Archive for space
May 6, 2008 at 1:09 am · Filed under dance, space, MEGAN, san francisco, improvisation
Hello!
This past weekend I jumped into rehearsal for a dance theater piece by Jacques Poulin-Denis. But wait, you say. Aren’t you still gimpy? Why yes I am, thank you very much. I don’t have to do anything too strenuous though, just a bit of improvisation on the themes of sleep, dreams, and discomfort. It’s fun and something different.
We worked at CELLspace, which is this really interesting performance/work space in the Mission. It’s a big warehouse-type building with little self-contained rooms that serve as artists’ studios, and a large, open area for performing artists. It was founded as an artists’ collective, so there are all these quirky touches.
I like the lobby. It has white walls and stuck to all of them are these small, white squares of paper with line drawings on them. The squares are neatly lined up, edge to edge, so that when you look at them all together, they look like one big map.
CELLspace is very close to Theater Artaud where we performed for WestWave, but I never knew it existed. I love discovering new places like this in the city. It’s such a treat to meet a different group of artists and to see how they work.
In other news, I can jump now! Tiny, tiny jumps, but still… Jumps in first position were never so exciting!
Recent Posts by megan kurashige
March 29, 2008 at 4:20 am · Filed under studio, media, video, teaching, TONY, dance and technology, science, space, physics, apples, computer graphics, opengl, education, performance, school, pedagogy, astronomy, learning, hermes, arts, double feature, animation
Last month I wrote a guest post on Matt Gough’s blog quodlibet titled math skills. It addressed the question of what fundamentals of physics and mathematics should be included in the dance technology curriculum.
Since dance-tech is in its infancy and still forming as a field this is an open question. This issue is not simply about inserting math and science into an arts curriculum but more so about how these two worlds partner. The action is reciprocal, math and science inform the dance and dance-tech provides new ways of knowing math and physics.
Force is one of the central landmarks of physics pedagogy. Gravity is Newton’s force.
And to use the force you must learn the force.
Simulation is a great way to learn about forces.
So is dancing.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
October 22, 2007 at 12:47 pm · Filed under studio, architecture, technology, TONY, science, theatre, space, dance technology, visible, stage, video cube, sarah lawrence college, you, politics, set design, performance, school, michel foucault, discipline, dance house, design, audience, intermission, ASHLEY, performance space, theory, art installation, THE ( INTER ) MISSION, social network
Over the past few weeks of my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College, the students and I have been programing, dissecting and repurposing surveillance systems to develop mediated performance outlets/environments. To aid and inform our strategies in this project we have been thinking and reading about panopticism.
What is panopticism anyway? wiki wiki
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical architecture imagined in the 1780’s, is illustrated above. The name literally means the “all-seeing place.” He describes it as a multi-purpose architecture whose design principles are applicable to constructing factory, school, prison, hospital or asylum. A multi-story ring of individual cells surround a central watchtower; every cell is visible from the watchtower while the watcher remains invisible.
The viewer can see everything while remaining invisible.
This panoptic prison named Presidio Modelo, built under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in Cuba, once held the one and only Fidel Castro. It is now a national monument.
Foucault uses the Panopticon to analyze the new ways in which power is exercised in the modern world and the role surveillance technologies play in creating a disciplined/docile body. He describes Bentham’s architecture as a kind of multi-staged performance space.
The unverifiable possibility that a subject is being observed at any time is the essential mechanism by which the machine operates. Visibility, as Meghan noted in class, makes one take responsibility for their own subjection.
He who is subjected to the field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play simultaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Discipline and Punish 202
What does this have to do with performance? Everything…
Foucault describes the stacks of cells; “They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
In one way the panopticon is like a super-theater, a nesting of many stages.
However Foucault stresses that surveillance architectures are exactly the reverse of those of theater. He writes, “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.” Survellence allows one to see many while theater and spectacle is based on many seeing one
Compare the structure of the Panopticon to that of the Globe Theater.
Different yet the same. Definitely involved in a complex tangle.
This assembly can be used as a dance technology. On April 28th and 29th 2007 Martha Williams directed and performed in a dance installation entitled Stacked, converting an out of business clothing store into a surveillance menagerie. Each dancer took residence in one of nine changing rooms which they themed and designed the interiors of. Camera feeds from each cell were composed and projected in the central room so that all of the dances could be seen at once.
Turning the panopticon back into a performance space constitutes a double reversal.
