[-empyre-] swarms, task envelopes, trajectories and displacements...

[Norah Zuniga Shaw]

Great to have Johannes and Laura taking the reins this week and thank you
again for including me in this conversation. I owe some of the contributors
a response to their very good questions and have not gotten to them yet
because of an up tick in teaching responsibilities and the delightful
arrival of Dana Caspersen in our mix as a guest teacher this week. Thank you
Johannes for this lovely threading together of many departure points in the
conversation thus far. Allow me to add a few words from Dana that I think
also thread together many of the themes that have come up in our critical
motions:
 
Excerpted from walker arts blog titled: Performing Arts » Methodologies:
Bill Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt by Dana Caspersen
 
The work we do takes place on many levels, but always comes back to the
undeniable fact of the body: its capacity for oceanic depth and complexity,
its simple pressure against the air, the intricate nature of its thought,
its states of oracular, dreamlike possession.
 
ŠBill dances with extraordinary vision, his body releases into time in fine,
detailed increments; magnificent, rhythmical waves of complex, shearing
form. In his dancers, he looks for the ability to coordinate in highly
complex ways, creating folding relational chains of impetus and residual
response, using isolation and extreme articulation of head, neck, hips,
torso and limbsŠThese initiations and reactions within the body are
simultaneous and inextricably linked. The body is a continuum, like a body
of water; all parts are continuously alive to the others. I notice that the
biggest challenges for dancers seem to be maintaining the authenticity of
this full body integration, maintaining and traveling large forms,
understanding the complex internal relationships that inform the movement.
 
ŠThroughout the years, Bill and the company have been developing an
extensive group of procedures that we use constantly in choreographing and
improvising. These procedures should be regarded as tools for the playful
mind, not laws or some kind of choreographic machinery. The dancer¹s [Norah:
and here I could insert the ³user¹s² in relationship to our site] own
curious mind is the most important thing. I find these procedures, and
Bill¹s methodologies in general, useful in that they tend to promote an
inventive curiosity.
 
ŠBill¹s dancing is co-ordinatively extremely complex and at the same time
completely organic. The key to understanding how to dance his choreography
lies in figuring out which points on his body are initiating movement and
which are responding to the initiation. This inner response, which we call
residual movement, is refraction, like light bouncing between surfaces.
 
ŠWhat I have learned from Bill is to direct myself to be equally curious
about failure and success; to try to move continuously back into the work,
and not anticipate the outcome. As I was trying to find a good way to
describe Bill¹s work, I came across a quote from the 17th century Japanese
Zen master, Takasui, who taught: ³ You must doubt deeply, again and again,
asking yourself what the subject of hearing could be.²
 






On 5/18/09 10:53 AM, "Johannes Birringer" <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
wrote:

> dear all:
> 
> 
> thanks to our moderators for their generous invitation to participate.
> 
> If it's all right, I won't wish to speak about my own work at the minute, but
> wait a bit, 
> there is still time & space needed for response to what was said earlier,
> and what Laura Cull has now set in motion.
> 
> 
> 
>>> 
> Indifference is necessary for an
> erasure of agency at the critical moment that allows a coupling.
> This  coupling can result in Chimeric Flesh.
> 
> We are fascinated by the diverse locomotion of living things, of the
> flocking behavior of birds and the swarming behavior of insects
>>> [ Stelarc] 
> 
> 
> 
>>> 
> In december of 2008 i did a 365 hour performance in mixed reality called
> Becoming Dragon, in which i used a motion capture system and wore a hear
> mounted display so that i could be immersed in Second Life for the entire
> duration.....one of the main explorations was to see
> if one could learn the new movement required for a new identity using
> virtual worlds...
> 
> In this way, I find the notion of indifference to movement difficult, as
> in my experience movement is always closely tied to desire and affect. In
> fact, considering the practice of Theater of the Oppressed, and the
> trajectories of feminism and cyberfeminism, it seems that learning not to
> be indifferent to movement is critical, learning to listen to the body. In
> my experience as a transgender person, it has taken me years of work to
> learn to allow my own desires to exist and that has come through listening
> to myself and exploring my own body and movement and desires and affect.
>>>  [Micha Cardénas]
> 
> 
> so i want to extend greetings to the borderlands hacklab, and all the
> swarms. 
> 
> it was  pointed out to us  [by Reggie Cortez Woolery] that mobs are not
> auto-poietic
> but can be used to do another body's bidding, inflicting violence upon real
> people.
> 
> perhaps the dialectical positions (<<above>>) could be addressed, to get a
> stronger
> grip on the political assumptions underlying the notion of task envelopes.  It
> would
> also perhaps be fruitful to think about the collaborative practices addressed,
> both artistically and academically/discursively (research practices), in their
> relations to soloism and the position of solo user (say, someone visiting the
> data
> base interface of Synchronous Objects), and the conceptual position of
> imploded singularities.
> 
> 
> for Dragon, i found i small haiku, written by the Japanese poet Basho:
> 
> 
> 
> Furu ike ya!
> Kawazu tobikomu
> Mizu no oto
> 
> 
> The old pond
> A frog jumps in
> The sound of water
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
> 
> with regards
> Johannes Birringer
> Dap-Lab/dans sans joux
> www.danssansjoux.org
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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