[-empyre-] "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration" Week 4

[Sondra Fraleigh]

Dear soft-skinned all,

I hardly know where to begin, but perhaps this is a good thing. Thank you for your apt insights into art, technology, culture, and ethics. I know you will be expecting me to say something about Butoh and slow time. I don't know where this might fit into concerns for technology and perception, but I would like to share a link with you to a Youtube posting of mine - just for your interest - and to introduce myself. 

This is a video I made recently as a tribute to Ohno Kazuo-sensei, my hero. I wouldn't be dancing today without his example. I'm 72, and reminded that Ohno began his world tours at age 73. These went on for about 26 years. Talk about slowing time down. He has given me the courage to continue to dance and find new ways of doing this, well into my old age. Now I wonder, just why do we discard our old people? 

Age is metamorphosis, a word that has come to mean a lot to me, and which now guides my view of the dances I do inspired by butoh. I don't consider myself a butoh dancer or teacher, but I know I wouldn't be dancing or teaching as I do without my experiences and researches into this incredible art. I think of butoh as romantic, which may surprise many, but my view of romance is wide, certainly encompassing the darkness of butoh and Ohno's incredible hats. Also his ability to transform.

Most elders are scared to death of computers. I like them, as you will see in my video. I've done just about every part in the making of the film and also the music. I love technology of late, because it lets me use the Logic Music Application and my Audio Keyboard to make music. I'm amazed that I can just improvise - click on the instruments I want - arrange of course - scamper about the Help menu, and the score comes out all printed. When I studied orchestration, it took days to do what the computer can do in seconds. I don't want to go back, but I do think we need to take the critical stances concerning technology that so many of you are articulating. I'm concerned that our children will not be able to envision the future, as a unique feature of their humanity. Life will be now, now, now. What a flat meditation. The present is a valuable meditation, as it embodies the past and lets us brush against the future, what Heidegger called "the ecstasy of time." 

Music was my first love in the arts. I studied composition to the graduate level, finally with Lou Harrison, master of many Western and Asian instruments, friend of and critic of John Cage.  Seems that Asia keeps falling into my lap. I have many heros in music - especially the French Impressionists, which probably explains why I like the jazz improvisations of Dave Brubeck so much. He studied classical forms, and especially the French. Now there is another example of someone excelling in old age. Brubeck still plays in NY jazz clubs to standing room only in his 90s.

I should have a female hero too. Well I have: Simone de Beauvior. I enjoyed the empyre link to the study of existentialism, and noticed that the list there of the greats who invented existential philosophy (and thus phenomenology) is a list of men. How could they have missed the incomparable Simone? I'll have to write them about it when I get time. She is the hero of my book, Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion. Heidegger figures strongly also. I read Beauvoir when I was in my early twenties, and she changed the course of my life.

Here is the link to my home-made video. Somewhere in it you may find examples of deceleration, perhaps even in its many references to nature. I experience the nature of myself relative to natural and architected environments as they well up in me slowly. When I step outside my door, I feel invited to slow down, somehow to match my permeable, soft-skin to my desert home. The video shows my former home in Brockport NY, not a desert as you see. But winter slows me down, too. The footage was shot the year of Ohno's 100th birthday  2006. I had to leave my Butoh Tree behind when I left Brockport, like leaving a friend.

This short film is no big deal, I'm dancing barefoot in the snow at age 67, a feat (or feet) Ohno might have liked I think. Here it is, and thanks so much for all the wisdom and learning I'm garnering from these conversations:

http://youtu.be/Osq8ZUfGSLE

If you cant get it from this link, just go to Youtube and put in Sondra Fraleigh - all of my videos will come up. (I think).

Best to all, Sondra

On Oct 24, 2011, at 7:39 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote:

> dear all:
> 
> just having read Olu Taiwo's most eloquent defense of a politics and ethical awareness and position towards cultural deceleration, I feel humbled as we take stock at the beginning of this fourth week of the month-long
> open forum and workshop on "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration"  -   so many of you here offered your time and your thoughts to us, in a busy month, and this is not something we ought to take lightly, as it is always
> easy to be swept away by duties, commitments, sudden events, family matters, deadlines, health concerns, and care that may need to go elsewhere, not to quasi-blind discussion in a virtual space. 
> 
> we opened three weeks ago, from a physical lab, named "Choreolab," and one underlying physical practice in its configurement of "facilitation"  [which in Olu's spirit of his post I also take to mean "propagation of culture" and creativity]  – of  "Empathy, Trust & Openness" // Being in Relation with Oneself and Being Related to Each Other // Experts as Participants  — Participants as Experts // Research  with / through / of  Body & Mind //[Michael Weiss]–  one underlying practice was butoh, and I wish to return to butoh, and propose again other constellations in this coming week, with physicists and architects, without ever leaving our threads and the fascinating insights, and critiques, that you all have shared with us.  
> 
> butoh, if I may link it here with Olu's street arts workshop, excites me physically and intellectually, particularly as i cannot logically locate it in a predeterming "technology of perception" (Jaime), although i may be wrong, about its positioning on the periphery in Japanese culture.   Olu wrote:
> 
>>> On the one hand there are performers perceived to be on the periphery of society and performers perceived to be in the centre of the state designed architecture for the propagation of cultural values. Aspendos was and still is a place for professionals to perform; however, something of the street design still echoes in the structural ethos of its plan....""
> 
> Olu also spoke about playing (basketball) and the vagaries of injury to our bodies and ligaments  (echoing the findings that Scott Taylor had cited, regarding "Deceleration Mechanics: A Lost Art"), and  Olu's emphasis on meditation but also on ritual practice I find immensely inspiring if we take these forward into the trans-cultural performances and mixing rhythms, regarding a wide spectrum of cultural action and reflection.   Sonja made an initial foray into the "city" and urban rhythms and memories, and I hope this can be picked up by our discussants this week, and i also felt David Hughes had pointed us towards a potentially larger cosmic view,
> 
> 
>>> 
> “There was the big bang.
> The universe accelerated and expanded.
> Then it slowed down. Consolidated, condensed, contained. Expanding still.
> Then it started to accelerate again. Faster expansion.
> That's where we are now.”
> 
> Hmm well not so much even when full.
>>> 
> 
> 
> that I am going to ask Akram Khan to take up.  I am very anxious to introduce him and our special guests for this week, and will do so immediately in separate mail.
> 
> allow me to end with an image (Nilufer, Mine, greetings to you in earthquake shaken Turkey) that has rested under my eyelids, since the events of the tsunami in Japan last year.  It was sent to me by a butoh dancer, Biyo Kikuchi, who had come to London last year and taught a workshop alongside Olu Taiwo on what she and her teachers/her group in Tokyo call the "Artaud System." 
> 
> The picture shows persons dancing on a street, or being still on a street, or listening to "that lateral space down there" (Kazuo Ohno), that invisible realm beneath the feet.
> 
> 
> with best wishes
> Johannes Birringer
> 
> *photo credit:  
> Biyo Kikuchi and her friends in the performance "From Listening," May 2011 © Courtesy of the artist
> 
> 
> 
> 
> <Biyo_ From Listening 2011.JPEG>_______________________________________________
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