Days of the Trash Queen

It is the third day of performing my adaptation of Deborah Hay's Art and Life in Charlottesville, VA. The costume can fail or nail the whole thing. The costume is ridiculous.

The closest comparison I find to this, is giving an Art History lecture naked. I was at North Karelia College, talking about feminist art, activism and Carolee Schneemann. In order for the lecture to work, I had to be absolutely on top of it, to stick to the subject and challenge the students intellectually as I challenged their perceptions of proper classroom behaviour, so that despite witnessing the unexpected they would stay engaged with what I was saying. In the end it changed the reality of the classroom, so that for a moment in time it seemed normal that the lecturer was naked. I walked through the room handing out articles. They looked me in the eyes and said "Thank You". I talked about their power to change reality. And about the risk that the state is taking in educating them as artists, whose very purpose is to question the structures the whole education system stands on. The students said they felt empowered in their profession after the talk. Well done, naked dancer girl.

So, I am performing Deborah Hay's work, dressed up in whatever was in the trash can of the venue upon my arrival. It is kind of mock-haute couture and borderline sexy. It smells of coffee and salad dressing and looks, well, ridiculous.

Why do I put myself through this? I could just wear something that looks great on me, and dance. But I say: whatever is in your trash can, I'm wearing. Surely it is a comment on the take-out throw-away culture, the illusion that things magically cease to exist once we place them in the trash can. Surely it is commenting on the fashion industry, and on what is being sold to us by exhibiting a lot of young, photoshopped female flesh. But I suppose in the end I do it to keep myself on my toes. To not get too comfortable in my performing skin. To push myself off balance by taking on an impossible task and making do the best I can. There is no way to plan ahead. I can only practice the dance, to make the content clear, in whatever kind of house it will inhabit next.
It is terrifying, and satisfying. It triggers me to question and to play. Ready - fire - aim.
"What if where I am is what I need?"
Thank You, Deborah Hay.

Grace at Dance Mission

Photo by Robbie Sweeny

death on the border

recently i have been taking photos of road kill. it seems to be in connection with the work although i don't have a clear idea why.

read about the debate around ricardo dominguez and the wishes for his de-tenuring. dominguez' latest work is providing a cheap gps safety tool for crossing the desert for immigrants to the usa, guiding them to the nearest sources of water and away from people who might shoot them for trespassing. now this life saving device has got some high up people mad at him, mad enough to have his own university turn against him. people die there, in the desert crossing the border. why is it a crime to try and prevent some of those deaths?

what makes drawing these lines across the land so precious? what makes people crossing those lines so dangerous that they would deserve death? why do we fear each other so?

http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n11/htdocs/follow-the-gps-225.php

march on airports

3.3.2010 I had a long day of flying. i detest the security controls at the airports, the way they make me feel fearful and the way they reconfirm the politics of fear that we practice to legitimize our different actions in the world. Going through a lot of those checks, 4 in one day, made me think about what i am working on with my thesis. The way that these policies and politics affect our bodies.

Landing from all that to Eugene, OR, where David Sommerville, whom i had never met before, had made cookies, warmed up the sauna and made a bed for me, was like stepping into a different world.

The things we do to each other as humans.
The way we create inhumane environments and force ourselves to live in them because it is for the best and because of our own safety. We create environments where we have to shut down our senses of smell and hearing to not go crazy. This then becomes normal. To live in cities, cars, highways, universities, airports, we have to handicap ourselves to survive.
And then there are places called Homes. Where you can let all your street survival mechanisms go. Doesn't it make you cry to enter into one of these havens? Have you created one for yourself? How does it feel?

sk/in... to touch - a dilemma

vienna 260210

i kind of knew they are parts of the same piece.

i was even using parts of the music of "sk/in/visibility" in the first soundtrack of "touch" to act as a reminder, when they were performed in the same night with several pieces inbetween.

i think i will wrap the bread in the same cloth with which i later blindfold myself.

but if they are parts of the same piece, should it be viewed in two parts, or should the bread sharing move into the circle and continue somehow... and a some how that would not seem too corny and ritualistic?

and yes, i know that in a way i am a priest and it is a ritual, but there is no need to underline it, it is visible enough. i want it to be an invitation deeper in, to come deeper in the cave

because it is a cave

it is not an altar

it is an alter

maybe there has to be some words, some story in between

i think that i will just call the whole thing touch.

no to sloppy thinking

being this lazy with my mind is an insult to the creator.

performing Touch at CCN Nancy, France, Feb 13th

i decided to do this in french because it was important that people understand what i say. i felt hesitant because i had no time to meet with our translator before the show, because he was in rehearsal with the ballet. so i did my own little translation and hoped for the best. realising how the context of performance suddenly makes me want to speak in correct form, to have the right words in the right order, although when i just talk with somebody i'm happy to just be understood.

