I am less than a week away from embarking on a journey to India. I plan on being there anywhere from 6 months to a year (or more). I have bought my one-way ticket, lots of malaria pills, and begun to dream.
Posts Tagged ‘ performance ’
pick a word, any damn word you like
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
visual knowledge and performance
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
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
grunge is dead \/\/ a treatise on “grunge” performance
Grunge is dead. My grandmother is dead. Jackson Pollock is dead. The implications are as follows: Music that was labeled "grunge" can never again be made, my grandmother will never again pinch my cheek, and there will be no new works of art by Jackson Pollock. This is as it should be.
