Greetings to all, I'm Iris, dancer-choreographer, tribal background: ex- Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet, and diverse elsewheres; not technic-ally inter-active but otherwise yes...; I've been following your committed discussion with great interest for some six weeks, and need to thank you for much stimulation and inspiration. And for making it available, and the archives, and so on. Much has been said on this forum about irrelevance of / -----> thinking beyond dichotomies. Not surprisingly, I found most of the issues you've raised equally relevant 'whether or not' technology is employed; more precisely, every-day reality is way past whether or not, but at choosing how, where, which, and this for everybody. Making good and interesting choices ---------- jaaaa, that's the bit, isn't it? Dawn Stoppiello advised, chuck those insecurities, no need to justify. Robert Wechsler noted musicians' confidence. Could it be that various questions have more fundamentally to do with how danc e is recognized - or not - (as Douglas Rosenberg stated) - in our culture? If the focus of a discussion were on how we - dancers, artists with a dance background, today - perceive, practice, and argue what we do, might we find issues yet to be asked, even while old categories no longer fit an interdisciplinary reality? If I may venture on, reframing questions and further disregarding the lists' title denoting genre-specifics, tentatively speaking, there might be "dance-originated ways of making good and interesting choices"... some of which may have been inconspicuous until recently, 'falling through the grid' of definitions, and it would help us to evaluate and clarify on that. A charming irony of a coincidence just now, as I picked up my Thesaurus (book), it opened on the page of Quantity; while I had in mind writing about non-quantifyables. Say no more. (Of course 'it' didn't open by itself, but upon my physical interference. Example of choice via body?) There are so many 'things' which can't be said --------- although lived, danced, embodied, discovered, realized... --- and we know as dancers, artists, our bodies know, body-mind, organismic awareness etc.... all of which is (still?) difficult to argue in Western language, intellectual tradition and art theory; language itself implying / 'creating' objects, assuming superiority of the rational intellect over the 'biological body', or finding in 'object-producing art' a better subject. It seems to me these assumptions are still there - albeit somewhat hidden or in deconstruction - in many contemporary / anti-traditional / even 'body-interested' positions. The Nuba, so I've read (Leni Riefenstahl), have over a hundred words for sitting and squatting. Native North American languages 'lack' separate words for either art or religion - not that they lack the 'thing'. And in some Eastern cultures "the Body is what makes this 'stuff' alive!" (Richard Baker-roshi); a quadrangular surface is defined not by four points, but five. The fifth is actually the first, and - you guessed it - center, and guess who.... In contrast to other cultures, dance and the body were the considered anything but sacred during most of Western history. Science achieved liberation from the Church's authority by the deal of concerning itself with quantity and objectivity. These very notions of quantity and objectivity have been put in question, new scientific and philosophical questions continue to be raised, and with technological progress the pace of change continues to increase ----- Umphhhhhh---------, all this is a jitteringly daring manège of glissading jumps and leaving out so much I know I know--------but-I-can't-stop-now--just-gotta-do-this-try-take-it-further-risk- fall-catch-keep-going-yikes-wheeeere-oops-here-ahhh-and-on---------> -> -> ->................. ............as dancers we've long lived with/in silence and practiced our art and knowing that which we don't say because it can't be said is still at the core of what we have to say ----------- and yet perhaps now finding our language as a meta-language of Body motion including silence including sound including space touch & and and-ing this language's resources of describing knowing communicating extending relinking changing connecting shifting solving daring finding lacking nothing perhaps more precise in contacting realities more concise in organizing complexities than has been thought than has been said Recognizing our bodies' language our dancing-bodying-language as this advanced which perhaps just now our culture may be -coming ready to hear regards good continuation of the adventure -------------- however you're doing it------------------------- :-) IT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 03/28/01 CST