other side of the argument as well.]

Lawrence Lessig – Creator of Creative Commons:
– TED Talks

Clay Shirky: Looking for the Mouse
– And the whole blog is good. I found this after the conference (my friend Tim blogged about it on his blog about making computer game that is actually just a good blog about ideas and creativity)
– If you like video check out Shirky speaking.
– Favorite quote from video “The group gets better together”

Seth Godin.
[Good blog on internet marketing. I'm a little disturbed by my interest in some of this stuff - that one one the things I like about live performance is that it is hard for capitalism to co-opt (just so inefficient.) And yet the good marketers are just talking about how to reach people in an honest way. But then I worry that tools may not be ethically neutral. Thoughts on that?]

RSS Readers
About RSS:
This is the clearest description I could find.
Which News reader? Lifehacker's top 5

Good web sites
Sarma
[It can be a bit tricky to find things, oddly. I’ve found stumbling around to be the way to go - just following curiosity (as in many things.) Here’s some that I’ve bookmarked:]
– Lepeki - The American Tradition
– Jeroen Peeters - Living together on Stage
– Lepeki: The body in difference
– Ramsay Burt - Undoing postmodern dance history
– Springdance conversations
– Other Matters
– Unfolding the Critical
– All of the Critics
[This lists the critics - if you click on the one you want, and then on “texts” you’ll get everything that’s on the site for that author. For example:]
All of Lepeki
All of Myriam van Imschoot
[The letters on dramaturgy are particularly good.]
– Sarma Links

B-chronicles
[I haven’t much all of this (recent find), but it looks exciting.]

ArtsJournal Daily

Artful Manager

Dance Theatre Workshop

Culturebot
[The blog of PS 122 – good links]

Dance-tech
[Just found thing today, but looks like an attempt at some of the things we were talking about]

All for now - please add in the comments

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"You all do a lot of talking"

I want to write more about this, but quickly and to put it out there.

At the last Thinking Out Loud (for Melanie Demars) we ended up talking about how and how much to articulate to an audience. The room was mostly people directly involved in art making with a few interested audience members.

And it was a good discussion, but something one the of "interested audience members" said has stuck with me - a woman who none of us knew, though suspected was a regular dance viewer, who hadn't said anything up to this point.

[an attempt at a close paraphrase]

"When I see shows, it feels like you all did a lot of talking to make the show, but then stop when I get there."

That seems rude. And a very clear articulation of of something that seems true and problematic.

As I said, I want to think and write more on this - comments and thoughts are welcome.

It will I think, come up in the panel I'm part of at the CDA
this weekend in Ottawa. Michael, Bonnie and I and I think both of the Kate's are going to be there. I'm looking forward to it, cracked rib (soccer) and all. Read Full Post...