performance

pick a word, any damn word you like

August 3, 2010
By
Eye-chart

Ecstasy. Power. Codified. Holisitc. Deliverance. History. Anger. Threshold. Hegemony. Energy. Paradox. WORDS, Words, words. When I think about codes in the performance of everyday life, words always seem to come to mind. Semantics, in almost every culture, signify who we are, what we are doing, and how we react to our world and relationships. Words carry a heavy weight, and our particular choice of language is deeply linked to the identity we forge for ourselves everyday. My fascination with the performative power of words began when I dated a linguist. He was/is very intelligent, but like many in his field, had no faith that humans could change their semantic destiny. In his eyes we were just lame ducks, and no matter what we did, a larger and more epic movement would have to alter the way we speak. Our everyday use of language was more or less incidental. He did not believe that choosing to say “you all” versus “you guys” to encourage gender neutral language was necessary, or even helpful. In his eyes (and in the eyes of many with certain levels of intellectual/gender privilege) how hegemony attacks us through language is not important, but to be expected as

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visual knowledge and performance

July 27, 2010
By
Eye_(red)

Would you mind indulging me for just a second? Take a breath, close your eyes and listen. Listen to the street, footsteps on the pavement, glasses clinking, your own inhalation, anything that is around you. Listen and be still. Now, feel your hands and drop into your body. Without your sight, what bubbles up for you? What is it like to have 360 degrees of stimulus? How is the energy behind you different from that in front of you? After a few minutes, open your eyes and see what is surprising and how quickly the mind reacts to vision.  How quickly do you make stories out of the objects that you see? While the above exercise may seem overplayed,  it is one I cherish and do routinely. Not only is it a great meditation but it makes one painfully aware of how ocularcentric our bodies and minds have become. It’s probably no surprise to you when I say that we live in a visual culture. We rely immensely on the objects we can see for reason, and clarity. Without them, the world could seem chaotic or overwhelming. Especially in western cultures, we ground

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a polyamorous performance piece

July 15, 2010
By
Polyamory_large

We all have mornings when we wake up and the lover next to us seems like a stranger. Early hours when last nights actions hang heavy or fall flat in the room. Those kinds of mornings happen to me a lot, more than most people actually.  It’s not because I don’t care deeply about my sexual partners, but because I have chosen a polyamorous lifestyle. On those days, I look over at the pillow next to me and feel awkward, a bit too wild, a bit too unhinged. When I finally excuse myself, something we all try and maneuver gracefully, I return home. Not to an empty house but to a primary partner, my primary partner. And although we have an open relationship, one founded in trust and respect, I am torn between my performance in the moment and the one I embodied so fully the night before. I feel both entitled and taken apart by my experience with another lover. These feelings and situations have been prevalent in my life since I began pondering/practicing/performing polyamory. While it’s becoming more common  (they even have a polyamory awareness and acceptance ribbon campaign) it still remains an experimental and radical form of

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listen to this\/\/a performance exercise

July 14, 2010
By
this is where the music comes from

Performance art is bad when artifice takes precedence over the performance. At best it’s kitchy and at worsts it’s a waste of everyone’s time.  Artifice: a manufactured thing. Performance implies a body, moving and engaged. The thing made should not come before the body, the thing making. The general (the body) should always come before the descriptive. Otherwise the audience is left bored or confused. Previously I talked about the importance of sight and perception in creating/experiencing performance. As someone who sings like an amputee, I often run the risk of forgetting my voice and relying on other media to express what I want the audience to experience. I remedy this by recording sounds with my pen. It usually looks something like this: (tilt head at a 45 degree angle and shake slightly and sporadically) ker-ush-sehkrgsh kerkirkersh That was the sound that my feet make as they climb up a rocky path. That’s my sound of summer.  Now, if we listen at any given moment of our day, we will find an endless number of sounds, all of which can be recreated more or less accurately using only our body. However, this requires a great deal of commitment and concentration.

