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Section 2b - Remote
(1) These notes are from my report for Arts Council of England ‘A Glimpse of the Future Amongst the Ghosts of Christmas Past (a massive learning curve for doo-cot)’
(2) Spectator as participant – is stated in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. What I have found inspiring about Walter Benjamin is his non conformity in terms of the intellectual establishment – I hardly dare to use his classic text. Brecht remarked that Benjamin’s death was the first real loss that Hitler had caused German literature – below is Brecht’s epitaph.
| Zuletzt an eine unüberschreitbare Grenze getrieben Hast du, heisst es, eine überschreitbare überschritten |
[In the end driven to an impassable frontier You, we hear, passed over a passable one.] |
| Within the written contributions to this book, the reader will encounter a range of spellings of the word Vodou (vodun, voudoun, or voodoo)...Today most contemporary scholars use the spelling Vodou - instead of the once -popular voodoo - to salute the historical roots of the religion and to convey its evolution from Africa to Haiti, but also to distance themselves from the general tendency of foreigners to devalue Haitian culture. The word Vodou itself comes from the Fon language and means "ancestral spirit and drums." Today, Vodou is the generic term for all aspects of the sacred ritual of the Haitian people. | |||
(7) The Future of Ritual – writings on culture and performance by Richard Schechner - Routledge 1993 – 706.2 -
I have found the beginning of this book of interest – the research into different performance cultures – for example Butoh and Kathakali. The below table compares Western and Eastern notions of Creativity - PLAY - from page 35:
| West: Positivist | India: Maya-lila |
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| Creation is finishable work: "On the 7th day God finished the work. . . . And God blessed the 7th day and declared it holy because on it God ceased from all the work of creation. " | Creation is never finishable. Cycles of creation and destruction. Continuous creation. |
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| There is a hierarchy of reality or truth. | Multiple realities. If there is an ultimate reality, it is neti. |
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| Therefore playing is: Deprivileged and low status. |
Privileged, the divine process of creating. |
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| With art and religion, not serious or real. |
With art and religion, serious, real, and often fun. |
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| Best when nonviolent, or when violence is pretended, limited, or tightly framed. | Creative-destructive: Siva's tandava dance, the violence of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. | |
| Female and infantile, an activity of the powerless. | Female and male, the activity of gods, of the most powerful. |
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| Loosened gender roles. | Transformative gender roles. |
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| Represses the erotic or represents it pornographically. | Celebrates the erotic, representing it ecstatically. |
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| Framed off as not really real. | Multiple realities transformable into each other. |
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| Metacommunication declaring "now I am playing" or "now I am not playing." | Intentional blurring of playing-not playing boundary. |
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| Temporary. | Permanent. |
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Indeed, art and ritual, especially performance, are the homeground of playing. This is because the process of making performances does not so much imitate playing as epitomize it. From this perspective, the Batesonian play frame is a rationalist attempt to stabilize and localize playing, to contain it safely within definable borders. But if one needs a metaphor to localize and (temporarily) stabilize playing, "frame" is the wrong one - it's too stiff, too impermeable, too "on/off," "inside/outside." "Net" is better: a porous, flexible gatherer; a three-dimensional, dynamic, flow-through container. |
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(8) This quote from Schechner's book - page 38 - echoes the machine mind confusion that as an artist who performs with technology - I sometimes experience. Because, I have to think like the machine, like the minds of the people who produced and developed the machine - I go back to its beginnings and mentally see it produced in the factory. The mind and physical creation of technology.
So this quote echoes that dualism, as well as, the changed psychological space which opens up for durational performance.
(9)The quote below comes from an article about Deleuze and Guattari at http://pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Deleuze.html
| The phrases, ‘desiring machines’ and ‘body without organs’ reinforce the theory’s horizontality. We have seen that desire is not a desire based on lack - which is negative but is always in movement and reforming itself: it is an affirmative process of flows and lines of flight. The ‘body without organs’ (the term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud) is, perhaps predictably, not at all an organic body (a body with organs, ‘the body of Oedipal reduction’), but a body like the body politic, one that is always in the process of formation and deformation. The body without organs is produced in a connective synthesis, and is neither an image of the body, nor a projection. In short, the body without organs is ‘rhizomatic’ and not engendered, or tree-like. | |||
(10) Ginger Beer = Queer.
(11) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist - Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century by Donna J. Haraway - reproduced in Posthumanism - Readers in Cultural Criticism, edited by Neil Badmington, published by Palgrave, 2001 ISBN 0-333-76538-9