Stellar company. Columbus Crew Stadium 4/28/12.
Tracing History.
2012, the year dance broke. As a part of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University, I’ll be curating an exhibition, Tracing History, focused upon dancer/choreographer, Bebe Miller at the Urban Arts Space in Columbus, set to open August 24, 2012. Her company’s next performance, History, will premiere at the Wexner Center for the Arts in late September 2012. A mountain to do surrounding this, some of which I’ll post here.
(pictured: Darrell Jones and Angie Hauser, photo: Julieta Cervantes)
The best:
Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
the rest:
Blues Control and Laraaji - FRKWYS Vol. 8 (RVNG Intl.)
Nathan Salsburg - Affirmed (No Quarter)
Spectre Folk-The Blackest Medicine, Vol. II (Woodsist)
Woods - Sun and Shade (Woodsist)
Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for My Halo (Matador)
Wooden Shjips - West (Thrill Jockey)
Sun Araw - Ancient Romans (Drag City)
WU LYF - Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (LYF)
William Tyler Behold the Spirit (Tompkins Square)
Envelope. Elizabeth’s Records. 10.15.11
New interview back-and-forth over at the Agit Reader page.
My artist of inquiry will be Bebe Miller, and specifically looking at her next project, HISTORY. I’m interested in the ways that Bebe, through her choreography, attempts to unveil or excavate the process of dance making, translating her experience and the experiences of the company into a physical language, as well as a record of thought. HISTORY reveals the interpersonal subtext over the last decade that drives her company’s particular style of dance making. Inevitably, in performance, it then connects an audience to their own experience of imagining/working/growing with those they share time with.
Bebe Miller is part of the generation of postmodern choreographers who fuse a minimalist sense of movement and process with the expressive qualities of European dance-theater. She’s often said that her work is not “of ‘THE BLACK EXPERIENCE’ but rather “of a black experience.” And it’s exactly those contrasting elements in her work: American vs. European, street vs. studio, contact improv vs. the pointed toe, a certain mystery to her work vs. a willingness to overshare about her process, and her unfailingly restless sense of exploration that is intriguing. I’ll investigate through gender, racial, and historical lense, looking at texts like Susan Manning, bell hooks, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild, among others.
http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/history
Musical movement: DRONE
Drone music finds its roots in ethnic or spiritual music which can be found in many parts of the world, including Scottish bagpipe traditions, didgeridoo music in Australia, South Indian classical and Hindustani classical, Indonesian gamelan, Gregorian chant, and the sustained tones found in the Japanese classical tradition; Repetition of tones, supposed to be in imitation of bagpipes is found in a wide variety of genres and musical forms.
In the modern era, beginning roughly post-WWII, the ideas become more defined, with reactions against traditional classical music, big band, jazz, and burgeoning pop music. Drone picks up on the idea of the “hallucinatory” aspects of art creation in the avant garde (see: Alfred Jarry, via Shattuck), and also the idea of high and low culture colliding (the intellectual appreciation of music vs. the verse-chorus-verse-bridge framework), and also of Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises Futurist manifesto that stated that the human ear requires a new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition.
Some names to remember:
John Cage, David Tudor (UCLA)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (electronic/chance pioneer)
Yves Klein 1949 Monotone Symphony (20-minute drone)
LaMonte Young, Trio for Strings, first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences (Father of drone)
Philip Glass
John Cale (VU)
Tony Conrad
Terry Riley
Angus Maclise (VU)
Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, Amon Duul
Brian Eno
Miles Davis
Sun Ra
Ornette Coleman
Glenn Branca
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Sonic Youth
Videos/artists:
LaMonte Young “B flat Dorian Blues” (1962)
Velvet Underground “Heroin” (1968)
Reviewed the new album by Brooklyn’s D. Charles Speer and the Helix, Leaving the Commonwealth, for Brooklyn-via-Columbus music site, The Agit Reader. Good tunes, and good to flex that part of the brain after considerable time off. More to follow.
Good news. Found out I was accepted into a small cohort of the first-ever Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University in Connecticut starting this summer. The intent is to study the field of Performing Arts presenting through the wider lens and/or practices of visual arts curating (i.e., installations, catalogues, assemblage of content and context, multimedia, retrospectives, career surveys, etc.). Continues less intensively through the rest of the year.