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- There is a problem in the creating of new work, that it is already outdated by the time we are creating it (which speaks to the conundrum in the "What is the Contemporary" article of how we locate the exact moment that something, like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?