-----Original Message-----
From: owner-dance-tech@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
[mailto:owner-dance-tech@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu]On Behalf Of Johannes
Birringer
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 1999 6:46 PM
To: dance-tech@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: IDAT99 and no budget
A short reply to Sandi's interesting post on monster conferences in
monster hotels and, alternatively, small intimate gatherings.
community/communion requires intimacy
and the provocation of belief.
although most communities are fictive, the fictions are necessary, and
some fictions are based on shared/similar experience in the body, in the
taste and the food and habits of culture. in the ways stories are told
or life in the neighborhood lived.
dancing on the web is a different thing altogether (Sita).
and so is dancing on Broadway.
i am reading the first pages of Sarah Schulman's new book "Stage Struck:
Theatre, Aids, and the Marketing of Gay America." I am struck, reading
how she describes the "Simulacra, Authenticity, and Theatrical Context
of "Rent" [the musical], and launches her critique of the profitable,
marketable, palatable construction of homosexuality as corporate
product. She wants to investigate how it came to be that "Rent" became a
hit and moved uptown, in the context of other, marginalized productions
by writers or voices not heard, especially plays written by the very
people
"Rent" claims to represent.
She ends her introduction by suggesting that "corporate product is the
opposite of art, because it denies the value of eccentric
investigation."
I think this applies, in my view, to our discussion, since large
academic conferences are corporate productions and advertisements. You
pay to consume.
The question then remains whether alternative gatherings are at all
possible, where dance can be communion or dance/technology be explored,
listened to, tasted, sensed and thought through, without the corporate,
market-driven impetus, without the need to sell your new product or
claim your niche.
The dance-on-web and dance-in-the-curriculum impetus are marketing
strategies, and so we employ them to increase our market (community?).
We must therefore sell ourselves and make it (technology) palatable.
Which of course we don't need to, it ought to be tasteful by now.
greetings,
Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co.