Narrative Tangentiality

Finished composing for and performing Montauk with the Liz Gerring Dance Co. and now back from the run at the Baryshnikov Art Center in NYC. Returning to the ink paintings and now working with black acrylic, india ink, and a bit of charcoal in addition to the blue ink, and larger pieces of paper (I'll post some new pictures soon). It feels great to be back in the studio. Listening to Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives - two or three "episodes" each day... Despite my deep admiration for a few particular pieces (Automatic Writing, The Wolf Man, and especially In Sara Mencken Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women), it's only my second time listening through this sprawling opera.

Robert Ashley's music is a wonderful example of ambiguity - structures as non-structures. There's a quality of endless wandering, limitlessness. I admire this quality because my own music seems to become, in the course of things, resolutely unambiguous. In reaction to or against the segmented, ordered quality of my recent performance piece, Flock & Tumble, I've been interested in shifting more towards structures of narrative ambiguity and thinking about what that might mean in the upcoming project with Linda Austin.
Ashley seems to have recognized some hidden attribute of television, some rarely utilized possibility for expansion. Over the winter break and in the midst of snow storms, Kelly and I watched the first and second seasons of Mad Men, which might serve as another example (though far more conventional).

The potential within the framework of a television series is something Twin Peaks first noticed and utilized in a self-conscious way. The open-ended aspect of television gives the possibility of endless narrative expansion, something that Mad Men uses to create a network of characters and psychologies rather than a narrative arc, following endless side-paths within an established group of elements. A revelation of character rather than plot, a deepening of interior space. Very little happening on the surface, but great depths below.

Perhaps this all has something to do with a working method that starts without possibly knowing the ending. A reliance on brainstorming, automatic writing... A faith in the generative properties of the network.
Soap operas take this tangentiality to absurd extremes, but with reversed emphasis - lots happening on the surface and very little below. This was recognized and parodied by Lynch in Twin Peaks, and even mirrored by the television show within the television show (Invitation to Love). A certian degree of amnesia is necessary to continue.
Perfect Lives remains slippery in every way. The established elements of piano, organ and voice are a kind of changing same, constantly flowing, a pattern of syllables... Even instability is unstable, as short "songs" emerge and then disintegrate. A few phrases, names and places stick. Perhaps patterns would emerge with repeated listenings, and I would like to finally see the video, which is now available on dvd.
Robert Ashley also talks about engaging different attention spans, something I've been pondering lately. I'm wondering what the effect would be of extreme repetition of dance events, "looping" single actions or phrases of various lengths, working with the varieties of memory - immediate, short term and long term. (Does anyone have the approximate lengths of these categories, neurologically-based?) What would be the difference between a five second "loop", repeated many times, and a 30-second "loop" or a two-minute "loop"? Or loops that tangent partway through their repetition... I'm interested in the live repetition of human gestures because of the inherent impossibility of exact repetition. I'm interested in using this repetition as a way of accessing the brutality of separation, the way that violence becomes aesthetic.

Flock & Tumble - Screens and bodies

A large performance event, Flock & Tumble is scheduled for the first weekend in November at AudioCinema (226 Se Madison St in Portland). A large, empty warehouse, 12 sound-makers (performers), 4 channels of pre-recorded sound, 4 video projections of the dancers Linda Austin, Wooly Mammoth and others, with clothes by Diana Lang. At this point, I am working with 5 sections - an opening "tumble", three "flock" sections ("Flock", "Swarm" and "Torus") and a closing "tumble". Loosely speaking, (that is, as far as I know) a tumble consists of actions which are passed sequentially from one performer to another, while the flocks use rules of behavior taken from animals (birds, insects and fish) to create clusters of activity. The dancers perform only in screenal space - projected onto the walls.

What does it mean to dance on a screen? Why are the dancers in this piece separated from the activities in “real time”? Perhaps simply to create this space for “unreal time”. I have been interested in the possibility of simultaneous frames which “open up” the edges of actual space into alternate ones. With the emphasis on the plural. These are not spaces to lose the sense of the body (as in the typical cinematic experience of "suspension of disbelief” - though these videos will clearly draw on filmic inspirations. I have been noticing the movement of bodies in films which exist on (or across) the edges of “realism” - the carefully choreographed actions in Bresson’s prime output. The way sitting down, turning the head, placing a hand on a bench can be both completely normal and totally stylized. He achieved this hyper-awareness by filming many, many takes of the same seemingly unimportant movement. On the 40th take, the actor finally reaches an appropriate level of automatism. “Don’t we complete most of our actions in a kind of automatism?” he asks.

Another very different film has informed my thoughts - a Japanese yakuza flick called “Branded to Kill” which takes the stylized choreography of genre-specific conventions - the gunfight, the chase scene, the violent death - and twists them into dance. Falling back into a spinning office chair, the wounded man spins around not once but three times, calling attention to the falseness of the entire construct. Calling attention to the beauty of pure movement which fights against the story while furthering it. There’s something about this fighting and flowing which can exist together. Maybe we can call it “Suspension of belief”...

Bodies will be multiplied by four, though not mirrored. Staggered flashes. Where does the individual movement exist in this multiplicity? How does the body contribute to the larger pattern? How does the repetition of movement create sequential pattern? These are questions I leave to the dancers, as authorities on the subject. Perhaps it can spark a conversation. I would like that.

Music has been underway since December, though I have to imagine much of the final result. In combining live activity with recorded sound, I want these elements to coexist, sharing space. I imagine voice to be a primary tool of the performers, while the recorded compositions are "instrumental" for now (concrete and electronic sounds).