I became also interested in David's silence..
>>Then there are artists like Stelarc
>
>No comment. :-|
Stelarc just wrote me from Glasgow (anyone been there?) where he was
performing PARASITE: EVENT FOR INVADED AND INVOLUNTARY BODY. He tells me
the interfaces worked really well, he is pleased.
In my latest writing/reflections (for a new book) I have expressed some
views on Stelerac's performances which are different from what I thought a
year or two ago. I see him as a dancer, my boundaries or definitions or
perceptions of what movement is and where it goes and how it is connected
(technologically or otherwise) and how it choreographs meaning or is
choreographed/designed meaningfully are fluid nowadays, and I agree with
David that there are multiple positions and that one can also occupy/tender
to more than one.
So I wanted to ask Scott why he thinks that dancers are in need of
determining/defining the border or the side on which they work or what they
don't want or what they want. I'm not sure Grotowski knew, or Schlemmer for
that matter, except that their practice produced conceptions and theories
they published about what the thought they were doing (published
afterwards, so they are stories). I think Schlemmer, for example, took the
(literary) idea of the Ÿbermarionette and applied it to his figurine
dancers who were moving compositions in planar and three-dimensional space
and kept changing (their designs, costumes). I think they never were
mechanical or subsumed by a constructivist design, but their movemens were
probably what we might nowadays call abstract. But wy would we call them
abstract and not expressionist, why, could we not see Schlemmer's ballet as
tanztheater (with social gestus) or as animated cubist film? There is much
we can see/read in the constructed movement, the constructed figure (like
Stelarc's Parasite).
I like the notion of parasite because it is siding and taking
sides/partaking from the hosts. I see technological instruments and fields
as guests and hosts in the work we do. I also realize that unlike some of
you on our list I have a not very strongly developed mathematical or
engineering knowledge to draw from and to expand, which I regret. So I must
make up my own sciences.
greetings from texas,
Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co./DDA Studio
Houston