spangbergianism

SPANGBERGIANISM
Blogposts Autumn 2010
Bring up the volume, forget Cage
Among current trends in dance one can identify a compulsive attraction to electric
guitars. Lately the guitar has made its way back in dance with a vengeance, but of
course not understood as a musical instrument or something to which definition is
already given. Music is the new cool in dance, and the absolutely most uncool is
naked men and DJ’ing. Singing is semi-cool but stay away from exoticism and
capitalization on the behalf of somebody that could be called other. Just forget about
that department, it will always bring trouble. A better proposal is to throw dollar bills
on the audience – coupé décalée style.
To form a band is a very bad idea in 2010. Stop it! You don’t want to be in a band. Get
real, it’s just some silly idea of realizing your youth dreams. Look, you are doing
business – it might sound pathetic but dance is a business and you have no where
else to go. To form a band is as stupid as thinking that Bill Gates created Guitar Hero
because he always wanted to be in a band.
If you, when you visited you parents this summer, went downstairs to catch up with
your old Stratocaster copy, make sure this was the last time. Do not do that again!
Concert… embarrassing in the first place but then where… In the foyer, or festival
center of a dance festival. Seriously. Songs sang with the voice placed between your
collarbones. Vulnerability 2010 is not recommended.
Sound is definitely the new cool, but with music come figures and entourage and the
first to show up is always John Cage. This summer I have already seen two shows
based on the lecture on nothing, and I hear rumors about a handful other pieces.
John Cage is not cool and his lectures are modernist mumbo jumbo – R.I.P. don’t
resurrect those old monsters, they will at best become zombies, living-dead rejecting
contemporary technologies and social networks as inauthentic. As if we want
autonomy.
Now, what is the lecture on nothing about? Nobody seems to know, however I didn’t
have the opportunity to ask Quentin Tarantino. You know it’s not about nothing or
music; it’s not about structures or repetition. It can’t be, if so it’s simply too stupid.
The lecture on nothing is obviously a critique of male heterosexual production,
delicately resonating with its environment: never up in the face and yet a sort of
undercover nail in the eye of male representational frames. The critique is moving
around the central note; it refuses to adhere to established tonalities and fiddles with
harmonies, but most of all it avoids any kind of production as an ungrounding of the
entire system of male heterosexual production. The lecture of nothing undermines an
entire system and what amazes me is that the follower of Cage is such a genuine
hetero. I like the image of a bunch of young male lets say bassoon players, needless to
say very hetero, expressing their admiration for Cage in the local music academy. The
bassoon player in conversation with the clarinetist: “-So radical, so subversive…” not
realizing that what they support is a gay manifesto. Sweet.
However a new problem arrived, what does it mean when a female choreographer
gives the lecture supported by, so to say, a master in her IPod headphones supporting
the text with a fleshy rather eroticized improvisation. Eszter Salamon subordinates
1 herself to the equalized, indifference of John Cage’s voice, liberating herself from
representation without nobody realizing. Salamon’s dance is not very exiting, it’s long
and the text is so dated, so tiring to have to listen to all those quasi esoteric tropes
that ooze of vanity, but this is precisely where Salamon’s piece goes undercover,
where it goes tactical and has nothing to do with Cage, but only this lecture can give
her permission to unground, decode herself. Salamon gives Cage the possibility to
undo herself.
Burrows and Fargion are in their n’th duo using the same lecture. Obsessed with
structures the two men fiddle and fiddle and fiddle with the lectures making it even
more important, giving it even more significance. Where Salamon dissolves the two
boys appropriates and so to say surf the wave of Cage. And by the way, if the
interpretation of the lecture proposed is correct, aren’t Burrows and Fargion
announcing themselves as a gay couple. Sweet, they are giggling and dancing a bit
clumsy. Contained and perfect. Jonathan and Mateo.
Sound is back in business, and perhaps Cage is more than a dead composer. It’s
definitely the new cool, but forget Cage and let’s engage in making thing. Nothing is
not an option, this year it’s all about “Too Much Too Soon” – make up and stop being
modest.
Show No Mercy!
Who’s your target group?
You are a choreographer and you run a business. Correct, your job is to develop and
manufacture products that you push on individuals with titles such as programmer or
festival director, organizations such as the art council or e.g. the Goethe Institute.
Your target group and your client are not identical, on the contrary they are
significantly different and don’t know each other.
So what do you do? You continue to push products called dance performances
without analyzing who your clients and target groups are – no let’s not talk about
“your audience” that is irrelevant. The business strategy utilized by dance and
performance is simple: hope for the best.
Your client is not cool; she doesn’t stay up late, has no idea about what a beat mix is,
and if he has a FB account she has less than 250 friends, still more than 60. Are you
d’accord with this, are you fine knowing that your clients idea about life is
approximately as contemporary as your vintage sneakers were last year. Your client
has heard about bittorrent but never used it. He still considers that music is
something stored on stable media, that mp3 is not authentic, and has all the Patti
Smith’s albums on CD (he had all of them LP, but you know… times change). Check it
out, that’s the guy that buys your show. Are you happy about the fact that he likes
your work? Are you okay with the fact that your work adheres to her taste, or that she
thinks that your stuff has potentiality.
Too many of your clients spend time with their grand children. Think about that!
Dance, especially produced by choreographers without health insurance, without
exception addresses the same target group. This kind of choreography, created with
too small budgets but always state funded, is directed to itself. The target individual
is identical to the maker: young, good looking, middle class, fresh and conservative.
The target individual dresses badly and considers it uncool to be cool. The target
individual considers herself contemporary but doesn’t know the address of Colette.
The target person considers himself contemporary but listens to soul.
2 Dance and choreography, shape up! It’s not a defeat to know your client or detect
your target group. But a person who doesn’t is either ignorant or somebody with an
unconditional belief in authenticity. Who thinks that art is special. Stop that! You are
not your work, and your work is not supposed to consolidate your identity. Dance and
performance does not become less superficial because you think it’s deep: it is after
all more or less an hour of classical representation accompanied by creative
electronic music (help). Dance and choreography will not lose its specificity because
it’s glossy, effective, fast, aggressive or fuckin’ nuts. But it will lose its specificity as
long as you, and me, continue desperately to try to please programmers, managers,
our friends and worst of all the audience, especially when we do it through being
alternative, healthy, medium rare, positive, disillusioned, a little bit crazy and always
available.
Summarizing the first half of this years shows, season and festival programs brings
me to a simple conclusion: dance experiences a deep crisis and this is signified by a
continuous mass emigration towards the general. The watchword of dance today is:
one size fits all. And worst of all it lacks any kind of attitude.
The reason is obvious: production value, belonging, identity and staying alive are
more important than specificity, excess, cocaine and revolt. Of course I’m pathetic,
but what’s the alternative? Modesty, Buddhism, demure, enthusiasm, faith? Are
those notions that you’d like to signify your practice by? Did you make life difficult
for yourself deciding to be a choreographer in order to confirm such an attitude? If
you did, I don’t want to be your friend!
Dancers, choreographers and all you others, we have a job to do:
- Stop working for your client, they don’t care – they just want more money.
- Evacuate your audience, and don’t let them in again until they are ready to kill for it.
- Fuck modesty and all other well-meaning aspirations. If you don’t consider your
mission an armed struggle, ready to declare war, you are not needed.
- Accept no interviews, agree to no essays published in dance magazines or written by
dance scholars. To be published in a dance magazine is a disaster, it means your work
is good.
- Spend more time on producing press images, rumors and attitude than rehearsing
and processing your next piece. The project is you and your pieces nothing more than
an hors d’oevre.
- Stop collaborating, and show too much attitude! Hierarchy is the only way to
change the notion of success.
- Sleep around, stop decency now!
- Fuck enthusiasm it’s just another word for priorities, moderate ideas and a balanced
psyche. Enthusiasm is another word for shrinking in front of circumstances.
Enthusiasm is another word for insecurity.
- Practice being categorical. Be glam.
- Execute your client. Be a fool.
Show No Mercy!
3 Hope For The Best Dance
Choreography has discovered a new method. The craft has turned interdisciplinary
on the level of production (groovy) and imported a fresh technique from cinema. Or,
ehhh actually from Hollywood and there is some mismatch going on cuz
choreography has in fact not appropriated a method. It is mixing up method and
narrative twist.
Choreography has over the last fifty years developed from a craft – connected to
efficiency and the consolidation of form on the basis of a general – to an expertise –
which is all about being special and individual in respect of a delimited common
territory. Lately we have seen choreography develop into a competence, which
perceives choreography as a field of specific capacities disconnected from
predetermined expressions. Independent of the approach the three paradigms or
modes of production propose some kind of consistency or coherence, and however a
choreographer’s work might take different forms it can be identified due it’s
consistency. Clearly evolutionary in the modernist sense of the word, recognizable
and predictable and hence also subject to “proper” critique, but recently this territory
has been contested by an alternative.
The new method inflates all linearity of production as well as any opportunity of
critique, and in some way repeats a sort of 19th century artist identity. In artist talk
after artist talk, in endless post-performance sessions the method has been given
prominence and has suddenly become common sense, used by almost everybody.
“The day choreography happened to me”, could be said to be its axiom and this is
precisely how it operates. It is as if the choreographer stepped into a choreography –
“-Oups…”, or simply found him or her self in choreography with the only possible
response being a facial expression mixing curiosity with surprise.
This is where cinema comes in as this choreographic method could be best described
through a classical Hollywood narrative. A set up that we know from films like Martin
Scorsese’s “After Hours” or Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” in which the
mystical woman abducts the boring office clerk for an absolutely wicked adventure.
It’s as if choreography today happens to people like an accident or mystical
coincidence. The deus ex machina, or divine intervention solving complex plots in
Greek theatre, is no longer happening in the end of the show, no no – it’s happening
all the time during the process.
The situation is fairly excellent since there is no way that the choreographer can be
criticized. “-The reason for the animal part. Oh, you know and then we saw this
documentary and we thought that perhaps…” or “-No, that part came in very late, the
result of a game we use that I have forgotten the rules for…” or “-The title? Well, that
was so funny. I was watching “South Park” – You know South Park – and there was
this character that…” I love it. Everything that the choreographer says turns into a
charming anecdote. Artist talks are like watching morning television, amazing
without ambition.
But I wonder how the contemporary choreographer sleeps at night knowing that he
or she didn’t actually make the piece but outsourced it to a company, thoroughly
inscribed in capitalism, called “Happy Coincidence” or “Serendipity”. The present
choreographic paradigm, the new style – you know first we had conceptual dance
and then dance-dance – will be remembered as Hope for the best dance.
4 It is perfect, Hope for the best dance is a congenial excuse for having noting to say, an
excellent response to neo-liberalism and a brilliant reason to be absolutely fine. Hope
for the best dance is the ultimate self-delusion, fooling oneself into the option that
the choreographer isn’t responsible for the consequences of his or her activities.
Hope for the best dance is the perfect recipe for all those choreographers that want to
think that they are politically engaged but in fact just want to be loved. The magic
potion for entire populations of dance makers that have no fuckin idea what they are
doing and are happy about it.
So, who’d you want to be, do you hope for the best or do you prepare for the worst.
It’s The Time Of Your Life
I don’t get it. I so don’t get it. Why is it always so difficult to make art? Why are
people making art as if it is so difficult, so intimately connected with angst, trauma,
self-denial? First of all, it’s not hard to make art. It’s fun, it’s great, wonderful and
liberating, or it should be why do you otherwise continue? To make really great art
might be demanding and laborious, but that doesn’t automatically connected it with
fear, sleeplessness or mood-swings.
Further on, art making is not supposed to be connected with tenacity, self-contempt,
psychological tension and breakdown. It should be a pleasure to go to the studio, put
the key into the lock of your residency atelier, not to mention the premiere, opening
or release. Why do you put yourself under the pressure of premieres if you hate them
so badly? Why do you expose yourself in this way, if it makes you toss and turn
through the nights for weeks, months, years? Premieres should be fantastic, exiting
and the time of your life. Let’s celebrate. If nothing else they are reason enough to
have another drink! If it is hard to make art, if it is trauma trauma t r a u m a, stop it!
Listen carefully, I say this only once: STOP IT!
You don’t have to, you are not obliged, especially today when format, content,
deconstruction, appropriation, remixing is open wide and your first task is to not do
whatever somebody else has already done. Chill! So if the universe is open like a
“svenska flicka” why have any problems at all. This is brilliant we are the winners in
whatever we do. Art is about changing the world, so of course its gonna be scary, but
you know it’s not the art that is scary it’s what the world might change into. Your
angst is not there because it is hard to make art, it is you attacking yourself because
you are so embarrassingly scared of not being loved.
So let’s cook this argument. Lets bring it through the Agatha Christie machine. Aha,
the problem is the position of responsibility, both in respect of what and when. Stop
taking it upon yourself to be responsible for the other, stop taking upon yourself the
responsibility of yourself, stop taking upon yourself to be responsible for the state of
art. You have only one responsibility and that is to change the world. It is a huge
responsibility but it can only take place utilizing a fair amount of, exactly,
irresponsibility. And most of all and finally: stop feeling responsible for what people
think about you, allow yourself to be considered a fool. Engage in shame, embarrass
yourself! Life doesn’t happen to kids that regard humbleness a virtue. Stop behaving,
terminate career surveillance, tell you boss to fuck off, sleep with your colleagues (all
of them), make art before lunch and make some more just because. Remember it was
love at first sight. And I still love you, unconditionally.
5 The Festival Is Dead, Long Live The Festival
Halfway into the Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival I start to have doubts. What
does a festival in 2010 actually do? What can a festival do when the circumstances for
its existence are only discussed in respect of economy, expected subsidy that didn’t
appear and how difficult it is to produce a program under the circumstances of
today’s cultural policy. If it is so difficult and so much agony involved why to do a
festival at all? Where did we store away our convictions?
Is festival a dead format that at best can perform some quality time for people who
choose between television, children and going to the theatre? I’m not interested in
serving this audience. They can stay home, because they never anyway stay around
afterwards for a decent conversation. What I hear most of all in the foyers is a
mixture between “-I liked it”, “-That was nice” and “-It wasn’t that uninteresting”. I
had at least hoped to hear some technical critique in the style of defining what and
not was bad, lousy or great, even if it is concerned with comparison it’s okay. “-It was
better than…” or “-I prefer” at least implies a position. Today it seems that we are
back in the 80s where everything was nice, interesting and when it came to dance “What amazing bodies”.
The festival as we know it showed up some 30 years ago. It was conceived due certain
communicational capacities and, well, not even fax machines. The festival is a child of
a time when distance was an issue. When it was impossible to see shows if they didn’t
come around during the two weeks festival thingy. In Stockholm the festival took
place in August (obviously) and it presented stuff that was completely new to me (to
most of us). Wooster Group’s “Emperor Jones” in 1991, next to Robert Lepage’s
“Snake Song Trilogy” (or whatever it was called), even some idiotic new circus was
there and it was fresh. But what do we experience today, a fresh conservative mixture
of dance-theatre, tired – not again – oh so amazing French circus, and some
unarticulated interactive whatever.
The important discussion right now is not this or that international guest appearance,
but what on earth is a festival good for and how the hell does it become proactive,
empowering and undeniable for dance, theatre, performance makers and doers? This
year’s edition of the festival in Gothenburg has made me even more doubtful. Yet, I’m
happy to be here being part of a team that dare pronounce five important words: “No, we are not fine!” accompanied with an ambition to stop, willing to try something
else independent of budget cuts, audience numbers or festival centers. It wont be a
nice experience, but hey there is no way out but to start from the beginning.
The festival is dead, long live the festival.
Zombies Having Safe Sex
A few months ago I attended a show by the Swedish/Icelandic choreographer Halla
Olafsdottir. The piece, a duo with Nadja Hjorton, spins on rock n’ roll as experience:
it’s loud, spectacular and intensely stupid.
“-Can you hear me Stockholm?”
6 The material – one of those terms people use but seem to have no idea what it
actually means – is in no respect elaborate and the use of space has more to do with
blinking lights, smoke and leather jackets. It’s equivoque in the same sense as Axl
Rose is an anagram for oral sex.
The audience is shaken, blown away and for the encore – mandatory as this is all
about the spirit of rock – they stand up and wave their arms to “We Will Rock You”.
The piece has zilch to do with analysis, this is pure intensity and in this sense
absolutely radical. It is a piece without safety net, exactly like a decent rock show.
Next to me a colleague from Brussels, the only person in the entire space that isn’t
standing up. No, she maintains her distance and keeps her analytical façade up like a
scared boxer in the first round. Afterwards she comes up to me and explains that she
has many things to say but that it is not the right moment. What does she think? That
the piece will be better off because she has something to say? Who does she
pronounce herself to be posing as some sort of authority of choreography and dance?
Hello, the famous critical distance is just a means to consolidate what dance has
already been. Today critical distance equals being sadly conservative, a defensive
posture that with a whispery voice contains dance within a defined territory. I’m sick
of the concerned face that looks for answers or even worse questions. Don’t you see,
it’s the face of a person that is not part of the game. No, I’m not against critical or
critique. Criticality is nauseating but that’s another story. No, the problem is the
moment of critique, and its concerned-face-expression. If we want to produce
something with and for dance, we must put away distance and step straight into the
abyss. Critical in respect of experience concerned with representation, makes no
difference, but if it is posed onto the self it can indeed move mountains. What you
should ask yourself is instead how you are able to participate in the given experience.
Why does the dance audience always present this stone face attitude, which most of
all reminds me about how I’m myself totally unable to make it happen in a social
dance situation. The skeptical distance that I put up is just a miserable reminder that
I’m not brave enough to hit the floor, to go nuts to the wrong music or give in to selfexpression. You know what, spectacle doesn’t become less spectacle because you put
on the skeptical face, propose yourself as an observer or well-meaning critic.
A few years ago it became synonymous with good pieces if the performer looked as if
he or she was thinking or where inspecting his or her own behavior on stage. That
was all fine, but two weeks after the fad had set off the self-aware, sort of meta
alienation, became style and however the performer had done the show so and so
many times he or she still looked like it was happening for the first time. Curious, yet
comfortable. No no, it didn’t matter if the show had been rehearsed for three months.
Over night the thinking performer became representation and all was restored to its
commonplace.
We are all aware of a discourse that proposes that critique has been incorporated by
capitalism and lost its touch. So why do we still insist? Why do we sit there with our
skeptical face looking like we don’t know what enjoying oneself means? Why do we
sit around like as if permanently constipated after showing trying to reinstate every
experience into something known?
Another few years ago the fad was about clarity. A piece was not clear enough; a
proposal that wasn’t transparent was disqualified in a second. But isn’t transparent
equal to have to take any risk. Transparency reinstalls the division between body and
mind and makes sure nothing unexpected can happen.
The moment something is clear, and we know what it is, it’s also as dead as a Volvo
and the only thing we can cherish is excellence and culpability. The thinking
performer, the skeptical distance and clarity has made dance into a zombie. But in
dance the zombie is not symbolizing that unknown other but has incorporated
7 zombie-life into itself: it feeds on the few exceptions, on the few choreographers that
are brave enough to be at least a little bit foolish. Dance has become exiting in the
same way as zombies practicing safe sex.
The zombie in dance has ripped to pieces the last little spirit to breach traditions, in
favor of a ubiquitous concern for the well-being of dance. It is time that we call in
Max von Sydow to exorcise the zombie within, it is time that we put away that
skeptical face, the face that seems to want to tell all those that are enjoying
themselves that they are stupid, celebrate dance and cherish a sense of havoc and
tumult.
“-Do You Understand?”
27AUG
In 1995 the first SMS was sent, in 2005 the world sent so many SMS that there isn’t
enough many zeros to put after the first digit. The same year hotmail opened its
doors for a new universe of communication. Google set up their webpage in 1998.
Can you imagine a world without Google search? Five years later, the Estonian
paradigm Skype transformed the world again. The list is getting longer, and all those
technical things did was to change the way we live: Facebook, Spotify, Youtube and
Myspace and so on. Sure, all kinds of things have changed the way we live,
combustion engines, hamburger chains, chainsaws, plastic and cassette tapes. The
difference is that I’m speaking about 15 years give or take, and there is another world
out there.
When I look back at dance I wonder what happened to us? In music they have new
gadgets all the time. I even own a Kaosspad, a machine I don’t even know what it is
supposed to do, but chaos. What does dance have? We are still barefoot and dance
studio fashion hasn’t changed significantly. Well, perhaps we don’t want to change…
but if we don’t I’d be up for a battle to find out the arguments accuracy. I think it is
time for dance to give up barefoot and the primacy of the body. Not because we want
to get rid of it – absolutely not – but because its primacy has become representation
without policy. Hysterical representation that will deny the symptom until death.
Over the last ten years the opportunities for dance and choreography have expanded.
There is hardly an end to festivals and venues, off programs and late night threads,
but at the same time it’s evident that programming has become subject to much
tougher control, audience numbers are counted more than movements and first
priority is to please politicians, not the art form. If we want to change dance and
choreography, to come to terms with the revolutions that have happened in the
realms of media and communication, programming is not the place to be.
Programming is a priori reactive and can not change dance. We shouldn’t give up on
programming but be happy if we can be an influence. Programming has another job,
and an important one.
The place to change dance and choreography is education, although the issue at hand
is not change but invention. Education, I believe, is the only place where invention
can obtain enough out-of-focus, mediocrity, low resolution and superficiality to
actually make a difference. In the ubiquitous capitalism that we live in invention
needs to be cared for, certainly not protected but cared for, so that it isn’t swallowed,
at least not too fast, by corporate economies and state sell out. Paradoxical, yes at
first glance but on seconds thought, the consolidation of traditions and maintenance
of history, the spreading of representation, that has been one of education’s main
responsibilities, are today distributed by other means. Everything is available, every
8 dance ever made is already on video on some or other Youtube, a student on any level
of education can find anything on the Internet: from dance classes to texts, anything,
so why should education bother about this domain. Today education is exactly not
about the patronizing gesture “-Have you understood?” which obviously will destroy
the self-esteem of every student, but rather about the possibility to produce a shared
platform that offers the student to produce knowledge on his or her own premise.
Contemporary education has nothing to do with facilitation of knowledge, or
introducing the student into some kind of socialization process (which is how almost
every dance institution functions) – Educators of the world: YOU ARE NOT
RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR STUDENTS BEHAVIOR! – except their bad behavior
which you should stimulate – but with production of knowledge, i.e. our job is to
make up things, to fiddle with the unknown. Contemporary education is not occupied
with knowledge but with concepts, which is not conceptual. Education today can be
defined as “engagement with concepts”, which implies a shift from identity – as
violence or the opportunity to engage in ones own – to individuation – the expansion
or diminishing of the capacity of identity as such. The arguments are pouring out of
me a little bit too fast today, but let me just put an edge to the last sentence. This
further implies that education has, or must, experience a shift from individual and
proprietary to instead be defined as singular and universal, and that is pretty damn
cool.