With this in mind, take another look at the dance-cube I prototyped last fall. In this staging the cameras are on the perimeter of the studio so that the gaze is directed from the outside in (as in theater) rather than from the inside out.
Though still, looking at this dance I am reminded of the cells of the panopticon.
“They are like so many small cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Could we characterize the structure of the internet as panoptic? Here is a great essay that explores that question.
This very space is haunted by panoptic geometries. Have a look at the contributor list in the sidebar, look at all those little faces, “perfectly individualized” subjects you can see all at once and may click on to reveal “so many small theaters.”
The design of social networking and internet dating sites, showing all your friends faces in an array, seduces us with a kind of panoptic fantasy, being able to see many at once. This is where things become slightly more complicated. Just like the panopticon embeds tiny theaters in an array, these social technologies embed so many small panopticons in a matrix of connectivity. Each cell is now its own theater and watchtower.
All these ideas should not creep us out. Rather, they should inform our thinking about performance and visibility and the way technology provides new venues for artistic expression. It is an open problem. In my estimation projects like Martha William’s Stacked, my dance-cube, or The(Inter)Mission are all part of a project to reverse-the-panopticon. While flirting with aspects of surveillance and making the subject hyper-visible, they enhance communication rather than simply separate us into little boxes.
So next time you feel like you are under surveillance consider it an opportunity to put on a show.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
May 13, 2007 at 7:58 pm · Filed under dance, dance event, dancers, friends, TONY, science, space, sarah lawrence college, choreographer, performance, community, project, sara rudner, process
Posted by Tony Schultz
Happy mother’s day! Today my dance-mom, Sara Rudner, is presenting an afternoon of music and dance in Dancing-On-View (Preview/Hindsight) at the Baryshnikov Art Center from 5 - 9 PM. Sara describes the work as a “marathon installation in non-theatrical time and space in a celebration of dance and dancers. The audience, free to come and go throughout the event, is invited to stand or sit, and determine the length of the experience.” I went to an open rehearsal this past Wednesday. Tonya Plank went this past Friday. Her account of the work can be read here.
Sara invited me to a rehearsal of the project back in March. The work, first shown in 1975, presents dance as a practice more than a performance. For Sara moving is something worth doing more than seeing. In this way the rehearsal has as much meaning as the final performance. I felt joy in knowing many of the dancers. The dancers included Rocky Bornstein (Kristin’s physical therapist), Megan Boyd, Linda Cohen, Erin Cornell, Erin Crawley-Woods, Laurel Dugan (who I have introduced to you before), Maria Earle (friend and former graduate student of history with my mother Priscilla Murolo) , Liz Filbrun, Peggy Gould (Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty), Anneke Hansen, Patricia Hoffbauer, Rachel Lehrer, Merceditas Manago-Alexander (Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty), Sara Rudner, Vicky Shick (who presented Plum House at DTW), Maggie Thom (daughter of Rose Anne Thom, Sarah Lawrence friend and faculty) and Lori Yuill.
At the March rehearsal Sara Rudner had been kind enough to explain to me some of the compositional processes going on in the work. Much of the choreography is manifest through performing variational operations on phrases of movement. These compositional variations can be considered as transformational mappings of movement in both space and time. Reversal, for example, maps the right side of the body to the left side of the body. This can be thought of as reflecting movement across the sagittal plane of the body. Inversion generally maps the front side of the body to the back side of the body, in effect,a reflection of movement across the frontal plane of the body. Retrograding a phrase of movement runs it backwards in time, creating a reflection across the time axis. Many more kinds of operations can be used to transform movement, including moving it in space (translation) and changing the facing (rotation).
As Sara described these techniques I was struck how theories of physics used these same ideas. When physicists build theories of the world they characterize these theories by their symmetries in space and time. For example, to theorize the behavior of particles we want that behavior to be independent of where we perform the measurement. Smashing two electrons together should have the same effect so matter if we do it here or there. This is called translational invariance. The effect should also be independent of how our system is oriented in space. This is called rotational invariance or isotropy. The symmetry of a system in mapping right to left and left to right (as Alice does as she goes through the looking glass) is called parity invariance. For simple particle theories reversing a physical system in time yields another physically realizable system. This is called time-reversal symmetry.
The lesson in this way of thinking is that when we know a dance we automatically know all of the dances that can be manifested from this dance through these variational techniques. In physics we know that for a theory to be “good” its mathematics must obey the same symmetries that we observe in the physical phenomenon we are trying to characterize.
