PW: Moten's Gift
1) Are there any movement concepts you find interesting in relationship with Moten's words?
2) Are there any movement concepts you find uninteresting in relationship with Moten's words?
3) Anything you find problematic?
4) I presented a version of this at ARC Pasadena a few weeks ago. I received some great feedback via text from friend and dance scholar Naomi Bragin, particularly relating to time in the second section. Can you think of concrete choreographic tasks that might work towards accomplishing what she is suggesting?
"This idea of death only holds true if as Fred Moten says you focus on the burial ground of the subject which is the world but what about speculative politics which is the seeing of other worlds which I would describe as parallel universes not distinct from what is now
It makes me think of the way you play with time in your work, how you might twist that to challenge a perception of time within a linear frame, in order to speculate on what's to be seen
Also I was thinking it might b meaningful for u to explore the cadences or resonances of what you do with blackness, something along the lines of what SG said about the pop lock and drop it :)"
Note: Pop lock and drop it translated into - when I go from aramandi to muramandi fast!
1) Are there any movement concepts you find interesting in relationship with Moten's words?
ReplyDeleteI read you as struggling with Moten’s words, with the meaning and implication of what it would mean to accept the gift of blackness, with trying to distinguish how that is different from appropriating blackness. The struggle is communicated to me through the introduction of interruptions of the erect spine - raised shoulders, shaking head, pitching forward, falling back – as well as a rhythmic sense of increasing urgency communicated through increasing speed and density. I like the somewhat unpredictable way in which you use your footwork and particularly like the syncopated density when Moten talks about giving up a sense of “home” (2:13-2:30 or so). It made me wonder in what way BN is (or is not) a movement home for you. I also found the very end after Moten’s words finish, where you seem exhausted, uncertain, not knowing quite how to move in the world, both moving and poignant.
I quite like the passage of Moten’s you’ve chosen – it gets at what I feel is the crux and mental-political knot of his argument for non-black people – and I generally feel that the relationship between movement/rhythm and text is much clearer than in your last study.
2) Are there any movement concepts you find uninteresting in relationship with Moten's words?
I find myself wondering what your intention is with your hands and arms. I get that you might not want to use mudras, and that the contained organization of the classical BN upper body probably doesn’t make sense when dancing the possibility of undoing citizenship. And I like that they contribute to a raw sensibility. But at the moment I also feel that your use of your feet, legs, spine, and head are much more clear, intention-wise, than your hands and arms.
Generally it seems like your movement is roughly divided into (1) upright footwork and (2) falling off your center. What would it mean to look at the transition between or combination of those two a little more? Could you fall and end with a sharp slap? Could your footwork initiate an off-center impulse?
3) Anything you find problematic?
ReplyDeleteI was struck by the fact that you were dancing in your living room, surrounded by belongings that you and your partner most likely own, while dancing about giving up ownership. (Granted, I really don’t know if it’s possible to completely give up property ownership – or if Moten himself has done so – but it brought up a visual contradiction.)
I’m not sure I think this is problematic – I actually found it interesting – but I wanted to let you know that for the very beginning of Moten’s words, up until he said “DuBois” and then shortly thereafter explicitly mentions blackness, that I initially read his words (“this history of deprivation”) as applying to you and your body (which reads as dark-skinned, gender ambiguous, South Asian).
As a viewer, I want to know more about your positionality, more about your personal investment in and/or struggles with blackness, why you feel moved to move to Moten’s words. Perhaps this would come before or after this section in a larger work?
4) So, I didn’t actually read this piece in terms of sections but as one continuous piece – so I'm not sure what the second section refers to. I do think, as I suggested in my feedback on your earlier study, that it would be meaningful to look specifically at Carnatic time structures, to figure out what kind of meaning-making they create in the world. My experience of Hindustani time is never only linear, but one in which completion and loss of wholeness coincide, in which a theme can always proliferate into multiple variations, and so it is a sense of time which is both mathematical and precise and pregnant with possibility. I would play with gaps, with loss, with the unsaid, with establishing a pattern and then not dancing it, so that the audience hears what is unspoken (Swapan Chaudhuri is incredible at this on tabla). I think finding concrete aesthetic connections between BN and black aesthetics, as Naomi suggests, is also a fruitful avenue: what kind of poly-rhythms (one way of holding multiplicity in the body) or movement ideas might talk to each other?
Affectively I see the end of your piece, after Moten’s words finish, as a place where speculative futures might live. And for some reason I wonder whether abhinaya, which has so much to do with seeing other worlds and imagining possibility, might not play a role, whether here or elsewhere in another investigation.
1. I generally am interested in the loose upper body which while unheard of in Bharata Natyam, reminds me of one of the aspects that I have heard that the African American aesthetic added to Irish dance to create tap. At first watch this is one of the things that I understood to be one aspect of the “gift.”
ReplyDeleteFollowing are specific moments that I picked out:
There’s a pause and a turn of the head looking slightly over your shoulder after his first line “there’s a history of deprivation.” I found this pause compelling, as if you were listening to his words and taken aback.
At :39 seconds you loosely grab both hands in front of you and then toss them back and then he says “give it away.” You do it even more subtly at 2:40min ish when he says “a gift on you.” It’s interesting both places.
Around 1min. sec he starts talking about taking the gift and you do some interesting staggering backward. Almost like you’re not sure if you should take it.
1:10min: when he says “complicated moral and ethical position to be in” you put your hands over your hair as if concurring.
1:20min: the shrug of shoulders at loss.
1:44min: another staggering back at “the very idea of property”
2:03: arms loosly hold self at middle on “something have to give up” It would also be interesting about 30 seconds later when he talks about “modes of security.”
2:45min-end: “your very capacity to own” and then you start slowing down, as if you’re loosing capacity.
2. As I mentioned earlier, the whole aesthetic of the upper body is very interesting. I do think that while I picked out certain motifs or gestures, they are mostly vauge and could possibly be repeated more purposefully perhaps with variations (while this might help emphasize words ideas and contradictions more, it also might lose the aesthetic so I’m not sure). I also feel that the continuity of the footwork makes me loose attention to the words. Perhaps adding in a few more pauses to allow us a moment to reflect on certain words or ideas instead of just being lulled into the semi erratic continuity of the feet. I’d be curious too about thinking about space…are you planning to be confined as you are in this home studio space? if so what does that mean in relation to his words and how do his words cause you to think about how you use the space around you.
3. no
4. I’m not sure except that I am intrigued by the idea of burial ground. Your movement where you stagger backward makes me think of trying to go forward and progress toward something, and then either not be able to or not want to face what it is you are going toward. It makes me think of the Myth of Sisyphus and how someone can be repeating the same task over an over without ever reaching the end, but instead being pushed back to the beginning, and yet the end is always there with the burial ground?