speakers knockin' 'til the morning light
a thought, not very well developed
I wonder how younger dancers like me -- who received the bulk of their cultural education far away from physical centers of artistic production -- will contribute to the development of contemporary dance. What will our developments look like? More importantly, what will they feel like?
Reading MDT's 'manifesto' with a few recently-heard conversations still in the back of my mind, there seems to be an emphasis on what you might call "physical networking," which is (as you might guess) fancy nomenclature for partying. Maybe it's because I'm a prude, or maybe it's because I suckled at the teat of the interwebs, but I wonder if parties are actually a necessary part of artistic and/or curatorial practice. Obviously they do wonders for the sort of business that benefits from facetime, and I don't doubt the power of celebration as a potentially 'liberating' practice, yada yada yada, whatev. I wonder, though, when I consider (for example) PS1's Warm Up Series, how the function of social events differs in the dance and visual arts fields.
I'm not being too stringent with my differentiations because I still haven't thought about this very much -- but yes, I do realize there's a functional difference between the Warm Up Series and, say, Circo Zero's Turbulence, which technically wasn't a party but still utilized ***GROUP PLAY*** as a mode of production (and even promoted audience participation!!!!!!!!). What may be an excuse for passive entertainment in the visual arts world, though, still seems to represent something more fundamental for dancers: namely, a belief in the immediacy of physical performance. But when I think about the concept of social choreography as espoused by Marten Spangberg and Michael Klien, I can't help but allow for the possibility that such work might not be immediate in its presentation. Especially in Spangberg's case, which favors "an art that has more to do with internet 2.0 than with central perspective" (is he only speaking figuratively?), work that's "one-off, here and now and individual" will almost inevitably -- thought not necessarily -- be presented over the internet. Even though I wouldn't consider myself an expert on how that might look and feel, probably 90% of my dance education was gained by sitting at a computer, not in the darkness of a concert hall. Surely I can't be the only one! tl,dr: how might the aesthetics of "less physical dance" differ from its more immediate counterpart?