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go tell it on the mountain\/\/the memory is born

July 7, 2010
By
sunrise massada

There is a small mountain in the Jordan Rift Valley called Massada. It’s hard to determine when something stops being a hill and starts being a mountain. I think the best we can do is climb the thing and see how we feel once we get to the top. Did we get our ass kicked on the climb, or was it more of an enjoyable afternoon stroll in an upwardly direction? Massada will kick your ass. A little over a month ago I began climbing Massada just about every day. You can read about why here, if you’re so inclined. The first time I went up it was about 9am, and just over 100 degrees. When I got to the top I looked over the valley and the dead sea below. In the vicinity I had one of the highest views over the lowest place on earth. It is absolutely breathtaking. But that’s not why people come to Massada, or at least not the only reason. Massada is what Pierre Nora would describe as a milieu de memoire, a site of memory. For Nora we have sites that store our national and personal memories. These sites (memorials, battlefields, national historic

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take the corporate option and shove it\/\/the 2010 vision festival unleashes the creative option

June 5, 2010
By
take the corporate option and shove it\/\/the 2010 vision festival unleashes the creative option

Muhal Richard Abrams is to jazz like Ché Guevera was to revolution.  He never stops moving and he never stops imagining and striving towards the impossible.  It’s no wonder then that Abrams life work will be celebrated at this years Vision Festival.  For the last 15 years the Vision Festival has celebrated jazz greats while at the same time creating a venue that encourages pushing the boundaries of what is possible in jazz performance.  Over the course of his life, Abrams has worked as a performer, educator, composer and advocate for jazz music. For me, jazz stands as the paradigm for revolutionary performance.  As Terry Eagleton notes, “though each performer contributes to the greater good of the whole, does so not by some grim-lipped self sacrifice, but simply by expressing .”  By becoming better at the thing love, the jazz artist learns from and enhances the abilities of co-performers.  If this isn’t a model for revolutionary activity, I don’t know what is!  A revolution occurs not because one person decides a revolution should occur, but because a group of people are driven to see the world as it might be, and not as it is.  One person

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bill hicks\/\/a t.a.g. obituary*

May 12, 2010
By
bill hicks\/\/a t.a.g. obituary*

Look into his eyes.  He often called himself a little dark poet, but what he did with words was not exactly poetry.  The theme this week, Pick up the gun, was taken from one of Hicks’ performances.  Every time Hicks got on stage, he knew he was picking up the gun, the gun that would give his enemy the justification he needed to kill the man in black.  Hicks knew it would happen, but he also knew that he had no other choice but to pick up the gun. So, what do you do in such a situation?  The poor shephard, worried for his life, tried to pick it up with enough time to at least get a shot off, but there’s never enough time.  If you have to pick up the gun, the only weapon you have is your words; you make the bastard who is going to shoot you regret the fact that they waited as long as they did.  That’s what Bill Hicks did every time he got on stage.  Well, every time but once. Living as he did on the cusp of popularity but always being just too risque, it was no surprise that Hicks was

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credo of the rainbow warrior

April 7, 2010
By
credo of the rainbow warrior

“radical art, like radical society, is radical not because it seeks extremes but because it desires to place the burden of hope for the future on the shoulders of an art which is sweeping, visionary, rapturous, disciplined, intelligent, and open.”

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disappearing and breaking\/\/remembering the past

March 24, 2010
By
disappearing and breaking\/\/remembering the past

Performance is often labeled a disappearance.  By the time it’s happening, it’s already done.  The moment performed is always already in the past.  My present performance has already happened.  And sure, we can wax philosophical all day long about such a statement but it feels like it’s just another way to say that it’s really hard to talk about what performance is.  Performance scholar Richard Schechner says that performance is “restored behavior,” that when we perform, we’re always performing that which has been performed before, albeit in a slightly different way, if for no other reason than the space and time has disappeared.  In this way, performance is about bringing the past into the present.  It’s about remembering.  Now this remembering is often unconscious.  When the President, for example, gives an inaugural address, he is very clearly calling on the performances of presidents past, restoring the genre of the address but putting his own flair on it.  Now, there’s no doubt that the whole thing is about pomp and circumstance, but it is a pomp and circumstance that is American.  In this framing of the event, we forget (as a public) that the restored behavior of past president’s is a

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paris calling

March 23, 2010
By
paris calling

Featuring Lané Jo, and the makeup and hairstylings of Lauren Marler. Music (“Paris 4 AM”) by The Legendary Pink Dots. Location courtesy of Hotel Congress. . . . . .

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