Re: de-corporalize me
Merilyn Jackson (merilynj@worldnet.att.net)
Sat, 31 Jul 1999 19:31:43 -0400
Clarifications from this writer slash critic. I use the
term for myself in
that way because I am uncomfortable with the term
critic. I write about
dance because it is one of several subjects of
abiding life-long interest to
me. And although I love to criticize
(those closest to me would say "live
to") almost everything, I am
keenly sensitive to using criticism (or the
title of critic). I prefer,
simply, dance writer because I like to describe
what I think I saw for those
who couldn't be there and to frame (you can
read contextualize if you must)
or reframe what I saw for those who were.
Unless a work is at the extremes of
good or bad, good criticism is a hit or
miss thing in an overnight review,
and I am chided by my colleagues
and readers for not having been harsher or
more ebullient. So, until we
find a better term, hence
writer/critic.
As for "techno-artist", absolutely no belittling was
intended by the
enquoting. This term is even newer, as Jeff suggests,
and for some very
successful integrators of technology and art in many
fields, it is and will
become even more so, an honorable title. Will
techno-artists be content
with that? I suspect Isabel Choiniere will
want to be known as a
choreographer and Todd winkler as a composer.
Others will dub themselves.
For instance, photographer, Bill Ravanesi, began
calling himself a civic
photographer when his subject matter and
multivalanced exhibitions demanded
a new appelation. I like either Jeff's or Greg's? performance
technologist, for some instances.
Yes,
unfortunately enquoting sometimes does denote belittling, but sometimes
it
merely means to set something off because it is not yet clear that that
is
what it is, and so forth. Ceci n'est pas...
You asked:
of a
dancer on a screen, where they can see, for example, facial
expressions,
which are responding and "connecting" to the audience, is
that
dance?
You do seem to realize that it is not merely facial expression
with which an
audience member might connect. If that were so, we would
never connect with
Merce's dancers, whom we rarely actually see smile or
otherwise emote, but
in whose faces we do often see a kind of sublime inner
knowing, that
translates or communicates itself to the other dancers and that
I feel
strongly when bodily in their audience. At Biped, I felt
at first as if I
were watching television (the scrim gave me the impression
of an undusted
screen) and later, when the images were projected on it, I
felt the delight
I experienced as a small child when drawing over the screen
on my Rootie
Kazootie plastic sheet. The size of the venue does in fact
matter --
greatly. In Biped's case (or in any of Bausch, Meryl
Tankard's and other
large scale works) the large performance space works
because it gives the
audience a chance to view the totality of the
work. Other pieces fail in
such spaces because they really are meant to
be viewed intime, or to have
multiple small focuses.
You may try to
convince me and others like me that dancing on a screen is
dance and
not a representation of dance. But I was the only one in my class
the
psych teacher couldn't convince that a set of pyrimidical horizontal
lines
was in fact a triangle. The question is, why would anyone working
in
these new areas want to use an old term? Why wouldn't you be looking
for
new definitions, or better yet, hoping to be undefinable?
Kent,
you wrote that you didn't think the white-bubblelike floating shapes
worked
in Biped. If you are talking about the motion-capture figures, what
I
found most intriguiging about them was how they turned into a nearly
solid
vertical line when the body was sideways and motionless -- like
unstrung DNA
in contrast to the ghostly fractility of the other projected
figures. It
gave this atheist and comically unmathematical person some
imagery to think
of when trying to figure out where my cast-off atoms and the
atoms of my
loved ones have gone.
For the freedom of your atoms and mine,
Merilyn
merilynj@worldnet.att.net