Beats don’t mark time, nor are they marked by time – they just groovily pulsate your sensual experience, making your aliveness reverberate joyously in recognition.

I can do soma fine, I’m mildly able at emotional stuff, I’m good but terrifyingly finicky about identity, but as for matters of aliveness and vitality: weren’t never allowed to develop a clue, really. (Nor western culture, sad to say: that stratum of being is direly overlooked ’round these parts.) I feel like I’ve been dragged schlepped and yanked out of situations in which my vital body tried to show me what to do at that moment, by a lot of people who made it their business to save me from my dirty lazy dangerous self, way too many times. Oooh weren’t they being selfless for doing that, they thought, I suppose.

Weird that I touch at an image of a kind of fourfold organization of the human again after lo these many years. Well at least I’m not mistaking what identity is as fervently as ol’ Rudi. I hope.

The difference between house and techno

So I’m sitting here listening to Gorje Hewek’s Vous Lhiem, and suddenly it strikes me, around 48:36: none of the layers here would be out of place in house music, just like their groovy interplay would be right at home, so why does this still feel like techno to me? There’s layers, loops and grooves in house and in techno, what is it that makes me want to call something housey or technoy.

Well, it could be something like this: techno uses stuff to make loops and layer them, and a lot of nice techno uses grooves for that. House uses loops to groove, and layers them if it enhances the groove. [Shorter: techno loops grooves, and house grooves loops.]

Apart from that (which is nothing like an ironclad law) anything’s possible of course, and it all depends on taste and influence and mood and expression and suchlike. The stuff that the techno guys loop is often artificial or concrete or abstract and not explicitly groovy, but it becomes groovy because the layering of the loops is hypnotic and that’s a very deep groove. The loops that the house guys groove are more often organic or come from a simpler artificiality that tried (and failed, gloriously) to mimic organic sounds: venerable 303′s belching clouds of acid vapour while attempting to sound like two hands, clapping. Also therefore techno depends on hypnotic layering, which determines the structure of the tracks: there’s no room to dig in to lyrics, choruses and so on within that framework, so instead it just keeps looping and shifting, minimally, to stay in a zone that’s fit for enjoyment by humans. The structure of house stays a bit closer to already developed forms of call and response, verse and refrain and all that, which have proven themselves to groove throughout the ages.

But always this: either you work towards layered looping (with groove as a very welcome side dish), and thence into hypnosis/trance; or you go towards groove (with some smart loopy layers to smarten stuff up) and from there into the sexytime.

And now that I’ve said that of course I don’t give a cock what you call it (housetechnobreakstrancegospeljazzecstasy), but it still feels to me as if those two are different directions, and it might be possible from there to feel into some potential palettes of expression and movement and energy, which would be fun. Worked for Kurt Koegel, and worked for me when he taught me about them (those palettes of somatic movement in contact improv he put together are awesome and freeing and comfortable and very very nice).

Breath center

I think I mentioned before that toe-breath is unbalancing (and the fact that it’s too much of a bother to look up and link to the post in question shows that blog management really isn’t as loser-friendly as all that yet), and although I’d still consider it a useful emergency move, the feeling that what it it does is pull me off-center is growing, and that’s never a good idea.
So I’ve been playing around with radially centered breath for a bit. I’m not interested in finding out if I’m working with hara, navel, dan-t’ien, Almaas’s empty cube (is that called moon spot, or is that something else again? note to self call Raymond), or the spot midway between sacrum and pubic bone; it’s somewhere in there, though I feel that (for now at least) I’m working with something that tends to be a bit higher and more to the front of the body than I feel is comfortable and sustainable and uh, right.
There’s a breath that goes radially into this spot, from crown and perineum, fingers and toes into this center, and outwards again. It was interesting to follow this movement of breath-like energy, and notice that there’s a different flavor of energy that can easily move synchronously but also antichronously (is that a word? when breath inhales this reaches out, when it exhales it pools together; you know what I mean). And a third layer, which was more one of intent or desire: it’s possible to find a spot in the breath cycle, or in that second layer (which I might call something like a libidinous cycle) where I feel most at home or most able to feel pleasure in exerting myself.
And at least a fourth layer, one cycling between where witnessing rests most easily and mindfully, and where it feels impossible to even stay awake.
It provided me minutes, nay seconds of fun just trying to keep track of all this stuff polyrhythmically, and I think it could be kind of revealing or maybe just a fun getting to know you exercise to play around with this and figure out where you like to be, and where you aren’t, and maybe why.
Oh by the way toe-breath (does calling it that disgust you? You’re probably from the Usa) is a move the vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden would call a paardenmiddel. It would advise you not to use this particular paardenmiddel, though it would applaud your use of the word. Damn it, that worked better when I wrote it all in Dutch. If being dumb (in a vaguely funny way) and deeply incomprehensible can be called better than being obtuse and completely incomprehensible.

From a certain kind of perspective that is an aspect of the witness, movement as it is normally perceived doesn’t exist. Everything is where it can be, nowhere is there a tension which could force a thing to move. The usual perception of time alters as well, of course.

Still, it doesn’t feel right to say that motion doesn’t exist in that view, it’s more like distance doesn’t exist. Because the field that this view oversees is unbounded, distance and separation don’t make sense anymore, and therefore it’s not possible to move from A to B in C amount of time. It seems like movement is usually ordered hierarchically (I want to get there, it would be better to be there than here). From the witness perspective, there is no there and here, because everything is where it is; and there’s no order: the world is one flat field, one experience, without boundaries but with a kind of coincidental, horizontal organization (the word Gliederung would be better), but that’s a thoroughly non-hierarchical kind of organization.