The disciplinary past of education had to die twice. It died first time in the 50s when
art education changed from craft to art, when measure transformed from ability to
creativity. Today we have to kill it again, and this time it is not about laterality or
disqualifying the teacher position – that’s already over so over – but to get down to
the fact that education today is not about learning, not about passing over knowledge
that is already existing but instead coming in terms with a society organized around
completely new modes of distribution, accountability and ownership.
Conventionally, we tend to say that an education should be a resource for the student.
We rarely ask how and in what sense, to be a resource is of course also, especially
when it comes to institutional culture, hierarchical. A resource is always violent. We
have to reverse the positions, today the student should instead be considered a
resource for the education, and the education an entity that operates through affect
and affection, thus producing an open ground for an expanding ability to act. In this
sense it is the student that educates education, and the education is a player in local,
national and international contexts. It is in the position of the players that students
and education can produce differentiation within the field, and more importantly can
expand what the field is. We don’t need more dance, there is enough choreography in
the world, what we need its something else, something radically different, like dance
and choreography.
If dance and choreography is to have a future it is imperative that we think about it as
a place where unsolicited transformation and production is stimulated. This is a
tricky responsibility because it means that we have to stop thinking about education
in dance and choreography in respect of modes of representation but rather as modes
of production. What we can “teach” students is not what to do but how. Education
finally has to transform itself from giving license and thus capital, to consider itself as
a site to produce permission and agency. You know, James Bond has only license to
kill, a participant in an education should be given the permission to not, and end up
somewhere totally foreign. It is in those foreign places, those vacances that dance and
choreography can find its futures.
Charger?
9 This morning it struck me: dance festivals are like apple chargers. Always around, far
too many and absolutely identical.
In a working session yesterday somebody said and I’m not kidding: “-I think my
charger (the white cube) is cool. It’s like so worn out.” I love it. I think that’s the only
reason to be proud of a dance festival… it’s identical with every other festival, but it
has patina, and the surface is a little bit scratched. Looks like it’s been around and
part of the action. If you know what I mean…
“… anybody got a charger?”
“-What kind?” – oh that moment is really embarrassing, it is always only an apple
charger. Same goes for dance festivals, you don’t need to ask what kind, when, where,
under what circumstances, there is only one… and the compatibility is endless.
Mine is marked with a piece of tape, just in case. Precisely like dance festivals the
only difference between them might be a piece of tape with a name. But just like me
and my charger, the dance festival seems to be totally incapable of doing anything
else than putting a little tape. In other words they are not just identical but really bad
in marketing strategies.
Chargers like dance festival are always around, they always function and make
nobody, except exceptionally anal people, produce a comment, but fuck me when
they are not around, when my charger is lost, vanished, disappeared – at the moment
the dance festival is the most important, life saving, thing in the entire world. When
it’s gone, not there OMG – it’s a disaster.
But then, I changed my mind – felt really shitty about it all and Sunday morning.
Seriously I prefer to spend a week with an apple charger instead of a dance festival.
Why? Well, at least apple chargers have some style.
Black Box Life
The charger question has a friend, the associate question that usually arrives before
the white cube issues. Yes, somehow it is the black box problem, and yes it is all a
question of power and regulation. Here we go…
“- What’s the network?”
In the land of digital communication sharing network implies a multiplication of
opportunities without consequences, without being obliged to form a group, having
secrets or agreements. The agreement is structural not strategic, it is impersonal and
inconsequential. We don’t fill up our bit-torrent client when bandwidth is going thin.
It’s rather simple, when I click in I’m whoever, not a history of prominence or
marginal who wants to get in – there is no hierarchy between users or engaged ones.
When I close the laptop I’m history and keychain, no string attached, no lobby to
maintain. The structural level of alignment, or the absence of composition is
attractive. It operates on the bases of permission rather than under auspices of
license. I like it cuz it offers navigation without ownership.
“-What’s the network?”
Dance festivals and season programs operate exactly the other way around. Yes, I
dare say without exception, because if you are not in you don’t work whatever it is
that you do. In dance networks operate strictly on strategic levels, without any
concern for structural or tactical openness or deployment. Networks in the cultural
sector are absolutely closed and are all about membership. You have to make yourself
worthy of being part, you will have to go through a test, and you have to invest a fare
amount on energy in lobby and travel-costs.
If digital networks are somehow a masochistic mechanical structure, then networks
10 in the cultural sector can be said to be a sadistic organicity. This is interesting in
relation to surveillance. Masochism is dealing with contracts and conditions and as
long as the condition is fulfilled the subordinate is liberated. Sadism is the flip side, it
deals with conventions and operates through ubiquitous control, and the surveillance
necessarily operates dialectically. Networks have become self-perpetuating, worse
and better than a panopticon. Networks in cultural businesses operate due a mode or
production known as “dynamique d’enfer” or dynamics of hell, the basic ideology of
which is:
Identify a reason for engagement
Convince partners to chip in
Make sure all players are involved in a manner where it becomes too expensive
(actually or symbolically) to withdraw.
This is the network situation in dance, it is about fear and pressure without a face. It
is: “-If you don’t do as we say…” It is the call for the rookie, the already weak, to kill
his best friend, the childhood buddy who fucked up some minor drug deal, s’cuse me
co-production.
It’s not about you… It’s so not about you, but you know that if you don’t do it
somebody will lose face and killing will not end. And losing face is the only thing that
matters. If there were a Hollywood film about dance networks the boss, the initiator,
would be played by Al Pacino on a really bad day. Dignity is all that counts. So in
dance networks we keep it in the family and there is no deals, no action, no
transactions without the silent approval of a very old Sicilian.
No you kill for the greater good. It’s not even you who does it, it is the organization
and you, you are just a… What are you responsible for?
You are responsible for the maintenance of hierarchies, the preservation of an
aristocratic society that operates like a flock of vampires, like apologetic blood
suckers that obediently confess there compulsive lust. “-I do my best, but after all I’m
a vampire. I was made a vampire, it wasn’t my desire, and now I’m destined to
destruction.” No, even a vampire can choose for a different route, it is rather simple
stop being apologetic and/or enthusiastic, be fanatic and take your own life.
“-What do you mean, enthusiastic?”
Rather simple, enthusiasm is one of these contemporary gestures, which mean
absolutely nothing, are completely soaked with liberal attitude and have zero
consequences. Enthusiasm is the ultimate vampire, the proactive attitude of a
murderer. Fuck enthusiasm, be a fanatic, allow yourself to be rich enough to be
categorical. Enthusiasm is for those that have already given up the possibility of an
alternative. Enthusiasm is like renting a car, it’s not yours. You have no autonomy.
How does it feel to give up your autonomy and sell out to the network just in order to
obtain short-term economical breathing space? Are you aware that the network is
making your program, composing your season? Al Pacino runs your business. It is
not you, who kill but it is also not you who makes anything happen. You are a victim
of your own life, and you know what, you will spend the rest of your life in a black
box.
I’m A Practitioner Of Dance and Choreography and I’m About To Die
11 Now I’m pissed. Really pissed. Holy shit, I have spent a week on this blog and I’ve
had a thousand views and not a single hate comment. The worst that has happened is
being accused for being “very old”. What am I doing wrong? This is not good. Either
I’m writing far too nice things and people actually enjoy reading, or my texts are
simply not hard enough to make you guys upset enough to start up some proper
havoc. Do I have to start to expose people with names, go personal and accuse
individuals for being nice and friendly?
Nope, this is not good enough. Reading those posts back I realize that I sound like an
enthusiast that listens to soul whilst putting my blog together. Is all that I could
accomplish another sweet talking blog that is not worthy of its name, but should be
re-baptized “I’m available.” Spangbergianism is as evil as an interior decoration blog,
as dangerous as if the blog was concerned with the pedigree of some common
aquarium fish. If this blog would be any good I should at least have Kanye West as a
follower and a million views, but no I’ve had a thousand. Did it make me famous,
nope! Did I make a hundred thousand dollars, nope! Should I stop, yes probably but
no fuckin’ way, I’m going on until I have exhausted every opportunity to make a
mess. I refuse to fall into the abyss of cynicism, I refuse to be seduced by the tempting
embrace of cultural policy.
Shit, is the situation in dance and choreography so tragic that its practitioners don’t
even remember how to put up a proper fight? Is the only response we are able to
produce an indifferent consent? I’m ready to think so cuz over the last years I haven’t
experienced a single provocative performance, not one artistic statement that has
made me raise an eyebrow, not even my own. I can’t record anything in dance that
has given me reason to question my political perspectives, nothing that has made me
make a comment that was concerned with issues outside the business. From time to
time I have forced myself to get upset about the misuse of resources or the lame
attitude in programming. But hell, that is so not good enough. Fine, this is neoliberalism what do I expect. Something to happen… not really, but it still makes me
want to get depressed when what I hear is choreographers compulsively repeating
sentences including “at least”. “-At least it wasn’t that bad.” “-At least, there is
something in the program that I’m curious about.” “-One performance is at least
better than nothing.” Aspirations my fellow choreographers, aspirations! Is this the
best we can do?
Visiting the Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival last week was as exiting as
having dinner with a bottle of Evian. Checking out the performances of Impulstanz
for an entire month was as provocative as a global climate change conference in
Copenhagen. And here I am at Tanz Im August and I’m so bored that I end up
listening to jazz instead of chasing co-production deals.
For a while dance was at least ontologically speaking contemporary, but nowadays
programs are swarmed by reconstructions and pieces that celebrate dead
choreographers. Congratulations, it’s obviously perfect to do a show featuring an ex
Cunningham dancer. And I know what you will say… “-The piece was made already
before Merce died.” Yeah, sure but that doesn’t mean that you have to tour it. You can
also say, no! Do you need the money so badly, affirmation without any conditions?
What you are doing is making our art form age faster than necessary, or turn it
around you don’t make it age fast enough so we could start something else up. But
here we are, art form or not, the point is that its politics are completely empty and its
rhetorics more dead than that of a communist party. Think about it, how do you
contribute to its transformation?
The first questions we have to ask ourselves when we set out to make something: Is
this truly contemporary? If you are not 100% sure, start again. Begin from the
beginning. Stop being enthusiastic, be fanatic.
12 I will give myself one more week. I still have hopes for myself and I still have hope
about all of you. I love this art from, I sincerely do. I’m a practitioner of dance and
choreography and I’m about to die.
Ps. If I die, no reconstructions, please. Por favor, no dedication pieces (“For Pina”
how embarrassing). Then I’ll have to die a second time.
Forbid Showings
Forbid showings! They are a menace and nothing but a grey day. Stop them, they are
like Prozac – they make you happy for the wrong reason. Stop them, they are calls for
help – “-I don’t know what to do now, help me? Offer me a solution.”
A choreographer explains, what we will experience is the result of a weeks work. Stop
this apologetic bullshit, at least keep up a good face. Do you apologize before a onenight stand, too?
A choreographer says, “-Great if you come. It’s gonna be rough but I’m really
interested in what you think.” Stop that, what rough? Do you also apologize before
burring your nails in your lovers back?
Come on, don’t do this to yourself – showings are like going out clubbing making out
with a bunch of – both men and women – finally going home alone masturbating to
lesbian porn.
Showings are your contribution to the prevailing power distribution. Your showing is
a means for other choreographers, programmers and education directors to make
sure you are not doing something inappropriate, that you don’t jeopardize power
centers or shake some things identity.
Showings are your contribution to the immobilization of dance, showings is like
pacifism without arms.
Very promising but basically a laugh.
No I’m not proposing the prevalence of premieres, that’d be a reindustrialization of
theatre as a classical commodity.
No I’m not proposing some neo-liberal version of the emancipated spectator, that’d
just be a call for be more your self.
Don’t be proud, for gods sake don’t be proud. Fuck showings – SHOW OFF – and if
you’re anyways taking somebody home for the night the nails trick is not enough.
Holding back is so 00′s it’s time to put our your diabolic self. Suffering is the new
amazipation.
Betray All Sides
A thousand years ago, at the premiere party of the first dance piece I was part of, a
choreographer came up to me and said: “-… but why?”. “-… but why? Why, Mårten…”
– using my first name to underline the accusational tone: “… but why? Why, Mårten.
Why do you always have to do things you have absolutely no idea about?”
The moment that followed, still present in my body was brilliant. The self-esteem, the
sensation of having created something, having engaged in an adventure was
13 exchanged by a sense of failure and anger. How stupid, to estimate that a
“professional” choreographer would show me respect. My naïveté was impressive.
What we had just done was obviously a threat – we had no idea – and I thought she’d
value what we had done? Stupid! I still carry that comment with me, day to day, for
fifteen years: “-… but why?” It was devastating, traumatizing and a blow to an
embarrassing conviction to idealism. But unfortunate for her, the reaction wasn’t
exactly benevolent to her but an endless, fuck you and fuck your interior decoration
dance. Fuck your well-meaning arguments. I’m not interested in knowing what I’m
doing that’s like buying an album with Devendra Banhart on Itunes.
Today, the choreographer is still active, my age and a celebrity in dance (almost):
loved and appreciated, and considering the previous statement, it all makes sense,
cuz she is still doing exactly what she was really good at fifteen years ago. More of the
same. Juzuz, she must be bored? .
“-Why, Mårten…” – well, if for no other reason then not to get bored, but more
profoundly because doing what I have no idea about is putting myself under pressure.
Doing what I can’t offers two opportunities, first: the contestation of the self, i.e. a
capacity of becoming other, and second: the sense of having nothing to lose, and thus
opening for a possible destabilization of a given territory.
To do things you have no idea about, is a means to complexify conventions, norms
and identification processes. It is a means to abolish excellence, which as we know by
definition is homogenizing, the axiom of maintenance of norm, and something that
feeds on refinement and exclusion.
It is easy to admire and equally a tough job to keep excellence away as it is one part of
the Janus face of capitalism: territorialization.
Sitting through another horror piece by Jerome Bel, is in that sense a tragedy. How
did it happen that an artist with such passion for doing the wrong… not so many
years later has been completely consumed by excellence, finesse (another word for
dramaturgy) and a compulsive fetishist (another words for a need to be loved).
Don’t go anti, but fear excellence; it’s a state funded army, be a war-machine
expelled, hiding in the dessert, by insisting on doing what you can’t you are a threat
to good governance. Excellence knows its arms, our job is to invent new weapons.
Don’t disguise yourself, don’t go undercover, abolish history, don’t choose your
fights, fuck negotiation and, remember, betray all sides.
Don’t Call Me Again
After having met in the festival somewhere, sent a bunch of DVD’s and e-mails I meet
up with the programmer who tells me that the festival would like to invite me. Yeah,
wow – I’m happy… and we exchange the conventional worries about this and that,
and finally agree that I will write a concept, and that it has to happen rather soon cuz
you know… Yes, the invitation always arrives too late to make sure power positions
are maintained.
I feel happy as the programmer has empowered me through comments about how
radical my work is, and underlined that I should really not be afraid of you know…
but time, you know time. We have to do this right away…
In a week it’s put together, based on old idea obviously, and I send it in. The proposal
should be specific and there is even the desired participatory aspect to it. The keen
programmer however doesn’t get back to me. Nothing, no e-mail saying that it has
14 arrived, so three weeks later I grab the phone, “-Oh yeah, it arrived but you know, but
before the EU application…” a billion excuses before we agree on a phone meeting the
following week.
The programmer calls me, and it takes one second to realize: not good. “-We really
like your concept. It’s very interesting…” another billion of excuses about subsidy that
didn’t show up, pressuring budget cuts, the co-programmer is not convinced.” Finally
we agree, I will rescale the project and…
The game goes on and the radical proposal, the importance of my work as daring is
sanded down to an enthusiastic dance piece with a nice soundtrack.
I have spent three weeks on writing proposals, hooking up with collaborators and the
lot. The programmer slash commissioner has spent 25 minutes on the phone, and the
time it takes to not convince his colleagues.
But I’m available and an obedient pet artist so I start working on the proposal, spend
some of my own money, replace a dancer that got a job with Meg Stuart. We even
managed to fish up a residency in a city that I don’t remember the name of. The
programmer absolutely absent suddenly calls me asking for a program text and
images and yeah and this is very, you know, the festival and… Two days later the email comes back asking for a less complex and more descriptive text… another two
days later the new version comes back but now shortened to four lines.
Finally, two weeks residency in the festival before the premiere, I meet the
programmer for a ten minute coffee where we talk about the festival and I answer: “Yeah, we are doing well…” When I start to talk about the work, the meeting is
suddenly over.
We meet again, when the programmer tells me we can’t… and that we really need to
think about the audience, you know… and it’s time for general rehearsal, a small
audience – mostly friends. The programmer, with his colleague, shows up ten
minutes late (wonder why) and we can finally start.
It is now seven months later, the “we are really interested in your work” has turned
out to be a program text edited by a volunteer, a budget catastrophe and a warning
about… you know our audience… and now we do it.
After the general run and some conversation, the programmer with entourage comes
up to me and after proper politeness explains that the piece is too long, “-I think you,
have to cut…” “-I mean, I like it but you lose the audience…” and here the colleague
affirms with a nod and an anxious face.
And me, what do I do? I nod, I look concerned, I look available. I haven’t changed, so
this all takes place with me in costume and the programmer with a backpack.
Who the fuck are those people? Yes, I meet them everywhere, in every festival, in
every season program. Some of them are even artists. Who do they think they are,
showing up late at the dress rehearsal having a problem? After five months without a
single word about dance and choreography? Do they think the length of the piece is
an accident? Do they think that I after seven months of work make a piece that is half
an hour too long by chance, and that I would respect a person that already has cut
75% of the budget? What do they think, proposing changes the day before the
premiere? Yeah, we really want to support you? What kind of ethics do you have
when the audience is privileged in front of the artist? Who are you asking for radical
and only wanting something that perfectly plugs into the existing market? When you
are promoting “artistic freedom” and produce nothing but instrumentalization? How
do you stand yourself, knowing that I know that you don’t give a shit. How do you
manage performing an ethics that is so full of shit you are not even welcome in hell,
15 especially considering that you don’t get a terrific salary? Come on, don’t call me
again if all you want is to please local politicians and keep your job. Don’t ask me to
be radical when your radical equals more of the same.
ps. stop looking happy to see me, and for christ sake don’t ask me how I am.
They Might Call You A Madman
So you consider yourself a politically engaged artist?
You apply for subsidy from the art council, you produce one larger scale production,
next to some intervention-like production each year. You work as a choreographer
and hire dancers that you announce as co-creators, and from who you demand
undivided devotion. They are after all collaborators, which means no day off. In the
studio, where you always work (perhaps even your own space), the reigning
atmosphere is sharing, but after the premiere it is only you who answers to interested
programmers, meets up for a coffee with the director of the local venue and decides
what performance pictures should be available on the webpage. It is only you who
shows up for the after talk and you make sure that the local programmers don’t
develop any relation to your dancers, that of course all are doing their own work
(obviously insignificant).
The contemporary choreographer is a master in manipulating the distribution of
power and responsibility in ways that make working conditions unbearable and
conflict impossible. Luckily the dancer is smart enough not to object. It’s at least a
job.
How do you manipulate your colleagues, what illusions do you propose in order to
make yourself invincible, although you have no idea what you are working on?
How many times have you proposed to dancers and others an open experimental
process, and how many times have you when it is three or so weeks left to the
premiere announced, that the experimental period is now over and that it is time that
You make a piece… The formulation is usually not that direct, but it’s my firm belief
that it happens to every second production. No, more often!
“-We are working collectively”, another of these sentences destroyed in the same way
as an overused “I love you” become evidence of the opposite. You’re not working
collectively, you tell yourself you are but in fact you are just postponing the fearful
moment of taking a decision. You are working collectively because you are a coward!
No, in fact you are two cowards, that’s the first one, the second the fact that even
though you are (or not as we have seen) working collectively you desperately want the
result to look like a conventional, however special, dance performance. How
embarrassingly vain. If the result of a collective process is compatible with a “dance
piece” the process has not been collective, but simply a conventional one with
another name.
You understand yourself as a political choreographer? Obviously every utterance into
the world is in some or other way political, but what exactly is your politics?
Questions, you emphasize are important in your work, but did you ever question the
possibility of stopping. Questions in contemporary choreography are never more
fundamental than: “-How are you?”
16 You say you work with text, but have forgotten who wrote it. You say you work with
text (D&G in dance is similar to text) in order to justify that you have no idea. You
take an active position in respect of post-colonial discourse but forgot his (sic.) name,
Spiva… something, no?
You consider yourself a politically active artist? You make political work? Somebody
comes on stage wearing a burqa, somebody sings a song in Persian or screams in
Hebrew. That doesn’t make you more or less political, you are just miming,
reproducing images from the everyday which in the theatre become totally and
completely irrelevant, and curiosities for your standard middle class audience.
In the after talk, to which only you show up, you talk about your Turkish performers
as them or they. They are so this and that, and instead of having anything to say
about the ideological and political subtext to your work you – with a selfacknowledging laughter – tell anecdotes that after polishing the surface a bit come
out as patronizing exotication. Your work is as political as the art council that
supports you.
You consider yourself a political artist? You make performances that you tour to
international festivals? You spend your entire subsidy on production, six months
rehearsal period, residencies and research labs.
You arrive at the airport where the pickup is waiting. You shake hands with the
director or some assistant, receive your per diem and after gaining Internet access
announce that you have to start set up… Yes, that’s what you get paid for, being busy,
so at least pretend. Until next evening you and sometimes your dancers are occupied
with curtains, video projectors and slow motion technical teams. We spend the next
many hours in a black box without windows worrying about the strength of the video
projector. You are still a political choreographer busy with human injustice, and you
think that the seventy minutes of your performance can first, convince the audience
member that his 18€ was well spent, and second, persuade the same dude that your
political position, opinion, production is so strong that he will change his mind? I
think this is rather unlikely.
And afterwards, I see you in the foyer chatting with local colleagues and friends. No,
you never talk to your dancers in such a situation, that’s very inefficient and by the
way you are not friends, they are your subordinates. In fact the amount of time you
spend on talking to a person is directly linked to how much money he or she can put
into you upcoming project.
If the audience reactions were only so good the director tells you with an excusing
tone of voice that he has a really early flight tomorrow morning, but that that you will
meet in April in Utrecht. “-Yeah yeah, we perform in Bettina’s festival” you say,
implicitly saying: “-I’m available.” If the audience had been positive you go for dinner
with the director and too many other people that the depth of the conversation at best
reaches gossip. Half past midnight we are all back at the hotel answering a few mails,
before watching half a downloaded film.
