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Soon approaching, over the weekend Fri 11 – Sun 13 September, is our first Digital Lab at The Place as part of the Choreodrome artist development programme.

Choreographers will be 3D scanned and printed, hear talks from BBC Sherlock Network app writer David Varelawho is now travelling back by boat from Montevideo to Buenas Aires, then a plane to São Paulo where he has been part of a traveling transmedia conference: Mediamorfosis.

Ju Row Farr from interactive performance company, Blast Theory will talk about engaging audiences with their interactive cinema piece My One Demand at Toronto film Festival, and the BIMA nominated digital life coach app Karen.

Friday and Saturday will feature a hands on experience of making motion controlled audio circuits alongsideDirty Electronics’ John Richards who has been busy this season performing at the Supersonic Festival, Sonar Festival, Barcelona, Incubate, Netherlands and is lead speaker at the forthcoming, Ableton Loop conference in Berlin.

Newly announced Wired/The Space Creative Fellow, Annette Mees of Coney leads our Sunday daytime session on multiplatform audience engagement.

With digital technology now integrated into our everyday lives, this weekend aims to present exciting new ideas on how we can experience and understand technology with a group of performance artists who are exploring the new creative landscape.

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We will present a short version of The Wheel Connecting Fingers Company at the EnglishTheatre Berlin for the Festival Expat Expo-

2nd April 2017 from 2pm-


We will be thrilled to share with you this new project--

http://www.artconnect.com/projects/the-wheel
Here the link to the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1101704719951797/

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Between the Seas Festival accepts submissions for its 5th edition

(September 7-13 2015 at the Wild Project, New York).

Between the Seas, New York City's only international Mediterranean performing arts festival, is currently accepting submissions for its 5th edition, scheduled to take place in Manhattan's Wild Project theater, from Sept 7-13 in 2015. Artists of the Mediterranean and Mediterranean diaspora as well as artists with a working interest in the region, collaborations between non-Mediterranean and Mediterranean artists, are all invited to apply.

Curated by Aktina Stathaki, the festival boasts a highly eclectic and daring programming that has so far included established and upcoming artists from Greece, Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and beyond. Some of the artists that have been presented at Between the Seas are: Malika Zarra, Nejla Yatkin, Korhan Basaran, Pedro Gomes, Rachel Erdos, Ido Tadmor, Elias Aguirre, Esteve Soler, Yiannis Mavritsakis, The Arab-Hebrew Theater of Jaffa, Mancopy Dansekompagni and more.

This year the festival will accept submissions in 3 different categories: young artists/new works, dedicated to emerging artists and performance in-development; main program, that will present more established companies; and new plays intended for stage readings. Submission guidelines can be accessed here. The deadline for submissions has been extended to February 5, 2015. Submissions and inquiries should be sent to: betweentheseasfestival@gmail.com. For more information visit: www.betweentheseas.org.

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Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36.2
Sept. 2010: 89-102

Malabou, Plasticity, and the Sculpturing of the Self
Hugh J. Silverman
Department of Philosophy
Stony Brook University, U.S.A


Abstract
In What Shall We Do With Our Brain? (2004), French philosopher Catherine
Malabou returns to the traditional philosophical mind-body problem (we do not
experience our mind as a “brain”) and introduces the concept of a difference or
“split” between our brain as a hard material substance and our consciousness of
the brain as a non-identity. Malabou speaks of the brain’s plasticity, a term
which stands between (as a kind of deconstructive “indecidable”) flexibility
and rigidity, suppleness and solidity, fixedness and transformability, identity
and modifiability, determination and freedom. This means seeing the brain no
longer as the “center” and “sovereign power” of the body—as it has been seen
for centuries, at least in the West—but as itself a locus and process of selfsculpting (self-forming) and transdifferentiation, as being very closely interconnected with the rest of the body. Malabou also speaks of our own
potential to sculpt or “re-fashion” ourselves, and (by further extension) to reform our society through trans-differentiating into new and potentially freer, more open and more democratic socio-political forms. In this bold project
Malabou still remains close to her Hegelian roots, and she is also influenced by
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body-subject and Nancy’s alter-mondialisation
(other-worlding) as an alternative to globalization.

Keywords
brain, plasticity, non-identity, self-decentering, transdifferentiation, entre-deux
altermondialisation, sculpting the self, Hegel, phenomenology

For the rest of the doc go to: http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/M/5.pdf

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The Kitchen announces first session of The Kitchen L.A.B.,A new inter-disciplinary discussion series,Wednesday, September 19Featuring Shannon Jackson, Elad Lassry, Tere O’Connor and Lynne Tillman
 
New York, NY, September 17, 2012—On Wednesday, September 19, The Kitchen inauguratesThe Kitchen L.A.B., a new program devoted to presenting, discussing, and developinginterdisciplinary works revolving around themes of common interest to artists in different fields—and, more specifically, considering the meaning and uses of specific words in contemporary art.This season’s theme, presence, will be discussed by four of the most prominent voices in the artstoday: Shannon Jackson, Elad Lassry, Tere O’Connor and Lynne Tillman.
Moderated by The Kitchen’s executive director and chief curator Tim Griffin, the event will startat 7:00 P.M. at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Admission is free and open to the public.Seating is first-come, first-served.
Throughout its 40-year history, The Kitchen has been committed to a spirit of innovation acrossdisciplines and, in this regard, hosts an incredibly diverse audience. And yet this audience today isalso surprisingly atomized.
To wit, art communities see art, dance communities see dance, music communities see music, and so on. Such disjuncture pervades the contemporary cultural field even while there is an increasinginterest among artists in interdisciplinarity. Thus, the same words often carry very differentmeanings for artists in different fields, and the same maneuvers signify in different ways.
The Kitchen L.A.B. invites artists to unpack such vocabularies by responding to them both inconversation and artworks, creating hybrid events that will underline not only points ofcommonality among disciplines but also, as important, real differences.
 
The series begins against the backdrop of Elad Lassry’s Untitled (Presence), for which hecollaborates with dancers from the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater in TheKitchen theater space, aiming to consider changing relationships between performance,photographic reproduction, and perception.
 
Elad Lassry’s work was recently featured in ILLUMInations, at the International Pavilion at the54th Venice Biennale, and in a solo exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway. He will have asolo exhibition at Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy, this year as well. His solo exhibitionshave also been held at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich,Switzerland; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland.
Recent group exhibitions include The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum; SecretSocieties. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and CAPCde Bordeaux; Time Again, SculptureCenter, New York; Les Rencontres d'Arles 2010 / Edition 41,Arles, France; and New Photography 2010, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
 
Shannon Jackson is the director of the Arts Research Center at University of California atBerkeley where she is also Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater,Dance and Performance Studies. Previous publications include Professing Performance (2004),Lines of Activity (2000) and Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (2011).
 
Tere O’Connor has been choreographing since 1982 and has created over 35 works for hiscompany. The company has performed all over the world, for such distinguished organizations asthe Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, de Rotterdamse Dansgroep, Dance Alloy, andZenon. O’Connor is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow, recipient of a Foundation forContemporary Performance Art Award, Arts International’s DNA Project Award, and a CreativeCapital Award, and past Guggenheim Fellow.
 
