I’m performing in an Yvonne Meier show (Brother of Gogolorez) at the end of February, and creating a dance performance (Shitopia) with Igal Nassima (sound) for the week right after that. At least I’m not silly enough to make something completely unrelated! Shitopia is drawing some of the same material and concepts as Body Island, but set in a different context and as a solo dance performance. Different but the same.

Performance score in process:

Shape in space of the score:

Last January I performed at Judson Church with Aki Sasamoto and Igal Nassima. It was the last performance as a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, which I’ll finish in June. It was weird, fun, scary and sharky all at once. On Feb 20th we’re performing it again at Center for Performance Research in Williamsburg. Thanks to guys at Catch.

Here’s the vid!

And here’s an interesting blog post by Alissa Hororwitz about it: http://www.artandculture.com/feature/2183

Since I don’t have anything in my “past works” category, I figured it was high time I put something in there before the semester gets into unmanageable no-sleep land.  I haven’t put any documentation together for my most recent non-ITP projects (specifically A New Theory of Biology, which was presented at the Chocolate Factory last April). This NY Times review says some nice things I didn’t know about the stuff I make.

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The shoes.

They didn’t make themselves, that’s for sure. The documentation for how we made the perfboards for the wireless modules can be found on a flickr photostream here, and the rest of the documentation (code, etc) can be found at our website here.

The show went really well, with just a couple minor set-backs.  My computer kept crashing when I tried to do more than one layer of looping in MIDI. Closing and restarting the Processing sketch seemed to help for a while. Looking back, I really wish we’d found a way to cycle through the preset MIDI files we created, a way to cycle through using a gesture, or the hat somehow. Switching over to the sound sample files from MIDI would have been great… as it was, I had to stop the sketch, change SYNTH to SAMPLE, and then re-run it.

People seemed to enjoy trying to figure out if the floor was sensing my weight, and what exactly the hat was doing. Tom told me not to talk to people at first, but to simply dance, and people would respond or be intrigued by what was happening. After dancing for 10 hours in the shoes, I finally understood how to use them and the little performative tricks I could play to make it seem like there was more going on than there really was. One of the perks of having a team in this case was that Yin could explain what was happening while I just danced a storm.

I read Walter Benjamin’s piece titled above (apparently oddly translated) and had a gut reaction as a performance artist and dancer. I agree with Benjamin that the unique existence of a body moving in space/time is problematic when it comes to reproduction. Daily practice of one’s art is inherent to many art practices across the board. The writer usually writes every day or at least considers why he or she is doing something else, and not writing. The painter, the sculptor, the singer/songwriter– in various stages of art production, these types of artists are for the most part solitary, and usually don’t rely on others until later stages of the work at which point other people become necessary. Dance, like film as described by Benjamin, is often seen as a group endeavor, with a central figure as the main brain and various individuals carrying out directions. In modern dance and ballet lineage, mechanical reproduction of a piece was sometimes executed in the form of Laban notation (a written form of dance notation), whereas before it was primarily oral and demonstrative with illustrative pictorial diagrams. The mechanism was social. Now more often the mechanism is video– the choreographer might video the dancers to remember the details of what he or she wanted, and for the benefit of the dancers who need to remember the details of how the sequence went. This is different than using video media to present a dance to an audience. In my opinion, the problem in reproducing a dance or any live performance using video lies in the failure of the technology to capture the depth and breadth of the experience the live viewer might have had. The camera is not the eye, and an enormous amount of information is lost in translating experience to the moving screen. The mechanism of reproduction for live performance is still lagging when compared to the plastic arts and 2D or digital art.

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