Perhaps you repeat the ritual the day after, otherwise you have a flight back home or
to the next city. The pick up to the airport, you and the team complain a bit about
being tired, check in, all is fine. And you call yourself a politically active artist?
Stop it, if you have any ambitions in respect of politics stop working. Take a few years
off and consider exactly what your politics is? How you work, with who, what fictions
you use to convince your environment, what sweet talk you apply to satisfy
programmers and the council? Do you really think Alain Platel has anything to do
with transvestites, do you think Constanza Makras gives a flying fuck about
immigrants, do you think Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker really bothers about global
17 climate change (the company is still flying), and do you think William Forsythe is in
depth concerned about human rights. No, they aren’t, no they don’t care, if they were
really convinced how does it happen that they only make one show or project
concerned with this or that, and how does it happen that their political engagement
always coincides with concerns expressed in Time Magazine.
If you want your work as process and practice reflect political or ideological concerns
get ready, it will not be successful because if you want to work differently what will
come out will not be the same. And you know, how this business works, if it doesn’t
look like dance you don’t exist.
If you have any political ambitions leave the stage, step down, fire your dancers and
go to work. Don’t apply for residencies, terminate your black box addiction, get rid of
your manager, stop going to Brussels, forget to return e-mails, change side of the
street, don’t pay the rent to your studio, pick fights for no reason, get angry, stop
cleaning up, fuck any strategic outlining.
Do one thing, yes do one thing: Refuse to give up! Every insurrection starts there,
with the refusal to give up. Many might call you a madman but remember the refusal
to give up contaminate, and tomorrow there’s gonna be a whole lot of madmen.
Don’t You Dare Give Up!
For Christ’s sake don’t organize yourselves! Don’t form associations, deny all
memberships, unsubscribe from all newsletters, stop standing around in the bar after
the premiere, vomit when you hear the word network and faint whenever somebody
uses the hrrrr-hrrr word (self-organization). Organizations are not about to change
no nothing; they are arrangements for collective self-pity. Organizations are pleasing
and helpful, celebrating the cute side of difference and have a tendency to pride
themselves on tolerance – - – Ghaaaa. Associations and networks are full of
possibilities and opportunity and therefore nothing else than sympathetic and redbull for identity addicts.
Don’t go to meetings, if anything scream and destroy, assemblies are not places for
decisions, for action or refusal but for chitchat, idle talk and palaver. Organizations,
associations, clubs, networks is all about the feel-good of a common power, but at the
same time as the power is common it is also deferred, recognizable and over. To
organize is to announce your weapons; it assumes the same status as gaining
representation in respect of a dominant discourse.
Zombies come in groups, operate only through mass and indifference to collateral
damage. A zombie doesn’t mourn, he leaves his dead friend behind and is completely
organized. You, have no choice than to act on your own behalf, to insist on
precariousness or even sovereignty. Mind you, to go solo has nothing to do with
egoism, nihilism or some neo-liberal rush hour version of individualism; on the
contrary it implies the necessity of giving up identity, of acting without support or
belonging and connecting only through intensity not interest, identity, lack or some
other psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo.
You have to do your own reconnaissance, forget to assemble a dossier, act without
probability, circulate knowledge without framing, liberate territory, override
circumstances, avoid direct confrontation. Invent weapons and do everything in
order not to use them. Don’t expect something peaceful.
18 A dance programmer comes up to me. We chitchat and the programmers asks: “-So
what do you think about the program?” What can I say? We know that under the
regime we live today to object is unthinkable. The first rule of the contemporary
artist: “Don’t ever dispute, never get angry, avoid conflict at any price.”
If I’m in the program it is obviously perfect and if I’m not any objection will be
understood as narrow-minded or greedy. Metaphorically my answer is always: “-I’m
available”, whatever you propose I’m in “-I’m working on a really interesting
project…” Fuck, I’m bored with stingy choreographers that suck an idea forever: Let
go of your ideas they won’t get better, stop considering consistency or
comprehensibility as something good. Exhaustion as methodology is so 90s, and stay
the hell away from tacky formulations like you feel that the idea still has something,
you know… Stop it!
Yet, I can’t just confirm the programmer, so I try an enthusiastic answer that at the
same time addresses some kind of asymmetry in the program. No no, I’m of course
not questioning how the fuck Ivana Müller ended up in the program, why “SelfUnfinished” is presented for the 467th time, or Ivo Dimchev’s ideology. That’s suicide
(I’m alive, I’m alive). Perhaps I address an overrepresentation of large-scale
companies or choreographers from the old West, an “interesting” thematic or a
question mark around the sudden interest in history (btw. I didn’t know dance
history is identical with Merce Cunningham, pronounced with a French accent:
M’eurse Cönning-gahm). But en fait it doesn’t matter what I say because the answer
is always the same. A concerned face: “-Yes you are right, but you know the budget
cuts have been so brutal. It’s like impossible. I’m really happy we got this season
together at all.” I look like I accept the argument and nod understandingly.
A few months later I meet the programmer after a performance of my new piece. He
lets me know that the piece did not fulfill his, and implicitly nor the rest of the clan of
programmers (you know they decide on the common opinion at some network
gathering, probably in Bergen), expectations, or that the piece if it enters the circuit
will only do so because it is already inscribed in some or network, not because it is in
any respect proper art. I look bothered and with a slow shake of the head I respond:
“-Yes you are right, but you know the budget cuts have been so brutal. It’s like
impossible. I’m really happy we got this season together at all.” I don’t think so! Such
an argument doesn’t exist in the mouth in of an artist, not even a choreographer. No
way, the artistic act is supposed to exist independently of budgets and if there are any
cuts or missing funding, the artist is supposed to come up with some brilliant idea;
change the format, fire the producer, save money on costumes (“-What about
underwear?” – OMG are you serious), hire faster dancers, anything – anything – the
artistic act is sovereign, free and unconditional. Fuck yeah, long live authenticity!
But who would expect a programmer to have a brilliant, or even acceptable idea; to
sack the assistant, change the format, skip the big companies, change the marketing
strategy, or why not double as a ticket girl, work in the bar, or… Hey, give up a part of
his salary? Programmers are victims of external circumstances, whereas artists only
have themselves to blame.
But then, shitgoddamn I’m happy I can’t use the apologetic budget bullshit, that I
have no choice but to blame myself instead of relying on the internal negotiations of
EU-funded networks.
At least I can love what I do without second thought. I’m not part of some swinger
club (Next Step), and I don’t operate through international networks with low profile
web visibility. We don’t negotiate, we take it or leave it, we are in no respect strategic,
we carry arms and we are ready to use them, we don’t save our skin, we sign our emails “Fuck You All”. We are not members, we don’t organize, we don’t send out
19 newsletters (how utterly uncool), we know – only absolutely oversized ambitions will
change the world.
Keep it up, motherfuckers. Don’t you dare give up! Like you, I’m alone but trust me,
my support is unconditional.
Rich Enough For Vanity
It’s common knowledge that the Eskimo people have no less than fourteen different
words for snow. Dude, fourteen ways of saying snow…
Now, I wonder if there was a language spoken only by artists, a sort of international
artist lingua. Then, how many words would there be for vanity?
Oh yes, I can almost hear you taste it. Vanity, you say to yourself. You recall artists
that made it their life to be special. You think about Marina Abramovic in her white
dress, plastic boobs and embarrassing retrospective in MoMA. You contemplate
Cecilia and François for a moment. You recall somebody else… “-OMG what a diva” –
good that his/her career is not going that well. You think about Pina, but forgive her
– rest in peace. You don’t think about Alain Platel – such a nice guy. And you don’t
think about Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, but you should!
Vanity doesn’t resonate particularly well, doesn’t taste that good in your mouth. You
don’t want to be known as the vain artist, nope. It’s romantic, echoes of bohemian
lifestyles, illustrated delicacy and we don’t want that. We don’t want to devote our
lives to how to best wear a shawl, how to work on our penetrative gaze or the color of
our training pants. Don’t think so, the artist should be understood to be a grounded
individual with control of the situation, a clear mind and the ability for hard work.
Vanity is so not currency in 2010.
This is very bad. It’s a disaster. We aren’t artists anymore but crisis managers. We are
like leftists who have lost all their visions and are just about maintaining a
comfortable position. The love of the underdog. This is fucked up. Seriously fucked
up!
Vanity is dead long live vanity. Shit, I miss Martha Graham.
We should work more on it, we should devote all out time to our vain attitudes. Be a
diva, promise! Be vain, can you afford not to be? At least act as if you were rich
beyond reason. We must not accept that there is only one word for our elevated
manners. Fourteen is not enough. I want devotion. Unlimited admiration. We must
reject premiere parties that don’t feature authentic champagne. We must refuse
interviews in magazines without worldwide distribution. Reject theatres that don’t
provide four-star hotels. Ravage about festivals that want to put you in the same
program as Superamas. And of course cancel shows at the last moment, just because.
Or for no other reason than to make the life of your assistant a living hell. By the way,
you don’t have a producer or manager you only surround yourself with assistants.
And a lot of them.
But why? Just because, but also because what has happened to the artist today is an
incorporation into the world of management. The artist today is a negotiator, a
person that would do a much better job than Obama on a visit to the Middle East.
The artist of today is somebody who runs a declining business and desperately wants
to get back onto the main stage. The choreographer is no longer a movement maker
but has become a specialist in moving and choreographing co-productions, residency
visits, occasional site specific projects, you name it.
20 Oh, it’s all good. Cool. We are doing fine. But the artists – you and me – have lost our
privileged position. It is time to take it back, to insist on being special, to stop any
kind of modest behavior. No way, we are not managers, producers of this or that. We
are artists and we insist. We insist on special treatment. Be vain, be vain as fuck. The
more vain you get the more fanatically you will have to defend your territory. The
vain is ready to fall, to fall without any chance to recovery. The vain rejects everything
that is not immediately favorable. Fucks strategic thinking in favor of being
photographed from the right angle. The vain, the artistah, hits the critic in the face
after a bad reviews. The vain, the artistah, is not having an after talk or some idiotic
discussion. The vain, the artistah, has admirers, devoted fans and is absolutely
categorical. The vain takes everything personal.
“-If you don’t like my show. I can have somebody show you the way out. Capish!
Let’s sign up with Eskimos (minorities together yeah…), although it might be cold
and lonely out there we need at least fourteen words for vanity. Remember you are an
artist. You don’t need to have any reasons, you don’t need to be clear (P.A.R.T.S.),
you don’t need a fuckin’ concept, you don’t need to have good or decent ideas, you are
not responsible for the audience. Not for their emancipation. Forget about
transparency. You are an artist and you rock n fuckin’ roll.
ps. After the opening night of Xavier Le Roy’s Product of Other Circumstances at
Tanz im August the other day, an assistant showed up with a bottle of cheap Prosecco
and flutes still in the box from IKEA.
Xavier Le Roy, act up. You should have been a diva and cancelled the second show.
Did you? And festival people show some fuckin dignity. A bottle of prosecco, are you
insane?
The Antinomy of Contemporary
7SEP
Now I know! At first it doesn’t seem too bad but on second thought, this is a disaster.
Thinking about choreography created right here, right now provokes roughly the
same sense of contemporary as sex with a Christian high school boy. Committed,
inexperienced, far too caring and convinced of not finishing on time. And worst of all,
the teenager is desperately trying to please you. Working it this and working it that,
and all these attempts makes it even more obvious. Choreography has become so
overwhelmingly liberal and democratic, so amazingly well-meaning that it has gone
totally blind to it’s own conservatism. In times of crisis dance will be the first art from
to start squirreling away whatever is left of its relations to the present. But since the
crisis is already going on its seventh year that sense of novelty is one that without the
slightest doubt would announce Raimund Hoghe as a contemporary dance maker.
But then… You know what… Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is in fact the most
contemporary Belgian choreographer around. Seriously, and that is pretty freakin
sad.
Contemporary is hard work. The radically contemporary must be irrelevant and must
not expect recognition. To be contemporary is not additive, it is not history plus, it is
rather about renouncing, the act contemporary is one of subtraction, and the first to
be taken away is “you”. Contemporary is all about forgetting oneself. And if you now
think yeah, leap of faith you are so on the wrong track. Fuck faith and fuck jumping,
contemporary is without faith, it is without history, without concern. Paradoxically
21 enough: The contemporary doesn’t give a fuck. The moment when it does it’s, so to
say, shit pommes frites passé.
The contemporary can’t be measured, localized, when it is put into the program it’s
already over. Don’t take the season program for a promise of contemporary but
rather as the diagnostic of the already out-of-date. You should fear the phone call
when your national dance platform proposes your participation, or the moment when
John Ashford wants to present your work. And you know, the definition of panic,
that’s when Rio Rutzinger offers you a teaching opportunity or credits you in Juice.
OMG, that my friend, that is the nightmare.
However, the sad reality is that you have worked for that moment for your entire
career, myself included. There is nothing else to do, the way artistic production
functions is precisely in that gap, the double desire for contemporaneity and at the
same time for relevance.
“-I want to do work that concerns people. To catch the audience off guard, to make
them feel something… something specific, you know something political.”
But you know, there is no way out of that paradox. Something political is never
contemporary, it’s just more of the same. Simple opinions however complex. It just
doesn’t matter. Politics never matter, it’s just not part of its job. And if you want them
to feel something, and even worse something specific you better rethink. Feelings are
not contemporary, emotions are definitely not, they are conventional, commissioned
and co-produced. Some feelings, emotions and lately even affects have already been
in PACT for a residency. Choreography is trapped in it’s own fresh conservatism.
If you really want to go contemporary, you have to give yourself up, forget about
Judith Butler and leave choreography behind, terminate your relation with Kaai
Theatre and, this is imperative, stop making pieces where you take off your clothes.
Choreography today is like imagining Manhattan as a part of Sweden. In the sense of
being totally and exceptionally nostalgic and at the same time so well-meaning and
appropriately on time that it didn’t even hurt. Choreography is like Camper shoes,
fashionable and orthopedic. No, it’s better choreography and dance is like – but
maybe this one is too cool: this is kind of Barbara Raes fresh or should we say Fred
Gies fashionista… dance and choreography is like Cheap Mondays. You know, at the
same time Comme des Garçons for the poor and H&M for the rich. It’s so fitting I just
can’t wear it, so out of the question I can’t stop (I freakin masturbate to that logo, you
know the happy corpse kind of naïve with meaning. Fuck yeah!). Choreography is so
Manhattan – No no, so Williamsburg understatement and so Sweden that
homogenization has become absolute complete.
Time has caught up with us. We have nothing else left but to leave. Don’t look for an
itinerary, there wont be no call-cheat. Get the fuck out of here. Leave Manhattan once
and for all, let’s erase Brussels from our souls, fuck Sweden. Well, it is not about
geopolitics after all, so stay put but remember: comfortable is not an option, afford to
be vain, insist on being a star, stop being appreciative – don’t ever use the words “at
least” – and celebrate without acknowledging tomorrow. Whatever works, is no
fuckin option. It’s not enough is a positive critique.
Wear make up, too much, sleep around, too often, miss flights, too early, accept only
outrageous ideas, too late, and insist, insist, insist on absolute irrelevance.
Turning To The Audience
22 Who needs an audience that goes home? At the festival office part of the hard work
surrounding the two weeks of public presence, consists of finding new audiences. “We want to reach out to individuals and groups that don’t find their way to
contemporary dance.” Do we really? The programmer underlines the importance of
his local audience and how the program is specific for the local context. Interesting,
I’m curious cuz it seems a number of shows are local and special everywhere.
Somebody said:
“-Sweden is really a special country when it comes to theatre.”
“-How do you mean?”
“-Well, it’s the only country in Europe where Forced Entertainment is only present
every second year.”
The festival crew works hard on attracting new audiences, obviously it’s only
concerning demographic populations such as immigrants and kids or immigrants
and kids, or sometimes due a strike of genius kids and immigrants. Interest groups
seem to be a foreign concept, but guess why: those aren’t part of the local
government’s statistics. As part of the hard work, we hire a marketing company that’s
very professional and innovative. After some months of hard thinking and
uncountable hours on consultants fees the company pitches a marketing strategy that
everyone celebrates because it is absolutely identical to last years. It consists solely of
conventional signs, longitudes and latitudes, so we can be certain that nothing will go
wrong. Business as usual. Yes, it is remarkable to what extent marketing campaigns
for festivals fail to be different. Impressive.
The problem with dance and choreography is that there’s only one wallet, one sack of
money. There is no mi casa blah blah, no way: the State runs the business. Goddamn,
I envy visual art for their commercial players, if for no other reason then that dealers
and collectors are in it for the money not just for keeping their job. Our expression,
on the other hand, is financed exclusively by state money which implies that the
festival as much as the artist will do nothing else than more of the same. Why change
if it worked fine last year and the previous ten? After all, the festival director won’t
become a millionaire even if the ticket sales increased a billion percent. As a business
model dance and choreography is a sucker, it is currently approaching the future
through what is commonly known as classical Fordism. A large part of the business
however is still operating due an economic model called feudalism. It’s kind of weird
that however volatile and immaterial dance and performance is, it is treated strictly
as a product that operates independently of relations.
On the other hand since we know that the State needs art and culture, that its part of
your cities unique selling point and the festival is part of the bigger picture, why, if we
don’t even get a good pay, don’t we invest in risk economy like it was our family
name. We have nothing to lose; yes it’s just a festival, just a piece, just a season or
intervention. Basically, who cares? But since nobody does it’s also the time of our
lives.
The festival is busy looking for their new audiences, however only until the show
starts. Sometimes the new audience is even granted an explanatory introduction, as if
anybody would need escort to be able to consume a dance piece. Give me a break and
stop patronizing people. During the show they, next to us, a we that doesn’t belong
together, sit there in the dark, without communicating anything at all. Patiently we
take in solos and duos, if we are lucky somewhat abstract choreographic attempts,
but more often poor choreography dressed up in theatre: I can’t think of an
appropriate punishment for the invention of Tanz-theater. — Ouch — It’s amazing,
there we are a few hundred curious individuals (at least in the beginning) sitting in
the dark attentively consuming some dancy monologue that at best resembles a
nostalgic documentary about someone’s memories. And then, we all rush out, the
23 entire audience seems to be blown out of the venue as if a tsunami just passed the
fourth wall. Grandiose.
The only people staying around after the show are professionals, dancers and local
choreographers, a presenter or two flown in for the day, everybody in intimate
conversations. The bar is perfect to fit 18 people and if we are lucky they even have
two kinds of white wine. Moderation.
A good half an hour later the performer shows up, perhaps even the choreographer.
Now, dressed in pseudo fashionable after-work outfits. They have a drink, probably
mineral water, and after a short conversation with the flown in programmers take off
for dinner. “-Yeah, I really need something to eat.” But come on, what happened to
the audience? Is it really so bad, that we only need them to buy tickets? The moment
the statistics are fulfilled we get rid of them, and fast. Seriously, what do we need the
audience for? Do we really want them to go home? Do we want them to stop thinking
about the show already on the tram home? Do we want them to make it home for the
late news? Have we forgotten about the possibility that those people might have
something on their mind, at home they can’t inform us, with the girlfriend and the
glass of wine they can’t participate. Can we afford not to listen, not to overhear and
share all these conversations which are about our work, are we really so cynical that
we can ignore our audience and stop our mission in dance and choreography after the
applause?
What are you doing in the dressing room after the show? Giving notes, save them for
tomorrow and stop trying so hard to be a choreographer. “-It’s important to take
one’s distance. You know to come down after a show…” Oh yeah, is that how
important this is for you? So important that you have to regain yourself in the
dressing-room? I’m sure that’s how you make revolutions. Come on, sitting around in
the dressing room is all about feeling important. In the dressing room you are still the
star, not just some average dude in a three star hotel.
And what is the festival crew doing? Oh, they stand around talking to mafia brothers,
or colleagues engaged in the same network. And where is the new audience? Have we
absolutely given up on the possibility of sharing anything at all? This isn’t news but
worthwhile repeating: You are not interested in a new audience but in keeping your
job and serving local politicians.
Yeah. Something is wrong in the state of dance. Stop obsessing about the show and
think about what the relations are that your work produces. Whatever position we
occupy, it’s the same, but what kind of relations does our work produce? Do we really
think our pieces have an impact on the people seated in the auditorium? Sorry, no
fuckin chance. It doesn’t work that way, the idea of devoted attention, the impact of
that thing up there, is a multiplex cinema, no more. That’s like being a devoted
anarchist and not realizing the politics is game of posers. The reason for cultural
consumption is no longer about the intensity of experience, on the contrary it is about
how it is communicated and about the capacity of spending time together. The era of
television is over we live in the age of Youtube. It’s not about making something
amazing, a good movie, an exposing documentary, it’s about being part. Youtube is
not about images, it’s about relations.
So we wonder what does the festival think when the investments in shows are so
many thousand – a regular size show with ten performers is, just the fee, about
15.000€ per night and I’m not counting infrastructure and rents etc – and the
investment in the after-party is, well, the same amount but without the thousands. Of
course our festivals will suck: dance performances are boring, have tacky soundtracks
and poor light design. Dancers were perhaps something sexy in the mid 70s but
today, now I can have everything sexy on the Iphone. The festival should focus on
24 everything else than the show. Let’s change the numbers around. Or think about it in
this way. I spend a year on making a piece or a festival. I invest my entire life in this,
in exactly this. It is this performance I want nothing else! But at the same time I allow
some local loser to take care of the catering, decide what wine we should drink, and
that quiche with spinach is like amazing.
Who needs an audience that goes home, we don’t – the question is can we afford
having an audience that doesn’t stay? Can we afford not to make them talk with us at
least until the sun comes up again? The audience is the only thing we have – next to
the co-producer – so let’s enjoy it and make it enjoy itself. Free drinks for everybody,
and hey – no fucking pasta salad buffet. Stop it, fuck that premiere party backstage –
it’s not exactly VIP and hey you already know everybody and where is the film team –
let’s invite everybody.
“-But it will be very expensive?” Yes, exactly, in times of economic not to mention
creative crisis the budget for the after party should be the last thing to save on. If we
are anyways going down, let’s go down with a glass, no a bottle, of champagne.
Cynical no way, fanatic fuck yeah.
Loiter, Loot and Mess Up
No, Comrades, it doesn’t help. To get out of it isn’t an option. No revolutions were
won by standing on the outside shouting at the bourgeoisie. Hell no, there is only one
thing to do: stay in the middle and fight for your life. Sleep with your enemy as they
say, but OMG where is the enemy now… to sleep with your enemy today is nothing
else than furious masturbation.