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, one collection ofessays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly onculture. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006) and No Lease on Life (1998)which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book CriticsCircle Award, She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence inthe Department of English at the University at Albany, and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
 
 
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FIAF AND THE KITCHEN PRESENT U.S. PREMIERE OF
DD DORVILLIER’S DANZA PERMANENTE
AS PART OF THE 2012 CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL
Performed in Near Silence, New Work Transposes the Score of a
Beethoven String Quartet Into Movement for Four Dancers
Danza Permanente
DD Dorvillier/human future dance corps
Co-presented by The Kitchen and
The French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)’s 2012 Crossing the Line festival
The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street, NYC)
Wednesday – Sunday, September 26 – 30 at 8:00 P.M.
Tickets: $15, www.thekitchen.org, 212.255.5793 x11

“Ms. Dorvillier has a gift for creating a kind of irrational theater that is held together by the strength of a
single imaginative vision.” — The New York Times

 

New York, New York, August 29, 2012—The Kitchen and the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF),
New York’s premiere French cultural center, present the U.S. premiere of Danza Permanente, from DD  Dorvillier and her human future dance corps, as part of the 2012 Crossing the Line festival. Danza  Permanente transposes the score of a Beethoven string quartet into movement for four dancers, each of whom  takes the part of a single instrument. The work is performed in near silence with bursts of recorded sound by  Zeena Parkins, who also serves as music director.
Performances of Danza Permanente will take place Wednesday through Sunday, September 26–30 at 8:00  P.M. at The Kitchen, which is located at 512 West 19th Street, NYC.

Tickets, which are $15, are available
online at www.thekitchen.org and by phone at 212.255.5793 x11.
In Danza Permanente, the performers embody the musical structure and dynamics of the string quartet,  behaving as sound, in silence. The transposition of the score is by choreographer DD Dorvillier and  composer/music director Zeena Parkins, with dancers Fabian Barba, Nuno Bizarro, Walter Dundervill,  Naiara Mendioroz, and rehearsal assistant Heather Kravas. The lighting design by Thomas Dunn and the  acoustic environment by Parkins follow the score, framing the silence and the dance.Of creating Danza Permanente, Dorvillier has said, “I chose to work with the score of Ludwig Van  Beethoven's String Quartet #15, in A Minor, Op. 132, not so much for the man Beethoven himself, but for the  music, which is at once moving, demanding, rigorous, and extreme in contrasts, colors, and mood changes.

This infamous and beloved music has an intellectual and affective power that is akin to literature. It is thinking
music. Danza Permanente originates from a curiosity about how, without words, music, through its unique properties, induces thought and feeling.

 
DD Dorvillier (choreographer) Puerto Rico, 1967. Choreographer, dancer, and teacher in New York City since 1989. Bessie Awards for choreography (Dressed for Floating, 2003) and performance (Parades & Changes, replays, 2010). In 1991, Dorvillier and dancer/choreographer Jennifer Monson created the Matzoh Factory. For over a decade, the studio was a grassroots site for wild experimentation where choreographers and artists congregated for low-tech/low-cost shows, rehearsals, parties, and readings. Dorvillier has worked with and been deeply influenced by Jennifer Monson, Zeena Parkins, Jennifer Lacey, Yvonne Meier, Sarah Michelson, and Karen Finley, among others. She has been an MR Artist in Residence, curator of the MR
Festival, and co-editor the MR Performance Journals “Release” and her awards include NYFA Choreography  Fellowship (2000), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship (2007), and Guggenheim Fellowship
(2011). Her work has been presented in NYC at The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project,  and PS 122, and others. Internationally she has presented her work at ImPulsTanz, Vienna; DeSingel,  Antwerp, STUK, Leuven; Hau/Hebel am Ufer, Berlin; Frascati, Amsterdam; Zagreb Dance Weeks, Zagreb; Springdance Dialogues/TSEH Festival, Moscow; and many others.

Zeena Parkins (composer, musical director) multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, sound artist, wellknown as a pioneer of the electric harp, has also extended the language of the acoustic harp with the inventive use of unusual playing techniques, preparations, and layers of digital and analog processing. Parkins has received commissions to provide scores for film, video, chamber orchestras, theater and dance. She has longterm creative relationships with Neil Greenberg, John Jasperse, Jennifer Monson, Jennifer Lacey, DD Dorvillier, and Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh, and has also appeared with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, who commissioned a new work for Experiments in the Studio. She has appeared in festivals worldwide and on  countless recordings. Some collaborators include: Kim Gordon, John Zorn, Bjork, Yoko Ono, Christian Marclay, Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp, Thurston Moore and filmmakers Cynthia Madansky, Mandy McIntosh and
Daria Martin. Zeena has received three Bessies for her extraordinary work in music within the dance and performance field in the United States and abroad for over two decades.

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An dance-tech.net will be there!!
 

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In recent years, technological innovations have given rise to a new field, dance technology. Populated by artist-practitioners, technologists, and theorists, this new area encompasses performance, research and development of video game technologies, motion capture experimentation, and dance for the camera. For some time, work in dance technologies has advanced without a recognizable critical dialogue in the United States.

This began to change in October 2009, when the World Performance Project at Yale, in collaboration with SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in residence at MIT, convened an international cohort of artists and scholars for a one-day meeting at Yale.  That event, “Emergent Global Corporealities: Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social,” brought artistic creation, comparative media theory, and emergent technologies together with considerations of the social and corporeal.

This group reconvenes at MIT in April with additional participants for Version 2.0. “Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social @ MIT” brings a dozen researchers to MIT to present their original media-focused research. The two-day symposium includes readings, demonstrations, and some small-scale performances, culminating in an anthology of writings to be edited by the conference convenors.

The symposium convenors are Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor, Music and Theater Arts at MIT and Harmony Bench, Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University.

Confirmed Participants Include:
Johannes Birringer, Chair in Performance Technologies, Brunel University
Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer in Dance and Film Studies, University of Surrey
Maaike Bleeker, Chair, Performance Studies, University of Utrecht
Ian Condry, Associate Professor, MIT
Scott deLahunta, Independent Artist, Berlin
Simon Ellis, Independent Artist, London
Jason Farman, Assistant Professor, Washington State University
Susan Kozel, Professor, University of Malmo
Petra Kuppers, Associate Professor, University of Michigan
Nick Monfort, Associate Professor MIT
Chris Salter, Associate Professor, Concordia University
Marlon Barrios Solano, researcher/on-line producer/dance-tech.net (New York/Geneva)
Jaime del Val, Independent Artist, Barcelona
Maria X (Maria Chatzichristodoulou), Lecturer, University of Hull

 

Th, Apr 21 | 7pm
Fri, Apr 22 | 8:30am–10pm
Sat, Apr 23 | 9am–10pm

*Open to the public. No registration required.

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A+B=X by Gilles jobin in Paris, France


Cie Gilles Jobin re-sets extracts of the first group piece A+B=X, created in 1997, on December 10th and 11th, 2010 at 8.00 pm at the Swiss cultural center in Paris within the framework of the event Constellation Young Gods.

Choreography Gilles Jobin Music Franz Treichler / The Young Gods Dance Susana Panadès Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clément da Costa

For the 25 years of career of the The Young Gods, a Swiss electronic rock music band, the Swiss cultural center will organize a programme of four days around their artistic collaborations.


RE SET OF DELICADO IN GENEVA
Delicado, a command made for Gilles Jobin by the Ballet Gulbenkian in 2004, is re-set by the Ballet Junior of Geneva! Come to rediscover Delicado at the Salle des Eaux-Vives in Geneva from 16th till 19th December 2010.



NEW CREATION

The Cie Gilles Jobin is actually working on its new creation, for 4 dancers, at the Studios 44. The rehearsals will go on at Bonlieu, Scène nationale - Annecy (France) in January 2011.

Avant-premiere March 3rd and 4th, 2011 - Swiss Dance Days - Bern (Switzerland)
Premiere March 15th, 16th and 17th, 2011 - Bonlieu Scène nationale - Annecy (France)
Please check out the tour on the Cie's website.

