Friday, January 18, 2008

form & function

if we don't understand the function of the form that we're dealing with, or rather if we just use something superficially but not in the way it is designed to work, we risk abusing and therefore losing it.

it has happened with love & marriage, which too often have been turned into social institutions that hardly ever have anything left to do with the moment of meeting and wanting to get together and perhaps procreate.

it is happening with motivation & trust & social understanding, which are consumed by money. (right now it seems like we are all very willing to sacrifice the original for the abstract substitute for it - what does the world cost? and on whose terms???)


in the case of dance (and other arts & communications) it happens by repeating the traditionally inherited forms without acknowledging the consequences of what they were made from and for.

in daily life such an example is "Have a nice day." which from the original good wish has become something quite different in Anglo-Saxon mainstream use.

in dance this source is kinesthesis, the sense of movement, whether the experience of ourselves moving or that of someone or something else in our range of perception moving.


unless a generation re-contacts this source and consequently re-evaluates their inherite traditions from their own experience of it, the only results be epigones and imitations, rather than fundamentally new creations of experience.

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