Think about it. This is all about going big, biggest, about convincing the middle that it
is time to take farewell of the past. Somebody recently said that we in the twenty-first
century are backing into the future mourning what we leave behind. This is how we
deal with the crisis, any crisis, trying desperately to return to a past that we know
fucked us up. Perhaps we manage for a moment by adjusting a little this or a little
that, but the name of the game stays the same and at best what we can do is to
postpone the moment when hell breaks loose. The only serious way to deal with crisis
is to give up the present paradigm and invent new models of life, art or dance. It is
high time that we turn to the future, face it straight up and don’t hesitate to jump into
it. Oh yes, the future is a terrible place, but hey it sure can’t get much worse than our
current situation.
So what do we do? To go marginal is not an option. To hang about at a tiny and oh so
radical festival in the north of Finland admiring each other, slapping each other’s
backs for repeating the same radical gesture one more time? To act in the margins is
comfortable. It’s not so difficult to convince those that already are your friends. We
all want to belong and in the tiny circle there is no problem, we all agree about how
radical we are and how important our mission is for the bigger picture. To take the
position of the outsider equals when armed pacifism transforms into weapon
fetishism. And one day we will realize that although our guns were loaded it was only
with salt. The most dangerous position for the arts, next to general cynicism, is to fall
in love with its own radicalism, to fetishize ones own revolutionary spirit.
Lately a self-proclaimed outsider has shown up on the art market. When institutional
critique has finally been incorporated by conscious museum directors and, maybe not
but possibly, festival directors, the race seems to be over. The logical step would be to
step out and set up camp somewhere else, start a community, gather believers, but
25 no, not anymore. The outside has already been incorporated in the capacity of the
inside, so now the celebrated artist use the outside to remain inside as radicalized.
We move out of the institutions in order to boost our value on the inside. We make a
little excursion into a known territory of instability and a little bit later we show the
documents of our endeavor at a museum show. Or why not, advertise our outside in a
worldwide newsletter. OMG, an e-flux message just popped up in my inbox.
Unitednationsplaza was a brilliant marketing stunt, congratulations, but isn’t it a bit
too transparent what is at stake when the same nations plaza invites a bunch of top
notch artists to celebrate the outside as simply amazing. Today the Finnish festival,
when performed by the right players, has become an eminent playground for
extended cool-factor. To set up a free, or non-aligned university, that of course is
deeply critical to anything Bologna, today is as revolutionary, or cool, as having
dinner at a restaurant owned by Jamie Oliver. You just have to book your table in
time.
“-But even if those educational things aren’t proposing anything revolutionary aren’t
they at least something else than the regular museum, with its empty however
mandatory lecture series?” Yeah sure, at least but that at least is precisely as at least
as communism with a human face.
However it hurts me we have to give up on revolutions. There is nothing to substitute
the paving stone. To burn some cars doesn’t make anything than you and me a little
happier. Everybody knows that activism proper is past tense and makes absolutely no
difference but has become simple self-representation, identity politics. No, we have to
march back into the museums, back into the festivals, and set out to fight a war. Me
as little as you knows what for but the first struggle is to find out what it is that we
struggle for or against, but there is no other place to do it than in the middle. And I
believe we have to do it dressed up in theatrical costumes and start using theatre as a
means to unground contexts and conventions. It is time to use illusion to fight
illusions of democracy, equality or fair play.
The only way out is in. Let’s get back into business, and fight a war not on the
mainstream but straight in the heart of it all. This is the only way that previously
depoliticized masses can turn into political subjects.
To set out to produce alternative structures is a no go. It will just be understood as
cute self-organization. To struggle for new strategies is equally fucked. Selfprecarization is a total cul-de-sac, or from another perspective to make oneself a
“Tino Sehgal” – That Was So Contemporary (“-Courtesy of the artist, 2005”). The war
in the institution has to be fought through a mechanics that can only take place
through tactical betrayal of all sides. You know, directors of museums don’t fear
graves, not even empty graves, but they do fear mess, looted and messed up graves.
Tacticity is a matter of being absolutely obvious and overtly theatrical, but make sure
never to be faithful to the principles you have laid down for yourself.
Next time you receive a commission it is your goddamn duty to fuck it up. Blame the
commissioner, it’s not your fault you just did what you were supposed to: loitered,
looted and messed up.
Thug Life
Theft is a totally underrated concept in dance. If I was taken to court I would
immediately plead guilty on all counts. I confess, my entire career, or should we say
all my activities in dance are based on theft. I’ve been stealing from day one. To tell
you the truth, I’m just about to set up yet another heist. The only problem today is
26 that I don’t exactly know what it is that I’m s’posed to take with me. But it is serious
fun and quite exciting that soon, soon, I’m going out for a nightly excursion to steal.
Ja ja ja, there’s all kinds of mumbo jumbo on appropriation, sampling, citation and
palimpsest but isn’t that just another word for a postmodern relativization of
responsibility. Or after smoking a joint: “-It wasn’t me!”, with a Jamaican accent.
There is something endearing with theft, perhaps similar to a gift. A respectable thief
doesn’t ask for anything back, but is willing to eye the consequences. Theft requires a
certain cool, similar to when you offer somebody a gift. There’s but one thing you
can’t ask for and that is appreciation. Perhaps that is the dilemma of capitalism, that
the thief as much as the one that offers a gift expects something in return. Capitalism
steals from the poor and is still expected to be treated like Robin Hood. That equation
doesn’t make a home run. Nope, a proper thug stands tall without remorse, willing to
pay the price. “… thug life, from now till’ the muthafuckin’ ever” – 2Pac
Ok, I’m going romantic here, but so what? Steal more, and make sure you leave
traces. Steal in front of people’s noses, steal when everyone can see you and make
sure you put the loot into action AS motherfuckin AP (that’s quite embarrassing). But
hey, don’t ever ask for a ransom, that’s the low life. So do ask for a ransom, but only
one that is completely out of scale, too small so that it doesn’t matter shit, or
outrageously over sized. Stop acting visa-vi some hideously old school notion of
dignity. That old Charles Bronson should r.i.p. Revenge is so stone age not even
Italians have time for it. Theft today should be a means to undermine and corrupt a
field, to make a landscape completely unstable, making it shaky under your as well as
others’ feet.
In a society based on discipline theft still carries with it an opportunity to operate
between layers of rule, but we aren’t there any longer. In a society of control theft is
as good as any other business strategy. The romantic posture would then be to
propose, that the thief as any other business engagement must know what the act is
producing. But fuck that, this only implies a return to known models of reason. As
long as you are aware of the consequences of your act they are justifiable, but again
justification is always resting on established conventions. So nothing else than theft
without reason, without conditioned revenue, will contest conventions and norms.
Theft in this respect complexifies or ungrounds.
After Roland Barthes we know that there is no other way to pursue the world than to
thieve around, to borrow and steal from wherever, is the only way to bring the bacon.
The title of the contemporary thief is DJ. With this knowledge in mind we have at
least two choices, we can continue to steal as if innocent and somehow continue to
ride a dead horse, i.e. although we know it’s not an option to maintain that the
artistic act is operating due some calling, or to consider exactly not what we steal, but
in respect of what aspirations the theft is taking place.
Initially, we can consider theft in respect of time and space. To steal ideas, like some
Leonardo Di Caprio, is excellent as ideas don’t operate in the world but instead make
the world operable. In other words to steal ideas is brilliant since their capacity to
unfold is endless. Ideas are made of proliferation but left to the user, the entity that
handles it, to choose how to cultivate it, i.e. to steal ideas undermines models of
ownership, proposes a notion of open source, and must be considered to produce
surplus for all involved parties.
To steal modes of production, methods or, let’s say, capacities of cultivation is also
dandy, as they can not not point back to an idea, which if we are not speaking simple
plagiarism, must differ. However such acts of theft are rare because they are not
making life simpler for the thief, but in fact imply the same or even larger efforts. The
common thief steals expression, and that is in no way cool, as such theft operates on
27 the basis of dislocating actual value, i.e. it qualifies in respect of identity or
recognition. The dude that steals expression, or representations (or perhaps setdesigns), is just somebody without imagination that wants effortless admiration,
belonging, and he or she will inevitably claim innocence, or simply pretend that it’s
raining. Don’t worry they don’t sleep well at night, whereas you just might end up a
little poorer for a moment, but pride yourself you are good enough to elaborate a new
even cooler thingy in no time. Be brave, don’t lock the door and fuck backing up.
We could also consider theft in respect of capacity. Stealing structures should not be
considered, that’s what we do every time we make pieces for the stage. It feels good
exactly because it provides safety, yet it also makes it impossible to assume anything
else than a little bit more, less, left or right and maintains systems. To steal strategies
is equally uncool as it inevitably confirms the initial owner. Stealing strategies is
comparable to wearing vintage fashion or stealing from a second hand shop. Theft of
tactics is more complex, as it basically means to steal something that has no reason as
long as it is not connected to some or other strategy and structure. To steal tactics
makes life complicated as their application in a foreign territory necessitates
transformation of said territory. In other words, it’s is like stealing something you
have absolutely no use for and insisting on not getting rid of it. It demands
individuation or unprecedented change. Tactics are digital in the sense that they
don’t lose value when duplicated, and to steal them implies the necessity of
producing new surfaces for their proliferation. To steal tactics is like doing a bank
robbery through digging endless canals, it makes the ground to which they are
inserted more and more unstable. If to steal structures and strategies equals further
stabilization and conventional decision-making based on reaction, to steal tactics is
the opposite, it rather implies to make yourself unable to maintain resistance, and
produces action, or even better activation. When you steal a structure you’re simply
afraid to get caught, when you steal tactics you fear not being noticed at all.
Why if we consider theft a productive force don’t we set up a gangster syndicate, start
to work as a mob? No no no, that’s exactly the wrong way, that’s not even theft, that’s
more like a theatrical form of redistribution of ownership, or in our field consensual
forms of collaboration (it will always end up in a known disaster). It won’t be easy,
but unfortunately you will have to put on your thug outfit and sneak around all alone.
Steal without reflection, without sympathy, without discernment, steal ideas and
tactics, steal for no other reason than to corrupt.
Let’s go 2Pac in choreography. Fuck, I change my mind, I’m so not guilty.
No More Production Value
Most shows created nowadays don’t play for more than ten nights. You aren’t inside
the network business, didn’t graduate from the Anne Teresa school, you are fucked!
How much time do you spend preparing, applying for money, rehearsing, discussing
with costume designers or cooling down the musician in artistic crisis? Months? All
your time? You teach a little here and there but otherwise, the lot? Whenever we can
get three months in the studio, out of which two weeks should take place in Essen or
some other god forgotten place with a residency platform that promotes your stuff. A
year’s work on the production and after the premiere that nobody really commented
upon you show the work at your other three co-producers, perhaps even one or so
other date. At the end of the day your three months in the studio to create an hourlong piece gave a dozen hours on stage. It’s not exactly efficient, in any respect, to
work more or less a month for each hour on stage.
28 Btw, fire the musician and do it yourself. Musicians aren’t there for your sake but to
boost their own careers. They believe they are hired to be artists, and will sooner or
later complain: “-I don’t feel that there is any space for my creativity…” as if your
work would become better because of their musical conviction. Pitiful, my God, these
sad, melodramatic men with guitars. Or, shit, or set-designers that think they could
really make installations, you know for museums. Fuck, I’m in a good mood today.
Celebration.
Production value in dance has over the past fifteen years stabilized into a rather
unhealthy climate. The good old six weeks rehearsal period was ten or so years ago
disqualified in a favor of endless processes enabled by far too generous art councils,
especially the Flemish one. The generosity of the Swedish art council during the 90s
is a central reason for why Swedish dance today is completely passé and old school.
Why do anything at all if we know there will 200.000€ on the bank account next year
too. Hello, I have a ten years research grant, and it’s not small either.
Production value evidently sets the standards for quality. If you don’t work three
months your work can’t be good. If you do work three months there are often too
many people involved that the work can’t be allowed to be shit. The interest of the
business is to make sure that every production by Giselle Vienne will be good from
now until eternity. Every time you work for three months you also assume the
hegemony of your art council and since every producer in Europe worships Brussels
what you do is vote for Les Ballet C de la B. And you know what that means:
financially independent and socially engaged dance theatre. And you thought you
were special.
Why would you argue for the importance of the process? The relevance of practical
choreographic research with half a dozen dancers? Well, obviously because if you can
fool some halfwit cultural politician that just discovered the fad artistic research you
get your ass covered for half a year. Bravo, but if you did research for half a year how
does it happen that what came out was just as boring as last years attempt: just
another show, in just the same format, in just the same venue. From where the hell
do you get the energy? Admiration.
Stop working for three months at a time, stop trying to sell your piece before or after
the premiere. Stop sending newsletters, stop informing programmers. Forget to reply
to e-mails. It will crush you. It will destroy you. It will strip you of your dreams,
cancel your ability to laugh and make you a dead-living that operates through public
appreciation, revenge and holding back. You will become one of those nice vampires
in Twilight that after falling in love with a normal babe desperately tries to secure
humanity. I’m not telling you to be yourself, but check it out it is not your job to save
festivals and season programs; it is not your job to help the art council. Your job is to
destroy, to turn them down but not through simple refusal but by bypassing
circumstances, by jumping over fences and creating situations due which you dictate
the conditions. You know that the 25.000€ you received from the art council is not
because of your art. You know that you got the money in order for us to be able to
control you. As a venue director I will insist on the necessity of three months
rehearsal period in the studio, obviously. But why? Because if this is how shit works I
can be sure nothing will change and I can work long-term without making any extra
efforts. If this is how you work then I know where to find you. Choreographers of the
world disguise yourself, no that’s not enough we have to operate even deeper; this is
hyper-camouflage, the purpose of which is to keep a considerable part of the enemy’s
resources occupied, whilst undermining the rest of it. Be an opportunist. Be innocent
with blue eyes.
29 The last few days I have heard half a dozen cultural managers, curators,
programmers answer: “-Oh, it’s really a lot of work right now.” Don’t do this, you
have chosen to work here because you say you are interested in art. Stop, saying it’s
too much, it’s never too much, it’s never even enough. How can it be, you are s’posed
to like what you do so enjoy yourself. Every time you allow yourself that to utter the
too-much-bullshit you have also signed up to a culture that pleasures itself with being
in pain, that prides itself through negativity. A colleague at the university tells me
before summer holidays: “-Oh, so nice to turn off the mobile and to take a break from
e-mail.” What do you want: to sit in your favorite armchair reading a novel? Is that
what it is? But then why didn’t you make this your job, instead of programming
dance in a venue that is continuously, as you always say, threatened by budget cuts.
It’s your lucky day when the council for the so many years in a row announces that
they might have to cut all your funding. You fucking masochist! Admit it, it makes
you hot. And you know as much as I that the city can’t afford to close the venue not
because of you, the program or anything like that but simply because its too much
work, too much fuzz.
I think you pleasure yourself most of all when you sit in your armchair reading an
introduction to artistic research, or an application for the upcoming network
meeting. Yes, you do, because afterwards, in bed with your partner, you can whisper
things like: “-I’m so happy that I finally read through those applications.” and still
you did it in your favorite chair, with a blanket on your knees and with a glass of not
exactly expensive Rioja. You walk with a stone in your shoe to feel alive.
Stop complaining about writing applications. It’s amazing, just the very idea of
articulating your work, in whatever form, it’s amazing. To set out to produce new
projects, to take another risk, it’s fab. If we don’t get the money, great, cuz then we
don’t need to make economical reports and we don’t need to rent a studio somewhere
half way to the suburbs where there is not even possible to have sushi for lunch. Just
think about the hilarious lies you will make up to sound convincing. Or the travel
grant you received without any kind of invitation but wrote just because it would be
so fun to visit Tokyo. “When the hell should I have time to go there?“
A friend, an admirable one, told me the other day: “-I want to change the work, I’m
sick of it. I’m getting too well fed, too comfortable. We need to come up with
something that nobody wants to pay us for, start from the beginning and fuck it up.”
People that do Sudoku should die. People that defend that bullshit for being good for
your mind or make you smarter, burn in hell, real slow. Fuck you, write a debate
article, list all choreographers you can’t stand, make drawings of pieces you can’t
remember. Write a public letter about how embarrassingly stupid it is to put Michael
Clark on a residency in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, or create some nasty gossip
about a friend.
To actively break with production values is more provocative than the work it results
in. What you show is always already authorized by somebody, it’s up there right, but
how you organize your resources that is far more open to you. So break it break it
break it.
So, you didn’t get the money you expected. What do you do? Downscale a bit,
perhaps it can work with three dancers… perhaps, maybe the dancers can work half
time the first rehearsal period? Don’t do this to yourself, it’s exactly what they want.
Best choice, tell them to keep the money, but it is also okay to keep them as long as
you change the circumstances for the production.
If you anyway will only be able to show the work seven times, why spend an eternity
in the studio making choreography. Why don’t we just make a piece in two days and
the rest of the time we can spend doing something amazing, like something we have
30 no idea about. Something that won’t psyche us out. Why, if we anyway will have only
200 people for the premiere and the second day, should we get stressed out already
four weeks before showtime. Look at this, your wonderful spectators will be so much
happier to see a show or whatever it might be if you’ve had a great process and high
fidelity time together.
Yeah, you do political pieces, so why not start working in the streets where we meet
people all the time. Is it really better to stay in the studio and close the door, turn off
the mobiles and etc so that we at least think we are important and do valuable work.
Why not rent out the space to Woody Allen or something and hang out in a café with
a bunch of books, so we can learn something else. Or why not just offer each other the
pleasure of being without kids or… What we do is business so the moment you start
something up you also decide in what ways resources are producing, organizing
relations and independency, not least what kind of power and hierarchies do you
want your resources to produce or reproduce. If we anyway don’t have any money
why do we work as if we were a commercial operation that has to put something out
there? Fuck that, you don’t have to anything. You’re an artist enjoy the privileges,
stop acting as if you were a responsible citizen (if you want to convince me sign up to
medics without borders, no worries), stop admiring Renzo Martens and act with
endless ego.
Stab Somebody In The Back
Stop writing self-interviews. It’s self-celebratory in the guise of modesty. You sit there
at your semi-improvised writing table and after some initial struggle you get into it.
You suddenly feel enthusiastic, you see a piece taking form in your mind. You can
imagine how nice it will be to collaborate with those favorites of yours that you were,
just a few moments ago, a bit worried to meet because your proposal might be
understood as vague. But what is your proposal? Really what is it? And you say “I’m
interested in”, but what do you mean you are interested? I’m also interested, like in
waterskiing and dance duets and facial expression, but what have you asked yourself?
Most choreographers are more interested in “or something like that” than in anything
else. More interested in “you know what I mean” and “I don’t know, but…” and you
are okay cause everyone nods understandingly. Self-interview is the lazy man’s way
out of self-scrutiny, you don’t have to do anything to yourself whilst doing them, they
carry no consequences, but make you feel like a good person afterwards. There is
something utterly qualm about self-interviews, a tone of well-meaning yet sexually
repressed Christianity.
The catholic self-interview is disgusting but at least it can opt for forgiveness.
Confessional and chatty, obviously not coming to a point, and feeling extremely good
with itself. And by the way why should you write it at all when there are really nice
interviews on the internet that you can copy and paste from.
It is the protestant self-interview that really sucks, and OMG it sucks with its selfrighteous tone of I’m exposing the truth and, you have no idea how painful it is for
me to lower my defenses and say those things. Force them out of myself like some
dogmatic madman in a Dan Brown novel. Stop it. You are such a hypocrite, selfinterviews are the worst kind of autopoiesis, a kind of redundant psychoanalysis that
produces trauma rather than the other get you going. Self-interview would be the title
of the book Lacanians would have written, had they not been so occupied with
annihilating Anti-Oedipus. Justify your works with whatever theory you don’t know,
but doing it through self-interview, that’s like eating muesli pretending it’s a bloody
beef, having yogi tea imagining it to be glass of gasoline. Self-interview is like a
31 wooden sword, the making of an epic movie, an image of armed struggle, where is
your machine gun.
Self-interview is like taking prisoners, and only as many as you can handle. We don’t
take prisoners and if we do we take so many that positions become catastrophic. Selfinterview is the pleasure of imagining how it would be to inflict physical pain oo
oneself. You have a job, stab somebody in the back.
Self-interview is monotheism for balanced liberals, auto-realization for artists that
suffer in the studio, for those who celebrate the painful in art, that shy away from
confrontation and believe in civilization. Self-interviews are all about becoming
comprehensible and elaborating your work as a sympathetic one-ness, serving
programmers (they love one-thing concepts and coherence). It is not enough to say
“but I’m working against coherence”, no way. Vague is not an option. Self-interview is
for people that think caffe latte a little bit special and artist studio an autonomous
zone. For those who with a considerate tone state “-Well, there is also day tomorrow”.
Stop it, self-interviews are time wasting dialogue, the equalization of anything, the
end of aggression. The production of causality. Go to war, fuck being considered.
Self-interview is the opposite of hate, it’s the negation of tears. Self-interviews don’t
clean your eyes, they make you see the same. Self-interviews no way, hit somebody in
the face.
Stab Yourself In The Back
Write self-interviews, but make fuckin’ sure you don’t try to justify your existence,
your amateurish relation to philosophy and aesthetic theory or your dilettante
knowledge about the body. Write tons of self-interviews and publish them on your FB
page, upload them on aaaaarg and create a myspace page where you offer the world
to listen to the audio version. Write self-interviews every day – make it undermine
your practice, use the format to rip it apart, to make life hell. But the moment you
start using the format in order to make life easier, to obtain satisfaction you are on
the wrong track. It’s you and me that are responsible for how the self-interview
became the trailer trash of dance.
“-Could you read my self-interview? This summer I was in a kind of crisis, but I think
something really interesting…”
Jezuz, how out of focus are you. Come on if you have a crisis, to write a self-interview
of three and a half A4 is not an option. That was not a crisis, you just wanted to pity
yourself a bit. Pity yourself a lot, like a lot, and make it your artist identity, but then
don’t even think about writing self-interviews. And btw if you are currently in an
education program, quit it. It will violate you, brainwash you, make you a small
person and a nice individual. Education is the social democratic version of hell.
Write self-interview as the only thing you do for the three months you spend in the
studio. Nothing else before the premiere. Write self-interviews not in order to have
ideas, or to pin point your problem. Write them for all other reasons, or for no reason
at all, but the moment it starts to smell of therapy get the fuck out. That’s the moment
when justification arrives, that’s the moment when self-righteous confession gets to
be your superhero. Self-interviews are not there to make you special. Self-interviews
are not a DIY kind of AA meeting: “-I’m a choreographer….”, I can say it.