Choreography Gilles Jobin Musical direction Cristian Vogel Dance Susana Panadès Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clément da Costa, Martin Roehrich Original music Cristian Vogel and Carla Scaletti Light design Daniel Demont Costumes design Karine Vintache GenMov software by Cristian Vogel Assistant of choreography Margaux Monetti
REPRISE A+B=X A PARIS

La Cie Gilles Jobin remonte des extraits de sa première pièce de groupe A+B=X, créée en 1997, les 10 et 11 décembre 2010 à 20h au Centre culturel suisse de Paris dans le cadre de l'événement Constellation Young Gods.

Chorégraphie Gilles Jobin Musique Franz Treichler / The Young Gods Danse Susana Panadès Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clément da Costa

A l’occasion des 25 ans de carrière du groupe phare de rock électronique suisse, The Young Gods, le CCS de Paris organise quatre jours de programmation autour des collaborations artistiques du groupe.


REPRISE DELICADO A GENEVE
Delicado, une commande faite à Gilles Jobin par le Ballet Gulbenkian en 2004, est repris par le Ballet Junior de Genève ! Venez redécouvrir Delicado à la salle des Eaux-Vives de Genève du 16 au 19 décembre 2010.



NOUVELLE CREATION

La Cie Gilles Jobin travaille actuellement à sa nouvelle création pour 4 danseurs aux Studios 44 de Genève. Les répétitions se poursuivront à Bonlieu Scène nationale d'Annecy dès le mois de janvier 2011.

Avant-première 3 et 4 mars 2011 - Journées de Danse Suisse - Berne (Suisse)
Première 15, 16 et 17 mars 2011 - Bonlieu Scène nationale - Annecy (France)
Retrouver les dates de la tournée sur le site de la cie.

Chorégraphie Gilles Jobin Direction musicale Cristian Vogel Danse Susana Panadès Diaz, Isabelle Rigat, Louis-Clément da Costa, Martin Roehrich Musique originale Cristian Vogel et Carla Scaletti Lumière Daniel Demont Costumes Karine Vintache GenMov software créé par Cristian Vogel Assistante chorégraphique Margaux Monetti




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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – MAY 27, 2010

SHARE OUR STAGE 2010 – A CELEBRATION OF MUSIC DIVERSITY
A BENEFIT FOR ARTS EDUCATION
June 18th & 19th, 2010 – A Greater Boston Non-Profit Partnership

Break The Silence! Foundation (BTS-Foundation), Brookline Community Center for the Arts (BCCA), Boston Music Conference (BMC), Genuine Voices, and Boston Music Coalition (BMC), have joined together for the purpose of opening an Arts Center in Downtown Boston to help both inner-city kids & aspiring professionals alike discover their talents with the use of mentoring, workshops, and classes along with the connections they have all made from working in the entertainment industry! The Greater Boston Community Center for the Arts (BCCA, Inc.) – Read our combined mission!

Share Our Stage 2010 is a once in a lifetime event that will include a star-studded two-day entertainment lineup, to benefit the creation of the new BCCA in Downtown Crossing, Boston – The Phoenix Rising of the former Coolidge Corner, Brookline based center that closed its doors in May of 2005, having served over 7,500 community members with 170 classes/week & 500 events/year, conducted by its diverse resident faculty & visiting artist body of 350.

The Saturday, June 19th, 1 p.m. matinee at John Hancock Hall, will present the Official US East Coast Premier & Celebrity Red Carpet of "Elle: A Modern Cinderella Tale", a music-driven Disney cast film, fresh off it’s “Best Family Film” award at the Newport Beach Festival, & success at Cannes, a live performance by the hit Urban-Pop group My Hero, from the Film's Soundtrack, & 11:30 a.m. Red Carpet celebrity photo-ops. The 7 p.m. evening show “An Evolution of the Blues”, a first rate performance, will feature performances by multi-Grammy award winning artist & actor, Chris Thomas King, King of 21st Century Blues, & his band, Urban-Pop group My Hero, 7-time Grammy nominated blues band Bellevue Cadillac, music & dance by Genuine Voices & Boston Tap Company, celebrity appearances (including Vinny Vella co-star in “Casino”, “Sopranos”, Etc.), & a 5:30 p.m. VIP reception with the events performers, & complimentary hors d’œuvres, beer & wine, at the Back Bay Grand. VIP ticket holders will be treated to a taste of Boston’s finest nightlife, including a Friday, June 18th 6-10 p.m. pre-event VIP reception at the House of Blues Boston Foundation Room, featuring appearances by Chris Thomas King, My Hero, the Bobby Keyes Trio, & DJ Aeryn, and an open bar from 6-7 p.m. & complimentary hors d’œuvres – 50% of the proceeds to benefit the International House of Blues Foundation (IHOBF). Splash Ultra Lounge will host a June 18th 7-10 p.m. VIP reception featuring complementary hors d’œuvres, appearances by My Hero, & music by DJ Joe Sobalo Jr. To top off this incredible weekend, VIPs, sponsors, media, & affiliates will enjoy a festive after party at Mantra Restaurant, sponsored by our Share the Stage 2010 title sponsor, One World Cuisine, and bringing together all the weekend’s performers, for schmoozing, impromptu performances, music by DJ Aeryn, & the exquisite atmosphere & dining of Mantra.

June 19th Matinee tickets are $20 (Reserved) & $30 (VIP), and Evening tickets are $35 & $50 (Reserved), & $100 (VIP), with discounts offered to children, students, seniors, service people, union members, and affiliated organizations. For complete event details & exclusive VIP tickets purchases (on sale only through June 5th), visit www.bccaonline.com/shareourstage.html. For Reserved seating visit http://www.tillingers.com/calendar.html.
BCCA, Inc. is a non-profit tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. Donations are fully tax-deductible. Tax I.D.: 05-0548309
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June 19th 1 p.m. Film Premier & 11:30 a.m. Red Carpet at John Hancock Hall:

Share our Stage 2010's matinee to benefit BCCA, Inc. (www.bccaonline.com) will present the Official US East Coast Premier & Celebrity Red Carpet of "Elle: A Modern Cinderella Tale", a music-driven Disney cast film, fresh off it's "Best Family Film" award at the Newport Beach Festival, & success at Cannes, a live performance by the hit Urban-Pop group My Hero, from the Film's Soundtrack, & celebrity photo-ops. Complete event details & exclusive VIP tickets at www.bccaonline.com/shareourstage.html. For Reserved seating visit http://www.tillingers.com/calendar.html.

June 19th 7 p.m. Blues Performance & 5:30 p.m. VIP Reception at John Hancock Hall:

Share our Stage 2010's matinee to benefit BCCA, Inc. (www.bccaonline.com) will present "An Evolution of the Blues", a first rate evening show, featuring performances by multi-Grammy award winning artist & actor, Chris Thomas King, King of 21st Century Blues, & his band, Urban-Pop group My Hero, 7-time Grammy nominated blues band Bellevue Cadillac, music & dance by Genuine Voices & Boston Tap Company, & celebrity appearances. Complete event details & exclusive VIP tickets at www.bccaonline.com/shareourstage.html. For Reserved seating visit http://www.tillingers.com/calendar.html.
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1. She is ...

... a dance experiment. As part of The Place's 40th Anniversary weekend called Something Happening, I'm asking audiences (4 people
at a time) to say what they are thinking as they are thinking it ... or
just a bit afterwards. The material will be performed by Paea Leach and
Elisabetta d'Aloia, and we'll be recording the audio as will as
videoing the dancing (up close). I don't know what it will be like, or
what I'll end up doing with the audio/video material, but it should be
good fun. If you are in London this Sunday 16 May, stop by The Place and have
a look. We are in session 5 starting at 4pm. www.skellis.net/sheis

2. Improvisation workshop & research

Marika Rizzi and I are sharing a bit of practice each morning between 10am and 12pm from 14–18 June at Roehampton University (all welcome -
just drop me a line). This is part of a week of improvisation research
with Kirstie Simson, Le Quan Ninh, Henry Montes, Marika Rizzi, Darrell
Jones, Kenso Kusuda and me. It'll be a dense period of working, thinking
and reflecting and will include a couple of performances: one at 19:30
on Wednesday 16th June at Roehampton University, and the other at 19:30
on Friday 18th June at Siobhan Davies Studio. Kirstie is also going to
be teaching in the mornings out at Siobhan Davies Studio through Independent Dance.
There are more details at http://june2010.posterous.com, and we'll be keeping a
pretty active online presence there during the week.

