Secrets & Motion (thought into words and vice versa)

Listening to Myrlie Evers-Williams speak at the Inauguration made me once again aware of why I've wanted to work with words for so long.

In planning the start of last year's season, or maybe end of the one before, I brought up working with diary pages in the context of the candid thoughts of youth, but it wasn't the right time for such a project.  At the tail end of Mythos:Pathos, really as fodder for grants and something to put on paper for the next year's marketing materials, I threw the idea of turning words into a full-length performance again, and it took root.  Moving forward with an equally motivated codirector, we decided we wanted to pursue text (both original and preexisting, anonymous and owned) and we would find it through community members and library books and other sources, and we would treat it with dance.  A solid assortment of text-turned-dance would be a shot to capture who exactly we are.

Words are so important, even if they never become words.  Words are progress.  Words document, propel, and provide narrative to history.  Words are birthed thought (yes, I'm still going!), opinion and communication.  Words are protection and unfortunately sometimes weapons.

An important idea to me, personally, is how often words are forgotten or dissolve from our brains. The fables, myths and cautionary tales we read as kids are so often forgotten or discredited with adolescence.  Advice from our parents, those things we never said we would do or allow again, our wedding vows- what falls by the wayside?    A wonderful side-effect of this project is the amount of time we will be granted to meditate on words we might otherwise just read through; selecting text will be a vital task.

While Merli and I will be creating and merging segments together to form a larger show, I think my own focus will be selecting historic and contemporary texts and comparing them to original and personal pieces to find both difference and universality.  This, as always, is bound to change and in need of specificity, but it's currently a nice way to think about time travel through words, thoughts and dance.

Funding.

How do you tell not just the world, but a small panel of critical individuals how great you truly are at what you do/are trying to do, and convince them to give you money?

I'll let you know when I figure it out!

All joking aside, it's incredibly hard as a modest individual to do just this.  At a certain point grant writing isn't about you, even, but convincing said adjudicators that you are simply capable of executing the proposed project to completion.  As someone with HUGE ideas, more often than not, how do I convey that no matter how epic the project, I will always find a way to complete it to the best of my ability?  How do I convey that sure, I'm sometimes quiet, usually awkward and silly, but I'm a creative problem solver and I don't ever give up?  Some days I feel like it's impossible to do this, and I should just apply from a perspective of someone I am not, someone serious and career-focused, but it feels so wrong.

The best successes I've had come from outside individuals taking me seriously, and putting faith in my ideas.  How do I reinvent the grant, the application, the interview.   Hmmmmm.....

Ahhrrrrrrrt (still rhymes with fart).

We've all been there.  Perhaps you've sat in the dark, trying to enjoy a dance concert or a play, while the couple a row in front of you 'tries' to stifle their constant practiced intellectual chortle at every other gesture or line of dialogue.  Maybe you've walked the halls and galleries of an art museum, dodging esteemed 'museum go-ers' glaring at others that temporarily block their view or *gasp* enjoying the art in their own way.  Spoiler alert, there are EXPERTS everywhere.  How do you tell said expert is an expert?  Don't worry, and certainly don't try too hard... they will find a way to make it known to you.

Anyways, a good friend emailed me the following link today on this very subject.  The essay paints a good picture of 'experts' and non-experts alike, though I think it misses a third group of experts that are still knowledgeable, but also similarly free-minded like our non-experts.

Calling out the sneery condescension is what resonated with me most in this piece; it is what makes our audiences dwindle and future populations feel unsafe (mentally!) in our theatre spaces, galleries, and various other forums that should stay public.

Read!  Digest!  Thoughts?

(Thanks, Kelsey!)

The Power of Non-Experts

• by Desi Gonzalez on January 3, 2013
• 19

Yves Klein directing a model (Image courtesy pacific-standard.blogspot.com)

At Billboard’s Woman of the Year award last month, pop princess Katy Perry declared, “I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women.” Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon responded with quips like “Ha! HA HA HA!” and “Let me just point out that if you believe in the strength of women, Ms. Perry … you’re soaking in feminism.” Over at Slate, Amanda Hess, along with fellow writer Nona Willis Aronowitz, discussed the phenomenon of “the feminist police” — critics like Williams who scorn women like Perry. Sarcasm and condescension has never worked, Hess and Aronowitz contend; attacking deniers just widens the chasm between self-declared feminists and the rest of the female population.

