Yes it's true. My DADA needs a MAMA, but not in a heteronormative way, or even in a way that supports the idea of binary gender. My DADA also needs a ZAZA and a MEEMEE, a QUSO and a WEBFART.
What am I trying not to say?
Help, I just realized that the anti-spectacle is indeed a spectacle.
Most specifically I just realized that I am being interpellated by cultural studies texts that challenge the hegemonic culture making machinery. What does that mean? I mean that just when I think I'm resisting, or conspiring an "alternative", I realize that the university, the books produced in academia, and the language that we speak to critique hegemony, spectacle, and ideology are all spectacular distractions shouting, "Hey you, look over here!" Just when we get an embodied awareness of the matrix, we get seduced back into the fold, the plié, the crease, the contraction.
Cultural studies texts induce an internalized and masochistic prison industrial complex, including panopticonic surveillance structures, inescapable tortures, punishments, and incarcerations. The room has no windows. Only a ceiling open to an infinite sun, camera, eye. 24/7 people, I'm talking 24/7.
And I'm an artist. A performance artist past the edge of a nervous break (dance). No one understands me. Which is predetermined. We/they want it that way. And I am only now understanding how deeply embedded this failure is. But embedded does not equal embodied. The msm journalist in Iraq is disembodied, cut off from the socio-political body, in a way that should seem familiar to contemporary artists.
So I'm approaching DADA in Davis with some trepidation, some concern about my nostalgic formulations. Isn't nostalgia a further embedding of the ideology that is cyborg-izing what remains of the living tissue that was my bodymind. Ouch, why doesn't cyborg-izing hurt? Why isn't the surgery of interpellation leaving visible scars at the corporeal points of entry or exchange. And how are these points of contact, penetration, and embeddment, anything but the primary material of my dancing, where dancing is the live moment presence of the dance, the making of the dance, the embodiment of the dance?
So I refuse to dance DADA. I will speak to the dead object that is alive with fetishistic vibrancy. I will share my concerns with whoever can hear me. I know that the ear has not kept up with the eye, i.e., the ear listens from a more archaic paradigm than the eye, cyborgized at a faster rate by visual technologies and the languages that support them. So that means I will also sing, sound, moan, whisper, grate, shift, burp, scratch, vibrate and resonate.
Saturday. Davis. 90 degrees in the shade. I'll see you there wearing shades, dishing shade.
Keith X Hennessy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
15 comments:
Well, I have to say some of the most scintillating performance studies discussions seem to be going on on the DADA blog. One more reason for both the academy and the industry to take note of this excitable event. I find myself (who is making a very 'straight' contribution to the cabaret) wishing I'd had just a little more time to come up with something rather less 'me' and more 'mask'. But then - as I constantly persuade my Non-Realism and Comedy undergrads - it is only THROUGH the mask that we reveal the self, so I guess by not even bothering with the mask in the first place, I am short-cutting the performative process. (Phew! What a relief, when I have so little time anyway.)
Personally, I defy such terms as 'anti-art' and 'anti-performance': who determines the strictures of art? Who decides the parameters of performance? Stanislavsky argued that he had no hard-and-fast system, so I guess he more than anyone would be (from a contemporary perspective, where every acting guru wants to make their mark on Stanislavsky studies and insist on the system) considered highly anti-Stanislavskian. Perhaps? Dadadadadadadadadadadada? Nyet.
('Toerag' has been borrowed by Bella Merlin for the moment...)
Dearest Toerag and other Stanislavski sympathizers,
Firstly, I'd like to speak to you in the succinct chorus language you might remember from BB Gabor's 1980 one-hit wonder:
nyet nyet soviet!
Secondly, it's always already too late to recuperate or historically revise Stanislavski. Of course he's got a presence that is lacking in all the cyphers & vampires who have replaced him with Systems (aka classes, workshops, drama awards, oscars, academies) bearing his family name. But let's pull the (male) gaze back a bit, and refocus on the fuzzy peripherals of mainstream vision. Here in the swampy margins, we sense the truth of simulacra: the original is no longer or never was.
The Stan System of our imaginary theater nation is a series of ideological repetitions and rehearsals, almost a mockery of mimicry, through which no vital performance can survive. And if we want, as Phelan asserts anyway, to experience the (petit) death in the wake of the real/live, then vital is crucial. The performance has to live in order to die. The question is, has been, will be, how can the people cum together?
Me or mask, that is not the question. Bella will shine through either of these illusions.
Whether tis nobler in the theatre to deconstruct or restage Oklahoma, we still suffer the outrageous fortunes of Obama's loyalties.
For us there is no choice. It's realness not realistic.
Dada is dead. Let sleeping dogs lie. You are what you eat.
At Gifts-To-India.com you will have a bit tough time. Do not panic, because we have so many collections that you will wonder which one to pick and which one to leave.
Gear up to celebrate your favorite events and festivals in India, and huge collections of out of the box and unique gift items are awaiting you.. For details, visit www.rightflorist.in
At Gifts-To-India.com you will have a bit tough time. Do not panic, because we have so many collections that you will wonder which one to pick and which one to leave.
Post a Comment