The sign at the entrance to the installation. “Furo” means “bath” in Japanese.
A question was asked in Hebrew, restated in English, and then translated into Japanese. This was part of the scene at yesterday’s press conference for Furo, a collaboration between Ohad Naharin and the Japanese video artist Tabaimo.
In the last two decades, Israeli choreographers - led by Naharin - have pushed the boundaries of their art form along with their foreign counterparts. Furo continues this move forward. Globalization, collaboration, installation, technology, and video art are some of the hot words right now, and every one of these terms can be used in a discussion about Furo. The seed for the production began in New York City, where Naharin saw an exhibition of Tabaimo’s Japanese Bathhouse, and the collaboration between the Israeli choreographer and the Japanese video artist was initially shown in Stockholm. Now the installation - with Tabaimo’s video projected onto three screens which shape a stage space dotted with yellow buckets and flanked by two dancers standing on boxes with rotating platforms - is in Tel Aviv, with tickets at a mere 60 shekels in conjunction with Israel’s 60th birthday. Over the next few weeks, audiences will flock to the city’s port to see the work, which loops continuously for several hours nearly every day. Viewers can filter in and out as they like; meanwhile, pairs of Batsheva dancers trade off performing duty partway through each loop (one full cycle is 45 minutes). I got to preview the work (and make my way through a Q-and-A session primarily in Hebrew!) at the press conference and can’t wait to go back to see it with a regular audience on Friday. I have a feeling I’ll stay for a few cycles . . .
My MacPro tower is getting an upgrade today, and our new hard drives are apparently GreenPowered. The western digital website says they consume less power… “the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 14 days each year”. We’ve got four drives, so I guess that’s 48 days? Although I’ve got the motorcycle, not a car … So maybe its the equivalent of not even having the beemer to begin with?
Amazing 1995 video about the internet. It’s funny to look back.
Wish I had some home video of trying to slog through Prodigy - at a blazing 14.4 kbps. I think we got it in 93 maybe? (my parents were/are awesome in supporting my tech interests as much as they could) I remember not being sure what to do with it besides weather, really slow loading news articles, and trying to play games, where it would take like 3 minutes for each screen of the game to load. There was the promise of using it for research for homework and book reports - the entire encyclopedia at your fingertips! - but I don’t remember that working all that well until AOL and higher connection speeds came along.
via kottke, originally digitized/uploaded by waxy.org
I’ve run in to so many dance people with iPhones recently!
With Apple’s latest update in January (in addition to adding the insane GPS feature, and group texting) you can now add direct links to your favorite websites on your home screen.
If you’d like to add The Winger…
- Go to The Winger in the iPhone’s Safari browser.
- Tap the + button.
- Select “Add to Home Screen”.
- Give it a name like, say, The Winger.
- Click add, and this nice little WInger icon will appear on your home page.
So the other night I wrote a post, asking everyone what they find interesting or engaging about a dance performance, or what would draw them to see a dance performance that they wouldn’t otherwise have sought out.
But let’s go even further back…
What was your first introduction to the arts, or to dance - apart from just observing the world around you? (I’m keeping it loose here)
Was it in school? Were you taken to a performance by your school, did you play an instrument in school, did you study a musician, choreographer or other type of artist which then lead you to discover dance or another art form?
If you didn’t have such arts exposure in school, do you think that if you had it would have changed your interest or involvement in the arts?
Do you think there is a way to change the current tide in the US, and convince the government - or whoever it needs to be - to put more funding into arts education in school, not less?
If everyone shared their stories about how they were first introduced to art or dance (school, family, friends, or some other outside force) could it make a difference?
Here’s some ramblings from me as I sit here typing…
I remember adoring art class in school. I couldn’t get enough.
I remember going to art museums with my parents and on field trips as a little kid (I feel like those experiences still remain as some of my earliest vivid visual memories).
I remember loving music classes. I played the saxophone… Lugging around a saxophone case that was as big as I was in 3rd/4th grade. I played until 6th grade I think - I changed schools and went from a cool jazzy teacher who challenged us, to another teacher who didn’t.
I remember my dad bringing me on photo shoots (involved or just watching) or showing me how to make prints, and thinking it was so amazing to be able to create such beautiful things with subjects and light.
I remember my school going on a field trip to see The Nutcracker, and thinking it was neat that my classmates got excited about and had a better understanding of what I was already doing after school by that point.
I remember my mom playing classical music in the car, and while first thinking it was annoying, starting to develop a taste for styles that I enjoyed more than others (and beginning to feel that WGBH in Boston played it too safe!).
I remember my mom taking me to Boston Ballet performances back when they were still at the Wang Center. I loved seeing the orchestra members warming up before the show, and loved getting to see a lot of the same dancers each time we went.
On another note - I remember my 6th grade class having access to Macintosh computers. They blew my mind. I in turn begged my parents for something similar… my first computer was a Mac Classic, and spawned my (and my family’s) ongoing love for well-designed technology.
That’s just some of my random personal experiences. Everyone comes from a different situation, has different memories, different influences, and different things that got them excited about art and/or dance. The fact is that as a kid, school, family and friends are your entire life. What you are exposed to during that time can have a big effect.
What’s your story or experience?
Did school programs have much play in your exploration?
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.
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.
