Art Authorities & (state) Power

When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid — not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again. Eve L. Ewing, University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration

after I recently attended several pieces and discussions about majority-minority questions at the duna part festival 2019 in Budapest, Hungary, I realize this sentence about the dis-senting Other is more important in the age of machine-enforced (totalitarian) perfection than ever ...

please read the full article here
https://nyti.ms/2oLKNnN

Logo for Hungarian Protest Movement against Imminent Cuts

naked bare (bear) pieces: music - and other "helpers"/facilitators/enzymes of/for movement

after a very long phase where works grew and still keep growing from and by interaction with set musical pieces, I am once more thrown back onto movement without this additional element. for a while, ongoing sounds like these healing drones felt especially good, and for training with others to them. but now even that should be off, for a time.

it feels almost like getting off drugs, because in my current state it is so easy to move in response to musical stimulation on all levels.

I had always made it my point to dance as a Gesamtkunstwerk, using my own bodymind as the core system, where all would come together, be perceived, worked with, each at its own intensity (in a way, following through on Elaine Summers' notion of intermedia, where two or more media merge to in-form a "third" ... )

but now I am returning to the sense that just my moving body is enough justification for the dance to be "legitimate", worth the effort and the attention. and that without the extra stimulus/happening, my bodymind can and will have some quite different things to do / "say", on its own.


additionally I also increasingly enjoy dancing naked (easy enough in my home backroom/studio)
again there is a similar feeling of bare openness of myriads subtle possibilities and chances.
 
finally, I recognize that -just as in the first phase of Kinetic Awareness® (echoing Viewpoints)- it can be good to slow everything down and explore one element / bodypart at a time. in this case the / my moving human bodymind, on its own, with only the co-incidental sounds that John Cage rightly identified as music.

and challenge the idea of a 'machine' with a limiting, and more safely expectable, outcome / result ...


on a similar plane, but not the same:

And this then began to bother me because perhaps I was getting drunk with melody [...] and so I began again. [...] That led me to some very differnt writing that I am going to tell you about in the next thing.  Gertrude Stein, from Portraits and Repetition, "Lectures in America", 1934

male abandon - conceiving/dreaming of group pieces

after having enjoyed beyond words the enormously stimulating (!) public research by Random Collision at Theater Rotterdam / Moving Futures two days ago** , I keep working on a series of dances that all put (cis-passing?) men in very vulnerable and open situations, emotional, sensitive and sensual, present, embodied.

much of the work is made for gay and Queer men who already by their sexual practices are not enjoying the same kind of mainstreamed-culture protection.

but in the basics, I am surprised how much a male thing it seems to be, to go for abandoning the self, surrendering to the impuls, the risk, beckoning a partner for mating, daring to give it all away for this one moment of maybe procreating (...)

this to me, also from personal experience, seems to be a centrally male quality in a sense.
and how far it may permeate other choices. 

**
the Moving Futures webpage exists no longer, instead here is a link to the project

Budapest quotes

"Tradition ist Schlamperei" (tradition is sloppiness) - attributed to Gustav Mahler, no source
 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Gustav_Mahler

"if it ain't impossible to begin with, at the very least, it's not worth my time or attention" (unknown)