3. Recovery

After a few sessions in March in Melbourne, Natalie Cursio, Shannon Bott and I are going into another stage of development and testing with
Ben Cobham, Ben Cisterns, Pete Brundle, Paula Levis and Vanessa Chapple.
We'll be working at Arts House in Melbourne in July, and you can follow
a bit of chatter online at recovery.posterous.com as we work towards a hopeful
premiere around February/March 2011 in Melbourne.

4. Desire Lines

This project has been commissioned for the latest incarnation of The Place Prize and I'm currently in full pre-production (reading, scheduling, wondering
how it can possibly work) mode before work begins in the studio in
June. skellis.net/desirelines
with inevitable research blog somewhere around there.

5. Polar Twin

NZ choreographer/film-maker Daniel Belton and I are in the very early stages of developing some ideas for a trans-hemisphere adventure
scheduled for 2011-2012. We've been thinking about the nature of
'interpretation' in relation to imagined and actual experiences of the
North and South Poles and probably heading towards some screen-based
outcomes. We may be some time.

Just a reminder, you can't respond directly to this email. If you'd like to drop me a line, try se@skellis.net. Lastly, occasional blog at skellis.posterous.com,
and cooking news and short ramblings via twitter on @simonkellis!

All the very best, Simon

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Dancing in the Light

Latest "Dancing in the Light" multi-media performance was held at Berklee College of Music on July 27th, 2009. Randy Felts, Ricardo Monzon and Lisa Leake swirled, swooned and side-winded inter-kinetic energy on stage, as Randy twisted things up a bit through the fusion of his "synthophone" with melodies, harmonies, multi-percussion, off-beats and sound bites, plus Lisa Leake's gyrations (from numerous dance genre). Visual art by local artists was mashed into the large screen overhang, so that all images mirrored and penetrated one another, artistically speaking. Here is one pic but videos forthcoming.
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Indeterminacy and the Roaming Body

At the end of 2008 I had the abstract for the following paper accepted for presentation at the intercreate.orgSCANZ Symposium, New Plymouth, NZ Aotearoa 7-8 February 2009.SCANZ is now an annual fixture on the international map of practitioners in the Arts, Sciences and Literature, so I presented this paper to a diverse audience from Holland, Brazil, France, Germany, the UK, the USA, Australia and NZ Aotearoa. My presentation was comprised of my reading to the symposium audience at the Govett-Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth, my avatar, Rollo Kohime simultaneously (one sound channel for both venues) reading to an audience in my Second Life Wellington Railway Station (my SL avatar is now voice-enabled and the station was projected onto the main wall of the conference room, approx 10mx5m) and a secondary screen showing selected videos of my dance practice - the first was referenced specifically in my paper.Abstract Title:Negotiating the Parameters of Missed Conversations in Urban SpacesAbstract:This paper represents a research strand of my AUT Masters in Art and Design project (majoring in dance and video), ‘In the Company of Strangers'. Indeterminacy as a force, responsible for sustaining in us the dynamic of the stranger, is explored in encounters between people in urban spaces. Concepts centering on disjunct-conversations and departure are being investigated through my research-practice which, as a scrutinizing lens, attests to the contemporary theories which reside in the states of 'becoming' evidenced in selected writings of Henri Bergson and Brian Massumi.This project posits the formation of a new Urban Myth: Experienced through the vehicle of the roaming body, our engagements, meetings and encounters in urban spaces frequently manifest as disjunct, ‘missed conversations’. I am asserting that this is due to the inevitability in our existence of indeterminacy occurring as a significant mediator of our behaviour. Indeterminacy implies motion and emerges, as Massumi so ably asserts, through ‘… an unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary …’. We, all of us, are constantly being drawn away – always either approaching or embracing involuntarily, a state of ‘Leaving’ which co-mingles with and unerringly erodes our efforts to engage with another in the here and now........................................................................................................................................

This paper begins with the notion of the Stranger identity and 'Belonging' in contemporary urban environments and closes with the event of ‘Leaving’. Between these manifestations lies a gulf of uneasy indeterminacy, evident in the ways in which our choices are made, our actions which appear to prevail, the spaces and times which we occupy and displace and our interactions with one another. The idea of belonging is central to our existence and to our understanding of how we and others give meaning to our lives. Our sense of identity is founded upon social interactions that indicate our allegiance to particular communities or groups, through shared beliefs, values or practices. Yet over the generations, has our pursuit of personal autonomy robbed us of that cherished sense of belonging and is there still a more subtle, insidious force acting upon us? In my research practice I am positing a new Urban Myth. My contention is that all our exchanges, whether they be either apparently resolved engagements, casual encounters or missed conversations with people and places, are governed by the agency of indeterminacy evident through a continual Leaving of these exchanges. That is Leaving with a capital ''L'. I am suggesting that ‘Leaving’, as a point of separation is a phenomenon. Leaving is not merely a point of departure, but an ingredient central to that process we call change. For us, as creatures of change, movement away seems to be inevitable and this ensures that there are constantly present, small, overlooked dramas with their attendant poignancies expressed within the simplest, most mundane, everyday dynamics between people and places. I am suggesting that this behaviour is involuntary, informs and mediates our respective realities, knows no cultural boundaries and occurs everywhere, all the time, although I am concerned with its manifestation in urban spaces. I do not consider this notion to be negative or depressing. Rather, I find it compelling, capable of propelling us into re-evaluations of who we are and how, as sentient beings, we conduct our lives through a perceptual reality composite, caught up, despite ourselves in a perpetual state of change which is centred ultimately, in this universal movement away.

