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

[sonja lebos]

Thank you Johannes for the beautiful description of what is going on in London. Recently I was listening to an interview with George Steiner, who, in short, warned against people disability to keep an eye on the street, to feel other people and to note common gestures. Precarious times, and these certanly are, require that minimum of attention, especially at the beginning of the millenium when people have learnt to be so economical with their attention - '...because Life and History are two different names for the same thing: the movement that wrests us away from death, the becoming of affirmation' (Badiou).
It is always important to get some 'real' information (no matter reality not being enough), in distinction to most media tasteless infotainment.

The reason for excercising the politics of remembrance in a certain Spannungsfeld (tension field) with cultures of memory I again find in the writing of the same author: 'a singular bond exists between theatrics and politics'. 
Therefore, I am so looking forward to the live-stream Schechner Performance Studies on Ritual, Play and Performance. This could be an engaged exercise of that singular bond, a metaformance indeed where 'we are never exterior to that to which we relate' as Elisita put thoroughgoingly.
I thank you all

--- On Sun, 10/30/11, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

> From: Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] "(E)MOTION FREQUENCY deceleration: particle acceleration / intimations of soul
> To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Date: Sunday, October 30, 2011, 7:10 AM
> 
> 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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