I see the same story repeated in the galleries of contemporary art. I’ve had countless people express strong feelings against modern and contemporary art, as if “art” were a dirty word. (As a more high-profile example, filmmaker Werner Herzog’s declaration of despising art comes to mind.) But equally as problematic is the art world’s mocking response to the naysayers: The unease of many people is met with “That’s because you just don’t get it.” Art insiders are guilty of alienating the public, just as feminists who “condescendingly dismiss [women] as morons” alienate a lot of women. I like witticisms just as much as the next guy, but not when snark comes at the expense of inclusion.

Installation view of Yves Klein at Hirshhorn (Image via Hirshhorn)

Turns out that if we spend less time dismissing non-experts and more time listening, we can learn something. A few years ago, I spent several months in the circular halls of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. As a part of the Interpretive Guide program, I initiated critical conversations with visitors on the exhibition Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers. I’ve never thought so deeply about the oddball French artist than I did that summer — and all from talking to the public.

Most approached the exhibition with apprehension. A listless pool of blue pigment, a video of naked woman rolling around in azure paint; the works are peculiar, even for those of us with art history degrees. But after contemplating for a bit, visitors were able to make astounding connections using their vast repertoire of personal experience. Klein’s signature electric blue reminded one visitor — who had just spent the last few months backpacking through Southeast Asia — of the precious indigo dye of India. She explained that indigo has mystical connotations in Hinduism, which makes an interesting parallel to Klein’s claim that his hypnotic monochromes represented an infinite void.

Or take the perspectives of MoMA Unadulterated, a “hacked” audio tour that interviews kids on their responses to works in the Museum of Modern Art collection. (Full disclosure: I currently work at MoMA, but MoMA Unadulterated is an independent project unaffiliated with the museum.) Their commentary is adorable, but also really astute. One kid compares De Wain Valentine’s minimalist “Triple Red Disk Metal Flake – Black Edge” to flying saucers. I’ve passed by the sculpture innumerable times without stopping to think about it, but now I can’t help of thinking about its unusual form and materials as otherworldly. At Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’s “Belgian Lion,” consisting of an image of a lion on a frying pan, one kid wondered whether he made the pan. Another youngster gets to the heart of the concept of the “readymade” with her retort: “Why would you make a pan if you can just buy it for cheaper? … Other people are buying the piece of cardboard, they’re buying the paint, they’re buying the paintbrushes … Why not?”

(Image via kathrynyoung.wordpress.com)

There’s something to be said about grassroots perspectives on an issue, whether it’s art or feminism. Nona Willis Aronowitz drove around America with the intent to talk to women about what feminism means to them. But as it turned out, the word “feminism” hardly came up: “The main thing I learned from writing [my book]Girldrive is that the question, ‘Are you a feminist?’ is boring. We asked that question and got some generic-sounding, bullshit answer. Once we moved on and asked about women’s actual lives, we learned the real stuff.” A person can have valuable opinions about a woman’s relationship to society even if said person isn’t aware of the larger movement of feminism.

It’s the same with art. You can have a powerful and intimate response to art, without knowing that Marcel Duchamp pioneered the idea of the readymade. All too often it seems like those entrenched in the art world, myself included, are too numbed by big names and buzzwords and the weight of art history to have a fresh perspective. I dream of a world of grassroots art interpretations, that values the perceptions of a novice as much as a Ph.D.

Grassroots only works, however, with the backing of a general public. Here’s how Katy Perry can, surprisingly enough, teach us a little lesson about the art world. Perry might not know much about feminism, but let’s stop attacking how people identify with a cause — feminism, contemporary art, or otherwise — and start recognizing that these non-experts might actually have something to say.

I am not always (often) an articulate communicator, but I always communicate.

I'm going to stop this blog post before it turns long and angry, but non-communication is a huge pet peeve of mine.

I need to stop reading books with fairly dark and more than fairly gory plots located in the Midwest before bed. In any case, I just finished book #2 of the New Year. No wonder why my house is a bit of a mess...

O Christmas tree

This is the second year in a row (meaning it's a thing, now) of me wrestling down the Christmas tree at some ridiculous hour such as 3am. I get frustrated and bitter, wage some invisible war at my lack of help while fully conscious of the fact that the scenario is completely of my doing, leave the sucker on the front steps, and head to bed gruffly satisfied, sticky, and smelling of pine sap in my cute (also scented and semi-sappy) pajamas.

Next year I will break the cycle, oh-night-before-trash-day.

It's 11:30 on New Years day and I am in bed!!!! This only merits a blog post because I'm so impressed with myself. Now can I resist cracking open this brand new book on my nightstand??

Answer in the morning.