In the text, Negotiating difference or being with strangers, John Allen (2000) informs us that, ‘In his classic essay on “The Stranger” published in 1908, Simmel tried to convey through this figure, a range of ambivalences which have come to haunt us in the practices of negotiating difference’. Allen is alluding to the paradoxes attendant within those perceptions when we try to position ourselves as social familiars, leaving unknowns outside our circle, as Strangers and therefore, 'Other'. In my sphere of enquiry, Simmel`s words are provocative, not so much for how society functions, but more specifically,for how those individuals within spatial/societal structures function and relate to one another. In defining or ‘negotiating difference’, Simmel adopted a 'host' figure as our familiar self. The figure of the ‘Stranger’ captures the paradoxical experience of what it means to interact with someone who is both, perhaps nearby in a spatial sense, yet remote and therefore ‘strange’ to us in a social sense, while the converse of this may also be true. The Stranger, then, is someone who is involved with us, yet removed, in a sense virtual, spatially and socially as an accepted member of our group or situation. Personna who we label within our host-field as both familiars and strangers, constantly come and go. However, as I will endeavour to discuss, we are all susceptible to Leaving as a given which brings in its wake, its own estrangement. Yet, Simmel`s 'host/stranger' binary definition begs that all-important third dimension, which I maintain can be defined through the state of indeterminacy. As indeterminants we all of us depart despite ourselves, from every engagement we make, fleeting or involved.A definition of the term, 'Indeterminacy'.The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which is founded in quantum mechanics, asserts that both the position and momentum of a given particle cannot be determined simultaneously.'The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant and vice versa'. (Heisenberg,1927)In other words it could be said that one is unable to record scientifically, evidence of a given body that is both static and moving at the same time. If one cannot measure something, does this make the non-finding absolute? Is this definition simply a finite, modernist Truism or an opportunity for a poststructuralist Truant? Is the definition deconstructable? Given that we register the activity, is it possible perhaps to measure empirically, through the senses, this activity in one body taking place in two situations at once? Despite the scientific, physical non-finding, does this mean that one`s 'attention' cannot be in two places at once? Or one`s desires, intent, perception? I suspect that this is not the case. I am suggesting that through acknowledging and assuming in ourselves a state of 'the being-in-change', it is possible to transfer ones presence in the form of intent, from 'here' to 'there' simultaneously and that there is physical, visible evidence for this in scenarios involving engagement between people in the street.My personna/presence here, now, is divided between this space and this Second Life space. To the people behind their avatars in my Second Life Wellington Railway Station, who can hear my voice and see my avatar moving, the collective personna constituted by myself and this audience I suggest, is actually virtual and in that extension of this reality, my avatar-self in Second Life, is real. So at this point in time, we have an equivalency as analogues in two places at once - the constituents of a blended-reality.To illustrate dual presence through an indeterminate intent - in this instance, in departure; in the first video clip shown here, the couple in the spotlight conduct an animated conversation in the street. Without being privy to their dialogue, we have no way of knowing what they are discussing. We could speculate, but I am fascinated by their body language, their neutral proximity to one another, the signals they unconsciously transmit about the way they are feeling with regard to their engagement with one another and how this evolves through the duration of the meeting. If I apply a non-judgmental appraisal to their situation, in the last minute prior to their separating, although the woman eventually says goodbye, physically walks away and leaves the engagement, the man appears to have already departed from the conversation. He shuffles, he checks his cell phone, he hides behind his hands, he waves his arms uncertainly and looks around. He checks his watch. Eye contact decreases. No longer is he fully present.When she does finally leave, his reaction is marginally interested – because his roaming self has already left. His ‘Leaving’ has crept into and hijacked the meeting, while ostensibly, they were still engaged. It would be easy for us to say, 'But he has simply switched off'. I am not disputing this. I am asking, 'Why?' I am suggesting the whole story is more interesting. Indeterminacy is embedded here. The only difference between this and other engagements is that in this case, the slip in the present (now past) is visible. Can this constitute evidence of a simultaneity of presence? Here, yet not here? Both people left. Movement away occurred in both parties, even though ironically, one of them left first by staying behind. Is this occurrence actual or merely a point of perception? (Is a point of perception no less actual?)In a second definition of indeterminacy, Brian Massumi, (2002) in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, tells us that a body in motion is held within an ever-changing process of movement relative to its own already non-static position in space, ('... its own non-present potential to vary ...'). Massumi, (in a vein which is similar to Henri Bergson`s sense of 'becoming') maintains that the only 'real' relation is that of a body to its own indeterminacy, (... its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise that it is, in any here and now.') Does Massumi`s interpretation and my demonstration here, refute the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, despite the difficulty in being able to measure two presences (or one divided presence) simultaneously? In contrast, although not entirely, William Wordsworth, articulating indeterminacy as an aesthetic, made room in any insubstantial meaning or questionable reliablility of an event, by replacing it with imagination deferring to a potential for interpretation. He called it, ‘Something evermore about to be’.Indeterminacy and the roaming body – in the contexts of this phrase, perhaps we have no way of forecasting how our connections will be determined when we meet someone in the street. Will we even engage? What might comprise the least element of a meeting between two people in the street? Somehow though, either sooner or later, (or, in the light of what we have just seen - sooner and later), without always recognizing it we are always leaving. Allowing for the variables within which we carry out our departure, the only non-variable is that we will actually depart from meetings which resemble islands in the stream - places of temporary purchase within change.In my videoed dance work, I am concerned with the investigation of what I will call the spaces 'between recognized content’ in our lived experience. In exploring what may comprise engagement and conversation on the street, I am not so much interested by what is being communicated, as what is being left out, due to what I identify as interpersonal terrain dominated by indeterminacy. I am interested how this uncertainty located within movement/change may influence or to a significant extent, govern the nature of dialogue in urban contexts. The videos playing here are expressions of small-conversations, sometimes missed, between the dancers and between the dancers and members of the public. The dance-work is supposed to be mildly interventionist in terms of how it affects the flow of commuters and catalyses a response – creating for the people walking past, a private tableau made public between two people, a virtual, half-witnessed-half-remembered-later moment, representative of the myriad of disjunct dialogues and discreet micro-dramas within scenes of departure which may occur, in these kinds of public spaces. Responses are curious, concerned, mystified, guarded, warm and cold but above all, removed from us as strangers - as we are removed from them.The anthropologist Marc Augé (2004), offers us another perspective on belonging and what I shall describe as the results of a societal, collective maturation of autonomy. In his definitive text, ‘non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’, Augé succinctly documents the profound dysfunctional changes (relative to the fracturing of identities within community and the dislocation of community itself) to our westernized societies. These dischordant developments were precipitated not so much by the nature of our thinking about architecture, but by the architecture of our thinking about our behaviours in our habitats. Augé rigorously interrogates the substance and resultant implications of our living spaces and environments and ultimately, finds them wanting. His commentary questions the extent to which we are still in possession of spaces which we might define as 'places' - whether we still belong in those spaces that we frequent the most, or whether they have become, in his words, 'non-lieux' or non-places: airports, railway stations, hypermarkets, filling-station forecourts, Ferry terminals ... or Ferrys.Contrary to Augé`s assertion that places like airports are situated at the fore-front of non-lieux locales, John Di Stefano (Senior Lecturer at Massey University in Wellington) proposes a very different view in the description and categorizing of the airport as a socio-geographic space: In his acclaimed video, ‘Hub’ he suggests an alternative definition for the term 'belonging' - that the idea of ‘home’ and belonging is today perhaps more ideally expressed as ‘… a sense of being between places.’ (Di Stefano, quoted in Video Data Bank, 2001). Hub proposes that we consider the airport as a home-away-from-home and also a place of ‘dis-Appearance’ – a place of opportunity which entails a transformative process rather than simply vanishing. So rather than being a non-place, the inference here is that the airport becomes, ‘… a rich and complex respository of interlacing personal and political histories – a new space of belonging.’ di Stefano (2001) Clearly then, one persons sense of non-place is another`s place. But, is it not our search for personal and professional independence and the systems which provide for a more efficiently autonomous management of that independence that has for some, created a world of 'non-lieux' or non-places? It is interesting to note, too, that all these systems on a larger-than-life scale are orientated around the movement of populations, essentially articulating and perpetuating within arrivals, climates of departure. Leaving. Why not Arriving? Does not indeterminacy bring us to our arrivals just as surely as our departures? I am sure that it does. Arrival suggests a governance of some significance; a quiet triumph of navigation to a secure location, yet each arrival holds the seeds of the next departure, creating for us a pause, a sense of temporary settling; seen through this current contextual vision, arrival is itself only momentarily grasped and subsequently lost as a place in time and space which punctuates change, from which ultimately, we move away.Within the parameters of this urban myth, the manifestation of indeterminacy suggests that ‘Leaving’ is a universal state over which we have no conscious control. Departure is that paradoxical frame of reference for us as humans which both, frees us from the constraints of our previous engagement while instilling perhaps, trace echoes of what has been left behind. For me, this creates poignancy - a pathos evident in the most mundane of departures, humanity-wide. Whether it be recognizably profound and measurably life-altering, or apparently occurring within the humdrum of the everyday, departures and the act of ‘leaving’ people and places of significance constantly colour our lives. Could it be that this unconscious facility that we unknowingly possess; Leaving as an ongoing, involuntary occurrence, is responsible for our departures, regardless of our own diagnostic sensing within a meeting or engagement with someone? Perhaps departure itself is the indeterminant driving factor here. A condition which affects us all, impinging upon and mediating our behaviour while for the most part, we remain in ignorance of its existence.In 1927, Henri Bergson, who had previously been hailed as both, ‘the greatest thinker in the world’ and ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ (Mullarkey, 1999b) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been a major influence on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze. Bergson is perhaps most widely known for his treatises on the concepts of time and becoming. His stance as a ‘process