Who do you want to be: Spiderman or Superman? Spiderman wrote a lot of selfinterviews, and they tendentially started with a “-How are you today?”– therapy for a
32 confused kid projecting superhero images on every possible surface. Spiderman is the
manifestation of desire as lack. Peter Parker is conducting self-interviews as a
substitute for not having a girlfriend to settle down with. But Superman don’t do selfinterviews – he is from outer space. A place where Andy Warhol couldn’t reach him
with his silent Freudian questions about what’s underneath, but there is nothing.
Superman has no depth, and no stretch, but in that telephone booth (is he about to
dress up in the Iphone in the next episode?) he’s operating in the crack. Fuck selfinterviews be Superman and step down to the people and do journalism.
Self-interview is a mourning process, a kind of revenge for not being interviewed by
the magazines. For not having a spread in the local dance paper… Oups – maybe not,
but do the stars have that? They don’t, the problem of dance and choreography is it’s
deep addiction to modesty and self-critique. So boring. Haven’t you understood that
self-critical is another word for self-obsession and a masochistic kind of compulsive
autopoiesis. Self-interview proposes that there is something noble in being humble.
This has to be exorcised now.
Only if we give up on our desire to know what we desire, can something happen. No
insurrection has started with a self-interview. Self-interviews are striation and lack,
we need an antidote – no manifestos SVP – that’s the same thing but in Italian – no
we need nothing else than to invent new forms of articulation, alternative concepts to
produce knowledge. Be naïve and make it now, we have no time for elaboration, in
any case elaboration brings you away from the crack, and into something tacky called
deep or to the surface called dance theatre. BMC is bad for you; stop thinking that
somebody will save you. It’s your job, to stab yourself in the back, that’s what selfinterviews are for. They should be like ninja stars in your chest, a machete deep
between your shoulder blades. You have no idea about the body.
Self-interviews imply asking, with a curious yet hesitating smile: “-Where will the
revolution come from?”
Hello, it doesn’t come from somewhere, it doesn’t give interviews, it emerges with the
liberation of desire. I fuckin want you! Now!
HAVE YOURSELF KILLED – BE OBVIOUS
A big space can become bigger – DEMOLISH
A surface is only so sustainable – UNGROUND
Pacifism is not resistance – ARM YOURSELF
Emptiness is no danger, mess is – DRUJASKAN
Life and Work is not separated, everything is economy – RAVAGE
Shopping is not consumption, but an act of war – BE A RAT
Shopping is not a matter of money – SHOPLIFT
Theft is only a matter of context – SCAVENGE
Paying attention is another word for surveillance – BE ARROGANT
Movement defuses political groundwork, static masses are inherently violent –
LOITER
33 Public space doesn’t exist – BARRICADE YOURSELF
There is only one side – BETRAY IT FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE
Strategies compartmentalize, tactics live on diffusion – THERE IS NO TIME TO
AGREE
Enthusiasm is the neo-liberal substitute for not having an option – BE FANATIC
Negotiation is safe sex for constipated contemporaries – BE CATEGORICAL
Hate is a waste of time – KEEP IT UP
Gradual change is another word for self-promotion – BREACH
Be yourself is the starting point of cognitive capitalism – PRETEND
Professionalism is another word for representation democracy – BE AN AMATEUR
Networking is not friendship – MAKE ENEMIES
The contemporary artist has become a virtuoso in entrepreneurship and lost all belief
– BE ROMANTIC – INSIST ON FAITH
Resurrection? Not Exactly
God, I despise that film scene when the protagonist wakes up in a coffin and after
some initial mandatory panicking, bloody fists and so on, recollects the subject and
visa-vi good reasoning either starts digging or comes up with some genuinely smart
solution. Break out.
The nightmare isn’t to wake up in a coffin but the realization that I thought Uma
Thurman was sort of cool in “Kill Bill”. – - disguisting – - I don’t want to know but
can only guess what tacky symbolism the buried alive scene carries. But perhaps it is
time – it certainly is – to leave Oedipus behind and take up Antigone again, but this
time we have to take her from behind or so to say play the drama in reverse. Our
present day Antigone must insist on keeping her brothers out of the ground. They
must not be put into the ground, never put to rest or prepared for a spectacular
Houdini like resurrection. Quentin Tarantino forgot for a crucial moment there to
resist psychoanalysis and let Uma just die, or like wake up in any space whatevers.
Shitgodamn, sadness he runs all the way into the core of Freudianism and becomes a
CIA agent highest rank, i.e. Central Identity Agency. What however is surprising is
that the coffin scene isn’t in every Woody Allen film, but then on second thought the
coffin is the only scene there is in every Woody Allen film. – admiration – Stop going
to Woody movies – how could he not screw his daughter or whatever, that’s not the
reason. Stop watching Allen flicks, stop yourself from comments like “-He’s funny”,
or babbling about his passionate relation to New York. You know what, he is the
fuckin Dumbledore, Don Corleone and freakin Darth Vader of CSI.
Your job is not to stab yourself in back in order to resurrect, exactly not! You are
dead: there is no beginning to start from. And thank good for that nothing to
continue. Leave all ideas behind, forget your legacies in a road stop hotel, abandon
the choices you have to make. Enter the desert, bring a barrel of oil and start your
mission: lateralize. Fuck resurrection, fuck insurrection, fuck any pre of postfix, if
anything surrection, no strings attached. Pure intensity.
34 Your identity is not the sum of your relations. Detach your relations form yourself,
and operate without mission. Only if we leave the current obsession on identity, only
if we let go of desiring representation in the dominant discourses – the workers
movement is ontologically over – forget your activist past – only if we push out the
coffin scene also from the deleted scenes department can we bring it on like a decent
cheerleading trope. This is not about satisfaction, this is not about you or me, this is
not about the subject standing up, this is not about Antigone’s brothers, so not about
Obi-Wan Kenobi, this is so not about creativity, this is about group sex and the
creation of the world. A breach of the condition for success!
The time is now for rotten politics, the time is now to fuck Woody and vote for
putrefaction. Stop the revolution, the future is built on de-solidification. Abandon
ship, motherfuckers.
Piracy and Desire
When we’re done stealing. When we are done shoplifting, still refusing organization –
thug life is a solo piece – when we are up for vanity and posing, we still have enemies.
We have two enemies: imagination and creativity. But there is a way out of piracy.
Let’s go Caribbean, it’s hot an sexy, let’s board the enemy’s territory and swing our
stolen swords. It is not a matter of gold and other riches but about the act, of
boarding, of creating a general havoc.
One can think of two kinds of breaks with the confinements proposed by the law.
Prison break – a breach with a conventional and continuous imprisonment which
without exception results in the subject always looking over his shoulder waiting for
the law to catch up. The subject will inevitably return to his original imprisonment
where he will finally feel relief. The prison break operates on the basis of breaking
through and leaving a trace, whereas a clean break implies a shift of discourse, i.e. the
prison guard will not even know that the subject has disappeared out of the field of
vision. The result is identical, but after a clean break the subject will continuously
look over his shoulder hoping that at least somebody will appear. A clean break
implies sovereignty, a lonely place, and nobody to gossip with.
Piracy can be considered as simple prison break, a crossing of a conventional
restriction in order to get away with some or other thing, or simply to obtain value. It
can also be understood as a clean break, especially considering digital media where a
copy is not destabilizing value. Is it however possible to consider piracy not only as a
strategic endeavor, but rather as operations either on structural or tactical levels? We
would like to understand piracy as a concept, as a heterogeneous huddle of
incompatible connections raising questions that cannot be answered within our
present predicament or as a cluster of mutating lines carrying the potentiality of
ungrounding established capacities of dualist discourse.
The language apparatuses that define present political contexts have over the past
twenty-five years lost their deterritorializing agency, i.e. any political emergence or
social movement can but be canonized due the dominant discourse of Western
representational democracy, hence the multiplicity has made itself invincible. As long
as tomorrow is designated by yesterday’s idioms, difference can only operate on
levels of degree, in particular in a reality where capitalism has become omnipresent.
There is nothing to fight against any more, no battles to choose or struggles that
would makes sense, precisely because the enemy is within. Activism and public
manifestation have become an empty spectacle and an identity booster for souls that
enjoy the comfortable position of being a little bit lost. The crisis must not be solved,
35 nothing must be repaired since that necessarily means further consolidation of
impotent language apparatuses. The complete compatibility between capital,
cognitary labor and control implies the rise of arbitrary power; a power that is its own
body without organs, that is difference without reference to a prior unity and hence is
resistant, or better unimaginable to prevailing political discourses. But as there is
nothing to rely on, potentiality becomes an open question; arbitrary power releases
the possibility for a radical breach of subjectivity.
The primary function of western models of governance, democratic or not, is to
produce stability. In short, good governance is “supposed” to establish long-term
conditions to ensure economic expansion, prosperity etc. Politics, also today –
especially its representations, operate on the basis of discipline and its striated
production, distribution and accountability, i.e. stability is always prior to
transformation; change is reactive to a common continuous and divisible
organization.
In “Cyclonopedia” Reza Negarestani turns this model around taking as a starting
point an ongoing production of instability, proposing a political context that operates
through ungrounding and corruption of systems and grammar. Populations and
subjects appear to strive for stability, survival and probability; capacities that
implicitly strengthen identity and the understanding of belonging, to a family, tribe
or commune. A politics of ungrounding that multiplies surfaces and increases
incompatibility must, if maintained properly, constantly threaten belonging, identity,
the need for cartographies and consistent modes of navigation in favor of affective
production. A production that is not creative but possibly creational, and calls for an
idea that stability is formed as a response to activity, or that change is active,
discontinuous and indivisible. Change in this sense is unorganized and expansive,
improbable and potentially disruptive in respect of power, knowledge and
subjectivity.
Certain authorities were quick in localizing piracy in relation to modes of
maintenance of established social apparatuses. Piracy is theft, end of discussion,
which further implies that it operates on the basis of strategy. We would like to
propose piracy as an ungrounding, activational capacity, an affective mode of
production, that challenges established political discourses. It’s about theft, but not
of “some thing”, but of something irreplaceable, i.e. the ability to authorize voice.
Thus we should understand piracy as a concept contesting political discourse on a
structural level.
Similar authorities have scripted piracy as a grass root movement whose motif was to
crush Hollywood or kill the music business. Piracy is destructive, end of discussion,
which again situates it in respect of strategy. We would like to propose piracy as pure
tacticity, even as an open set of pure tacticities, which must be understood as
mechano-in-organic insinuations of fear, surprise and havoc which, while seemingly
event-specific remain indifferent to, but complicit with, the very
medium/organization in which it/they are actuated. Pure tacticities consist of a series
of betrayals, an ungrounding mechanics that can only take place through a tactical
betrayal of all sides. Thus we should understand piracy as a concept that,
metaphorically speaking, betrays the grammatical, or compositional reference to, of a
digital order, in favor of an empirical, non-compositional experience in, of an
analogue unfolding.
Prison breaks as well as clean breaks configure desire on the basis of lack. Piracy is
never about lack, it is a desiring machine that instead of breaking out, is breaking
apart, opening for the emergence of an alternative politics: the capacity of a struggle
that matters.
36 No Change
Half a year in advance somebody sends me an e-mail asking if I could give a talk at a
conference about piracy or perhaps something like dance and activism, or
choreography as critical experience. Everything is laid out: the topic, the money, the
context and how amazing.
I say yes, everybody is happy and soon I receive a mail from an assistant – always a
woman – who needs to book my tickets, now! The argument is always the same, if we
book well in advance… After yet another few weeks I’m demanded to send in my bio
and a short descriptive text on what the talk will focus on. Dude, it’s three and a half
month away and I haven’t even started to think about the possibility that that talk
should be about what possible thing? I’m not very busy, my agenda is not totally
thick, but come on why do conference organizers take for granted that I have nothing
to do before their conference?
That would mean that I’d be paid every three months and usually 300€, so guess
what even if I didn’t want to have another job… The fact is that the 300€ you pay me
should also cover necessary preparation, including sending bios and writing
abstracts. Considering that I’m not hired by an institution but actually self-employed,
badly paid and legal. Then 300 is approx eight hours, and you want me to pop in on
Friday evening and only get back to my home base on Sunday evening. Do you really
think I can afford writing an abstract, when I can’t even afford coming up with an
idea that takes time to execute. Pay me a thousand euro and I’ll deliver a kick ass
abstract, a spiced up bio and a give a talk that’ll teleport your audience to a place that
couldn’t even imagine tad-talks.
How many times haven’t I said yes to talk at dance festivals for 150€, hotel (or sofa)
and travel? How many times have I accepted to give a talks at theatre foyers, lecture
spaces in art centres that could have been the set of a movie based on a true story by
Solzhenitsyn or in cafés with coffee grinders that sound like terminally sick
Lamborghinis. How can anybody expect a masterpiece in such contexts, how can
anybody expect respect and good preparation when the talk, lecture, conversation
takes place over there, with zero technical preparation and a video projector that was
old already 1953.
Of course every dance festival with decency should put up a complementary theory
intensive program. Obviously, and yes sir knowledge production is central to dance
too, but why is the program always at the wrong moment, in the wrong space,
without an audience, badly paid and if we are lucky the programmer pops in for five
minutes before leaving for a date to set up another joint co-production? If we want
the theory program to be any good we need to offer it some resources. “-Yes, but you
know this year the budget is really tough and we have to focus on shows?” Do you
now? Says who, the artists, the audience… Who decided that your festival has to this
or that? You are a coward who wants to pretend that you take risks.
Consider that say, two nights of a middle sized show by Alain Platel cost 30.000€,
just the fee. If you pay me 300€ for a talk, that means I could lecture for 100 days.
That’s like sort of every day for half a year. Of course it’s not that simple, I know but
then it’s not so much more complex neither.
A colleague tells me a programmer came to see a piece four times before deciding not
to present it. Have you ever heard about a presenter traveling and I don’t mean to a
theatre or university in the same city but like with an airplane, to see if a theoretician
is really the thing. Don’t think so! We say that theory is important in order to renew
37 our practice and that it is important that theory is made in close proximity to dance,
but the moment when somebody wants to get paid it’s really not that important.
Look, when was the last time you paid Xavier Le Roy 300€ to do Product of
Circumstances in a café?
This year the discourse orientation in the program extended to also include breakfast
talks. They are great, especially since they are given an intimate form with no more
than twenty people showing up. If this format would be of any interest to you, why
hasn’t it ever happened that we have morning shows and talks at eight thirty prime
time? You know why, because you are a coward that has no what so ever interest in
testing your audience behavior.
I have finally have sent in the bio, after seven reminders. The flight is booked. Now
silence. A lot of silence until a week before the situation is taking place. Suddenly a
burst of e-mails, including a question concerning the possibility to translate my
lecture in order to make it available for those that aren’t familiar with English. Look,
I haven’t even started to think about it, and what makes you think that I would write
it down like a paper. You told me that it isn’t academic but an opportunity for dancers
and choreographers to engage in discourse. And now you want a lecture, a paper?
After another too many mails I arrive in the city. I’m picked up at the airport by a guy
who knows nothing about the event or festival, who dumps me at the hotel… I find
my way to the venue where I after a little bit of confusion shake hands with the
director or the assistant who immediately passes me over to the technical director
who will show me the venue.
The director is very happy to see me but has no time for further conversation. We will
talk afterwards of course, but afterwards there is another event, and the talk wasn’t
really what was expected of me so the director comes up to me and says: “-I just
wanted to thank you…” but when I respond with a question about what he thought
about it… he has suddenly no time but has to clean out the stage for the next event,
must set the café for the lunch guests, must a lot of things in order not to have a
conversation. It can of course be that I’m not very friendly or something but I have
double checked this is the same for all of us that give talks and engage in discourse.
So what happens is that I have lunch or dinner or whatever with a friend from the
local scene and suddenly I find myself with the same guy that took me to the hotel on
the way to the airport and…
If you have invested half a year on me, insisted on the bio, been keen on translating
my lecture, so intensively wanting to introduce more discourse into the dance field,
why were you SMSing half of the talk, looked absent minded the second half, didn’t
talk to me before, during or after and didn’t send me an e-mail afterwards? Why?
And btw made an introduction so badly prepared and with a totally stone age bio?
Or consider that this is a weekend conference, and there are eight speakers per day
and panels and artist presentations. Why did you still not invest any time in talking to
me, but were chatting with your assistant throughout the dinner? And why did you
decide to pay all those talkers a bad fee when you could also have changed the
template, paid them double the amount and instead of insisting on keeping the
schedule allow thing to take time, really long time. Or why did you need to underline
that it is really important to let the local audience in, when there anyway was no time
for a real q and a?
I just came out of such a conference, flown in the same day thrown in without
context, I even got a bottle Havana Club as a thank you gift, but what the hell was I
doing here remains simply an enigma.
Check it out, this conference was indeed addressing piracy. Interesting and important
subject, but why is the template still talks and dialogues in 45 minutes slots where we
38 know nothing will happen but superficial exchange of self-promotional slogans. Why
does piracy want representation visa-vi dominant discourse? Why not set up another
forum, why not remix the whole shebang? Why not fuck identity and belonging and
community and the fuckin book table.
Well, obviously because you are not interested in piracy you are interested in having
or getting a job. Right, now I remember. You don’t become a hacker because you have
a mission but because it’s a backdoor into big business. I’m so fucked, I thought you
were interested? How naïve, how romantic of me. I wanted to change the world and
you just became an organizer of uninteresting events because you weren’t cool
enough to organize parties.
Face The Fact
Sociology.
Taste it. What do you experience?
So-ci-o-lo-gy
Admit it, it’s embarrassing. There is a taste of enthusiasm, of desire to engage,
however always at proper distance. I shiver, when I think about it. Check it out:
somebody slides up to you at a party with a hello sexy kind of gaze. After some proper
small talk, the mandatory “so what do you do” question pops up. I would lie, say I’m a
hairdresser, interior decorator or even that I design furniture, rather than to have to
admit: “-I’m a sociologist” or – holy fuckin’ Moses – even worse “-I work in
sociology.” I’d rather die, spend the night with Oprah Winfrey without knickers or
watch all the films by the guy who did Amores Perros, without breaks, even without a
bottle of whiskey to calm my nerves. – - Did you like that film Babel, shame on you
SHAME – - This one is even better, what if you – the Sociologist – would slide up to a
superbabe and after proper chit chat have to admit you are in fact a sociologist. I
mean, what would you do if your date would say something like: “-I’m really
interested in people.” Oh my fuckin god, where’s the exit. I mean even if your date
were a look-a-like of, what’s his name, Sean Penn – Oh yeah he was the protagonist
in the Amores movie. Get out of town.
I believe we have found a little brother to Woody and his psychoanalytical mumbojumbo, the kid is known as Sociology, not really interested in minds and identity, but
in people. You know people in general without generalization, and the worst of all he
is contemporary which is to say he has exchanged ideology for forgiveness, and he
forgives to a soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla. Now that is seriously fucked up.
It is obvious that theatre makers are in fact just a bunch of failed psychoanalysts, and
those are the good ones. The bad ones are more like family therapeuts, common
shrinks or, lately, cognitive behavioral therapists. The really good ones, I mean they
are of course all very bad, after all they are theatre directors, have probably
terminated their practice and spend their time at the university. Those are the really
evil ones because they are, you know, undercover, and might like appear, like,
interesting to begin with. But don’t worry they are like American serial killers, they
really want to be caught. So if you’re smart you will soon detect patterns, signs,
combinations. Just remember don’t try to think as they think, it will only make it
worse. Just be polite, excuse yourself and disappear. They wont take offense,
remember, they have really cool state institutions to fall back on.
What is not so obvious is that almost all dance makers and choreographers, are – I
don’t really know which – failed or really successful sociologists. No they are better
39 than that, they are dance makers because they were too embarrassed to work in
sociology, but never-the-less they all are. Something has gone terribly wrong with
dance, it’s flooded with sociology all over the place. What the fuck happened to
abstraction, what’s wrong with seriously homogenous bodies. Give me back some
serious geometry (no, I don’t mean Emio Greco, and btw stop stop stop making dance
installations, that’s not even sociology, it’s embarrassing and the night side of
betrayal of our practice.) Pina Bausch was at least decent enough to do proper field
studies (chain smoking and deeply alcoholic), but the contemporary choreographer…
and you know they all work with some kind of improvisation, and most of them have
no fuckin idea about what choreography is but use every excuse not to have to make
any of it, or are using sociological protocols even for that. Help me from those so
called dance performances where the executors, oh so personally, already after 20
minutes have danced, talked, sung, played theatre and help me god played some
instruments. Dance performances with folk music should be forbidden, especially
engaging kletzmer.
With a generous gesture they, the sociologists, offer their dancers to themselves
create the choreography, obviously under supervision of the author who through this
gesture swears himself free from any kind of responsibility and at the same time
produces himself as invincible. The sociologist collects and distributes perfectly
balanced pieces in order not to make anybody choke. Sociology is for ladies over 50,
oh it makes them feel good. So very good.
They are everywhere – perhaps not in the US – but there are tons of them in Europe.
In Berlin, flocks, and they are of course really good in institutional policy – they know
people but have no idea about choreography – so all of them are on lifelong contracts
with state funded venues. In Belgium the policy is different, so instead they establish
private clinics or institutes, tendentially with the result that they forget to do
fundamental research and become exactly the media hungry 20 seconds researchers
that Bourdieu warned us of.
The sociologist in dance are necessarily anti-intellectual. They are interested in
people, in developing and refining a body of knowledge about human social activity,
and the goal is always to make our lives less complicated, less fucked up, to give us
solace and hope about the human condition. To make us appreciate each other as we
really are, to see our real identities behind the masks of the everyday. Fuck off! Dance
is not about comfort, it’s not about consolation, not a hand on your shoulder when
you cry. Dance is about constructions, its artifice and precision. When Cunningham
says: “When I dance I dance there is nothing more to it” – haven’t you understood,
that it is not an urgency for authenticity or body, it is a celebration of becoming
inhuman, to become blank.
Cunningham didn’t engage in eastern practices to become a softy and move to San
Francisco, no it was in order to get away from the all too human modes of
composition etc including heterosexual dominance that we operate through in the
west.
Hey, you guys that nowadays talk about how hard and angular Cunningham’s
material really was, with an attached OMG. Get it, that’s what makes him bearable,
and that’s where Bill Forsythe lost it. Fuckin sociologist. Come on, stop that
improvisation nonsense, you just want to be loved, go back to the neoclassical and
deconstructed, that was at least hard and didn’t excuse itself or its academic selfobsession.
The really bad ones, those that one would call hobby sociologists are those that
defend the body as something that carries another knowledge, some other I don’t
know what capacity to open our petit subjects to a bigger “you know what I mean”.
40 Those that obsessively search for practices that produce states, that go visit shamans
or think that BMC or authentic movement will make you richer than if you engage
yourself in reason or thought. Those are bad. No there is one worse type, the selfsociologist, or the kind of dance maker that is interested in people as long as it equals
himself.