this made me think of two things,

one: why do i want to be more proper on stage than i actually am?

two: having the task of making myself understood in french completely took away the stress and nervousness i sometimes relate with performing. and this was a very good thing.

i introduced the piece and asked the whole audience to take their shoes off and take a seat in a big circle on the stage. i had some chairs, but there was way too much audience to fit them all on the chairs, and i apologized for that. to my surprise most of them went to sit on the floor, and many of the chairs i had hunted throughout the theatre were left unused. they made a very large circle. i felt relaxed, the whole space changed, and the audience who left their seats became a different kind of social group, they suddenly had connection with each other. i liked that part, it felt very important considering the whole piece, even though i had never thought about it before. i just wanted people in a big circle on the stage. but the action of leaving their seats, taking off their shoes and coming up there created a shared experience and an intimate one between them, which felt like a major part of the piece.

s'il vous plaît, fermez les yeux.

respirez.

mettez votre attention à les sensations sur votre peau.

comment se sent-elle?

qu'est-ce que vous sentez?

les mouvements de l'air?

les materiaux de vos vetements?

vos cheveux?

est-ce qu'il y a les endroits vides, sans sensation?

imaginez, mais faites pas.

imaginez, comment sentirait-il toucher la paume d'une main avec l'autre.

et puis, touchez la paume d'une main avec l'autre.

comment est-ce qu'elles sentent?

cette piece,

je vous invite venir me toucher.

toucher en quelque façon que vous voulez.

s'il vous plaît, dites-moi de m'arrêter, avant que je cours dans quelqu'un, avant qu'il y a une collision,

parce que je ne peux rien voir.

vous puovez aussi dire les autres de s'arrêter, si vous voyez quelque chose qui vous trouvez mauvais.

quand vous voulez voir, pouvez-vous ouvrir les yeux.

i did not use the sound score, the time was too short for it to work. but i sang a song towards the end of the piece, the west coast of finland ballade ...allt under den linden så gröna. i had been singing it during our residency at PAF, and Donna Faye had suggested i use it instead of Quand je serais vieille, because it brought to her the sensation of suspended falling. it worked for me.

i was surprised by the amount of touches, i did not expect so many.

it is a weird study of vulnerability - i feel that even though i am blindfolded and look vulnerable, i am still very much in control of the situation. i am manipulating the space and the audience. they are the ones who feel the discomfort, if nobody comes up to touch me and nothing happens. and they are the ones to feel the responsibility to take care i don't hit things, and the responsibility to stop the action if something feels inappropriate or bad to them. yet they are in a group. they can always wait for someone else to do or say something, but they are also witnessed by each other in that action. how long to wait before acting yourself? maybe the dancer already hit the light tree because everyone waited for someone else to warn her, and everyone is left feeling guilty? yes, i am really manipulating them.

but how far is that from any performance, or, any social situation in life?

what if someone kills herself on stage, when do we stop her?

we feel the responsibility to intervene in things that happen around us, and maybe we wait for someone else to do something, or maybe we choose to convince ourselves that we did not see or hear anything, and negotiate how we deal with the guilt, because of course we saw and we heard. like, how many blocks do i walk in NY until i have to turn back and go check if the homeless person lying on the street is hurt or just sleeping?

brussels

reading "regarding the pain of others" by susan sontag.

thinking about fear, again, thinking about stability, about the illusion of safety in human built environments. on the airplane it is so clear, how small the light dotted cities are in the vastness of the world. and how small the airplane is in the gusts of wind and turbulence that shake it. it is good to know i am small.

thinking about haiti, again. about how good intentions mixed with ignorance can do much harm. how we so much rather act from a place of ignorance, than find out what is really there. reading the news about expedited adoptions from haiti makes me so angry. remembering how the children sent from finland to sweden to be safe from the war suffered from the displacement, and how the trauma of war was doubled by the trauma of being sent away. it became the ruling story of the life of a whole generation, poor children being "saved" by rich, well meaning families who had no idea what was going on.

thinking about falling, and the images of falling.

the dream of the stairwell of one of my childhood apartment buildings falling from under me, leaving just the skeleton of the railings standing in the air, draped with loose debris from the concrete floor that had collapsed. i keep going back to that image, in waking and in dreams. maybe a reason will present itself.

a thesis proposal

Title of Project: Hell Yeah (working title)

Conceptual Framework

I am working on a poetics of pain. Being in a country at war, remembering the physical sensations of fear and threat that I connected to the Cold War, and to sensations and memories from my childhood. How does a constant sense of alarm affect the body? There is an invisible undercurrent of threat and insecurity, which legitimizes violent actions in the long run, but nothing is visible; it is in the air, transparent yet always present. How do we stand to look at other people in pain? The imagery of terror is a male imagery, but there are so many women and everybody knows what happens to them, yet it is still invisible. How do we make choices to distance ourselves or to become involved in their suffering? We tell so many stories. There is mud, and sand, and hair. There is the beauty of breathing, of the moment when the eyes that have been beaten and swollen closed have finally healed enough to crack open, to let a sliver of light in.