philosopher’ on ‘lived’ and ‘experienced’ time and space is particularly relevant for me: He was concerned with the actions which bridge or give rise to the manifestation of content. He pursued these intangible qualities binding content, concentrating on the unfolding process of the event itself.But significantly, for this paper, Bergson`s thinking recognizes and traverses the territory occupied by indeterminacy and in so doing, transforms ‘being’ into ‘becoming’: If we take it that ‘Being’ can be defined as the descriptor typically given to those essential qualites of a thing that endure despite all temporary changes in appearance, reality can then be defined ontologically, by enquiry into the particular kind of “being” that a given entity has or expresses. ‘Becoming’ however, for Bergson, was and remains quite a different way of defining reality. The word describes an action rather than a static quality. It refers to a view of the world which is defined through motion which is continuous. So the only reality is constant change, flux, transformation – becoming. The things we perceive as ‘real’ and constant, reliable and set are outcomes relative to our respective perceptions. To quote Bergson,‘ … the qualities of matter are so many stable views that we take of its instability’. Bergson puts this very succinctly another way: '… rather than there being things which change', more accurately speaking, there is, '…change provisionally grasped as a thing'. Bergson (2005) This realignment of perspective may allow us to witness indeterminacy in-the-making, made visible in meetings between people on the street, governed in their actions by the phenomenon of departure.In his 1939 Essay, Movement as Language, Len Lye stated:Movement is the result of a feeling in one thing of strong difference from other things. Movement is always one thing moving away from other things—not toward. And the result of movement is to be distinct from other things: the result of movement is form. The history of any definite form is the movement of which the form is the result. When we look at something and see the particular shape of it we are looking at its after-life. Its real life is the movement by which it got to be that shape.In Lye`s description of the world this observation shares similar territory to Bergson`s, maintaining that we live 'change' in a constant process of becoming and that we can only grasp and isolate moments provisionally within change itself.Brian Massumi (2002) echoes this point of view:When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition ... In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary. That relation, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze, is real but abstract … This is an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real relation – that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an elsewhere and otherwise that it is, in any here and now).When I began my Masters study two years ago, my commencement point for research was to take and investigate the basic premise that the 'real' is influenced by the virtual, all the time and everywhere; that we experience moments which could be described as 'virtual' every day. I began to work in both Real Life and initially, quite cynically in Second Life and very quickly found out that the residents in Second Life who I interviewed, indignantly regarded the whole construct as very real. To these people (now myself included) Second Life is another facet of the Real. This notion is supported in Massumi`s exploration of the ‘‘indeterminacy’ of the body – the realities facing the body which are incomplete without the recognition of another, constantly simultaneously-generated virtual description of ‘now’.’12 Massumi posits that ‘this body’ is here, but also, ‘this presence and essentially when in motion, they are no longer with us, here, but ‘over there’, now ...' 13 My work focusses upon the nature of movement itself, which is inevitably coloured and controlled by what could be said to be a force outside almost everything, but which equally, is integral to all: Time.Massumi suggests that the body in movement means accepting the body in its occupation of space and time, as a paradox: that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body itself. Of it, but not it. Indeterminate, coincident, but real and material. Massumi calls this echo a, ‘Fellow-travelling dimension of the same reality’, 14 A legitimate interpretation of identifiable alterity? In this time-based context, it could be said that the body is present but within its indeterminacy, the time-based embodiment of ‘body’ has already moved on. This assertion as a concept is interesting to consider in the context of my ‘in-transit’ dominated practice and offers a framework for speculation about the reasons for what often, are the expressions of truncated, disjunct forms of communication in the street. In a sense, one could say that the environment or ‘stage’ for my work, rather than a commuter-busy passageway, or Wellington Railway Station at rush-hour, is more accurately, the moving body itself. The body`s potential to vary suggests an alignment which juxtaposes yet subordinates ‘being’ to becoming. Our ontological presence can be defined by the idea that we are in a continual state of being/becoming – a time-based positioning. In qualifying his argument, Massumi paraphrases Deleuze in saying that the problem with dominant modes of cultural and literary theory is not that they are too abstract to grasp the solidity or corporeal fabric of the real. The problem is that these modes are not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of what we take to be real. Which leads me to the previously mentioned state of blended-reality.Mark Hansen, in Bodies in Code who sees the embodiment of function manifesting through the human body, acting as a kind of seismographic wand. Hansen maintains that: ‘… all reality is mixed reality’, Hansen quotes Brian Massumi who talks about the existence of the analogue as a transformative entity:Always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought sensation is the being of the analog(sic). This is the analog(sic) in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain, Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into music in the heart. Or outside coming in. Variable continuity across the qualitatively different: continuity of transformation.(Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 2002:135 in Hansen, 2006:5-6)Through our internal analogue therefore, we possess the innate capacity to transform continuously, the many real and virtual realities of which our existence is comprised. The blended-reality paradigm can shift the fields of 'orthodox' perceptions which have, in the past, established existing modes of seeing and understanding reality: Hansen maintains that the reason why so many of us now operate in so-called virtual, metaverse worlds with apparent ease, is because we have always done so - we encounter without comment, a myriad of moments which we could describe as virtual every day in our 'real life' existence. The shift for us as 'analogue' where the process within us as humans which brings metaverse technologies like Second Life.com together with our natural perceptions, supports a function which expands the scope of our natural perception and integrates real-world and virtual realities to arrive at a more homogeonous blended-reality.Rather than presenting the virtual as a completely technical simulacrum – a portal to a fully immersive, separate or fantasy world, the blended-reality paradigm regards it as just one more realm among others which can be accessed through our already embodied perception or our ability to enact - or, in the case of both Real and Second Life, to role-play. 'We are all in the same house, but using different rooms', Dharan Longley, a very good friend of mine said to me yesterday. So there is less emphasis here on the content and more emphasis on the ways in which we access that content.I am working in Second Life as well as Real Life, not because I am intrigued by their differences where I recognize a separate virtual and real world, but because under the auspices of the blended-reality that I inhabit, I can perhaps more easily explore the interplay between Real Life where Second Life becomes a facet of the Real. Here I can converse, witness and belong as analogue, while making critical commentary upon yet another field of departure.This section in brackets was not read at the conference due to time constraints:[Points of PurchaseTo contextualize my thinking, I need to continue with my case for 'belonging' before I can sensibly comment on its erosion. Over the last 200 years, Western Thought has created a dialectic which, I believe, impacts upon certain concepts concerned with the acquisition of autonomy within personal identity - that debate which seeks to synthesize the Self and the ‘other’; the implications of which may affect our ability to ‘belong’ in the here and now and consequently, to question a sense of lasting allegiance to any one place.Is it possible to exercise a conscious control over our facility to belong? At which point does an autonomous state stand so resolved, itself independent and immune from the need to be a part of something greater? On the one hand, that late 17C and 18C set of collective Western values emerging through The Enlightenment, called upon individuals to think for themselves. In embracing this, we have since held that independence and thus the capacity for reason (which apparently, enables one to successfully stand alone) were to be our exemplars. This in turn has necessitated that the individual be able to separate from all that is externally imposed on them in order to evaluate and consider rationally, their ongoing condition: that of a sentient being, with the capacity to act autonomously. Yet it can be seen that perhaps self-autonomy, is divided: Since Georg Hegel, (1770-1831) major psychological accounts of the self have placed its dependence on the ‘other’ at the centre of formation and maintenance of the self. For Hegel, one needs the ‘other’ to recognize one's status as a self-directing subject in order to create the conditions for the self-directing activity; one's self image is mediated through the ‘self-other’ relation, not only in terms of its substantive or evidential content but also in terms of the self in its base capacity. For Sigmund Freud, the ‘other’ is internalized to become a central organizing principle for one's desire, one's needs, driven by one's unconscious. Thus, on the one hand freedom and independence requires reason, which requires the ability to separate from the ‘other’, while at the same time, the self is ineluctably dependent on the other's interruptions and influence. If both of these traditions are broadly correct, it would seem that we are doomed to a lack of freedom through autonomy, because undivided autonomy is doubtful. Consequently, freedom through independence is defined as precisely that which we cannot attain.Linda Martin-Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy and currently the Director of Women`s Studies at Syracuse University in the USA, asserts in The Political Critique of Identity, '... in classical liberal political theory, the initial state of the self is conceptualized as an abstract individual without, or prior to, any group allegiance. It is from this "initial position" that the self engages in rational deliberation and thus achieves autonomy ...' through free choice. 'As (Immanuel) Kant developed this idea, a person who cannot gain critical distance from and thus objectify their cultural traditions cannot rationally assess them and thus cannot attain autonomy. In Kant's view, an abstract or disengaged self is for this reason necessary for full personhood. Moreover,the process of modernity, which was conceptualized as analogous on the societal level to the process of individual maturation, became defined as just this increased ability to distance oneself from one's cultural traditions. In this way this distancing ability also became a key part of the global, European-centered teleology of intellectual and moral development, defining the terms by which societies were to be labeled advanced or backward.’ Martin-Alcoff goes on to stress that, ‘… the norm of rational maturity, then, required a core self stripped of its identity …’One side of this theoretical and often prejudicially-lived debate, has sought to locate and resolve in us an independent state of self. We can now see that this state may be defined dichotomously, responsible not only for shaping but also for ignoring it seems, the collateral damage occurring to that other aspect of personal and collective identity - the issue of our ‘Belonging’. Could it be that this aspect of which Kant speaks, this process of maturation, the graduation to ‘… full personhood’ is a contributor to the erosion in our sense of belonging? Has the manifestation of this balanced autonomous identity so carefully harboured by us, comprised merely a veneer over that reality which now emerges as a lost locus?

