"blind, deaf, mute,somnabulistic,memoryless" (zombiefication continued)

I am quoting from Borges, "Funes, the Memorious". After falling from the horse Funes started remembering everything he perceived and every single time he perceived things. It was difficult for him to sleep and think in general ideas, as both is to abstract from the world and abstract from the difference. Before the accident he was in a normal state of being in the world, suggested by the title. For the dance project I am calling it a zombiefied state and will try to thwart the viewer's habit of abstraction from what is going on by splitting the perception planes and reversing them. The act of hearing is going to be presented visually without any access to what is actually heard inside the dancers' ears.Music should be played at low volumes - it is possible to hear the sounds generated inside in a quiet place, which is not going to be the case there, but conceptually possible and empirically proved. The idea of real individual additional ghost tones has to be idiomatic in the performance to encourage listening in search and recollection of perceptions linked to the place of action without trying to generalize- it is not the kind of music,dance,video,scenery you think it is (one thing is presented as something else, if dance is a language you have to understand, there it is going to be from the wrong book, and if you fall into a trap of figuring out, it will only make things worse..)


www.twistedtreeline.co.uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qshHYscbw3A

zombification ( ballet project, part 2)

To develop the idea with zombie-like creatures walking on high heels to my track "Baronin von Schmerz" and notions of sensitivity and numbness, I would like to start with a quote from Resa Negarestani, whose philosophy of the weird as the horror of something under mobilisation of nothing elaborates on a condition of survival or remaing less as a result of subtraction, which is that of a zombie.

"...in the lexicon of the videogame, the horror is neither the anticipation of the 'boss' at the end of the game, nor of his absence; nor is it the supernatural, or the growing hords of undead armies, nor the uncanny ambience, it is the very definition of survival that is pregnant with the problematic from the beginning." (From The Horror of Something).

It is not a denial of life, but life infected with death, which removes the border between the two- something Russian underground artists of the 80s-90s in the movement called necro-realism were trying to do. Here is a ballet I would like to keep in mind while working on choreography.

http://conceptualism.letov.ru/TOTART/AND-SO-ON.htm

Survival under difficult conditions may paralyze the will and block away sensitivity to pain -what if every single person were a surviver in a world of lost connections, conformed perceptions and pre-packaged responses?


www.twistedtreeline.co.uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qshHYscbw3A

kamikuma on air

Spiritplants radio http://www.spiritplantsradio.com/

Saturday 26 november, 9-10 pm EST, 2-3 am GMT
Sunday 27 november, 9-10 am EST, 2-3 pm GMT

DJ Frog http://madasaboxof.blogspot.com/

Out of the box/ collaboration with kamikuma

Out of the box/ collaboration with kamikuma

free jazz collaboration

work in progress (ballets ordinaires et bizarres)

The current project, still in the making, is about ordinary movements as expressive means in dance. The idea is to create a performance or a ballet, involving several dancers. I really hope for a fruitful collaboration and I am eager to learn. Music is a dance to me, now I would like to translate its kinetics to real everyday gestures, presented on stage as a ballet.

It's like tracing spatially your experience of sound, translating what is felt and sharing it in interaction with others.The capacity to listen, absorb the fluctuations of energies around, tune into the breathing of space -all those matters, taken for granted, deserve an investigation. I would like the performance to study our sensitivities-what if the dancers move with their eyes closed, listen to the sounds in their own and others' ears? An article I read for a couple of days ago comes into my mind- the author is concerned with "perceptual geography", the interplay between acoustic tones and additive ones, our ears actively and individually create as a response. I had to copy a passage :

From the point of view of biological evolution, von Bekesy compared the basilar membrane to a piece of skin with an EN0RM0USLY
MAGNIFIED_ "TOUCH" SENSITIVITY. I take the implication of
this analogy very seriously. To evolve, we will create more consciously
with such extremely sensitive endowments, increasing the subtlety in our
responsive energies. We do not acknowledge our subtleties, much less
appreciate them. So much in our environment requires keeping them on
but says pretend it's not responding, don't let outside or inside touch
you. (Music played at such intense levels, although primitive, represents
a need to at least feel some of this capability in action.) To evolve with our
sensitivities, we must learn to feel with them, in intricate subtle situations. The interplay between musicians and response tones with their
corresponding shaping features is intended to stimulate rapport between
dormant energies. I think we can approach some of these experiences,
gently through music.

It is from "Psychoacoustic phenomena in musical composition" by Maryanne Amacher.
She bases her research on personal experience and study of responses to different kinds of music and sounds. Old composers seemed to know about the sensitivities we forgot- the passion of baroque and why the affect is so intensely subliminal.Her theory of additional tones makes perceived sounds ( the process of their production is not merely a passive echo) as important as the sounds themselves.

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/emr/articles/amacher.pdf


The music for the project comes from the album, released on 10/11 on an experimental British label,Twisted Treeline,Somehow Recordings, the track called "Baronin von Schmerz",see the link below to listen, in a style I call noise baroque. It is a slow and intense piece, expressing a range of emotions: passion, pain, anguish... I made a dancing routine to it, which is arbitrary: the actual dance was performed to a track by AK Rockefeller, Varkensfeest, I found on soundcloud:

http://soundcloud.com/humphrey-king/varkensfeest/

He is a musician, activist and artist, and I find his family history poetic- the youngest grandson of the famous Rockefeller,whose father got rescued by West Papua natives...

http://akrockefeller.com/story/who-is-ak-rockefeller/

I have a story of my own,that my grandmother Valentina Pavlovna Maklakova (1905-1987)told me about our distant relative, free mason Maklakov,who was in the government between the two revolutions in Russia and emigrated to Paris.He was defending a Jewish person in the court- a kind of Dreyfus affair, and that was how my gran got introduced to the circle where she later met Leo Glickson, my grandfather, a rebellious linguistics professor. Maklakov was suspected of poisoning Rasputin, but there is a theory that it was British secret services that dealt with the man.

Fiction or not, the stories are about dissolving the borders, and there are so many associative links, that it makes me want to ask for a collaboration distance performance in West Papua.I believe in the artists' conspiracy against commodity culture. Free mason handshake, AK Rockefeller!

As I said, the moves in the video are arbitrary and non-professional, but still dancing.For the ballet I would like just the opposite- non-dancing and following auditive impulses, which are going to be highly relative, the determining factors not so much culture, race, etc, but rather the difference in psychoacoustic response.My plan is to project the video, where the dancers would be performing. I was thinking about zombie like creatures walking around in crazy high-heels that hurt in a very dispassionate manner, clashing with other zombie like creatures.The ear contact is required when clashes, to wake up and listen.

I really want just walking under constraint and holding back emotion ( it has to be experienced inside-the shoes may help!). It's very loose ideas so far and I am neither a professional dancer, nor a choreographer. Well, my logics is as follows: if I already know how to do it, why doing it?



www.twistedtreeline.co.uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qshHYscbw3A