Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0604112315160.15448@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: performance text april 11, tyler school of art
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 23:15:50 -0400 (EDT)
performance text april 11, tyler school of art dancer twists him in her mirror, choreography master. meanwhile the empire procures the violence of perfect movement. "hello hello!" can you hear me? the way I usually proceed is this: there are images moving on the screen / there is sound from this unit - as people come in. there are typing errors which are part of the piece. i keep more or less silent during the performance and then open up the room later to discussion - these pieces are influenced by dance / by the current political situation in the hart of empire / by sexuality / by broken language / broken english / there are sounds everywhere around us that like birds tend to ignore what humans are doing, with the birds of course there are vulnerabilities, withe atmosphere, none at all, lightning in a distance on the other side of the globe produces many of these sounds, those of you familiar with very low frequency radio will understand this material immediately, no matter how much I tend to disguise it. the woman moves in relation to the antenna and modifies the antenna such-and-such. the strings of the instrument couple as well with the antenna. you're hearing radio waves directly, no microphone, we work that way in relation to the planet, to the foundation of the world. the foundation of the world lies in dance, not through ritual or repetition, but simply through the presence of the body in movement which seems to need nothing else for its success. understand this about the dance: what is repeated,at the end of the day, begins to fall apart, hopelessly, the body finally giving out. torn apart, dissembled towards a politics of culture that produced these torn fragments of skin and bone in the midst of the machinic, these are production of the machinic, these are desires flattened finally into the screen-product. ok, i'm not making much sense. think of abu gharayb, perhaps that might help, the dissembling of broken bodies, the fury of war, slaughter , minor elements which are past the point of any return, chaotic debris which can't reassemble into humans or any semblence thereof - here for example a twist which re/produces itself, falls apart, dissembles, tries for reapplication, loses itself, no such reconstitution, what is on the LEFT is further torn by the RIGHT. until an EXPLOSION back into culture - i.e. into cultural DEBRIS - what we retain - those elements of (sexual among other moments) desire that implant themselves on dance - so that the machine has a certain rhythm characterized by the presence of DIPPING DOLPHINS at times the atmosphere is thick - you can hear it now - the 60 cycle hum that comes from the power grid - THIS power grid - the one in this room - which you can tap into - in a sense perhaps of absolute despair or catastrophe - this story is true by the way, the woman has disappeared - now you will hear HEAR the PRESENCE of a body in the midst of RADIO RADIO - Foofwa d'Imobilite (Geneva) dancing w/ VLF radio antenna - the room alive with power grid ECSTATIC ELECTRICAL FURY AND RESONANCE CONNECTIVITIES - yes yes yes it's true - a second performer on the scene - more wires/ more electrical inteference - more antenna couplings - the consumption of what ordinarily passes FOR GRANTED or silence - just try to listen to the stars when there are people around, nothing doing! between the electrical and the body falls the terror - not that of the whimper of Eliot but that of the Wolf (although personally I love wolves) - the background is the WTC footprint in NYC a few years ago - I'm using up my material too fast... i'm using up my best material... i'll have nothing to give you ... nothing remaining, im spent - well i fooled myself... i'm 73 and still have a few tricks up my sleeve... i left the walker back in the car... someone will have to help me get up later... used to be a dancer like merce cunningham he's still choreographing in his 80s moved until just a few years ago it's the body of the dancer - the body of the dancer that history plays out upon/against - injuries which appear in everyday behavior, but disappear during performance, injuries of the imaginary -if you close your eyes you can actually believe this is a musical - at night i dream and recently had a dream in which leslie thornton sitting somewhere here, anyway she said that my work has no history, that it has nothing to do with history, and i realized, this is true, it's doing nothing but riding and writing form, it's shape-riding, it's in other spaces altogether, btw this will continue until i stop it - it's not true that one 'learns from history' - that history absolves one somehow of making mistakes - history should be abolished - let it take all those religions along with it - nothing will be lost but we might survive, perhaps enough to write the history of the future - so these works, well they're flat, they're just here, now, i might throww them out in a while (files), put them up on the net, lose them in the 500 or so disks I have storing these things - in the dance itself there's an image of a woman with her legs spread - the boy is screaming, screaming... - it's all the result of oil - well you get the idea - george bush drives the oil which configures the broken body which leasd to the screaming boy which finally devolves into the crashing airplane carrying the HEAD of the HEAD OF STATE which might be GEORGE'S BUSH - meanwhile back home, useless home movies, back into the dance or medium of the dance again - you'll thank me later - this is in the midst of the narrative where an 'impasse' occurs - that is, whatever bodies are on the screen bode somewhere else - the screaming is done with as is the crashing plane so enough of that - maud was dancing solo, there was no one around, nothing was going on in the auditorium. she was just there, as if she were inside herself, in her own private space, a room of her own, the rest of the dancers having left for the day, or leaving the space for her imagination, what a ballet-moment for one of the premiere dancers in switzerland, just there, internalized, against or upon the screen -meanwhile on another continent, i asked azure to dance, not against the screen, but within it, moving herself into that imaginary signifier which takes bodies, makes them whole again, meanwhile in another continent, other moves perfected, swirled, against filibert's momentum, there are difficult times and difficult dance, these are - now comes the difficult time,the point of all of this. let's see where we are. the screen is absollutely flat but screaming at the sight of the body or the site of the body. nothing else exists within the imaginary, i mean this is all debris, three-dimensional assembled debris, which returns us to Abu Gharayb, those photographs which were equally debris, oh why seargeant couldn't you have destroyed these LALALA? instead, we're faced over and over again by the sex of war which is always already an imposition - against which each and every image i have ever created is disposed/of - deposed - This was a dream I had. Something gave birth and something collapsed against itself. What gave birth eliminated or annihlated the mother. What gave birth showed in lamps showed in avatars while the real continued to disappear. I'm watching all of this, see, this viral display, something "coming up" as if uncalled for - ah, i can see you're restless, there's not much more to go, don't worry, perhaps four more minutes, these figures which are formed from torn and disheveled motion capture equipment, the body resymmetrized, dissolved, divided, the figures as if "hood ornament" for the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach California... - yes and to return to the electrical, you're listening to the wifi connections around washington square park in New York City, you can't get away from the grid easily, it's only to go away that you can finally here, what? hear the sound of the stars themselves, what you can hear in just a moment just a minute, hold on, the body's finally going, finally disappearing, just the planes are left, this is the dawn chorus, recorded at 4:am in the morning in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania with a VLF radio and antenna, you're hearing the sun thank you -