Let us examine for a moment, verbal conversation as an adhesive which only partially binds us to the moment in this stream of change. Not only does speech aid our functioning effectively in social situations and locates us in time and given space, but more candidly, the ability to converse and to be heard affirms, empowers and expands the map of the human heart.In Tricks of the Mind, by Derren Brown, under the section on ‘Targeted Rapport’, Brown writes, ‘ Most people when they are getting on well, will be in a state of unconscious ‘rapport’. They will tend to mirror each other`s body language and so on without realizing it …’ At the same time, ‘… there is the odd sensation we have all experienced (though we never think to mention it) of knowing when the other person is about to get up and leave. Suddenly there is something in the air, a moment or a shift and then you know the other person is about to say they should ‘make a move’. And if they don`t you have that feeling that they are outstaying their welcome’. The level of unconscious rapport shared up to that moment, particularly if the conversation has lasted for some time, is responsible for the sharing of mutual thought and body patterns so that together you can sense when the time to leave has arrived. Speech comprises much of the articulation of this and that of our wider socio-contextual map - much, but not all. The hidden message which is about when and how to leave an engagement is articulated through speech-prompts but also through body language, an underlying empathetic cue to move on, with this decision coming from a place ‘of ‘ and in the body – a place from which, in a manner of speaking we have already departed.Brown maintains that studies carried out on rapport have shown an array of mirrored behaviours that are not merely body positioning but something far more subtle. It has been established that people in rapport with one another tend to breathe at the same rate, adopt similar facial expressions, blink at the same rate and use one another`s language. I would describe these responses as somatically based. In other words they are products of a non-spoken, internal discourse that the body carries out continually (using one another`s language is still instigated by a bodily response to a stimulus). A hidden dialogue beneath speech and vision through which we are more overtly governed. We have at our fingertips, so to speak, a very specific skillset which is available to us on a subliminal level during our interaction with another; a transponder of sorts, fashioned to assist us in the process of moving ourselves and a stranger identity to a place which may simply be less strange and designed almost as if to counteract the inexorability of our predilection for departure.‘Rudimentary engagements, communication at its most basic, the prototype of all human interaction …’ such are the descriptors for the term, ‘Protoconversation’ in Daniel Goleman`s, Social Intelligence, The New Science of Human Relationships. The term relates to the early neural signals which expand into methods for establishing a rapport that we experienced as babies, making our first communicative forays into the outside world through the medium of our mothers. Often a synchrony of rhythmic motion, touch, gaze, sound and breath, a coordination of hand movements and facial expressions will establish a mutual rapport between mother and child. Such conversations are moreoften than not very short in duration – even only seconds in length and they end when both parties arrive at matched states, typically, affectionate ones. Protoconversations have a certain elasticity in meaning and application. Not only does it refer to the very earliest development of our powers of communication (mostly non-verbal), but in adulthood, protoconversations remain as our most fundamental template for mapping, matching or missing in meetings with others.The template is tacit, a subtle awareness through feeling and the senses which allows us when we meet to quietly proceed, in step, with a stranger or acquaintance, friend or family member. Protoconversation is a silent dialogue – Goleman uses the term, ‘substrate’ upon which all encounters or engagements are built. Goleman assures us that it is, ‘… the hidden agenda in every interaction’. Goleman (2007) A silent go-between if you will, which underpins and as a mode of communicating, often outlasts the manifestation of speech. One could extend this to say that protoconversation is a silent, neurokinetic conversation supported by mutual empathy - assisting a curiosity about the path ahead. Attention, albeit one that fluctuates, is paid to the task of listening to one`s partner, in the moment, using certain tools: When ‘conversing’ or when in a dance duet, (particularly those dance modes which are based on the premise of improvisation) listening - paying attention through touch to the tone or tenor of the connection with the other person, the unspoken, fleetingly glimpsed under-dialogue of the-moment-in-change is not only paramount if the conversation/duet is to last, but it also allows us to gather information about what is occuring in front of us on Goleman`s ‘substrate’ level.So what occurs before the engagement closes? Why do people leave? What cues, like those just mentioned, are there to warn of impending closure?In Contact Improvisation Dance, (like the name suggests there is an absence of choreography in this shared movement mode - and more of an unbridled revelry in indeterminacy) as in a spoken conversation between two people where each must navigate uncharted waters as they go, whether they are strangers or not, sometimes one person leaves the conversation or duet; sometimes there is a tacit, unspoken moment when both parties recognise that a point of stasis has been reached and closure is imminent; Why? Are both parties simply - tired? Sometimes there may be the result of a mismatch in listening, a change in mood; Sometimes the narrative which has been self-sustaining, evolving, fluctuating through pauses (which are not in themselves necessarily inert) and bursts of intense movement, simply runs out of momentum and finds its own place to rest. The conversers or dancers are instigators of these pathways to departure, and simultaneously, witnesses to it. Rarely though, is departure itself recognized as the instigator of the act to leave. The act of 'Leaving' itself makes no demands upon us - we are swept on regardless, in a stream of change that we cannot stop. ‘Leaving’ is a descriptor of this state which forever accompanies us. Suffice it to say, I believe that to be at peace with ‘Leaving’ requires practice when there is a suspicion that conversations, meetings and engagements are those points of purchase in the stream which inevitably, cannot last. It can be seen that perhaps within the parameters of negotiating engagements in this paper, the slide toward departure may involve something more than two people reaching an energetic impasse.]To close with Bergson, in The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting, the authors, David Middleton and Steven Brown suggest that Bergson`s view of the world is a process which embraces a, ‘fluid continuity of the real’, (2005). There is no doubt that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows, and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially chosen snapshots of the transition, all that is naturally experienced is duration itself. (Bergson quoted in Middleton & Brown, 2005: p.61) I maintain then, that we are not 'beings' but time-based creatures, mediated by uncertainty through change. In this Urban Myth the interconnections which exist between indeterminacy manifesting through lived departures, ensures that there is no surcease for the roaming body in this blended continuity of the Real we call life. No secure position to be attained and held indefinitely. In this context we may find that we are interconnected through our mutual estrangement and that our engagements, conversations and connections will always be at hazard.I suspect from my observations that ultimately, as indeterminants, we are always ‘Leaving’ and that this is a true descriptor of our condition in that business of being human. There is real pathos to be found in a lifetime of leaving engagements and this state will keep us forever defined by some, if not ourselves, as strangers. My opening paragraph of this paper introduces the notion of ' ... a climate of indeterminacy governing our actions which appear to prevail ...' In the end, despite our acts and accomplishments which bear witness to signal points of purchase, perhaps the only actions which truly prevail are those which draw us away. Leaving.My last reference is a quotation from Buddha:What is the appropriate behaviour for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What`s the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?(Buddha quoted in Human Givens Journal 2008)References:Allen, J. (2000). Negotiating difference or being with strangers. Thinking Space Crang and Thrift (eds). Routledge, Taylor and Francics Group, New York, (p:57)Augé, M. (2004). non-places; introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Verso, London. Translated by John Howe.Bergson, H. (2005). Visualizing Experience. Henri Bergson on memory in Middleton, D and Brown, S. D. 2005, (p. 61)Brown, D. (2007). Tricks of the Mind. Channel 4 Books, (p.186).Buddha. Human Givens. vol 14, (3) Human Givens Publishing Ltd, East Sussex, England, UK.Buddha. (2008). Human Givens. vol 14, (3) Human Givens Publishing Ltd, East Sussex, England, UKdi Stefano, J. (2001). HUB video quoted in Video Data Bank.Goleman, D. (2007) Social Intelligence, Recipe for Rapport, Bantam Dell, (p.30)Hansen, M. (2006). Bodies in Code. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, New York. (pp5-6).Lye, L. & Riding, L. (1935). Movement as Language, Movement as Medium in Epilogue. Deya Majorica and London, p.231-235.Martin-Alcoff, L. The Political Critique of Identity. The second chapter from Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self.Retrieved from: http://www.alcoff.com/content/chap2polcri.html 25.1.09Massumi, D. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation Duke University Press, Durham & London, (p.135).Middleton D and Brown S. (2005) (The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting, (p.62).Retrieved from: Quantum Mechanics 1925-1927 THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLEhttp://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08.htmWordsworth, W. (1805) The Prelude. Cambridge and the Alps, (Vl 541-2)Mike Baker Nelson, NZ Aotearoa 6.2.09
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All of us at the A.O. Movement Collective love that you're supporting our work by keeping in touch with us digitally! We want to keep bringing you innovative and exciting projects, and the number one thing you can do to make that a reality is to make a contribution - right here right now! We know that our supporters are students, artists, and revolutionaries - people who don't have wads of money to throw around - but think about this: if every member of this group donated just $10 (less than seeing a movie, proposing to your partner, or buying a new pair of jeans), we would have enough to self-produce an ENTIRE SHOW next year!All you have to do is CLICK THIS LINKhttps://dnbweb1.blackbaud.com/OPXDONATE/donate.asp?cguid=98B0A09F%2D9D5A%2D4653%2D9079%2D9CCCD7EB6251&dpid=7503and specify in the form that you want to donate to SARAH A.O. ROSNER. To donate by mail, and for more information on how we use donations, check out our website. It's tax deductible* and can officially be considered your "good deed", "act of charity", or "protest against lack of arts funding" for the week! Also, we'll be eternally grateful.*Sarah A.O. Rosner is a member artist of Dance Theater Workshop, Inc., a non-profit tax-exempt organization. Contributions in support of Rosner's work are greatly appreciated and may be made payable to Dance Theater Workshop, Inc., earmarked for "the Dance Theater Workshop member project of Sarah A.O. Rosner." A description of the work and current project activities for which such contributions will be used are available from Rosner or Dance Theater Workshop, upon request. All contributions are fully deductible to the extent allowed by law. (Note: A copy of Dance Theater Workshop's latest annual financial report filed with the New York State Department of State may be obtained by writing to the N.Y.S. Dept. of State, Charities Registration, 162 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY, 12231, or to Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, New York, NY, 10011)
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Led by sound designer Norm Scott www.normscott.com and director/choreographer Martha Williams www.themovementmovement.orgFor curious artists, dancers/choreographers, video-ists; students of all of these who want to interface their medium with sound and wonder how to do that or where to begin; or for folks who simply want to learn more about sound making process.In this interactive workshop, participants will have an opportunity to actually be a part of the recording and compositional process. They will go "out into the streets" to record that will later be contributed to a short score. Prior to the field trip portion of the class, we will discuss the formulas and limits for sound collection and the meaning and relevance of intention and limits in the creative process. We will especially look at how we can infuse the theme, which is “productivity," every step of the way. Upon collection of sound, we will return to engage in the interactive compositional portion of the day concluding with a real live useable score that will (in some form) be a part of The Movement Movement's full length evening contemporary dance piece premiering at the Joyce SoHo in June 2008.Sun April 6th, 10 AM to 4 PM - $50 (12 person limit)Harvest Works596 Broadway, Suite 602 (btwn Houston and Prince)New York, NYTo register visit www.harvestworks.org – go to classes/audioFor more information on content contact Martha Williams info@themovementmovement.org
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The Golden Viral: Leslie and Ly's

