I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
some theorists locate special value in the human performer in live performance this presence is ephemeral each appearance is unique finite disappears from a spectator’s field of vision after the moment of display
Performance in this sense is distinct from video or film or anything pre recorded
The same theoretical point of view identifies the function of the pre recorded document as a strategy to arrest the inevitable disappearance of human presence an attempt to preserve the moment
the empirical reality of the human performer which may appear to us as more substantial in performance palpably there in its corporeality becomes in the retrospective moment of theorizing more fragile more volatile and transitory in contrast to the greater recoverability and endurance of the recorded document
a sense of the relative stability of a recorded document derives from a perception that a moment from the past has been captured but any intense examination of this arrest reveals that the technology does not wholly recover the prior event merely marks a moment that no longer exists retains presence only through the record of some aspects of its previous presence
this extrapolation from film theory suggest that prerecorded representations of a human figure like the picture or film signifies primarily as a reference to an event in the past
Roland Barthes claims that when we study a photograph we do not see a presence “being there,” rather a presence that “has been there.”
he claims there is a peculiar conflation or “illogical connection” of here and then
I recognize the subject of the photograph displays what is not really here the still photograph in this sense has no projective power
according to Barthes because the cinema employs narration fiction audiences identify film not as the experience of what “has been there,” as in a photograph but, rather, responds to the experience as “There it is.”
yet Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet integrates live performance and recorded media 40 pre recorded segments displaying the presence of those 40 performers while inviting or making the audience a performing body rendering Barthes’ distinction among here and then and “There it is” much more complicated
as a spectator I confront two different presences one that is empirical– materially realized in the present moment– and an other that clearly reproduces an earlier moment that on it’s own holds some projective power
the operation of the pre-recorded vocals its manifestation of a moment prior to performance alters the behavior (or work) of the audience interacting with it
the interaction reveals an equivocation between the here and then with the audience functioning in the performance as image
the pre recorded sound plays a game of being immediate the spectator recognizes that this “illusion” is an aesthetic lie an artistic conceit but the audience plays the game of being in the same time frame as the recorded sound in a time frame they know is prior to the performance despite the artifice of immediacy consequently the performance oscillates between temporal stations in a dynamic that doesn’t ever come to rest
at some level of consciousness I recognize that the recorded sound captured an event from the past and that what I now hear is only the physical residue left from that earlier moment projected in the present yet this awareness provides in my role as spectator as I witness the audience move in and out of the space move amongst the 40 speakers listening their facial expressions their postures their brief exchanges with each other leaving me with a sense of a gratitude as I recognizing that the plenitude of a documented prior moment/performance can be reborn in a powerful meaningful new way
The Forty Part Motet is a forty-part choral performance of English composer Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century composition Spem in Alium, sung by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. The performance is played in a fourteen-minute loop that includes eleven minutes of singing and three minutes of intermission. Individually recorded parts are projected through forty speakers arranged inward in an oval formation, allowing visitors to walk throughout the installation, listening to individual voices along with the whole.
The weather was partly cloudy with a temperature of 52℉ and the duration of the performance was two and a half minutes for an audience of 3 (two of whom were Hell’s Angels).
The Fragment…
A chorus of speechless fish made a din
saluting their dear mistress
with their tails
.
The Location…
Franciscan missionary Juan Crespi noted in his diary on Tuesday, October 24, 1769:
This is a fine place, with good lands and an abundance of water, where a good mission could be placed; for this purpose I give it as patron San Pedro Regalado, which name it will keep. It is a pleasure to see the great number of black berries in this place, so thick that they prevent us from walking. After traveling seven hours, in which we made two leagues, we arrived at the camping place, which is in a small valley with a good village of heathen, who received us with much friendliness. They are fair, well formed, and some of them are bearded. They have their village near the beach, about half a league from the camping place; but they also have their little houses in this valley, and at present are living in them. The valley has a great deal of land, much of it good; in the middle of it there is an arroyo with plenty of running water which goes to the beach, on whose edge, lower down, these heathen have their village. The only shortcoming that I noticed was the scarcity of wood, but the mountains are near, and there is plenty of brush from the redwoods.
During the Mexican era, the area was part of Rancho San Gregoria, named after Pope Gregory I.
San Gregorio was a vibrant town in the 1850s. A place where wealthy San Franciscans traveled to San Gregorio House by stagecoach for fishing, hunting, sea bathing, and boat races.
The building remains, as does The General Store operating since 1889. In the nineteenth century a Chinese community lived along the creek until the buildings washed away in heavy rains
In 1915, the community held seven cheese factories.