Think about it, the next time you sail up to that Ashton Kutcher type gorgeous, or
slide inbetween Angelina and Cameron, is it really appropriate that you respond with
dance maker or choreographer, or – hand on your heart – is it time that you face the
fact: You are a sociologist.
Size Matters
Size matters. Yes it does. Don’t go there… to the sort of early 90s attitude, that it
doesn’t. Stop that sexually neutral argument and face the fact, it matters and it
matters a lot. However this matter is only structural and abolishing it is of course
even more repressive to the out of the normal. Let’s reestablish that size matters and
instead of a passive one size fits all mind-set, see what the difference of size can do.
Check it out, who would you bring home? Mr Big, no way – a dude that relies on size
and quantity. Boring. Bigness makes you immobile, think about the body builder: lots
of muscle but for what use? The contemporary muscle man is simply mass with only
one ability, to pose. The tiny, small scale on the other hand has nothing else to rely on
than ability, technique and innovation. Mr Big is about to be a sloppy bottom passing
responsibility to you, whereas Tiny is the total promise of adventure.
If capitalism is not a mode of production, but instead a production of modes and
worlds (Lazzarato), this is true all the way to horizontal activities or concerning size.
To propose that size doesn’t matter is a statement typical of a capitalism operating on
a regional level to which there exists a possible outside, and in any case size doesn’t
matter homogenizes, resonates of well-fare state and lighter shades of communism.
The moment we enter capitalism without borders the only thing that matters is size,
but it matters not on a structural level but only in respect of how size makes you
mobile, dynamic and fuckin fast.
Those that disrespect size will end up in the same position as the automotive
industry, they live on a lie about you-are-good-as-you-are… without need to upgrade,
change or mess shit up. So even if size doesn’t matter, like fundamentally, to consider
that it does implies the necessity of strategic and tactical differentiation.
Dance venues and festivals, and in fact dance makers and choreographers too, utilize
an economical system that isn’t exactly contemporary and it is apparent that they
have abandoned the importance of size completely. “-Have they?”, you ask. Yes, and
it is even better, it is as if dance tries with endless effort to gain exactly the same size
and is completely obsessed with the equalization of the experience.
Have you noticed that independently of circumstances dance insists on one size, and
one size implies one strategy, one single tactic and the absolute absence of novelty or
innovation. Think about it, independent of size, every dance venue operates through
a season program. Each one of them, but why? For the big players, wouldn’t it be
better to present your program on a five year basis, it’s anyway not about to change.
No, you didn’t change program over the last 27 years. Come on you have presented
Rosas since 1982. If you have size then why not rely on it and make supersize me
moves, instead of pretending to be a middle sized venue that can’t afford anything at
41 all and a marketing campaign without budget? And for you Tiny, why do you insist on
a season program if you anyway don’t prepare productions more than a month in
advance? You just want to look like the big guy, you just want to feel important, but
man you aren’t. You don’t have the infrastructure, so stop thinking about yourself as
an international trafficking syndicate and realize you are just a local pusher without
importance. But hey, your situation is brilliant. You know, the moment you realize
who you are, consider your size, you have everything to win. Stop comparing yourself
with anything and start working. Check it out, you have had the same audience
numbers for the last ten years, sometimes a little better most of the time not, so why
not change strategy: as long as you work on season programs, your audience will not
change, and I tell you, you will show exactly the same dance season after season.
Namely: Season program dance, and how exciting is that?
Think about marketing campaigns for dance and choreography. How come that every
house, no matter what size, utilizes the exact same campaign. The idiotic accordion
with the exact same images and the exact same text length, why why why? Don’t you
have higher ambitions than that. It’s not the money, confess, it’s not! It’s because it’s
easy, because we know that it works. Make a book, a season catalogue – if they can in
visual art and business why can‘t you? Because you are lazy and a coward! And hello,
the small local venue, why do you send out 15.000 programs when you know that the
audience anyway will be 250 people per production. The print and sending out is not
for free. Why don’t you just call the people you know will come anyway, why not buy
a bicycle and go visit your audience in person. That’s gonna be convincing.
Who has decided that pieces, no matter what size the venue, can only be presented a
maximum of four times? That is the size doesn’t matter concept. Since you anyway
didn’t have enough audience for the second show, why not show it another 15 times.
Stop relying on the one size fucks all notion and start appreciating your specific
context, work with the circumstances you have instead of complaining and
victimizing yourself under pushed rental contracts and failing support.
And for the artists, dance makers and so on. Not since the introduction of lecture
performance have we seen anything new. No, everybody makes the same format,
operates with the same production rhythm and aspires to be small yet big,
contemporary and tradition preserving, a small body builder. You wont tour this year
neither, so why spend the entire budget on trying to make a larger production, you
know that Pirkko Husemann has no power and that it doesn’t matter if the show is
good or not. Either you are on the list or not? You know if you are. Stop hoping for
the best. How can dance allow itself to so completely support the good hour format of
dance performances? Why do you insist on making a quartet, give me a break? Why,
are you so keen on suffering?
And why, are you, big type choreographers, addicted to a show a year. You have the
money, you have the license, you are on the list, so why not make something
different. Why not invest in some decent mess. No, you are so embarrassingly geared
on recognition that you will always phase in on one size fits all in the end. Don’t you
understand that your reliability is the end of dance? You are not a good businessman
if you survive, you only are if you proliferate. Did you grow as much as Google over
the last ten years. You didn’t, why not. Because you rather chicken out.
Capitalism is here and it is all over the place. It is active 24/7 and doesn’t excuse
dance and choreography. We are in it big time however much we hope we aren’t. As
long as we maintain that position we are totally harmless, presenting simplified and
“fair” images of a dream world that is so already passé. Only if we give up our desire
for sameness and accept that it is all about technique, ability, adventure and
innovation, can dance and choreography make a difference.
42 Size matters, but yours is always too small as long as you don’t know how to use it,
and mind you there is no manual for that. This is up to you, you have no one to rely
on, but then check it out the only thing you have to be scared of is freedom.
Dance and choreography are wonderful, but right now, since fifteen years, you and
me, your neighbor and the art council, your producer and the middle-sized audience
have made it into a thing, a pitiful thing. It’s time to wake up, size is not what makes
the news it’s the show. Not things but action. Use your size, appreciate it for what it
is, and make it move in mysterious ways.
Magic makes size matter, what’s your trick? Come on, come on, come on set me up,
use the trap door, enter the prestige, violate me, mess me up. I don’t want to wake up
to modest excuses.
Ashtanga or Serial Killer
How to become a contemporary serial killer?
Since a while I’m carrying around this film scene. Can’t really get it out of my head,
and yeah – I think – it could be the opening scene of a sort of horror movie. If I were
caught up in that situation myself I would definitely have to hold back. It would be a
struggle with my inner serial killer. I’d have to put up all that cultural entrepreneur
kind of strength as a last effort of will to maintain myself on the right side of evil,
perverse and the unimaginable.
It’s contemporary times. A good son, say nine years old, in company with his father –
could be an architect, artist perhaps composer – entering a proper North-American
school. We see them in corridors, taking a corner and finally ending up at the
teacher’s office. Yes, it is time for that talk. Oh no, this has nothing to do with
misbehavior, relegation, class, nothing.Everything is cool. Seated, the female
teachers, perhaps forty and an inch older than that the father, goes along outlining
the general situation, touching upon some minor asymmetries, emphasizing the son’s
attentiveness and proactive behavior. Everybody is happy and the session is coming
to an end.
“-Well thank you then…” says the father with his hand on his son’s shoulder, about to
stand up. Cut to the teacher.
“-Mr Smith, your son is very creative, so…
Cut back the father. We see his hand closing around the boys shoulder, his face
cringe, hardening.
“so… imaginative.”
The father, in no time, barges over the table, tightens his hands around the teacher’s
throat. The son curios yet surprised, frozen, as his dad with rage shakes the woman
with ever more ferocity. His eyes black, hate pouring from his very being as the
teacher with a final spasm – graceful like a Meg Stuart dancer – passes over to the
dark side. She is dead, her body lifeless.
“-Nobody”, screams the father ”No-body, calls my son creative. No one, no one…
humiliates my child like that, accusing him for being imaginative.”
43 Cut. And the film goes on, the father on the run, away from justice and away from
creativity and imagination.
Admit it, you have felt the same. Closing up to the border where you might lose it
following somebody saying: “-Use your imagination.” Fuck off, imagination is for pot
smokers.
Consider the idea that there would be a rumor about you. Say, that you were very
creative in bed. No, there is no therapy against that, only the Vatican could help you:
endless celibacy.
To have your child be called imaginative equals saying she is completely mediocre,
absolutely average and a total waste of time. You know what, I prefer psychoanalysts
at least they shut up. Sociologists they promote imagination, they are the ones that
come up with creative solutions. Help me, juzuz Christ. Obviously imagination and
creativity are serious players in the movement where size doesn’t matter. Oh yes,
imagination is always within the range, it’s already suitable and just a little bit
eccentric. Creative is like another word for cute, or perhaps the more contemporary
“sweet”. Holy fuckin macaroni. It gets even better, the creative, those that know how
to use their imagination, they listen to house music. They know the title of the last
Hot Chip album and say Swedish House Mafia as if friends. Yeah. Creative people
have lunch with their parents and the pregnant girlfriend at the Moderna Museum
and would like to ride single-speed but instead go to yoga. Ashtanga, bitch!
Slavoj Zizek mentioned something in a lecture a few years ago, that, you know, one
sais that people have dogs because they can’t stand people. “-In fact”, he went on, “it’s
the other way around, we spend time with people cuz we can’t stand dogs.” This
obviously have to do with theatre, as long as we are with humans we are safe. As long
as we are with people you don’t need to face who you are. The same goes for creativity
and imagination, we use our imagination because we have something to say. It’s the
other way around, because we have nothing to say we seek refuge in imagination.
What haunts the creative is the possibility that somebody else did something similar,
that some other designer already had thought about that, or used a resembling angle.
I apologize for psychoanalysis, but you know – the creative is sort of a contemporary
hysterical, somebody that through all possible means will cover the fact that they are
totally average, mediocre and are scared shitless about risk, change and off balance.
The creative stands in front of a dilemma: I have nothing to say and I want to be
loved. I have never had an idea and I want to reach people. Great, like a paralyzed leg
insert creativity. Use your imagination, nothing is a problem. I’m fine.
Imagination is one of those words that over the last decade has changed into
something of a monster. Not as bad as creativity, corrupted into a business proposal,
a job and a class. Imagination resonates positively. To possess imagination is good
and a sign of inner beauty, but is it really? Imagination in a more radical sense is
nothing positive per se. My imagination is dark, dirty and probably perverse, but
today it seems like imagination is just well-meaning, behaving, state subsidized or
more often privately funded. Both general and individual imagination have been
corporatized, it has become a commodity, but not as a thing manufactured by kids
somewhere in China. You and me are the factories, everything and every time you use
your imagination you are working for the big corporation. It’s clear, your creatively
composed messages on your Facebook profile is you working as a volunteer for Mark
Zuckerberg, but don’t worry you’re just one of 500 million laborers. Workers
international suddenly got a new vibe.
Imagination is not free. What one can imagine is always already possible. Imaginary
things might be weird and suspicious but they are without exception installed in
44 representation. Recalling Roland Barthes, you are not the author of your imagination.
At best you are the DJ of your mind.
Imagination is not enough, it will never change anything it will just make you feel
comfortable. People complain that they dream too much, the dreams you have when
you sleep are just there to boost your identity. Imagine that! And even then you work
for somebody, your dreams, creativity and imagination are making somebody make a
lot of money. It’s called financialization, capital dispersed into forms of life,
individual and collective imagination.
We have to work harder, the only thing worth while imagining is the unimaginable.
Shape up, we have to imagine what we can’t even imagine imagining. This is hard
work and endangers the subject, but as long as we are sufficient with imagining;
blondes at beauty pageants will still answer: peace on earth.
Creativity is not real it is realized and possible, it has nothing to do with the virtual
and certainly no nothing with potentiality. Creativity is like James Bond, he might do
it with excellence but he is only licensed to kill. Remember that scene in Fight Club
where Brad Pitt gives his combatants a homework consisting in the permission to
pick a fight and lose. The subject is given permission to expand what can be
experienced, the moment is affective and “whatever”. But then of course, not even
David Fincher dares to stay, keep the cool, but here comes the creative, things starts
to change, movement, dramaturgy, scenes, silly costumes. Sadly and without any
other option the permission to whatever turns into a license to imagine. The longer
the experience lasts the more restricted my imagination, the longer it lasts the more
stylized what I’m licensed to confirm.
The teacher that announced that your kid was creative – she is dead now right – has
totally missed the point. Creative is like the centre-fold of well-meaning, good
student. Creativity is a little bit crazy, but offers nothing else than healthy
interpretation instead of insisting on production due no prior unity.
The end of creativity can easily backfire and come out like some sort of fundamental
formalism or minimal electronica that operates as cover for some slimy romantic
transcendence. To take on the task of abolishing imagination is immense, perhaps
even impossible. The problem is that it’s damn hard to fail with enough dignity, to
dare to set the things loose instead of bringing the ferry to the land of the dead safely
over the river. Creativity is like a virgin consuming pornography. A teasing promise
yet completely harmless, or perhaps better: a feel-good show for identity suckers that
claim to, but aren’t into group sex.
What’s your choice: ashtanga three nights a week or serial killer 24/7.
We’re Only In It For The Money
“We’re only in it for the money” once resonated of something provocative. When
Frank Zappa said it in 1968 echoed of a spoiled, doped, post-war American well-fare
state, surfer culture and cruise culture, with an excellent critical edge. This was the
time of active self-precarisation, free sex, hippies, a handful of liberation movement,
and an almost cute belief in the possibility of an outside. When, Ebba Grön – the
Swedish Sex Pistols (only problem, they were kind of authentic) – in 1982 baptized
their first album “We’re only in it for the money”, life was fairly different. Remember
45 – MTV launched August 1, 1981, yet the slogan had balls, carried a sense of factory
worker mixed with a firm belief in communism and at-least-look-a-little-scary. This
time self-precarious was swopped for a kind of pride slash fuck you parasite attitude.
Independently of perspective, actual or ironic, we’re only in it for the money
proposed an outside, a place where politics didn’t rule where harmony was
established and were, on second thought, life must have been like permanent house
music: boring, stylized and middle-class drunk Ibiza. But what does it mean today,
when there is no outside when there is only one option and we have no choice but to
be “in it for the money”, when provocation has been incorporated in economical
discourse, when free social networks are integral to marketing campaigns and your
biggest wish is that your product is hijacked by your customer. To name your debut
album “we’re only…” today could only be the work of either Ashley Simpson or a
Turbo-folk group from Novi Sad.
In the 60s individuals and groups made themselves precarious, moved out into the
forests and practiced free sex; cut themselves loose from middleclass USA and
celebrated the individual. In today’s political landscape self-precarisation is a wetdream for neo-liberalism, the perfect self-employed entrepreneur being so goddamn
creative and imaginative with his home made, half Chinese import, put it together
yourself services. Individual is everything, but of course we tend to forget that there is
somebody that makes piles of money on you working on yourself. Why? Well,
otherwise you’d be striving for something else. Your imagination is not yours,
Leonardo Di Caprio isn’t science fiction, contemporary capitalism is “Inception” – it’s
really good – especially Ellen Page as the young architect or is she the brain behind it
all, the business.
Be more yourself, re-create your identity from a DIY kit that is offered by every
corporate, cultural, non-profit and community agency, but identity is always
provided and produced and only the illusion of deterritorialization. Yourself is like
Kellog’s hell of lot of different ones but they are all Kellog’s and there’s no way for you
to not choose. Pas de tous, you are so fucked – doomed not only to be human but also
human with a name. Just like Kellog’s identity, the contemporary social apparatus
has terminated its intrinsic self-annihilation capacity in favor of this precise illusion,
re-create yourself through centrally distributed social networks. This social
apparatus, following Agamben, is designed to maintain itself intact, yet producing the
illusion of progress, alternation, differentiation. The result, at least initially, is the
exhaustion and empting out of energy sources. This is like a British television series
that doesn’t change the template until its far too late.
Recently Maurizio Lazzarato proposed that “capitalism is not a mode of production,
but a production of modes and worlds”, in other words capitalism has become
ubiquitous and thus obsolete to any significant critique (and we know that criticality
only is a lubricant for capitalism. Irit Rogoff, roll your eyes). Other thinkers and
economists, such as Paulo Virno, Akseli Virtanen and Christian Marazzi argue in
parallel with Lazzarato that contemporary capitalism equals life. Dualities such as
work and life, private and public, producer and consumer, subject and object are thus
falling apart and we experience an emergence of a hyper-multiplicity, i.e. an endless
heterogenization in which infinite forkings can only but play along with a capitalism
within which manufacturing, and thus conventional modes of measure, are no longer
relevant. Today, commodities and goods are like appendixes to the real shit, the
necessary leftover for the production of immaterial value, cognitive capital.
We experience a transformation of valorization processes dedicated to the production
of goods and services, processes that, so to say, are extending beyond factory gates, in
the sense that valorization enters directly into the sphere of the circulation of capital.
46 In other words an extension of the process of extracting value from the sphere of
reproduction and distribution, to a bio-economy or bio-capitalism whose form is
characterized by its growing entanglement with the lives of human beings.
Classical capitalism resorted primarily to the function of transformation of raw
material carried out by machines and bodies of the workers. Bio-capitalism produces
value by extracting it not only from the body functioning as the material instrument
of work, but also from the body understood in its globality. An example is how
capitalism has colonialized the sphere of circulation of language, semio-capitalism is
the term used by Franco Bifo, to the point of transforming the consumer into a
veritable producer of economical value. The customer is today a co-producer. The
individual is now the co-producer of what he consumes, contributing to creating the
market, producing performances, managing damages and hazards, sorting litter,
even administration. The coproduction concerns all the mass performances and
specifically services: retail, bank, transportation, free time, restaurant, media,
education, health, culture… most of culture and experience has thus become the
watchword, this is all about being activated.
Outsourcing is a common phenomenon but today it extends beyond the cleaning
service or consultants, today outsourcing has gained a new name “crowdsourcing”,
which implies that the user or consumer functions as labor, usually involuntary or in
exchange of access to e.g. a social network. Every time you login to your Facebook
account you work for Mr Zuckerberg.
This process is what Christian Marazzi has named financialization of life, which
implies the extraction of surplus value from common action such as sharing a blog
post, linking a page, commenting, but of course also sharing an experience, such as a
concert, performance or museum visit.
As long as capitalism has existed we have always been both producers and consumers
but what is taking place now is that the boundaries are dissolving. Not only in respect
of how IKEA outsourced the assembling of their products, not because they like you
and me to handle a screwdriver but because it was an option to displace a large
economy and only lower the prices of the products marginally, but in respect that life
itself has become economy. This is what bio-capitalism proposes: that the body in its
globality has become commodity, that life as such (bare life, see Agamben) has
become economy.
Leaving Fordist-production behind us also implies leaving goods and conventional
processes of manufacturing. Post-Fordist society is also leaving behind service and
enters new economical spheres, a first step was experience but today immaterial
capital, has as we have seen entered the body and its globality. If a cultural venue, e.g.
the museum can be correlated to the modes of production of society in general, the
sphere of the venue (museum) necessarily has to leave objects and its reproduction
(or non-reproduction) behind. If the 19th century museum celebrated the nation and
the 20th century museum celebrated industrial society, what is the museum
celebrating today: immaterial labor and the financialization of life?
More over, is not the institutions that we surround ourselves with correlated to
modes of production, e.g. the separation between life and labor. Thus when such
dualities evaporate, when hyper-multiplicity enters life don’t our institutions have
only two futures: to change rapidly and drastically or to become bastions of the past.
If the cultural venue and its artist should have any future the first thing to do is to
stop thinking about representation, design, audience etc and rethink what position
and how art operates under these circumstances.
Can we address the cultural venue in respect of rent, we – directors, curators etc – so
to say rent the museum from the nation, which in democracy means the people that
47 also are our clients, who comes to the museum and pay rent to take part of an
experience. This is exactly the implication of contemporary capitalism where the very
circulation of value produces economy, in the sense of work, employment, well-fare.
One could say that this is the moment where rent become profitable.
In respect of the process of enclosures, capitalist rent has been the other face of the
common. It is the outcome of a process of expropriation that is the starting point and
essential feature of the reproduction of capital over time and space.
Rent, in other words, represents not only the starting point but also the becoming of
contemporary capitalism, because as the law of value-labor time is in crisis and the
cooperation of labor appears to become increasingly autonomous from the
managerial functions of capital, the very frontiers between rent and profit begin to
disintegrate.
How, and in respect of what modes of valorization, does rent, when introduced to the
museum, become a mode of production of culture.
In order to produce art that has any validity at all we have no choice but to take up
the arms of contemporary bio-capitalism. You know there is a difference of being
corrupt and knowing corruption, let’s go all the way: long live corruption. Sell out,
unground. This is not about staying healthy and at the outside, the only way to
investigate illness is by becoming infected, engaging in pathology: paraseptic. The
first step is to engage in how the transformation of economical reality is provocative
in respect of contemporary art venues and formats, artistic and cultural production.
Yes, we’re only in it for the money.
No Fake, I Need Your Help
Casey Affleck is probably the most embarrassing person in the universe. No, not just
now but like historically. His object of study Joaquin Phoenix is fairly sad as well but
we forgive him. Joaquin is after all just an actor, but Casey – that stunt is so utterly
boring. It’s like trying to compete with amateur porn released on the Internet to boost
your career. So Paris Hilton crisis! Of course I’m dead jealous for not being in film
business. Not because of the “excellence” of the “I’m Still Here”-scam but because in
my trade there hasn’t been a dirty story since… the beginning. Wow, that’s not bad:
the filthiest, under the belt whoop-whoop produced by dance and choreography was
it’s coming into be being. — D I R T Y -– Yeah, a tip-top indecency is only good
whatever it is productive of, but the type of hoax staged by Casey is just so last Friday,
so kind of pre-recession joke.
