I am in a rehearsal. I take a position as a maker. I tell people what to do. People

I sometimes wonder if it was me who wrote it… but I’m not really sure

I feel like I’m back at the beginning.I’m not so excited about theaterdancepieces, it’s not very easy to name theaterdanceartists that I am really excited about, or theaterdancepieces that I remember… or yes? most of the time is more about friends and artists I know closely, to whose work I have a closeness that I don’t have to other well known artists, legitimated artists…I remember when I started studying dance and assisting a choreographer, participating in rehearsals and giving opinions on what I saw before having ever seen a dance piece, at that time I was so much more excited about processess than about pieces. And now I feel a bit like that again. This last couple of weeks I tried to go and see some performances, but my motivation is not completely there. I find it easier to stay at home and watch a movie, write and read things on the internet (which in my life is also overpowering books at the moment), etc… I am more excited about rehearsals than about performances. And of course, the workshop with Nora, and reading her writings and a bit of discussion with her, and trying to look at things in a somehow more global way (is that a good way to put it? to include a lot more things and environments and people and events in the idea of a dancetheaterpiece), all of this is also bringing my focus more on the process.The scary thing, then, is if it can stay communicative, if it can be shared with more people than just the researchersperformers. In that sense, the blog strategy seems great. I’m very excited about it and looking forward to start using it, both in this process and in others… Why do a performance then? This doesn’t have to have a solutionanswer, anyways… Maybe the experience of the performance is worth it if it can trigger energy, if it can inspire, o sea, if people that go to a performance leave the performance with a libido for something: writing, doing, shouting, moving, making love… sorry if this is getting too cheesy. 

On my way back home I took some pictures in the Vondelpark; I couldn’t stop complaining about the dutch weather and the fact that it was already dark at 17 hs.

I was in New York City and now i am in Western Massachusetts. i will be in Amsterdam soon. I am busy with the problem of self and the external:  is the external is self. i do not inhabit new places, new cities, new york city. I am inhabited by them. my internal space is changed when i move around.

“the object is not reducible to itself, which means it does not ‘have’ an ‘itself’ that is apart from its contact with others. The actions performed on the object (as well as with the object) shape the object. The object in turn affects what we do.”

I am reading this and I am thinking about the body -  the body as an object. How useful can it be to consider the body as an object? I don’t mean to deny the person-ness of a body, I do feel it to be important to see the subjectivity of a body. Is that where movement lies? Is movement its subjectivity?

I would like to refer to Foucoult whose name i can’t spell and with the disclaimer that i know very little about the guy’s ideas and i hope that this is ok. I am not about to go reading books by the dude at this point because a) i don’t feel like it b) it would be dangerous for my physical practise and the work i am making and c) at this point i don’t really care what he says I am trying to figure out what is useful for me and what my own questions and interests are. so there. And  because I think that there is some line of investigation into the readerly and writerly capabilities of the body in his writing. The idea that power is inscribed onto the body. But is power tangible – something to be given or taken? What if we think of power as a process, in evershifting relationships – something we talked about at PAF. ?
<But she does not know what she smells here. It is confusing her. She turns to another memory>

‘The Performance of tHe SElf in Everyday life.’ I only read a bit of that book – but what of the idea that we only ever perform our ‘selves’. There is no authentic self. Or perhaps there is a self  but it is not separate to, in a vacuum, in isolation from its relationships to others, to the external, and that it appears differently depending on its orientation and the orientations which approach it/ tend towards it/ / ?

< This brings me to the question of authenticity (ouch) which i am gonna post a bit later with guest appearances from Lea and a bunch of books on authentic movement (ouch) which i happen to have found in the bookshelf of Velvet’s mother’s house, a condo on a hill in the countryside of Western Mass. – ! >

But for now to continue with the ideas of spaces and how they ‘extend’ the body…
Background quotes:

“The nearness of some objects, their availability within my bodily horizon is not casual – i do not just find them there. “rather, the nearness of such objects is a sign of an orientation I have already taken towards the world as an orientation that shapes what we call, inadequately, “character”….Bodies tend towards some objects more than others given their tendencies. These tendencies are are not originary but instead are the effects of the repetition of the “tending toward.” – …. bodies come to ‘have’ certain orientations over time and they come to be shaped by taking some directions rather than others and towards some objects rather than others.”

The field of what this or that body does do, also defines a field of inaction, of actions that are possible but they are not taken up, or even actions that are not possible because of what has been taken up. Such histories of action or “take up” shape the bodily horizon  of bodies. Spaces are not only inhabited by bodies that ‘do things’, but what bodies ‘do’ leads them to inhabit some spaces more than others. If spaces extend bodies, the we could say that spaces also extend the shape of the bodies that ‘tend; to inhabit them. “What bodies ‘do’ leads them to inhabit some spaces more than others.”

Sara Ahmed asserts that phenomenology exposes the “sedimentation” of history in the repetition of bodily action… and so “what bodies “tend to do” are effects of histories rather than being originary.

So /. BUT.  Can we short-circuit this ‘sedimentation’ ? Is this what happens when the body is challenged by external demands, when it is trying to extend itself, it is becoming, or instead of being it is becoming something else, a moving toward something? This seems related to how I have been trying to work physically (thanks to advice from Katarina) – — — the intensity of being and the necessity of becoming more. i am not just simply happening. The possibilities which open up when demands are placed, when the body is in conflict, when the body is extending itself. The new directions that open up as a deviation from the path of standard orientation occurs, when we take different facings, when we tend towards different bodily inhabitations.

i am not suggesting to find an answer or even that any of this is very clever, just that I’m desperately trying to relate my readings/ theory with the physical practise and experience that I am having when I work. Of course there is a difference between moving for therapy/abandon/pleasure/release… and the (also satisfying) demands of working physically with constructed challenges – this alone makes it tend toward art not therapy. I do not expect there to be a difference between theory and practice.

so, thanks you for reading if you got this far. be a slut with your thoughts! i will provide coffee… xn