Gerald Casel’s Splinters in Our Ankles is a contemporary movement essay that responds to the colonial origins and collective cultural amnesia imbued in the Philippine folk dance, Tinikling. Choreographed and directed by Gerald Casel, this evening-length premiere is created in collaboration with dancers Arletta Anderson, Kristen Bell, Christina Briggs-Winslow, Rebecca Chaleff, Janet Collard, Peiling Kao, Kevin Lopez, and Parker Murphy, with original music composed and performed by Tim Russell and lighting and media design by Jack Beuttler.
Let us read, and let us dance;
these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. Voltaire
Stanford Dance Motion. Chocolate Heads Building Scene Space Launch at The McMurtry Art and Art History building, Stanford University.
Composite of Performance
Full Performance
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. William Faulkner
what is the objective for both performance photography and critical discourse?
to inform the reader’s/viewer’s understanding of a performance?
each produces a “text” offered as a substitute for the performance an individual “reading” an adjunct a document that can be shelved with a copy of the original text of the play
critical essays and photographs remain separate but related artifacts to the performance
the production at the moment of performance is co-extensive with the originating text while critical essays and photographs are supplementary to the original text potentially recalled consulted the next time the reader/audience member encounters the original text or subsequent performance
performance appropriates the original text a spectator receives text and performance simultaneously a fancier hopefully clearer statement might be a spectator receives the text through the instrumentality of the performance
critical essays and photographs have a freedom to stand apart from the original text apart from the performance the production use that text/performance/production as objective presence as the stimulus to its own subjective response
directors do at least the ones I gravitate towards seek strategies to distance both themselves and their audiences from a text isolating its strangeness archaic qualities yet one component of the raw material of performance an ever present element remains the original text in my roles as a director I’ve found it extremely difficult with performance to separate text and interpretation
a critic may develop an argument inductively conventions of critical discourse allow a critic to put forward an interpretation in a straightforward way
a director speaks primarily through accoustic and visual systems which he or she appropriates from the original text
performance manifests an overt collaboration between many individuals
the photographic document more often than not represents the singular vision of a photographer
critical discourse as well tends to represent the single voice of the critic
the previous statements regarding photographers and critics ignore the fact that the work criticism/photography is frequently the result of extended conversation with collaborators editors colleagues teachers and students lovers as well it is difficult to imagine a kind of discourse less derivative than photography and criticism
the form of a critical essay as with photographic documentation of live art most often functions as a serial artifact a unit in a sequence of writing or documents within the critic’s/photographer’s own work within a sub-genre of discourse shared by others
the photographer the writer of a critical essay have more direct control over the product than a director whose work is vulnerable to modification during rehearsals and performance because they operate through and with the aesthetic sensibilities the abilities of others
while a director may make visual reference to other texts by the original author or others performance (in most cases) remains a discrete representation of a single text
critical discourse often asks its readers to perceive an aesthetic text as one in a series rather than as an independent aesthetic phenomenon
the principal objective of a critical essay may be, for example to position a text within a canon that cuts across time aligns the individual work with a group of works identifying a play as a tragicomedy a dark comedy a drama of the grotesque aim to make the individual text comprehensible as a unit in a series this type of critical act explicates vivifies the text only by establishing the coordinates of the context that contains it
theater companies may place a production in a serial position one unit in a series in a festival situation but the individual performance usually remains an experience discrete accessible to those who attend only a single production
in performance the text is tied to the presence of the living actor with an individual physical form a unique personality
the critical discourse is not tied to the specificity of the actual actor nor to a specific occasion a reader’s experience of the essay may be fragmented divided among a series of moments with extended periods of time in between in which the mind processes re-works the ideas encountered away from the text in question the critical discourse
the photographer is held within the specific place and time of the performance they document experiencing the theatrical interpretation as a whole the photographer may return to document another performance but the interpretation of the performance is accessible primarily through the data of performance that the photographer can remember or in my practice built up over the period of rehearsals
the critical discourse positions itself in most cases in the context of critical interpretations of the play genre historical period contributing self-consciously to a body of criticism
as the field develops hopefully this will soon be true for performance documentation as there is no defined body of documentation
Nov 27, 2015 | Categories: Speculation | Tags: Notes | Comments Off on criticism, photography and performance
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Wanderlust: Gustave Eiffel ‘s tower on a damp and cold night in Paris.
Étant la plus saisissante manifestation de l’art des constructions métalliques par lesquelles nos ingénieurs se sont illustrés en Europe, elle est une des formes les plus frappantes de notre génie national moderne. Gustave Eiffel
The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion and the other inner forces… the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating. Jackson Pollock
Nov 08, 2015 | Categories: Industries | Comments Off on Chocolate Heads: Building Scene ⎪Space Launch
But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over… Death is not anything… death is not… It’s the absence of presence, nothing more… the endless time of never coming back… a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound… Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
