March 17, 2008

Two adjacent people (and other problems)

So today is going to be the day that I just talk masturbatorially about my process. The two biggest influences on my process, to date, have been Meg Stuart and William Forsythe. The Forsythe influence lends a deconstructivist approach towards physicality (while keeping the physicality integral), while Meg Stuart's influence enables me to work with human states, emotion and the physicality of therein. I did a workshop with her last summer and found out, to my surprise, that working with emotional states does not all have to be play-acting and make-believe, but once can actually work unpretentiously with the physicality of feeling. That shocked me because I'm American, and we don't do that. That said, I am really glad to have the American attitude that physicality is integral to performance, even if we don't want to call it "dance" outright (or if we do).

The process for this upcoming piece in July has been really interesting. This piece will be a duet for me and my good friend Anna Whaley. In addition to the difficulties of directing one's self (always a challenge), this is also the first time that I've made a duet. While working with Anna, the first challenge I was confronted by was how to work with the pre-suppositions of a man and a woman juxtaposed on the same stage.  How does it become more than "boy meets girl" and the ensuing, probably romantic relationship? What is the broader spectrum of interactions between two people? Things that come to mind: inert co-existence, antagonism, symbiosis, platonic love, romantic love, dominance and subjugation, witnessing, etc... Actually, the politics of being together are quite negotiable, but hard to keep from over-simplification with an audience. I guess what I'm trying to go after is an on-stage relationship that is constantly being (re)negotiated.

We have been thinking a lot about time and space. Sounds very "Composition 101," I know. But here's how we've been thinking about space: how can a proscenium stage, which is made to have as few points of interest as possible, be made into a space with history? How can we impose our personal histories onto the space? You'll have to see what our devices are (and so will we, to some extent). In terms of time, we've been thinking about our personal mythologies. How we freeze-frame moments in our life and incorporate them into our identities? How, subsequently, we can renegotiate and re-interpret those moments? How these moments can gain and lose relevance when they are pitted against the mythologies of other people, or be abstracted or reinvigorated by somebody else? This is what we are after.

And then, what happens to our personally mythologies and bring them to a space like a stage, where there is no evidence of anybody having been there before or coming after. Who do we become in the face of the moral, social and physical relativism imposed by a proscenium stage? The stage cannot make us into anything but frontal. It does not condition us, we arrive and leave pre-formed and pre-conditioned.

Here is a quotation from Godard's fantastic film Alphaville:

Time is like a circle, which turns endlessly. The descending arc is the past. The arc that climbs is the future.

Everything has been said provided words do not change their meanings and meanings their words.

It is not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well-being.

Before us, nothing existed here. No one. We are totally alone here. We are unique, dreadfully unique. The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped. An isolated word, or a detail of a design can be understood but the meaning of the whole escapes.

Here's the trailer for that film:

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