"I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" - musings on the closing lines of the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

When I think of Cyborg, I think of Seria Mau, who refused her destiny as an abused girl child and redefined herself, to become the K-ship whose captain she was. I think of Stephen Hawkins, and what he would have been, had he been born a century earlier. I think of heart valve replacement surgery and the artificial transplants in the heart of my friend. I think of dreams of electric sheep, and imagine possibilities of sensing beyond our bodies. I think of the son who became the God Emperor of Dune by merging his body with that of the sandworm, to save the disappearing desert of Arrakis.

When I think of Goddess, I think of celebrating and honouring the gifts that the Earth offers us. I think of my New Agey friends and their altars in the woods, and how I am irritated by their way of defining Goddess as fitting to their beliefs and needs. I think of maternal clay figures with many breasts, of a matriarchal utopia. I think of my great aunts and their summer paradise, on the beach with women of all ages, shapes and sizes, naked, strong, sun bathing. I think of belonging, I feel the wish to belong, to have a Home.

Then, I think of Zeus giving birth from his head.

And then, I think of Monique Wittig, replying to a rude interviewer that she does not have a vagina.

So much for a foreword. Now for Haraway.

I understand the argument, and I find it appealing. The cyborg’s multiplicity, the refusal of origin and of one truth, seems a necessity in order to overcome the dualist thinking that creates and renews boundaries, hierarchies and a self-reinforcing mechanism of othering. The cyborg, with no loyalty to its creators, suggests a possibility of freedom and survival through fluidity, changing, constantly in the process of re-defining self, and/or balancing on the boundaries of rigid definitions. A home in language, communication, networking, instead of a home in a place, a belief system, a genealogy.

But can we afford to refuse the Goddess, the wisdom of ecological feminist thinking? Does it make sense to let go and burn the bridges leading to ‘origin’ in a flashy post modernist kind of way? (Here I am speaking of origin in an ecological sense.) Could not a cyborgic network of identities leave that bridge standing, too, while building a multiplicity of new ones?

Is it possible to combine the two, to have an open fluid cyborg identity, but to still honour the dust or the minerals that we are constructed of? To piss on the Father’s (Mother’s) shoes, but still acknowledge that we are related?

In other words: does metaphysics have to be anti-science? (page 28) Isn’t that just another dualism that the cyborg image can question and re-define?

I believe we need metaphysics.

We need it to feel the meaning of our actions, not just see the consequences. We need something to believe in: not to flock to one Truth like sheep, but to have a reason to keep living. I believe that if we want to stop raping and abusing the planet we live in, on, and of, we need to acknowledge what we owe to it.

Maybe love is the last stronghold of metaphysics, or maybe it is art.

And maybe art, or love, can open a possibility to imagine a fusion of the two, an ecological cyborg, not of the Family of Man, but bound by love to the minerals she is constructed from.

photo for tuesday

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nad/3972563876/

sounds

still sick and in bed, so i re-edited the soundtrack for the second piece.

this may be the final version.

removed most of the text and most of everything, really.

i hope it works, because being sick i missed both the grad showing and the dress rehearsal, so i didn't get to try it out with an audience before tomorrow's review.

chomsky, and unfinished thoughts regarding the work

sick day

so i canceled my class

and am doing nothing productive to make the performance possible

except watching a bunch of noam chomsky interviews on youtube

so

i am here,

interested in the american culture and what american people say about these things - and sometimes shocked by how many americans tell me, that the american people are stupid and ignorant and do not want to find out what is going on in the world.

i do not think this is true.

it sounds like a strange claim to me.

i mean, all humans are stupid and ignorant in some sense, and then we learn more. but this sounds like the speakers claim to be set apart from the imaginary entity called "the american people", who, by its stupidity and ignorance, makes all these atrocities possible.

it sounds like a roundabout way of saying that they would have it differently, but can do nothing, because the majority is so stupid and ignorant.

i think a lot of people lack information.

i suppose the decisions on the matters have been removed so far from people's everyday lives, that they don't feel their actions can change anything. and this feeling of powerlessness is a

cause of apathy.

i suppose one thing that makes staying inside the apathy possible, is that many people never see the war or feel the terror. that what is happening is removed, too, as figures on screen or paper, that can be ignored, or justified by something somebody says in a speech. there is no urgency to act, because we do not see what is happening. only when death comes near, we feel it.

i am trying to understand how this is possible.

i keep going back to fear. we attack because we are afraid.

or is there another reason for attack?