Shit, is this where I’m turning moral. Yeah, fake is just so not cool. The position is
simply cynical, and we like cynicism, but only as a means and not as an end. Cynicism
is frequently mixed up with face-the-fact scrutiny of circumstances. To identify
asymmetries and announce their existence is not cynical, perhaps uncomfortable cuz
it’s direct and in your face but, if performed without attitude quite healthy as long as
it is not looking for protection. To complain is not much use but to realize that
circumstances if used as proposed are totally fucked is not cynical. The simplest
example is the art council that celebrates my project with 20% of the asked for
support and still expects me to accomplish the proposition from A to Z. Hello, this
means that, from now on I will increase my budget estimations with 500%, but of
course that will dump the market, so not a good idea. “-If you do that, you will
jeopardize the trust from the council.” Ehhh, yes true but since when did we have
trust? I’m happy every time they fuck me, cuz at least I feel something. Or, the theatre
group that receives only a fifth of the estimated expenses. Well, they will obviously
48 just play the first act of Hamlet. Isn’t that five acts. No no, we always try our best, at
least as long as we are not properly institutional, which is when extra hours suddenly
seem to have gone extinct parallel to dinosaurs. I didn’t say I like it but this is like
cognitive or whatever bio-capitalism, and we think art and culture are progressive?
Dude, when it comes to running a business it’s like Fred Flintsone is the director of
every (not second) dance institution.
What do you think about when you activate your out-of-office email service? You
don’t, and that’s the problem. It seems people acquire some weird gene when they get
a long-term contract or something. And more worryingly, what on earth do you think
when the return date is in six weeks? Jezuz, you have decided to work in dance and
whatever cultural bullshit and you take six weeks vacation, is that how dedicated you
are? And still you take for granted that others stay loyal and keep it up. I dig it, what
did you do this summer questions, and somebody proudly announcing a trip to a
festival, before doing the cottage in the countryside story with the kids and a good
book (a novel perhaps the Millenium trilogy). You haven’t even thought about if you
like it? Are you having better sex during or after those days off? Are you more alert
and have better ideas? I never met anybody that came back from vacation with
anything else than a tan and more bad ideas. I demand unconditionality.
Casey apparently hasn’t had vacation, bless him, nah – he’s been working quite hard
on topping his brother, and a scam is always a certain failure. The strategy of a born
loser, like an I-still-read-Marvel-comics-teenager with a firm belief in some sort of
outside, if not physical or actual then at least in the shape of a mystical brotherhood
or secret sect living on a weird island. No way, a fake never has any lasting value, it
might upset a few and produce today’s headlines that’s all. If it is good for anything it
is to stabilize already established circumstances, frames or markets. That’s the
cynical part, you are just in it for the money Casey. Your are nothing better than
Janet Jackson having Justin rip her bra off at super bowl. Casey Affleck is like a
Hollywood wannabe version of Lars von Trier whose films we never go to see but
always respect, cuz of his consistency. His “The Five Obstructions” is totally the
awesome flipside of “I’m Still Here”, cynical yes, but also absolutely unconditional in
its devotion to the medium. Lars von Trier never laughs about himself or somebody
else but only to the ridicule of devotion.
If Casey Affleck would be in dance he’d be the founder of Superamas, and watch out
for those that like it with the comment that the film or performance made them angry
for several days and therefore must have meaning and – OMG – value. Hello, you
also learn something from having your tongue freeze onto a lamppost, being gang
raped or submitting your visa card number to a porn site, but at least you learn to do
it only once. If Casey would be a director of a theatre or dance venue he’d certainly be
active in Vienna, and when photographed, strike a pose one would call: Brut. But
perhaps Casey is Ok since in a way he did dig his own grave. Like what’s his next film
gonna be about, Woody Allen?
Ladies and gentlemen, none of your strategies’ gonna make a homerun. Your silent
disagreement, biding your time to catch the right moment to utter that perfectly
balanced comment. It’s fucked dude, speak up now, don’t fool yourself you are just
scared to piss somebody off and embarrass yourself. No, your “-I just want to do my
work, I don’t have time to be angry” isn’t gonna change anything at all, to anybody
else it’s simply an expression of benevolence, and I hope you are not so naïve that you
believe that your work, like as such, has any impact. At best it’s a pawn in the
program that nobody has an idea how it came to be like that. And seriously, to fake
something to try to undermine capitalism, or markets, vis-à-vis some super clever
double conspiracy, nope that’s so cynical that even Casey can be forgiven. It will not
make any difference, it’s not shooting yourself in the foot but in the head whilst
49 having a laugh with the boys (use your French accent). There is only one way out,
speak up and do it now! We demand absolute unconditionality.
And if you say network, I’m leaving through that door. Even if you just whisper
collaboration, I’m slamming it shut behind me. If you mention co-production, I’m
gonna send my dog after you. And if you absent-mindedly write residency on a piece
of paper – you fuckin doodler – I’m gonna have you spend the night with Casey.
“-Aj aj aj, are you threatening me?” Yeah I am, of course – no I don’t think its gonna
make any difference, and yes I know you’ll reject me. Do you really think I’m trying to
be sophisticated here? I insist on being naïve, repetitive, categorical and now I’ve
shot myself in both feet. But look, this is it: I’m not faking, I’m in no way cynical, I
have no other ambitions than supersize me, I’m devastated and need your help. But
until that day, I will not come up with any decent proposal, no solutions of ways out:
I’m not “I’m afraid that’s up to you” (as one comment proposed), I’m “this is up to
you” without afraid because if I show the way I have done nothing else than declared
a politics and that’s totally undercomplex. It will at best be a little bit better, a little
bit this or that, and that for those that use the out of office service, I’m not happy with
anything smaller than the apocalypse. And that’s so not Casey, and so not Joaquin
(what kind of name is that), so not fake, so not cynical. It’s the real deal and
afterwards: you have no idea. No time to waste.
Be Special Be Free
The second most uncool person in the history of mankind right now is probably
Oliver Stone. Oh, not another I-want-to-be-special American film maker, but yes if
Casey made a fool of himself, the new “Wallstreet” movie could also have “I’m Still
Here” as catch-phrase. Another Wallstreet? Are you serious, like in 2010 – and on
top of everything with Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, again? Oliver Stone has
really made an effort to put himself in deep shit. I like it! How embarrassing,
Wallstreet part 2 – what would Hegel, Marx, Marcuse and Zizek say about about
about that? Ehh –first as tragedy the second time as farce. The addition would
obviously be that the farce might be a far worse tragedy than the first, as most follow
ups, but today it is too late even for a farce and instead we have introduced crisis
management. Is Wallstreet Oliver Stones answer to Michael Moore, how doesn’t it
deal with recession economy or become a promotion campaign for a neo-liberalism
worthy of Fukuyama. How the hell do you maneuver yourself out of sentimentality
revisiting a world where Brooks Brothers suits are what you put on when you poke
around in the garden on your roof terrace?
Oliver Stone is my new hero, totally – no, I didn’t see the film yet – it opens in
Stockholm tomorrow – he is my new hero cuz from where I stand he can not not have
understood that this can but be a flop. He doesn’t need the money, he is in no need of
fame, so why? Oliver and Michael hanging out together, brainstorming – that’s a
brilliant idea! Wallstreet 2, and they didn’t consider the fact that any broker on that
street would probably advice them not to? Or is this where myself, dance and
choreography hasn’t understood that this is what really brings in the bacon, this is
where the gold is buried: in repetitions of formats that have no future and therefore
are perfectly safe to invest in? In any case what makes money is not the quality, the
specificity or even the success of a movie, it is that is being done. The actual film is
just a token for the circulation of value, Hollywood is no longer a film industry but
like any other contemporary business – pure distribution.
50 Wallstreet isn’t “I’m still here” but “Money Never Sleeps” which we hope points back
to bio-capitalism, but it will probably in any case be hooked up with some moral BS
promoting the American way. But Michael is good, I liked him in “Falling Down” and
in “The Game” so it might be that he puts on the evil face and does it again. It would
be so amazingly fab if Stone and Douglas have made a movie about contemporary
capitalism and turned their backs to the sentimentality of the last so many years of
globalism, anti globalism, Naomi Klein, Al Gore, carbon footprints, burning cars and
an ever-growing nationalism (Fuck Denmark). What if those dudes didn’t walk into
the trap of more and more fear, and commodified fear – the Cosby show for the 21st
century – but instead turned all those fears intso simple monsters, scary things that
would go away when we turn on the light or brush them away with a broom. But that
would of course be even more embarrassing, so perhaps and I guess so, Oliver Stone
can only make a film that is deeply and utterly depressing, turning everything around
and forcing upon the spectator the idea that Hollywood is no longer suckin’ your
money, making you a passive consumer that is actually not there in the multiplex cuz
they want you to pay for the movie but so that you will spend money on nachos – oh,
I like that plastic cheese sauce – no today it’s you that consumes Hollywood, at the
same time as you are working for them, they work for you, they make you make
money. Yeah, it’s weird but this is Wallstreet, money never sleeps – the gangster isn’t
needed anymore, the hustler isn’t needed anymore, the smiling car sales man is not
needed anymore, the stock broker is not needed any more, we just need to move and
process, and money is produced. It’s the circulation that counts, this is the moment
when general intellect has turned i ching and power arbitrary.
So what are we doing in dance and choreography? I’m so happy and so depressed.
Nothing can get worse, what possibly could – that the government would terminate
the support to the local festival – they wouldn’t anyway – it’s like, hello, if I wanted to
kill you I would have shot you long ago – the local government is as much a prisoner
as we are – what bio-capitalism has accomplished is the commodification of desire.
The revolution doesn’t arise from interests or needs but from desire for desire. But
what about when desire is already a commodity, productive of economy, even in its
pure or abstract form. I thought that liberty was the dark side of our present
predicament: so wrong – the real thing is that desire itself is making money that
never sleeps. But then isn’t this the moment to celebrate dance and choreography, we
just have to jump over any ideas of gradual, upgrade, development, little by little, and
jump onto the train full-speed-ahead now. It is time that we hook up with Gordon
Gekko, hire two producers and a marketing agency before we even start thinking
about production. You don’t need to be original, you don’t need to have a good idea,
your good idea is to circulate, move, render, be mobile at any price, this is the only
way of leaving behind the powers we so like to serve, so like to get addicted to, the
poewers that boost your identity. Let’s integrate money in everything we do, it’s all
corporate, all commercial, the money you get from the council is also sponsor
economy and your only task is to make it move. It’s not about the work, it’s about
speed, but not only fast, it’s about changing the speed and making sure never to
become original. Stay mainstream, create you own territory, not because you like,
dislike, love or hate, but just because. Do as much as you can just because, be
enigmatic and undecided, be vague and esoteric, appear totally free from judgment.
Make dance pieces. A lot of them.
Be special. Be free.
ps. and I mean it, really. Respect.
51 Im Scared, but…
“Everything under heaven is chaos, the situation is excellent” said Mao – Oh no, is
Spangbergianism doing yet another loop into communism, “We’ve had enough of
your leftist jargon!” – Tahaa, nope I’m not, cuz think about it, this is exactly what
every politician that is not a present day communist sais. As long as there is chaos the
world needs politics and politicians, the moment all units are go go and house music
has turned omnipresent we don’t need politics no more. Politicians have a shared
hidden agenda, to never let stability rule the dance floor. Hence, chaos equals
excellent independence of your political aptitude, and “Houston, we have a problem”
is precisely all units are go go.
But admit it, it’s pretty cool to dare to say it like Father Mao, instead of pretending to
be a well-meaning maintenance unit, like present day politics and its staff members.
They aren’t nasty enough to be called politicians any more. Politics has come to face
the same destiny as architecture, in the old days – you sentimental fuck – architects
had ambitions, their job was to build cities, societies, worlds, futures; today architects
only desperately hold on to cornerstones that are no longer attached to buildings, but
they still do because what else is there: selling out to construction companies that
think that Greenpeace is a fertilizer. The problem is just that what else is there that
has already happened. Greenpeace IS a fertilizer and the harder you tighten your grip
around those old grab handles the easier it is to overtake you. You are not Ayrton
Senna, but just because you’re not, does not free you from the obligation to be in
control.
Contemporary politics issues a clever double play on the basis of identity. In
particular in respect of expression, politicians uphold the position of the architect of
the society, a proud yet humble servant with an ear to every citizen, but on the level
of production the story is quite another. Politicians have uncovered the wail of
today’s capitalism and realized that politics is not formed around consequence or
repercussion but has become a play with values. It’s not a matter of staying in
control, nor of trust in the classical sense, or even presenting a reasonable political
agenda, it is about risk management, based on risk understood as commodity.
However, when Mao proposed his chaos-theory it was obviously excessive of
ambition and power: personal, collective, global and pretty much amazing. It was
smooth, chaos as the absence of horizon, a chaos to be civilized, to be brought out of
the shadowlands of capitalism. And he managed, and we all helped out. Today the
excellence of the situation is rather to maintain chaos, and preferrably without
theory, but smack packed, filled to the brim with affect, i.e. unconditioned possibility.
But watch out this is not potentiality, but exactly its commodified neighbor. The real
deal of contemporary capitalism is this corporatized affect. Life in the mainstream is
no more about reliability, trust, generations and a football team connected to your
business, it’s about the ability to change, to never coagulate, never gain identity
proper, but to always show up somewhere else without negotiation, without storage
or real-estate, without employees or products. Let’s circulate.
For a while there we lived the dream and thought that change, mobility, becoming,
rhizome, BwO, wart-machines and other assemblages were the Eigentum of a
conceptually advanced population but, oups – how wrong we were, today all those
terms are the building blocks, or rather the soft-subversion with which every
company, organization and community builds their multifaceted identities.
Capitalism of today doesn’t give a flying fuck about identity, it lives on and sells
individuation. It’s not about upgrading or a new models but about innovation pure
and simple.
52 “Everything under heaven is total chaos, the situation is excellent” and I’m still
wondering why am I doing good work, and why are we all trying so hard to make
good work. If everything it chaos and that is excellent why do we make such efforts to
produce order, we do we make things that are not chaos at all but are trying
embarrassingly hard to be transparent, linear, balanced, stable and dramaturgical. In
fact I think most dance works if they were to be filmed would look pretty much like
The Lord of The Rings, filmed outside Brussels.
Dance and choreography, and art in general, is to an overwhelming amount creating
images, movements and situations that have lost every compatibility to present-day
political reality and reproduce imagery that is only there to comfort the audience,
that embraces like a grandmother in a long skirt, smelling of butter, a somewhat
liberated version of Jane Austen. The utopian, dystopian or whatever –topian is just
so feel-good and Haagen Dazs that nothing can ever happen, up or down. Dance is a
kind of well-behaving bulimic.
We, the dancers and choreographers, the immaterial workers of all times, the
champions of post-Fordism we don’t have to any more, we don’t need to feel
intimidated about our vague syntax, we don’t have to insist on composition but
should, perhaps even with a smile and some high-fiving, leave these terms behind
and celebrate that everything is total chaos, to open our eyes to the excellence and
allow ourselves to be as enigmatic as our expression. Stop making pieces about
anything at all, and especially not about identity, gender, differently able bodies,
immigrants or Katrina. We should of course make pieces exactly about these issues
but only all of them and at the same time, or without any proportion. But look, if you
make a piece about something make sure you don’t celebrate that thing, cuz you
know, celebration is always for those that celebrate not for the celebrated.
In fact we have a responsibility here, and there is no second option, we have to leave
something behind – the desire to become architects, the builders of society. We
should look only forwards and engage in the excellence and the chaos but not in
order to generate order and stability but rather to make sure chaos is getting even
more chaotic, for excellence to be a word that speaks about pushing positions.
Causality, must be left behind. Causality is like sex-toys, we think it expands our
opportunities but in fact makes us even more conventional. Sex-toys are for
sentimental souls, it makes you feel imaginative and maybe you practice some group
sex with your boyfriend, only the two of you.
To maintain excellence it is a good idea to leave the notion of the body of works
behind. To make totally unrecognizable stuff. It is not your works but the fact that
they cannot be connected, that produces the right kind of fear: a fear that makes
people move and stop holding back. Maybe even act a bit out of the frame.
In order to stay within the chaos it would be favorable to leave consensus behind. To
be judgmental all the time but never judgemental concerning the centre. Getting
obsessed with details and not only the good ones. Be extremely enigmatic with your
opinions, and change them without warning, make pieces that you rearrange every
day and yet make them very formal. Read the wrong books by Rancière, and stop
feeling guilty about reading novels. Hyperstition is the notion for the creation of
intact worlds that have no compatability to our reality.
It is time to stop thinking about yourself as a brand, to forget your Hollywood
dreams. There are no riches there for you to administer, so let’s bring the chaos on
ourselves and start making really foolish things. No, this has nothing to do with being
unprepared but perhaps about new modes of understanding satisfaction and joy. It
has nothing to do with those too long too slow rehearsal periods when nobody dares
to have an idea, and it has nothing to do with speed. There is nothing subversive in
53 being slow or fast, speed is something we consume, not produce.
We have nothing to lose except chaos and excellence, so let’s keep it alive. Let’s take it
as our responsibility to cultivate it. We must take seriously the fact that capitalism
has asked us to return affect, and turned it away from potentiality or the virtual. We
can’t rely on Deleuze and Guattari no more, we need new concepts. But you know, I
think innovation is not enough, inventions, neither, cuz they all build upon the
previous and are constructed in respect of transformation. From day to day, and we
hardly notice how inventions enter our lives and change them. We must become
immigrants – curse interdisciplinary practices – we must immigrate on a daily basis,
we must immigrate for every piece, we must break with the past, must break even
more with our known and friendly relatives and landscapes. We must immigrate in
order to be solidaric.
Change your mind for no particular reason but just because. Be as enigmatic as you
can, but this is not vain. Renounce vanity like Tilda Swinton, be modest but totally
without consistency of opinion, and from time to time, make sure you don’t fall in the
trap of becoming totally void of outlines. Make up stories about why and when, and
change them all over on a daily basis. Make projects that are totally hermetic. Refuse
risks, they are corporate anyway. Turn over a rare Ming vase at a party, and forget to
spend your subsidy. Affect is for beginners, experience isn’t much better than
enunciation. Embrace your inner chaos, change with it. I’m scared, the situation is
excellent.
More Chaos
25SEP
“Everything is under heaven is chaos, the situation is excellent”, have we heard it
before? Nah, I don’t want to, no more bio-politics now. It’s Saturday fwochristsake.
So let’s try another one.
Everybody is totally fucked up: there is not a single festival worthy it’s name, not one
dance venue that has a program; programmers, choreographers, dancers, producers,
set-designers and the guy you hire to make the music. No no no no, they are
completely over. Completely! Dance as an art-form, like you have to be pretty stupid
to make it your passion. I did, and there is something even more embarrassing about
it – it wasn’t a choice. I would of course never admit it but in fact I just ended up
here. I have a handful of almost exiting versions for why but as all you others, the
reason I’m in dance is because I wasn’t good enough for something else.
Somebody asked me why there is an absolute lack of kick ass producers in dance?
Isn’t the answer evident: because if you are any good you leave the business. There’s
no money, there is no fame, where is the fancy party? Who is the choreographer who
orders two bottles of exclusive champagne and asks the waitress to waste one – pour
it in the zink – just because it’s just too middle class to shake the bottle and spray it.
– - MTV is really the most embarrassing television channel around – - and the
business idea behind The Hills is pretty much amazing.
I have another confession, one that hurts. My first experiments in dance took place in
1990, I wrote my first reviews and took a few courses in dance-studies at the
university. In 1990, how amazingly stupid is that? I must have been blind and totally
senseless. How could I have missed out the Internet? Why didn’t I work two
afternoons to understand the rudimentary whatever about web-publishing and made
billions. I can assure you, hadn’t it been for dance I would be rich like Bill Gates
today. And what has happened instead, I work as dance teacher and write a blog. I
54 could have invented wordpress, but no – I decided for dance. I wasn’t forced, I didn’t
decide, I wasn’t passionate – and you know there was no Marcel Duchamp thingy,
you know that the ready made has to choose you – no dance didn’t choose me – I
ended up here and I stayed. Do you know what that proposes: thumb and index
fingers in a ninety degrees angle placed on your forehead. Loser LOSER L O S E R –
Leave now, get out of dance and choreography at this very moment. Don’t wait for an
opportunity, an offer from Hollywood or to be part of a band. They wont come to you.
You have a mission, to leave the domains. For each day you wait the offers become
less and less exiting. Check out, book a one way ticket asap. Go catch that flight. And
don’t you dare and come visit.
The problem with dance and performance, help me god, is of course the lack of chaos.
Who wants to invest in a business that hasn’t changed since the beginning of time?
Yeah, dance is the oldest art-form right… An idea, perhaps Belgian dance got its
legacy because it is the only country where business is so primitive that investment in
dance could appear attractive. My impatience has nothing to do with what you and
you and you are doing, I’m just so sick and tired of waking up to the same. I’m writing
every day, because I can’t wait, I can’t extend the contract any longer. My lease is over
and it just keeps going. I need a total make over. I’m not excessively fat neither do i
have seventeen children but SVP make me a total makeover. Twenty years and I’m
still curious, I want more, I want much more, I’m empty, lost, the season isn’t
running anymore, I have nothing to say and I’m not John Cage – and even if I had
something to propose I couldn’t cuz that’d be no better than any other networking
festival director dance artist art-council choreographer’s proposition. I can only
swing my arms without aiming – - I can’t retreat into yoga, it’s great, it feels tops,
makes me body triffic but I can’t – not even Youtube ashtanga – I can’t because of
how it proposes a healthy soul in a healthy body – and that woman in the yoga video
ends the session, with a flattering “rock it!” – only… I’m devastated, painful –
squeezed between an absolutely striated world of dance and total chaos. I can not
propose anything at all, and yet I must continue to write. For 100 days, I must write –
it’s a mission that can not be altered. And don’t ask why. I have to sit out detention,
no parole. A 100 days, three times more than Lindsay Lohan. OMG – the moment I
propose the potentiality of any revolution however tiny, is OVER. It’s our job together
not mine to search for the beginning, and begin. In the meantime I can only do one
thing: Betray all sides.
Take Me To Bed Now
Order, structural accuracy and separable steps could be the three watchwords of
classical production. Typically repressed people state things like: order and tidy and
you get paid on Friday (which is like catchy in Swedish), but you know as much as I
that this is passé. We don’t first design, then build, then test, then market and then
sell it. No way, that’s a waste of time and resources, but it’s also not enough to reverse
the order. That’s not change but just happy variation, says Bruno Latour – and you
know how it goes, what has to be changed is not this or that but the modes of change
themselves. So starting with the marketing is not an option.
Today you won’t get the good money on Friday if you keep up order, on the contrary,
if you do, your competitor will in no time detect your strategies and you end up in a
business agreement with Nokia. Corporate business doesn’t do “showings” halfway
through the process to which they invite competitors. No, this is all about release
dates and the right kind of cool power-point presentations. Contemporary production
does everything to produce more mess, the messier the better, weak organization,
55 strong entities, vague hierarchies and personal responsibility. Soft-undercover,
shadows, lateral production and leaking narratives.