On the day of love, I stood on an old dirty couch and watched a Midwest diva rap about the powers of her shoulder pads and sweater appliqué. The low-budget big-impact show was all flash with projections, heavy electro beats complete with backup singers. It was the Leslie and Lys show at the Mercury Lounge in New York City, and it was sold-out: people dancing, laughing, singing along to her not-so-underground hits, and getting the chance to touch her red rouge cheeks. CDs, t-shirts and other crap were being sold near the front door. How did this happen? In a city of million dollar rat holes, how does an underground phenomenon emerge? Simple: she unleashed her shtick via the internet, exploiting her talent for visual art, music making, dance and performance. Well, the dancing is not going to make her a star, but her moves are fierce and funny.Her entrance that night:In front of skewed videos of chubby aerobic classes, dog grooming, and other weird 80s cultural ephemera, I felt like I was watching a genius. There were low tech effects, like a giant black sock to disguise her dramatic entrance, and the music was courtesy of her laptop, which sat right to the side of the stage. It was technological full disclosure, low and hi-tech. And she shakes and strokes her full-figure beauty/booty in a tight gold-lame confection…a space suit for her alien glamour. Again: nothing to hide. Nobody laughs at her, they dance with her. There were fans with gem-sweaters, called up on stage to get letters of gem-sweater authenticity and then dance: performance pop art without the pomp.It’s Americana from hell. But so lovely are Leslie’s talents that what could be simple kitsch becomes a sophisticated commentary on body-image, whiteness, celebrity and DIY technologies and culture: she didn’t name her CD ceWEBrity for nothing. And, it’s a shit load of fun.See this article about her formative gemness: http://www.boston.com/yourlife/fashion/articles/2005/05/24/bedazzled/ http://www.lesliehall.com/#
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