At first, the aspect of this perspective where the body becomes reduced to a collection of experiences (that to the usual mind feels threateningly immobile) seems unhealthily dissociative, but in practice the loose relaxation and the deeply simple feeling of having the space to let the body have a pleasant experience of movement feels quite nice and natural.

Here we live and now.

Saw this collection of short contemporary dance performances (quintuple bill?) in Korzo today. First of all, the order of the program sucked. I like to be nice to Korzo, because they’re nice to me, giving me all those opportunities to see awesome dancers for cheap, but really now. Why put the two performances with energy, with humor, with bodies that are present and human and not bound to some doubtlessly smart but bloodless concept before the intermission? So that we can all be bored to tears after the break?

So: ‘Barocco’ by Chirpaz and Cere. Nice piece, strong images formed from strong bodily performance, simple enough but with wit and oodles of vigour. I liked the vocabulary a lot, it reminded me quite a bit of the few lessons in Hawkins technique I took with Vincent Cacialono. Chirpaz and Cere go on the list of makers to watch, as does Reut Gez on the list of dancers.

Also on that list: Kim Fischer, one of the two dancers who worked with Erik Kaiel on ‘my true north’, and Kaiel himself of course (pity (for me) that every dancer I’m interested in and ask about the possibility of taking classes with them is so busy… By far one of the nicest chats I’ve had with a maker though, I’m still nervous about approaching people but he made me feel welcome, and was pretty much ready to start a duet then and there in the foyer it seemed (another one?), and I really liked him for that). Kim made quite an impression already in ‘The autopsy project’ with Gingras and confirmed his growth here. Heleen van Gigch has a great stage presence as well, she did a fluttering hand gesture that for some reason reminded me of a similar one, again in ‘The autopsy project’. This piece is awesome. Some impressions: How the gradual opening up of space by movement is supported by light on this tiny black box stage was great, and much more subtle than it looked. The music was nice, beaty and groovy, but never overpowered the movement, and there were a couple of moments where it actually seemed that the two were moving together closely enough to become a third thing, which is a rarity. (It’s much easier to create that third thing by having them contradict each other.) The bluntness of some of the images was really fresh and refreshing. And of course it was a joy to see the use of contact improvisation as a source of the vocabulary.

So, all that made me a happy Somabile. What happened after the break though, oof. Do I need to dig into this…? I’ll keep it short for now. PUUR (miniatuur I) by Neel Verdoorn: I’m pretty comprehensively bored with this kind of movement, yes it’s clear and powerful and precise but it feels as if a lot of people who work in this idiom are still so enamored of clarity power and precision that they don’t notice that a great majority of phrases could be swapped out with something else without altering the expression of the piece. That’s wrong. The images were again pretty blunt, but this time in quite an unevocative fashion, they just sort of stood there. They got build up, there they are, the performers take a little breath from their hectic exertions, give us a moment to appreciate the image Yes We Get It. It is a Confrontation. Of Different Worlds. Okay. Moving on. (You notice how I can’t be short about stuff that annoys me?) (Oh, talk about being short: luckily, PUUR didn’t seem to fill the 20 minutes allotted it by the program. Did the makers notice there wasn’t enough there?)

‘silence never calls out’ by Edd Schouten, who is not a dancer, and it shows. Good grief. Sure, I sort of get the concept, and I heartily sympathize with an interest in silence, and I support a decision to be obnoxious and obstinate about how the piece is formed if you want to be honest about silence. But really, the impression was much more of people trying waaaaay too hard to be honest, failing, and compensating by being very very serious and very very tense. And tension isn’t very silent.

Finally (finally!) ‘On an even keel’ by Vaclav Kunes. Oooh art. Now let’s not be mean, Rei Watanabe is a gorgeous dancer and I enjoy the hell out of that; but the piece itself: again with the seriosity that wasn’t really earned. Seriousness was suggested by the weird backdrop that didn’t show anything except pretty lights, now and then; by the liner notes (do I mean the program notes? I think I do) which talk about life changes in general, and how in general they tend to change our life, which was reflected in the thoughtfulness with which the performers let go of one set of phrases and stood there for a while, considering their next moves, I guess?

Now, E8 is peanuts for a really great performance, even if I only get to see two pieces of about 20 minutes each. I might just go to see them again. But the waste of time and talent in the other three made me sad and angry.

On This

In Dylan Newcomb‘s latest piece (‘This‘, premiered in Korzo 22-02-08), it seemed to me that one of the underlying intentions or methods – or perhaps it’s clearer to say part of the style of the work – was to get the performers more and different paths to modify the vulnerability the viewer/participant is willing to expose in order to continue enjoying the show. Although bringing mechanics like this (which are of course present and really, inherent in all performing acts) more to the forefront of the presentation is interesting in and of itself, and it clearly is an interest many choreographers working in the Netherlands have been expressing more and more in recent years, I personally wasn’t happy with the shape of the process the dancers arrived at in this particular piece. I’ll have to ponder a bit more before I can knead and/or wrestle these misgivings into human readable form, but I will say that compared to performances I’ve seen in the recent past (which ranged from fucking great although not my thing, like Ann van den Broeck’s ‘Co(te)lette’; to the mindblowing excellence that is Gingras’s ‘The Autopsy Project’) in which the same mechanic was part of the issue, something in ‘This’ was failing.

So: more later.