hello all:
I want to add some suggestions for the discussion we had.
1. I recently argued, concerning our "movement", that <<we produce
hybrid multimedia work which in many ways may be movement-based or
-derived. But we are n o t a minor subgenre of dance>>, and Kent
replied
that
<<If we find ourselves at the "dance" end of the spectrum, we invite
dance critics and a dance audience and hope to educate them about the
criteria by which new media are integrated with the dancing. If,
however, we see ourselves as moving towards hybrid forms, we should
probably not invite "dance" or "music" or "visual art" critics and
instead begin to identify critics who are interested in the development
and aesthetics of hybrid forms. >>
The spectrum is fine with me, of course, but my point was that media
and technologies are not new, and that we are not moving towards hybrid
forms but that those have been around all over the last century; we
addressed the issue of the Judson Church, and I responded to Doug's
brief history lesson, and want to recapture something he pointed out,
which is important (and relates to Sally Banes's book on Greenwich
Village 1963 and her chapter on "The Reinvention of Community") --
<<The Judson Group ... was in the beginning mostly concerned with the
discourse surrounding their practice, the talking that occurred every
Monday night followed by the showing of work by a small group of people
without
an outside audience. When audiences were ultimately invited the work
was
recontextualized and the Judson Group very shortly dissolved.
Sorry for the history lesson, but if we are to as Dawn asks, be
considered as any kind of movement, I hope we can be an informed one and
one that honors our artistic parents. >>
I want to add here that Jill Johnston, who was the Village Voice dance
critic at the time, fervently entered these discourses and wrote about
and supported the Judson experiments; the Judson dancers and artists
were all connected socially to visual artists, filmmakers, musicians,
and writers, and Banes mentions that the Judson Theater became "a
metacommunity of sorts where the different communities revolving around
single arts disciplines coalesced and where interdisciplinary
imagination flourished" (p. 73).
2. We do not have a localized Judson Church of the 90s or 00s, and I am
not sure whether the internet helps us (as we produce discourse which we
may also see published elsewhere) to form a metacommunity/network of
sorts that reinvents a community of performance collaboration at the
intersections of media, art, technology, science..... or maybe this is
precisely what we are doing, and dance plays a strong role in the
evolution of digital performance technologies or vice versa, and plays a
role in the formation of discourse.
3. We did also ask about the [critical value of] works that have been
produced and that have been reviewed..........
and Doug insisted:
>>If one trains as a dancer, "choreographs" and presents one's work in venues that are contextualized as dance and in short relies on the vernacular of dance however mediated
one will be always and forever embedded in dance culture. >>
Samantha then mentioned her work in "convergent media," and I want to
suggest that "dance, however mediated, will always be embedded in dance
culture" is not a necessarily logical conclusion. On the contrary,
mediated dance becomes embedded in other contexts all the time.
4. The recent discussion amongst us points into a different direction,
namely that "dance & technology" - sometimes still in its alpha and
beta pre-release stages, in fact is always a convergent practice and is
now becoming an inframedia practice - it is highly self-conscious about
its use of electronic media, and is turning to its micro-elements, and
I'd argue those are not choreographic necessarily. They are
digital/digitized data that are being processed, reassembled,
constructed, manipulated, layered, transfered...... as we noted in our
references to recent work in telepresence, motion capture, interactive
systems, gesture recognition, etc.
5. The "Transdance" discussion revealed a discourse (or
aesthetics/poetics) which is entirely on a different level from dance
reviews, I think (e.g. cross-platform, cross-systems data transfer and
synthesis, programmable media, code, interference, animation, decay,
glitches, signal processing, immersion, real-time interaction, question
of the real/virtual, communication, usw).
6. As to community/movement, I want to reflect briefly on contemporary
discourse, and the minimal role of dance-technology within
(concert)dance culture (?) -- and I hope you will respond.
A couple of things: there was apparently only one proposal for a panel
on dance -technology at the entire CORD conference in New York. Then,
today I read Wayne Ashley's letter that >> months ago Brooklyn Academy
of Music [BAM] decided to pull back from its commitment to new media in
favor of the stage performances that are its
core focus."' Wayne, who directed the "arts in multimedia" program at
BAM, is leaving, and it saddens me.
7. But Jill Johnston is back. Please look at the December issue of
"Art in America," where she writes a fabulously interesting essay (with
many photographs old and new) on "Past/Forward" -- "Baryshnikov Dancing
Judson" - you know, the White Oaks 're-creation' project of sorts in
which Mikhail Baryshnikov and his dancers featured old and new works by
David Gordon, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown,
Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay.......... Is this a strange déja vu or not?
here come the parents, Doug, and Johnston writes with sufficient irony,
and also beautifully &evocatively, of this sleek spectacle ("Judson gone
Hollywood") produced by the ballet star/impressario with a keen eye on
the forging of an "entertaining, commercially viable program"........
and, surprise, at the end Johnston waxes nostalgic and just loves it. I
leave it to you to explain to me why she would see Lucinda Childs as the
contemporary heir of the Judson revolution.
8. As far as our revolution/movement is concerned, perhaps we need a
surrealist manifesto. I am working on one.
9. Other discourses, however, are worth taking note of. I recommend
the September (21.no3) 2001 issue of the Australian journal "Artlink,"
dedicated to "e-volution of new media," and really a powerful
stocktaking of artistic/technological developments in Australia over the
past decades, especially regarding:
- support infrastuctures for artists working with media technologies
- works, artists, and media / interactive projects that emerged
- pilot projects, funding agencies and infrastructures, networks
- venues and festivals, exhibitions, etc
- web-based initiatives, developments in audio art, 'event-space
vectors,' etc
- publications, conferences, training programs, forums,
- art schools that create a critical mass for digital media practices
All very encouraging, including numerous references to works that
include dancers.
I am not so sure what to make of the fact the in the current issues of
ballet international/tanz aktuell, Dance Europe, The Drama Review,
Theatre Journal, Theater, Leonardo (issue 34:5), Frieze, October, NY
Arts, American Theater, October, Wired, etc there is not a single
reference to dance&technology. Leonardo does report extensively on the
9th New York "Digital Salon" (and there are two performance images).
I suggest we would do well with a comprehensive infrastructure overview
for our various ecologies, as the Australians just produced it. Such a
critical overview may also yield some insight into the question of how
dance is aligned with digital media practices, where and how it
converges, and how practitioners (and writers) claim space for mediated
dance within the cultural mainlines of performance-media.
greetings
Johannes Birringer
OSU_Dance/Technology
AlienNation Co.
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