Program Notes for Bloodletting and Other Pleasant Things

A Quick Note on Notes
As an audience member, I have a complicated relationship with program notes.

I want to like them. But sometimes it’s hard. I want them to tell me some things but not others – to open doors, but allow for the space of personal interpretation that I so treasure in contemporary art. I want some context for the work I’m about to see or just saw (sometimes I like to leave the reading until after), some sense of how we all arrived here and maybe some things to think about in relation to my experience.

These notes are curiosities that have been brought up through working with Tony, Bonnie and the performers on Bloodletting and Other Pleasant Things.

I hope that these notes might be useful to you – but please, don’t feel obligated. You are more than qualified to write your own.

Any thoughts on the notes or the work are more than welcome – jacob@dancemakers.org
I hope you enjoy your evening.
– Jacob

Bloodletting and Other Pleasant Things
Tony told me he had questions about anger, about how it was expressed and where it came from. I also had questions about it. Or rather assumptions. A bias, not about feeling anger, but certainly against many ways of expressing it. Questions about how anger is contagious, about where it comes from and whether it was an aggressive cover for other, less sure, less absolute, emotions.

As is usually the case, working on a performance has changed my questions. Not answered, but shifted, complicated and challenged them.

Common Expression
Right now, there are two common expressions of anger that stand out for me.

The first is that anger (and other emotions) are experienced as living things inside of us, specifically as seeds. “Plant a seed of anger” “seeds of doubt” and so on. That emotions, especially the less pleasant ones, are present but small, ready for the conditions to arise. They are sowed, planted, they are watered, grown and harvested.

What strikes me about this metaphor is the way it deals with the even more common notions that anger and aggression is “just human nature” and “we all have a dark side.”

This idea (and most that begin with “we all”) has always been a bit of a problem for me. Often used to justify bad behavior or the continuation of ways of life and policies that need changing, “human nature” is so often used as a free pass. When something is turned into a universal truth we can’t make change.

The seed story complicates that universalism some. It acknowledges potential, but also the impact of external conditions, of conscious and therefore changeable decisions and choices made by the individual and those around her.

The second is that the language we use for anger is so often visceral, painful, and well, about the body.
Our blood boils, we are wracked, pulled apart, torn up, tortured by anger.
We froth, are rabid, we see red. We writhe in anger, we lash out, we are twisted up. We are blinded by and explode in anger.

Anger and its common expressions change our bodies. It is unrefined and not quite in our control. Anger grips us and consumes us. We are not ourselves.

Anger is not alone in this – guilt also wracks, love blinds and lust may boil the blood. These extreme and less public emotions are expressed in our bodies – overwhelming normal filters of control. They are shared with the more intimate of our relations in intimate settings (as I write this I acknowledge I have a very cliché WASP-y Canadian understanding of the expression of emotion.)

There are, though, public releases - sports (both the watching and the doing,) roller coaster rides and haunted houses, dancing all night – places and times where extreme expression is permitted, even encouraged.

And art too – art has for a long time and in many different ways been a place and time where extremes of all sorts are explored, acted out and witnessed. It has served as a possible bloodletting: a release so that something else might rush in.