i want to reach the feeling of fear, what it does in our bodies.

is there a shared sense of threat when we step on an aeroplane or ride the subway?

can we feel it?

does the threat of the other bring this nation together in a time of internal turmoil?

is the outside threat necessary in order for the state to function?

new draft

begin.
audience closes their eyes. i speak about the skin.

while they have their eyes closed i invite them to enter the space, and touch. i invite them to speak and change what is happening, to intervene if they do not like what is going on. i have to still think very carefully about how i say this.

i blindfold myself. the loop from the film plays.
i move.

the soundtrack includes the piano loop, silences, and text in finnish and in english:

where are you?
what are you thinking?
do you remember how it felt
when you first realised that you will die?
do you remember the shock in your body
when you knew with certainty the assault would come
sooner or later
how you shrunk inside your skin?
the touches you longed for, that never came.
the touches you wished had never happened, but you cannot erase.
what are you thinking?
how do you feel?

i take off my blindfold.
i sing a song.

the end.


it is not a problem if nobody comes up on stage or says anything. if that happens, it will create a growing unease in the audience, a feeling that somebody should do something but they don't want to be that person. it may be very uncomfortable that way, so it is creating an emotion about crossing the boundary, and it is a success.

also the incident that someone from the audience takes over the space and starts manipulating me for a long time creates a sense of unease and tension, people may want to tell that person to stop, but may not know how to - yet they know that it is up to them to change it. so it is another interesting scenario that looks like a failure but ends up as a success.

if people only speak and do not touch.

if people just come up very quickly and do something short one after another like they were obliged to do that.

whatever kind of failure happens, the concept works.

it is about risk and crossing of many boundaries, physical and emotional.
i want to put the song in the end to add another layer of performance but also of emotion, i am thinking of the layering of the languages in the soundtrack, and that maybe i will sing in french, so that most people will understand some, but not all, of what i am saying.

after the showing

i performed a draft of the piece at friday showings. i now feel confident that the concept works, but i want to make some changes. i think one solution is that i speak to the audience and they can have their eyes closed before i begin to move.

i still have questions how to incorporate the subject matter but leave enough space for people's own experiences to fill in the meaning of the work... i want it to have meaning but not feel like i'm preaching too much.

hair

this is footage from another project i have been working on,
playing with it here to practice the video editing program...



the pleasantville effect isn't quite working.

touch

there is something about the vulnerability of the body, that i had the idea of in the first classes, about touch leaving a mark on the skin.

but somehow it does not make sense to use digital media to project the marks, if it can be done for real.

the concept is simple, to invite the audience to speak, and to come into the space and touch me while i am performing.

i am also half seriously thinking about giving them markers so that they can draw on me.

but i want there to be more than just an experimenting with possibilities interactivity, so i am working on a sound score, trying out the same loop as i used in the video (if i show the video first, and the movement piece is shown in the next half, people will connect them together - and they are connected in a way).

i imagine that the music will create a stronger sense of boundary, that will be more difficult for the viewers to cross, than if it was just a silent experiment. i am also thinking i want to light it differently, so i need to find out if i have access to theatre lights.

my wish is to create a sense of unease, that people won't know whether they should react, and they're not sure what is going on and what is expected of them. to give space for them to make decisions, and that will make each performance very different.

interactivity

been trying to figure out what worked and what did not work in the first tryout of live interaction with the audience.

i think i just need to give up control more, to not try to dictate what is allowed and what is not.

also the structure and me explaining the interaction before beginning to dance is not working for me.

i will be trying a new approach, showing tomorrow.

the difficulty is really only that the work is still so raw that i am afraid even of my classmates and your reactions. but to perform in an interactive environment can not be rehearsed, i can only learn by doing it.

it feels like almost too big of a bite, and in dark moments i wish i had kept working with the video because it would have been so much easier just to keep tweaking it... but it did not make sense because that piece feels complete.

on a sidenote:

those who have a love for sailing - look at this young woman's blog!

http://youngestround.blogspot.com/

making faces

playing with final cut pro,
presenting: the clone effect!

i'm sure the world is happier that there is only one of me.

digesting

i showed some concepts and ideas for work in Friday Critique and again in Grad Critique yesterday. there is some footage and i'm happy to talk about it, but i don't feel ready to share it online.

i am confident that there is something there, but it is taking shape slowly -
and while i enjoy the luxury of the slow process and diving deeper into the ideas, instead of just squeezing out a product for a deadline, i am becoming painfully conscious that there is a deadline, and i am expected to produce something like a finished product.
right now i'm leaning towards a compromise, to offer a sample piece that is not _the_ work but a version of it, yet more than just a draft.
i am learning a lot about a method of making work that feels fruitful.

the new media right now feels like skill building, something i will not be using in my own work for now, but still fun and informative, and opening possibilities for the future.