In watching the rehearsal/performance of Dancing-On-View one is struck by great deal of thinking being done by the dancers. This recasts the dancing (female) body as no longer just an object to be studied but as the site of the production of knowledge. Sara Rudner’s work and creative approach invites one to see dance as a research practice very close to science. The knowledge produced from this work cannot be fully translated to the viewer. These physical insights are things that must be experienced. In this way Dancing-On-View is much more than a mere performance, it is an invitation to dance physical theory.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
May 8, 2007 at 4:21 pm · Filed under art, teaching, TONY, space, website, education, new york city, politics, choreographer, performance, community, america, black cherokee, otis houston
Sunday March 29th was a beautiful day. The sun was shining and Lisa and I took a drive north out of the city. On our way back to Manhattan we passed by my favorite spot on the FDR underneath the Triborough Bridge. Black Cherokee was out in full force and his message to me was still up.
As we passed Lisa screamed out the window, “We love you Black Cherokee!” He waived back.
Lisa and I think in very different ways about art and culture. Sometimes I don’t think she understands my fascination with Otis’s work. In that moment she did. “I am so proud of you baby!” Lisa teared up.
“Its beautiful right?”
“Yes” she answered.
After dropping off Lisa at home i made my way back uptown to see if Otis was still out. I parked my car and made my way over to his performance space. Black Cherokee was standing still with a broom in his right hand hand, a fold of cash in his left hand and an open book on his head. His mouth was taped shut with red duct tape. His nipples were covered and his pelvis was marked with a big X, using the same red tape. Behind him was a beautiful bouquet of daffodils arranged in the shell of a watermellon. As I approached I took a few pictures.
“Hey Otis. Thats me!” I said pointing to the sign.
“Are you Mr. Tony?” he said smiling. We shook hands.
“I like the way you write about me. Wanted to get in touch with you so I put up the sign.”
“What you are doing here is really important.” I told him. “We need this.”
“You get it man! I don’t know what you know and you don’t know what I know but together we have a whole lot of know.”
I recognized this as one of his poems he posted online. As the conversation continued I realized much of what Otis was saying was from his poetry. Black Cherokee is living art and this fact invades his speech. We talked to find what purpose we had together. We both agreed that we had to do something together. I want to help get Otis’s work out into the world.
Black Cherokee needs a website. I will need help doing this.
Before I left Otis gave me his CD. Its called America and it is pretty amazing. Hear some samples here on cdbaby.com. Listening to this music will make you happy and feel good. It will also give you insight into the performance work such as the use of books and the broom. He states his mission in The Children. He calls for a multimedia campaign to help empower and protect our youth, by any means necessary. “We must use video, rap music, pop sounds, every and anything all around.” My other two favorite songs are My Books I Read and I Like Where I Stay. Both have good music tracks and beautiful lyrics. I Like Where I Stay is definitely my favorite and give a window into Black Cherokee’s world.
Clearly Otis needs a few more beats to lay his tracks on and perhaps a better studio to record in, but the artistry and message are all there. I would like to ask anyone who is interested in promoting Black Cherokee through helping put together a website or with his music, doing video documentation, or through any other means, to contact me at tony [at] thewinger.com
This is important work and is an absolute joy participating in. So spread the word and help manifest this living art as a gift to the world.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
March 14, 2007 at 4:42 am · Filed under travel, film, technology, TONY, space, place, videoart, new york city
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
Hey Wingers. Just back from Santa Barbara visiting my girlfriend Lisa. It is so gorgeous out there. Perhaps the most wonderful weekend I have ever had. Lisa shows me lots of beautiful things and is always ready for adventure. I will be glad when she comes back to home to New York. Though California is seductive I am happy to be back home in the Bronx. There are beautiful things here too if you know how to look for them.
This is a timelapse video of Van Cortlandt Park and the 1 line train yard, taken from the window of my apartment. I recorded it over a year ago when I first started building time-machines to harvest media. This day was simply amazing and I feel lucky to have captured it. This video was the first I ever posted on the internet. It was featured in a video collection curated by Jonny Goldstein at Anthology Film Archives back in December of 2005. The music is by my good friend and Bronx native Damien Quinones.
I am happy to share this video with all of you because it represents the spaces and places that are dear to me. It should remind us of all the wonderful worlds hiding around us, ready to open up when we take the time to see them. Its important we look out for these things and share them with others when we find them. I hope Lisa likes it and that you do too.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
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