Funding Next Step

I came home from the first half of the Contact Improv and Body Mind Centering workshop to find a nice letter from the City of Davis with congratulations on my strong application. They had questions about the educational part of this project in the Davis public schools. So, for the last week I have been playing email tag with Gina Smith who is one of the Drama teachers and have sent quite a few more emails to other art and music teachers on the HS and Junior High level with no response. Amy Greer offered to lead the lesson for elementary and I will gladly take the high schoolers. The city needs some information on how the lessons will be focused and who will be leading them. They need this by January 5. With the holidays upon us and vacation time prevalent, I have quite a task ahead of me.

Oh the grantors also want to have a confirmed date. This is the communication I've had with Scott Bowen and Joy Cohan. I think we will still push on with the 16th of May. Yahooo!

Hope: Sat. May 16, 2009 probably will be the date of the Rotary Turkey BBQ in Central Park (they use the Sycamore Grove & stage all day after Farmer's Market), it's also the day of the Double Century bike tour (a couple thousand bicyclists up at Community park), and probably an outdoor movie in Central park that evening at about 9:00 p.m.

Depending on WHERE you do the cabaret downtown, these events should not conflict. It's also 2 days after Celebrate Davis, a huge event in Community Park.

exhibitionism

I've always been kind of fascinated by those human exhibits that took place in the early 20th century, wherein members of "tribes" from Africa or India or Oceania were brought to Europe and displayed as if in a sort of human zoo or living museum. It was a horrible thing, of course, in many ways. People and their cultural artifacts were removed from their contexts and placed before sensation-hungry Europeans. I sometimes wonder if Duchamp's urinal was a (unconscious?) response to this sort of thing (and a more sophisticated response than, say, Debussy's or Picasso's). After all, a mask (or even a person) from Africa will have a particular function in its society of origin; when it is placed in an exhibit at a European museum it takes on all sorts of new meanings. Similarly, one would presume, with toilets and other objects--perhaps members of another society would find in our toilets powerful artistic expressions.

I wonder if such exhibits could be done today. If someone put us, for example, in an exhibit, what would they want to see? What meanings can we be invested with if we are taken out of context? What is exotic about us, what strange rituals do we perform, in what ways are we "primitive"? What are our mating dances, our healing songs?

Alternately, what happens when/if we museumize dada? Does the present world provide a proper context in which to experience dada? Or is dada already subsumed by the cultural establishment? Should dada be meseumized? Should dada-ists be meseumized?...

"Ladies and gentlemen prepare yourselves, for today you are in for a one of a kind treat! Thought to have become extinct in the 1920s due to suicide, venereal disease, and anomie, we have traveled deep into the primordial recesses of art history to bring you these primitive and exotic specimens. Marvel at the enigmatic chatterings of the Tristan Tzara; delight in the strange songs of the Kurt Schwitters; tremble at the primeval visages of the Marcel Janco! Ladies and gentlemen, without further delay, I present to you: the Lost Tribe of the Dadas!"