When Ego is ego and art is art, part two

Well, here's the thing. Last night I also saw, or was subjected to, the very opposite of Requiem. I'm not going to go into detail about who, what or where, because though it was almost unbearably terrible, it was innocent, and I'm sure well-intentioned; and it was free, so what can you do. It was intended to be some kind of artistic "happening" that brought together musicians, dancers, poets, and performance artists. Sounds kinda cool, right? But oh... First a stunningly un-Native American poet came out and intoned a poem by a Sioux holy man while a taiko drummer waved his drum sticks importantly in the air. Then a musician came out and made random noises on a flute and moaned while two modern dancers tried to get inspired. Then a contact improv duo came out and did some random contact improv while the musician continued to emote. Then something remotely interesting happened. Three guys with homemade speakers on their backs. They were attached to each other by 15' aircraft cable, which they sawed at with cello bows. There were sound pickups attached the cables, so as they sawed it made bizarre electrified groans in various pitches. They could change the pitch by leaning and pulling on each other in different ways. I have no idea what it signified, but it was unique, and thus somewhat interesting, until the contact improv-ers started to contact improv in and around their cables, and it just got weird and kind of awkward. Then the drummer came back out, with a friend drummer and drummed for a really long time while the poor dancers tried to keep it up and find some sort of meaningful movement to go with the endless banging. Then everybody came out and did their things all at once in an immense cacophony while the poet did another poem by the Sioux holy man, and then the drum-guy, who sort of seemed to be in charge, went crazy and then made everybody stop. And at last it was over and we could go sit down and watch Requiem.

As I said it was innocent, and naive, and well-intentioned, and several of the performers were obviously fairly skilled, but it had no shape, no context, and no perceivable point beyond satisfying the artists need to make "art". And it begged several questions. First of all, it made me wonder what gives people the right to inflict their art on others. All we were told was that there was a pre-Requiem performance - we had no way to know what it was until we got there, and once there, we felt coerced by the situation to watch them and somehow show our approval for their desire to perform - the kind of "they're so brave, we have to support them" mentality. They weren't brave, they were self-indulgent. Is there a God-given right to present art, and does it go no farther than that we all have the right to express our idea of art and force the rest of us to watch? Maybe coercion is too strong a word - I suppose I could have just left and waited until it was over, but the social pressure to stand there and watch this trainwreck out of respect for the performers was overwhelming. But why? This performance was about nothing, and gave nothing to anybody but the performers. It's something I see far too often - people "being true" to themselves and their art, which really stands for rampart self-indulgence and public, yes, masturbation.

I don't suppose there's anything new about this, or anything to be done about it. It's a free country, after all, and there's no way that we could have artistic arbiters who could really determine what art should and should not be seen. That would be the worse kind of censorship. But maybe there is a place for considerate self-censorship. Ultimately, I guess it makes me want to urge all artists to keep asking themselves, Why am I doing this? And if the answer is more about how it makes you feel than what you are trying to give to others, think twice.

When I was at ASP, I often argued that I didn't really think the individual artists mattered as much as WHAT we made for our audience. I got into a boatload of trouble for that belief, often. It is distinctly un-warm and un-fuzzy, though I'm not saying that the people don't matter, not at all. Without people willing to do it, often for little tangible reward for all the time and energy, there wouldn't be any art. It's just that they serve the ART, not the other way round. I still believe it. It's what made Requiem so transcendent. I guess it makes me a bit of zealot, but it's what I think.

Oh, and the guys who played the crazy cable/speaker three-man walking instrument thingy: These guys: They were pretty cool so I don't mind blowing their cover.

When Ego is ego and art is art, part one

First off, let me just say that Nicole Pierce's Requiem is absolutely brilliant. One of the most enthralling and thrilling dance pieces I have seen in a long time. Nicole is an old friend who has danced with Kelli on several occasions, and I have always liked her quirky movement style, which often marries balletic elegance with an unexpected sort of robot-Barbie kind of vocabulary that is human, kinda comic, and kinda tragic at the same time. And Requiem takes it all to another level. First, it is set to the ravishing music of Mozart's masterwork of the same name, and just sitting the soul-drenching of beauty of that music is really all you need for a rich artistic experience; but you add to that the four living walls of projected trees that slowly morph from summer to fall to dead of winter, surrounding the space, and you get something memorable; then you add dance that is passionate, intelligent, intricate and deeply human - that seems to find all that is noble in the female passage from life into death, performed by masterful dancers giving every ounce of their talent and commitment - and you get something truly unforgettable. You're sorry you missed it.

But bizarrely, that's not really what I want to talk about. Because I had another experience tonight that was so far in another, fascinatingly awful direction, that I can almost think of nothing else. But in deference to Nicole, and what she deserves, I will stop here and continue tomorrow. Let's savor how exhilarating beautiful live performance can be, and leave it at that for the moment. Brava Nicole Pierce.

Mind's Eye

I was listening to NPR's Science Friday today and this caught my attention. It's all about perception. There's a part of me that's just a science geek that loves this sort of thing. But there's always a piece of me that thinks about perception from the artist's point of view. How do we perceive, and what does the way we perceive have to do with how we make our art? The part of me that's the science geek doesn't really care if there is an answer to the question, and the artist part of me doesn't care if there's an answer either, as long as there is a question.

