Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.53.0303101053100.23821@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Dancerun -
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 10:54:25 -0500 (EST)
Distance.dancerun.2 Concept/Choreography: Foofwa d'Imobilite Dancerunners: Franziska Koller, Anja Schmidt, Foofwa d'Imobilite Some music/text/image: Alan Sondheim {working notes and phenomenology on the piece, which appeared in two forms at the Kitchen in NY and will be on tour in Europe, a work which is difficult to visualize in spite of its relationship to dance and running, terpsichore and sport. in the latter, one might say that the spectator watches (in the sense of competition) the signifier left behind by the runner - the overall time of the event. in the former, the signifier is internal - what the body _does,_ not what it accomplish- es. or the means as opposed to the end - or the process as opposed to the state (x = time-constant) - perhaps operator/operation as opposed to stating/state. the _regard_ of the spectator at the dance or race. or an exercise-running or a competition. or the submerged competition among dances, companies, choreographers, dancers, and the overt competition among runners. or labanotations opposed to any-winning-articulations of whatever form. a work divided into two sections as well - exterior and interior, the former brought into the proscenium, spectator arena. what of a reversal - the audience along the route, mobile video carrying the interior section itself. do we need theaters? do we need theaters any more? the route is the flow of information, mitigated information and performance among the city, citying; the route is negotiated, dialog, dialectic. the interior part is institutionalized, financed, already an economy. within the interior, the audience-organs perform specific roles; the dancers are the lungs and feet - the dancers in this instance are the bodies of the audience, we want to run. neither dance nor running, but an alliance or allegiance with the air, the atmosphere, the spacing of the globe. they're a breath of fresh air, who let the air in, we're giving ourselves airs, the air's a bit thick in here, the air is the window of the soul. wavering among forms and among bodies poised for dance, competition, running, adulation, exhaustion, dying, rebirth, presentation, re-presentation - the event or eventing is a becoming, not of deconstruction or disinstitutionalization, but of a loosening of territories, not a territorialization or deterritorializa- tion, but an opening, which is also an opening, in these dark times, of _gladness._ it's this gladness which breathes of landscapes without viewers, of eyes without minds, of a natural world without tending, with tendency. a work shaking loose notions of _work,_ at the same time tending towards exhaustion - dancers taking breaks when necessary, covering and recovering similar grounds when unnecessary, always _untethering,_ from running, from dance, from dance-run, from run-dance, run-run and dance-dance, a broken cartesian skein. - then again, this prowess and opening towards gladness. How easy it would have been towards accolade! Carlyle's bowing figures in the early moment, pushed beyond their limits, arms in the air, breaking the ribbon at last! Such that England wins! ...drowned or ruined cities, submerged accolades, momentary stases, the coming recognitions, flooded sports arenas, flooded theaters, homes, palaces, bunkers, markets, cathedrals, the world gone upside-down... in which the body is found between function and form, or rather form into function which returns to form, or rather decathecting and looking (rather than watching, i.e. watching a dance or watching a sports event, we looked at this performance which keeps continuing, as if there's no end to the variations, nothing of imminent logic for example, nothing of teleology (rather than figures of violin, of tamboura or something slowly borrowed or roughly pulsing, of which this is a segment in which the body keeps continuing, or finding or found, or running or drowning, as if there's no end and nothing of it (muscle, not brawn submerged ===