Relationships between Drawing, Dance, Art and Music - tracing lines (presence and absence): Steve Paxton

where I found a structure / august 27th 2012

On of my key concerns in my undergraduate years was the movement of memory through time. I wondered how this could relate to concerns I have today.

Another interest that has remained with me but had little opportunity to follow is an interest in dance which I translate into: the body and movement in space. A love for lines made on paper, tracing words and drawings concludes my interests that I will use to construct a structure for this dissertation.

What do these interests share / what is the common ground? First I reduced them to key words: movement, ephemeral, passing, linear, order, time, inadequacy of language to notate, notation, trace.

here emerge three key terms:

movement

the limits of language = notation

passing / linear = time

------------------------------

concluding in: TRACES.

playing with turning it into a mathematical formula (didn't work but never mind that)

movement + linear passing (time) : limits of language {equal or same as} notation = trace

introduction / August 21st

My background is this: I love paper and pens, therefore I naturally love drawing. I often think of myself as leaving marks in space. For this reason I was for a short time a life model in order to make lines on paper by creating them in space. I also thought of my recent photographs in some ways as drawing with my body. I often consider the nature of choreographed movement; and think about the structure and mechanisms of the body due to something that affects my joints and periodically makes moving painful. Who owns a body and especially a female body and what it means to be inside of one has been an urgent question in my life. The disjunction between being present in my body and absent rings through emotionally. Dance and choreography have figured a number of times in my work. I tend to work from instinct, intuitively, romantically, naively. Yet I am eagerly looking for a theoretical language that could be mine.

think about this/ 19th August

*Forsythe interested in universalism or just dance?

*moving body as absence / disappearing body in my photos

*body performing absence as presence. Absence/presence

*the body now

*what is the contemporary body? / what is contemporary movement

*performing absence - body disappears in diagram / body disappears in motion, line language

*abstraction of body now; how it stays whole, how it performs it's fractioning & abstraction

*Peggy Phellin

*Cindy Sherman - disappears into body of other people's bodies - then those bodies disappear - then only objects - body reappears // dollparts = violent images (H. Bellmer, too?) // my work

*moving body -photograph - line drawing ..

*Difference between performance 30 years ago and re-staging today, where's the difference? Cunningham techniques today adapted and preformed, looks the same but isn't...

* where is the understanding today about body & performance?

*touching 2 things not just one (my point exactly)

*Algebra: sth of interest + theory + read + find sth in the middle like bridge = launch

*performing presence as absence, disappearing the body into language / body as language

*Abramovic ' artist is Present' didn't move, yet it was visible when she was present and when she drifted. (experience of friend of friend)

*relationship to alphabet

*expanding what body can do, yet in a dictatorial way ?? (training body as diciphal)

* Deleuze & Guattari: 1000 Plateau

chapter 1: story about bees transmitting 'knowledge'..

*performing body as presence - body disappearing into digital - face scanning + geolocation

*in what way do bodies continue to perform a language that is relevant today?

*stalker/stalked relationship to body = without saying it

*What is it for me to perform an androgenous body in a time when governments decide if women are allowed to have abortions; taking ownership over women's bodies in a different way to male bodies.

*presence - absence, polarity destabilized

*eroded discipline ; interested in moments of cross-over

*language moved from concrete to micro gesture (C.K.)

it's still a messy jumble / 17th august

yes I know.. I am working on it. I have finally typed enough words but the quality tails off right at the end, steeply! So I now have 5-7 full days to sort it out. It took so long to type just the words.. Now I'll need to think! I have things I definitely would like to talk about which aren't included yet. This is actually great because there are whole sections that would be ok to be culled or reduced to much smaller portions.

A key issue I have is that I ask myself all these questions but I am not sure I ever answer them at all.. So I would like to focus on that more during the week. signing out for now: Friday/saturday night. Sleep time.

reconfiguring ... / start 8th August

.. I have deferred my dissertation twice, taking me from 2010 to 2012. Again it isn't looking like as if anything is moving, coming together. But there is a difference. I have for now completely let go of the subject I was struggling with so much on my own. I realize that in order to write something I will have to write in a genre that I feel I can get a grasp on. Violence and the ills of the world are not something I have enough intellectual control over, it takes some greater brain than mine to add something worthwhile to the subject. It doesn't mean I have nothing to say. Just nothing really that worth while of me ruining my sleep while writing terribly trite material.

Instead I return to my previous interest in: Analogies between drawing and dance / reconsiderations of Gesamtkunstwerk. Contemporary choreography and how it is influenced by that of the early twentieth century, perhaps there will be space for Butoh, and body alignment and yoga too. I would like to build on this. Physical Theatre re-enters my thoughts as does a naivete that the cycnicism of the past years had muted somewhat. //// to be rewritten /// reclaiming the subject and my position on art

Relationships between Drawing, Dance, Art and Music - tracing lines (presence and absence)

Pages

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

video: ISTA Copenaghen, Steve Paxton's work demonstation, 1996

key words

Butoh

key related artists

resoures

great resources

theory

delicious mind morsels

unrelated artists

comforts / interests of the artist

reminder to self

Affect Theory

related artists

Dance

Performance

maybe artists

schools

perhaps apply / involve

Followers

previous points of research

memories of discovering dance

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