It's really interesting that for weird formatting reasons, the text above came out like that. I love it, in reference to the whole subject of this post, which is perception. Here is what it says: I was listening to NPR's Science Friday today and this caught my attention. It's all about perception. There's a part of me that's just a science geek that loves this sort of thing. But there's always a piece of me that thinks about perception from the artist's point of view. How do we perceive, and what does the way we perceive have to do with how we make our art? The part of me that's the science geek doesn't really care if there is an answer to the question, and the artist part of me doesn't care if there's an answer either, as long as there is a question. But check out the video. It's interesting that in order to hold onto a manageable perception of our environment, our minds only focus on a tiny portion of that environment, but make us believe that we still experiencing the whole thing.

I couldn't figure out how to embed the video in this blog, so you have to follow the link below. Enjoy.

Priming The Mind's Eye

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French philosopher Henri Bergson has a famous quote: "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." Bergson probably meant it metaphorically, but it seems to be literally true according to research by psychologist Martin Rolfs and colleagues. Rolfs studies the role of rapid eye movements in visual perception. shot, produced by flora lichtman, additional imagery prelinger archives, martin rolfs. french man: david zax.

Digital Theatre

My good friend Don Tirabassi showed me this site this afternoon. It's called Digital Theatre, and they sell HD recordings of major British theatrical performances on the internet. My question is, Is this good for the theatre? My second question is, Is there any doubt that this is the future?

Silver Jubilee

I had a post here about something that happened, or rather didn't happen, to me recently, but I have removed it as not being in a spirit I would like to embody. Onward and...well onward, anyway.

Bill T. again for me

I've become something of a cynic in my old age. I've been kicked around by the arts enough to be pretty suspicious of artists waxing rhapsodic about their divine gifts to mankind and how much they suffer and how important their work is. I have seen a lot of plain selfishness disguised as artistic intensity (I've a got whole post ready for that as soon as I can figure out how to get a bit of video onto this thing). But Bill T. Jones strikes a chord with me. For those who remember, my blog is named after something he said in an interview with Anne Bogart at the TCG conference a couple of years back. He's arrogant, self-absorbed and sometimes provocative for the sake of being provocative, but there's something rarefied about his artistic commitment that actually gets me believing again.

He was on "On Point" this morning, and this one caller's recollection and his response got me teary and nodding with a sense of real artistic purpose. Listen up:

You can here the whole Podcast here.

Thanks Bill, and Tom, and Marisa.

Separated at birth

I knew I'd seen him somewhere before...

Jungle of Cities

I was reading an article from the New Yorker yesterday - it's the January 10th edition, if you're keeping score - an only moderately interesting article about this woman promoting Freudian psychoanalysis in China. I can't pretend that I was following the article very closely, but suddenly something arrested my attention. It said, "afterward, he invited me to his home in Beijing, near Tiantonyuan, a cluster of pale, pointy high-rises which is famous for being the largest housing compound in China (it has four hundred thousand residents)." FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND. In a housing project. Can you imagine? A single development almost the size of Boston?

The world is a big, crazy place.

Underworld

So I dreamt last night that I had died and gone to hell. It wasn't too bad though. Hell seemed to be a large old school, like a high school or college building, where I sat in a class taught by a wise old woman. I don't know what the class was about, but it might have been philosophy - because this woman's lecture was more of sermon on personal truth and excellence.

It turned out, too that it was possible to escape from hell. Down the hall from the classroom was a huge room, the end of which just stopped in darkness at an impossible precipice. A black pit yawned before me, and another student told me that if I jumped into the darkness I could escape. He jumped and vanished. I deliberated for a time, worried that jumping off the cliff could just as easily lead to my annihilation, but eventually I gathered my courage and leapt into the void.

When I was a child I used to have a recurring falling nightmare. I would be holding my mother's hand and looking up at an ominous brick building. Suddenly I would be standing at the top of the building looking down at her. Then I would fall off the building. The fall was sickening and terrifying, but just before I would hit the ground I would find myself back at the top of the building, my mother still out of reach below. Then I would fall and be up again, fall and be up, over and over again until I awoke in a cold sweat.

In this dream, however, the fall was not unpleasant. It was a controlled fall, through darkness, without any sensation but gradual descent.

I landed to discover, much to my surprise, that the exit from hell was a small luncheonette. It was busy with customers, most of them young college students, much like my fellow schoolmates in hell. I walked through the restaurant out onto the sunny street. That was it. Then I woke up.

This dream reminded of why I sometimes wish I could be a novelist. I have this idea for novel, called "Odysseus in America". In it, Odysseus, the master tactician and innovator, contrives to escape from Hades and finds himself in California, from whence he makes his way across the U.S. on a second odyssey, avoiding the old gods who want to return him to the underworld, to try to get across the sea to Ithaca to find his beloved Penelope. I think it could be great story, but I'm just not a novelist. I have ideas, but the thought of putting them down on several hundred pages just makes me tired.

The Left Hand of Darkness

So, over the past several years, I've been experiencing a curious phenomenon. It seems to have some kind of karmic significance, though what it might be I can't say. Over the past few years, I have purchased a number of very nice, high quality, warm, flexible gloves. And after a few months, invariably, I lose one. Now this is not so unusual. But it is curious, that there is a unique pattern to my glove loss. See if you can figure it out:

Yes, you guess it: I only every lose the right glove. What could it mean? Is it that, as a left, liberal minded person, I must lose the right, conservative covering? Or do I lost the right, leaving the wrong, and so am not able to choose the "right" path?

Well, last night, going out with Bridget and Chris to see the Whistler in the Dark production of "The Europeans" and celebrate Bridget's birthday, sure enough I lost one of the lovely and expensive gloves Kelli had got me for Christmas. And which glove was it? Yes, it was the right glove - or the correct glove, depending on how you view this.

But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I found the glove, outside on my front walkway, where it had dropped out of my pocket as I ran to the car. So I didn't lose the right glove. But what did I find?