[-empyre-] "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration: particle acceleration / intimations of soul

[Johannes Birringer]

although not explicitly discussed, intimations of soul and spirituality, amongst the cultural and political analyses brought forth this month,
reverberated for me, and one should not miss that link (established from the beginning in Michael Weiss's posts on 'Choreolab' and butoh, and 
now intensified by Sondra's post on dancing and pain) to the possible interweavings of artistic and spiritual missions – and the
mobilizations of spirit and resistance –  that I clearly sensed in Olu Taiwo's statements, but also in some of the other postings here.


Sondra writes:
>>
We all carry the pain and joy of living, hopefully more of the joy....What if we could allow our pain to morph and move as we dance, or to transform in any other act of theater (or life)? 
[...]
..slowing down the motion is key to noticing the blocked places and spaces in full body consciousness. Using human touch with listening and waiting is helpful in excavating pain. Butoh has many speeds, but its great contribution to the field of dance and theater is its slowing down of movement, as well as its places of stillness and waiting. Consciousness is part of this, and realizations of self in a cybernetic whole...
>>


Michael just posted a beautiful response to this, referring to the "teaching" or the insights of butoh (not wanting to call this a technique in the sense Branden implied or I had suggested ironically when referring to method acting/acting method), so I will only add a comment from a different context, a more politically articulated spiritualism perhaps, that I parsed in the writings of women artists/scholars probing mobilization and demobilization (in dance, movement, choreographies, training, un-training, dancing and un-dancing), especially in relation to ideologies of training and thus re-configurations of body-in-movement (or "human factors"):

Ananya Chatterjea states that in her understanding,  the work of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (and that of Chandralekha, both core to her studies) is as calling on spirits and that calling is done through a very complex mix and hybridity of techniques; 'steeped in the cultural specificity of black life, questions about meaning and search, and a deeply spiritual quest, emerge with particular clarity and poignancy, resymbolizing the avant-garde structuring of her piece..... I therefore return to the notions of defiant hope, of resistive operative structures and forms, of holistic spiritual sensual journeys that characterize the creative work of artists like  Zollar and Chandralekha. in particular, I want to point out how these support, in tandem, an integrated commitment to life with full awareness of and in total resistance to , negativity -  a vital marker  of the radical edge in their art."*


What do make of this political spiritualism, and the possibility of "movement resistance"?**

While Ou would surely applaud the commitment to a transcultural process of deceleration that can be cognizant of "the many speeds"  (and studies are now coming out on hip hop culture and reggaetón in Havana/Cuba, or on reggae rhythm cultures for example explored in Julian Henriques' new book "Sonic Bodies"  -- http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/4257/1/HenriquesSonicBodiesIntro.pdf) that may be/live in our physical journals,  I gather that Jaime del Val would
oppose any assumptions of a holism that claims access to essential intuitions or knowledges.  Following Scott Taylor's post on the end of culture and the decay of ethics,  Jaime's transhumanism is (or is not?) based in the kind of negativity or negative dialectics that Chatterjea precisely wishes to circumvent (and this has been echoed here by Sondra, Michael, and Elisita).  

We look forward to Branden's cockpit interface,  and Sonja – i trust –  will take us also back to her politics of memory?


with regards
Johannes Birringer



Reference
*
"Chatterjea, Ananya, "Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreography through works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha," Middletown; Wesleyan University Press, 2004, p. 72.

**
Boyan Manchev, „Der Widerstand des Tanzes. Gegen die Verwandlung des Körpers, der Wahrnehmung und der Gefühle zu Waren in einem perversen Kapitalismus“, corpus. Magazin für Tanz, Choreografie, Performance. www.corpusweb.net, 11.8.2010
___ La résistance de la danse, Mouvement, numéro 47 (http://www.mouvement.net/ressources-204746-resistance-de-la-danse)

***Dance and Resistance:  http://www.laculture.info/index.php/International-conference-%22Dance-&-resistance%22/2422/

****Julian F Henriques,  Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing," London: Continuum, 2011. 



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