Notes from December 1

Note on Notes:

These are rough and provisional traces of a discussion - they are almost all questions, the evidance of thinking out loud.

Please join us on January 5th for a continuation of the discussion on Ranciere's Emancipated Spectator, and the start of a discussion of Dave Hickeys "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty"

Thinking out loud – December 1st, 2009

Articles

"Relational Form" by Nicolas Bourriaud >> "The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents"  by Claire Bishop >> "The Emancipated Spectator" by Jacques Ranciere

We had questions around relationship with audience.  Bourriaud’s article provides the foundation, Bishop article provides a critique, and then – since both those articles are so practice-oriented and we wanted something more theoretical – the Ranciere article speaks to why we might want to work this way and consider these ideas.

FLASHES: (from Friere)

• Relation to Marxist theory – difficulty and confusion of collectivity in this era Question of working in commercial theatre: how do you create art with meaning, if you have to sell it?
• Passivity of spectatorship as being problematic
• Bourriaud asserts the importance of evaluating within social and political context
• Shift in purpose of theatre: Are we making things to teach?  To provoke?  To engage? To mollify?
• Bishop says “this is about post-communism” and artists that are looking for a form of artistic revolt when revolution no longer seems possible; an attempt to resist commodification.
• Different shared experience when viewing performance and visual art :: you can talk to someone in the present about your experience while viewing a painting, which you are not able to do in a performance.

There was then a wide ranging discussion that we’ll attempt to summarize with categories of Ethics/Politics, Aesthetics/Form  and Audience. These categories are so interrelated that it’s difficult to pick and dangerous to forget the interplay , but hopefully useful to tracking thoughts. We were jumping like crazy, which was a good thing.

Some questions over morning coffee...

Our inspiring relational aesthetics study group the other night, my own surfacing "what do I actually do at Dancemakers?" question, and my "wait a second, what does anyone at Dancemakers do and how do they do it?", led to a long Jacob and Leora tete-a-tete over coffee, lots of Wordle, and dabblings in Autosummarize (in Microsoft Word) and We Feel Fine. A million questions emerged, including:

- Is relational aesthetics work essentially a practice intended to make the world better, a revolution of a kind?

- There is a problem in the creating of new work, that it is already outdated by the time we are creating it (which speaks to the conundrum in the "What is the Contemporary" article of how we locate the exact moment that something, like fashion, is contemporary). If I try to make a dance about the latest internet fad (google, facebook, wordle, etc), it is already irrelevant when I perform it. How do we deal with this?

- How does the idea of collaboration confuse the traditional notion of "choreography" in dance as something imposed on a dancers' body? If it used to be that a dancers' body was a choreographers' tool, how does power work in a collaboration? If the "best idea" wins, who gets to decide what that is?

- If an artist were to use material generated from a program like We Feel Fine (which could be described as a simple "context collectors", how does the artist provide a frame that moves it into the realm of expression, and then beyond self-expression into a place of complicating something familiar?

And finally:
Sometimes I like to see people onstage complete the impossible with seeming effortlessness and grace.
Sometimes I like to see people onstage struggle as they attempt to complete the impossible and not be sure whether or not they will actually manage.

Which, why, and when?

And is to complete the impossible gracefully denying something about the reality of what's going on? What does that mean?

Jacob's notebook

more (typed) notes on last nights great discussion on Relational Aesthetic and Ranciere to follow.