history can do funny things

How do we deal with our histories?
It's a very tricky question that I think a lot about these days.
What do we rebel against? What must we know in order to move on?
What influences do we accept, which do we deny?
And - and this might be the rub for me at the moment - when and why do we change our minds about the answers above?
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This comes up today as I look up Yvonne Rainer's "No Manifesto" and find this:

corpus: When you refer to your NO-manifesto from 1965, where you asked for a lot of clarification, do you think this need for clarification asks for hybridization after a while?

Rainer: The NO-manifesto is brought up over and over again. I wish it could be buried ... I came to it at the end of an essay about a particular work, "Parts of Some Sextets", which was a piece for ten people and twelve mattresses in 1965, I never meant for the manifesto to be prescriptive. Manifestos are meant to clear the air and challenge, and then their usefulness is over. I myself haven't abided by that manifesto, and I don't expect anyone else to, either. But it's always brought up, I don't know ... It's no longer useful - or maybe it is. Someone else should write a manifesto about what's going on now.

corpus: A young Danish choreographer, Mette Ingvartsen, wrote a YES-manifesto about two years ago.

on the rewriting there is also this:

Maybe to spectacle. Maybe to virtuosity. Maybe to transformations and magic and make believe. Maybe to glamour and transcendency of the star image. . . . Maybe to moving or being moved.
from Artforum

Which all made me go back to a discussion from 2004 about the same Rainer quote in which I replaced "no" with "not quite"

All of which makes me wonder about how to look back on our own histories...

I don't have answers (or maybe even complete thoughts) -
please feel free to comment Read Full Post...

3 points to dramaturgy defintition

From the description of Peter Stamer's Coaching Project at ImpulsTanz

On Dramaturgy And Other Artistic Practices

Dramaturgy deals with 3 main questions:
1. How does the artist transform his/her concept into practice?
2. What aesthetic strategies does the artist make use of in the art work?
3. How does the art work communicate to the audience?

I think that's a very solid reduction that I might steal.

Also very good, from Jeroen Peeters & Martin Nachbar's Coaching project description:

Physical dramaturgy seeks to explore and exhaust the realm of meaning triggered by moving bodies on stage: it insists on analysing one’s own practice and stimulating an awareness of the underpinnings and contexts of one’s work.

I like the articulation of "stimulating an awareness of the underpinnings" - this is something I think a lot about and often times feel is lacking in performance I watch in Toronto (probably other places too - but most I see things in Toronto.)

Thanks Ben for asking me to look at the ImPulsTanz site this year. 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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