We have to get rid of the Western model based on weak entities and strong
organization – like the alphabet – and go Egyptian, where the entity is strong, the
hieroglyph, and the organization weak. Stability is there anyway, what is needed is
speed and ability to navigate. Make sure you can change your mind, transform a
research process into a commodity, a product into a campaign and a Youtube
production made to hurt a community issue. Stability is there anyway, what is needed
is even more mobility and even less static resources. Stability is there anyway, sell
your house, don’t open a space – it’s the most stupid idea. Are you willing to pay most
of your subsidy in order to feel like a typical performance artist? Yes, I know if you
have a space your funding is secured, but dude – don’t go there – it’s a trap cuz the
increase of funding equals the amount of becoming stable, and thus being disabled
from expanding markets. Pina Bausch was the ultimate Fordist choreographer and
nothing to aspire to. Dance and choreography shouldn’t mourn and complain about
the lack of structures and big houses – look what has happened to dance in Germany
– but on the contrary use this as an opportunity. We have speed and we can use it to
not have to do what we can. We don’t need to become a communist party, but we can
occupy ourselves with lines of flight.
You know what, the most uncool ever is to evidence the process in the piece.
Make sure that you are not justifying a creation in respect of the process. More
research is bull shit, and yet it has to be there, but mind you, research is not a good
thing, but as corrupt as business, families and class struggle.
I wonder why dance still obsesses about being professional? That was important ten,
twenty or fifty years ago, but today it’s exactly the wrong question. We don’t need to
fight for our survival any more, check it out there is Queen Elizabeth Hall and
whatever de la Ville. We have what we wanted, now it’s about getting rid of it. Yes,
sure institutions, such as educations, dance venues etc need to watch out with quality
assessment, but if your art is being understood as professional quality it also means
that it is supporting established markets and measures of quality. Professional
quality is always well and balanced. If you want to make something that kicks ass you
have to accept accusations of being unprofessional (which obviously has nothing to
do with provocation, body fluids or badly prepared work). Ditch your good ideas,
exactly because they are good which means that they behave, fit and seem to work. –
The only thing professional I want is kids – - If you get invited two years in a row
your work is simply not evil enough. You can do better!
Why, and I seriously can’t get it right, do we so ambitiously try to appear bigger than
we are, to secure structures and represent our practice in relation to other art-forms.
Yvonne Rainer’s No-manifesto is not good, brilliant or even half ass smart when it
comes to producing dance – Trio A is a failure (and fuck Beckett) – - and it’s quite
boring that Rainer is making it even more of a failure today – but it is also the most
important impressive and sparkling manifesto for in what respect dance is specific to
other art-forms and expressions. It denounces the idea that dance is compatible with
any other art-form, and their positions in respect of dominant discourse, and instead
it resurrects dance as singularity. The No-manifesto should not be used vis-à-vis
expression, shape, look or attitude but in the sense of production in order to
unground our little sister complex and need for reliability, and instead intensify us to
operate exactly through volatility, vagueness, ephemerality, movement and mobility.
Yeah, as if by magic dance just ended up being totally contemporary. Let’s surf the
wave, we have one chance and there is no looking back. Do you really have something
to lose? Is what you want to keep up some more of the same?
56 Check it out, we know – our audience will remain super tiny, our future won’t be
amazing and the subsidy will not multiply, we have no chance to go commercial and
are doomed to be small, marginal, budget, exception – so let’s stop pretending
something else, and at the same time stop being forgiving and tolerant. – - Terminate
all opera ballets NOW – - No, upgrading is not an option and we don’t need them as
museums – we don’t need Dixieland Jazz museums, so why should there be operas
ballets – sure I’d be fine with an opera and ballet museum but not before we have a
contemporary venue and scene that maintains a similar amount of state coverage.
Every country that builds a new opera house, should be excluded from EU, UN, IMF
and some other abbreviations. It’s not acceptable especially as it is anyway just a
means to support local entrepreneurs, builders and security companies. Forget about
it – there is nothing good what so ever about Verdi’s Othello, nothing, not even when
staged by Alain Platel – [send me an e-mail and give me some arguments for a new
opera house in Stockholm or whatever city, please].
Let’s return here! So let’s stop pretending, the situation is excellent – basically
nobody cares about what we do, nobody bothers about dance. We are too small – we
don’t even have a decent magazine – like whatever Artforum, like even poetry has a
cooler magazine than we: “-What’s it called?”
“-Oh, the poetry one? I forgot.” That’s how bad the situation is in dance. We have no
history, no size, no money, no nothing. No nothing except, passion.
So stop thinking about one thing at a time. Stop asking for money before you start to
work, use the marketing campaign as rehearsal, rehearse in spaces that don’t belong
to you – you don’t need 150 m2 to make a dance – if you have one, it’s gonna be
exactly a 150 m2 dance, and that’s what every dance show is, so why another one –
rehearse in the kitchen, over the phone, stop wanting to be a choreographer – look
what they have done so far! Mess everything up and sell out. Stop cleaning up- work,
fuck transparency – without confusion nothing different. Stop being confused as a
means of justifying your lazy attitude. If your audience has nothing better to say after
the show than that they liked it but that it was too long, you have not done your job.
Make people ravage. Allow yourself to be boring boring very boring. Make really
small shows, and short ones. Make tanz-theater and hate dance theater. We have
nothing to justify, and hello why should we. Don’t even think about thinking about
some idea that you are privileged to work in dance. That’s the moment when you
start making really shit work. That’s like saying thank you to somebody that you just
had sex with. Look, I didn’t do it as a service. I didn’t do it for your sake. I didn’t do it
for any other reason than the fact that I like having sex with you, like a lot.
Take me to bed now, let’s dance.
A New Free sex
“-Feel free…” that’s the moment when you leave. You just walk out and into the
world, and you might actually feel free. It didn’t come as a surprise, your suspicions
were just confirmed. It all started with the word “dialogue”, became obvious with “I’m most of all interested in you and your work” and the curtain went all the way
down when the importance of taking time was emphasized and repeated. “-Feel free”,
was just the last drop and never again.
Feel free, are you totally out of your mind, don’t tell me anything about free. I decide
when I want to be liberated, it is my freedom, and watch out, you don’t want to have
anything to do with it. The moment you oblige me to feel free you have done nothing
smaller than obliterated any opportunity to free anything at all. The more free you
want me to be the more bulimic I’ll become. Feel free and you have already decided
how free looks, how it performs a certain pleasant conviviality within the boundaries
57 of contemporary liberal capitalism. Free as in individual yet confirming your, i.e. you,
existence. Indeed you have to pursue your personal interests for actual freedom.
Workshop, workshop, workshops – something dance and performance have
developed a rather obsessive relationship to. And how many times have I, you, we
heard the workshop host tell us to feel free. Yeah, sure it might have been important,
however fucked up during the heyday of hegemonic well-fare state West. Feel free
might have been an option when Erica Jong, a kundalini handbook and your copy of
Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” where collaborating on
your night table, but today feel free is like asking me to become a communist, and I
don’t even remember who Uncle Ho was?
Similar with this dialogue BS. Why would I participate in a workshop, perhaps even
pay for it, to have a dialogue? I have dialogues everyday all the time, I’m fuckin full of
social networks, Skype and SMS-hyteria. Let’s me be, talk to me and I’ll listen I didn’t
come here to chit chat, that’s what the world is made of, so why. – -Do I look like
someone from Williamsburg – Look, workshops aren’t for lonely people that go
shopping to have somebody to talk to. And you are not responsible to make them
happy, but rather the contrary – be hostile. I participate in a workshop to get as much
information as possible, pack me full , and have no desire at all to listen to the
workshop host having a dialogue with some whatever dance artist from Scotland that
missed the train already decades ago. Or, oh my, the older artists that participate in
workshops who haven’t understood that their career options are totally over and can’t
stop telling anecdotes without a punch line. No, I’m sorry I’m not giving workshops
to engage in dialogue, this is about knowledge production. Full stop.
And we all know what the urgency for taking time actually is? It’s just a means to try
to disguise that I haven’t got that much to say and in fact I have no idea what I’m
doing here. The taking once time hang up – goddamn I hate artistic research and its
petty arguments around slowing down and meeting other artists – I have nothing but
artists around me and most of them are far too slow – the hand up is not for you it is
for the sake of the workshop host. Look, I can take my time the whole year, every day
if I want. I take my time right now. And if I want to take my time it’s certainly not by
slowing down. Long silences are not an evidence that a workshop is good, intense or
mind expanding, it’s more often just the result of not being good enough. Slowing
down doesn’t imply a critique of capitalism, slow is already incorporated and a
concept Jamie Oliver sold to Channel 4.
Workshops are a menace. Don’t take them, they are bad for you, and make you a
devotee to people that want attention. What do you think you will learn from a week
five hours a day with who ever artist? Do you think Robert Stein will provide a
revelation, that Tim Etchells will show you the light or Ivo Dimchew make you make
a solo worthy yourself? Stay home, don’t fall for it. Make your own workshop if you
need, it’s there all of it on the internet, and internet won’t need your confirmation.
The workshop host just wants to be loved. Make your own and love yourself. I mean
why do you give workshops? Because you are so busy touring your own works?
Because you run a large-scale dance company consuming the festival circuit? I don’t
think so, we are d’accord right, people that give workshops are losers. Expel all
workshop hosts, put them all up in some reality show on a deserted island, and start
doing it yourself.
Think about this. The reason why workshops are so bad is because if they were not
then the mediocre artists would gain opportunities in teaching that would stand in
the way for the upkeeping of the mediocre career in the field, and that in its turn
would subtract even more belonging and sense of being a choreographer or
performance artist. Workshop are bad because they have to, not because of lack on
58 knowledge. Wishful thinking? Stop taking them.
At the same time workshop is obviously totally contemporary. The piece-making
choreographer enjoys Fordist economies and modes of circulation, which basically
means convincing an audience member that his so or so much of money was worth
investing and on top of that the approach to the world proposed was so cool that I –
the spectator – will change my mind about… like everything. Not very likely, but in a
workshop the whole idea is that the participant has already decided that the situation
is awesome and I’m here to be transformed. Deliver motherfucker, yeah. And stop
thinking that knowledge should be linear, clear, casual and sympathetic to general
narratives. No no no, the workshop host’s job is not to regurgitate but to ruminate
with the participants. But of course to ruminate totally inside out, to process
knowledge – practical and theoretical – in ways that make the participant completely
dizzy.
Don’t try to give another one’s workshop, insist on the format being you and nobody
else. Be a capitalist, be the Gordon Gekko of Arsenal, i.e. the Wallstreet of dance
workshop. David Zambrano, is amazing, but he is also the last giant. There is no place
for such anymore, no workshops can be fresh and groovy for half a century.
Workshops are like pop music best before and best before is right now quite soon
(which of course is excellent, the alternative is stagnation and bore). Technique is
over, skill-based training is dead, workshop is about becoming specific, fuck experts,
the next cool thing is all about competence.
Workshop today is not about freeing somebody, perhaps the opposite – yes indeed
the problem is that people are so fuckin free they have no idea of what they are doing
or what doing is – nor about facilitating knowledge. Workshop is a line of flight, a
convergence gone astray, it is a set of circumstances that organizes responsibility,
social relations, power and knowledge in ways that at the same time obeys the rules
of capitalism and simultaneously proposes the possibility of another systematics.
Don’t give workshops to survive, but to die a little.
Workshop is amazing the moment you give up your pretence to knowledge. The
market of performances and dance pieces are saturated and fucked from left to right
by networks, subsidy frames and coward programmers. But workshops, obviously, is
the place to be – dance pieces are things, workshops are cognitive production – so
where do you want to be. Dance pieces are things, workshops are experiences and
transformation – so where do you want to be?
Workshops is where we can experiment, make fools of ourselves, come up with
absolutely idiotic stuff and talk for too long, like really too long and like every day for
two weeks. It’s brilliant, and you have endless opportunities to manipulate people,
brainwash them, if you want. Yes Benoit Lachambre is a great teacher but the only
thing he does is to make you him. Workshops featuring legacy, is so not
contemporary. Fuck that, I manipulate you to become different than me, that’s the
future, my job is to individuate you. Shake you out of belonging and make you make
the impossible move. Away away away, to a free that has no feelings, to a free that
knows no interests, but is desire pure and simple.
In the workshop we have nothing to lose so let’s lose it. And hey, don’t you dare to say
thank you. I didn’t do it as a service. I didn’t do it for your sake. I did it just because.
Just because! Workshop is like the contemporary version of free sex, free group sex.
We Like What We Do
59 28SEP
Take drugs. Law abiding citizens are not for us. Enjoy all kinds of mystical stimuli.
We have excluded the word addiction from our vocabulary. “-Good, no?” Take drugs
but refuse the idea of user. User directed networks, quite embarrassing. Instead take
drugs. I like alternative movies, indie films, French movies, even. But alternative
cinemas, movie theatres, is to say the least a bit comme si comme sa. They smoke pot
those people and some have colorful tattoos on one arm. Not such a good idea. Take
drugs. You would obviously never take drugs at a party or whilst clubbing. Take drugs
on Tuesdays, around two in the afternoon. That’s a good moment, and preferably
alone. One should keep away from taking drugs with close friends of the same sex,
and never with persons to which one have whatever amorous relation. Sex on cocaine
is really overrated. Avoid that.
Dance – - dance a lot, but don’t become a user. Enjoy all kinds of movements – up
and down, even side to side – but reject any temptation of becoming a dancer, and
even worse a choreographer. You “are” not a choreographer. Choreography is
something one does, not something that defines one’s being. You know it already, but
this cannot be repeated enough many times, it’s a profession, a job, work, trade, and
it is not a calling. You don’t have a gift, you are not addicted! Madonna was right all
the time, choreography is like love, it’s something we do. The moment it touches
upon something else – obsession – it all goes down the drain. Obviously, somebody
that would consider that love is something special, not just an activity, or
choreography a calling, would be both a worthless lover and choreographer. Why,
well if it’s not entirely in my own power but actually choreography, on some
transcendental basis that makes choreography, I can but confirm choreography. I
want a lover that decides, not one that is addicted, not a user. I want me lover to take
me on Tuesday around fourteen hundred hours, not after the party, half drunk and
not completely decided, but you know…
Passionate. When somebody is baptized passionate, “such a passionate person” you
know it’s time to disappear. We don’t want passionate, that’s like worse than calling.
We want reason, labor, activity, style, superficiality, sex, darkness, carnival and
putrefaction but, by God, not passion. Passionate is self-promotion and conservative.
At the end of the day it’s simply narrow-minded since it prefers quantity in front of
quality. People that are passionate about dance utter things like, maybe it wasn’t a
masterpiece but at least they are doing something. That’s very bad, very very bad. At
least- is never good. Tell people to stop, me too – dance should better die, be
terminated for good than “at least” be doing something. Fuck passion, let’s go to
work. Quality is also fucked up, but that’s another story. Stop your disgusting desire
for dialectics. We can think without it!
Passion is not enough. Passion is enthusiastic and forgiving. Passion is like
alternative cinemas. Passionate individuals say that they organize things laterally,
they give workshops were you feel stuff but only what you are supposed to. Vera
Mantero is passionate, and she improvises. Passionate people take an interest in
opening up, – Oh, I was close to vomiting right now – opening up the body, exploring
its limits and depths. But opening up is always in style, it always defends the body
vis-a-vis a state of barbarism. They worship the body as a possibility for a deeper
experience, for something not civilized, for something that language can not grasp.
Jezuz, those are the people that will betray the revolution. Abolish them, send them
to France – oh my they already live there.
I prefer poetry. Poetry is really good. I like poetry because it is excessively and only
created. There is no deeper experience in poetry. It’s just language straight up. Poetry
is not passionate, but constructed. It’s precise and not about breathing. When
60 somebody starts to talk about poetry in respect of rhythm, change the subject. We
like poetry because it is inorganic, superficial, non-human. We hate passion because
it wants us all well, we denounce passions because it strives for oneness. We love
poetry because it is violent and aggressive. We do poetry because it divides,
differentiates and breaches.
Passion is not enough it’s passive and reactive. We totally don’t “just do it” – that’s
like Beckett – gööööööö. We do things, we do things, we do things, we do things,
because we refuse to stick to what we know. We are pretending to be fanatics, but
what we do is poetry, not music – no no no we make sounds. We don’t organize them,
we just make sounds, poetry, we make ourselves non-human. We do things, we do
things, we do things like Egyptians – hieroglyphs – poetry made of strong entities
and weak weak weak connection. Connections so weak they can only be made, only
manufactured, only artificial. Connections so vague, sounds so superficial, poetry so
hollow, we become inorganic. That’s what we do. We are not passionate, no chance,
but we like what we do. Today.
Suck Your Own Blood
“-Oh no, don’t do it… Don’t, not the ladder, not the attic.” It happens every time, why
do they have to, all these nice American adolescents ready to be slaughtered, cut to
pieces, ripped apart, their panic ridden gazes, and I know it’s just a film and it’s
supposed to produce fear, and still I can’t hold back. “-Don’t go there!” I’m addicted
to fear. Makes me feel alive. Fear is my new autopoiesis, it’s silent like my
psychoanalyst. It’s not the violence, blood or gore that makes it, it’s suspended time,
the lack of telos that attracts me. The blood part might be scary and disgusting, but
that’s just a matter of cleaning up, using an efficient tool or wearing rubber gloves.
Fear is the shit, and it is fear exactly because it’s not recognizable and offers no
solutions. That’s exactly the groovy part; fear is the experience of authenticity. Fear is
my new sexual phantasy, the latest wet dream produced by capitalism, and the
experience of authenticity its latest commodity.
No, it’s obviously not about becoming authentic – you will still have your
performativity – it’s about the experience of authenticity, which can only be provided
by a simulated situation that disqualifies telos, that departs from communication in
favor of pure communicability, or from causality, and instead calls for, so to say,
disinterested movement, gesture without signification. This experience is necessarily
individual, it is not as we have seen discursive and can not be inscribed in modes of
interpretation; it operates directly on subjectivity, i.e. on one’s own subjectivity thus
becoming a product one consumes.
Make pieces that produce fear. That make the audience pale, totally fear ridden when
helplessly applauding at the end of the performance. Affect, our last outpost, has
become commodity. It’s pretty much amazing, global capitalism has managed to
finanzialize potentiality as such. But as much as fear can produce economy and
stability, in respect of immobility, fear can also become productive of other
economies and instability, corruption. Insist on fear, put your spectators in a state of
an endless “don’t go there”. This has obviously nothing to do with proposing
something violent or spectacularly dangerous, not at all, what is scary is excessive
abstraction. An abstraction produced through strong entities and extremely weak
connections. Fear is precisely the lack of connection, organization and frame. Fear
isn’t collaborating, isn’t negotiating, it doesn’t talk to programmers, doesn’t love its
audience, doesn’t present itself: fear exists.
61 Vampires are last Friday and their films a sentimentalism vis-à-vis a long gone
capitalism organized around materiality and what can be extracted from the
environment. The zombie is a kind of immaterial worker, travelling in flocks
compulsively laboring as pure activity. The new zombie isn’t a Bolshevik or some grey
communist, oh no nowadays the zombie is a interior decorator, lives in London, puts
on well-balanced house music in his office, drives a SUV and is really good with the
kids. Haven’t we become auto-vampires, consuming our own subjectivity, like
sucking ones own blood. Capitalism has entered its homeopathic era, we are in a loop
that produces economy due an endless consumption of one’s subjectivity.
We have no choice but to be meta-vampires suckin ourselves, but to the same extent
that capital can produce experience of this kind, so can you and me. We have no
choice but to engage in the worst most ruthless and amazing financial and capitalist
strategies, and in fact we have no choice, cuz we can’t have any other intentions than
to do the same. There is no disguise anymore, we can only produce more, and there is
no escape but that is perhaps an opportunity as well as… I like it, the possibility of
consuming one’s own attention, that’s when hyper-camouflage becomes tangible.
It’s sort of fearful in itself, but you are aware about the fact that your next, and my
upcoming piece will deal with time and space – - yes, that shit that we have always
rejected as a bad excuse or some sick relation to exploration (btw exploration is a bad
word, it’s like bad education: patronizing) – - but this time it is not what time and
space can do, or what the body can do with, or in it, but rather a matter of producing
time as pure duration (unconditioned time) and a space without signification. This
isn’t some sillilitude about smooth shit, oh no this is a time that can but be
experienced although not measured, related or codified, it is a space that intensifies
experience but offers no horizon. This is like an endlessly suspended journey up in
the attic. There won’t be nobody to say boohoo, no ghost that can removed with a
brush or monster that needs a visit to the dentist, it will be nothing at all and that is
just fear. Colorless fear.
Last Meeting People
Scrutinize yourself, what kind of a person are you? Are you a person that has
opinions, do you express other’s opinions or do you actually stand tall? Are you ready
to clench fists and pay the consequences?
Tell you what, opinions are like creativity or imagination, a great medicine for people
that want to remain on the safe side. Opinions are for graphic designers and
musicians that make soundtracks for dance pieces. “-It’s a good way to fill the gaps in
my economy”, exactly, you talk about your devotion, the importance of your own
project, but in fact you don’t have a project, or your project will always just be a
project. Stop pretending and get yourself a kid.
Opinions are a means to stay under the roof, to maintain yourself within the balanced
and well-meaning. Stop it.
Most people in the arts have understood that having opinions is a good and healthy
strategy. Have you forgotten that opinions are not about to produce urgency – which
is a pissy word – or, say, any impact on the current situation. Opinions are just bad
excuses. But of course – - OMG – - you don’t want to dismiss an argument, appear
narrow-minded or categorical, but is that really the situation? Just because you
occupy a position doesn’t necessarily mean that you are obsessively about to converge
every other person. Opinions are just for you who want to surround youself with
62 consensus, or the illusion of it. Take a stand, give me something that contests my
position. Beat me up.
In the creative industries including art a particular character has emerged. The so
called “last-meeting person”, you know people with a little bit of power but not on the
top positions, that change their perspective in respect of their last meeting, and I tell
you those people have a lot of meetings. These are people that want to, and find it
important to have opinions, but the sad thing is that the opinions that they have
always belong to the person that they met last. It’s particularly common among dance
programmers – dramaturges hired by dance venues, ouch – and you wonder: “-aha,
oh that was a u-turn. Oh, but that’s actually a reiteration of the opinions of…” Those
people are obviously far smarter than myself, because they have understood that this
is a strategy that makes them immune to any claim, subject to any conflict and always
benevolent to everything. On the other hand those people are always afraid, always
scared and they sleep well at night but they have never experienced fear. But then
they have never had anything else than half bad sex, and they are sloppy bottoms.
The only really bad thing with those is that they end up in dance because they are too
stupid to fit into some other more lucrative business, and they support each other
endlessly. Sit in each other’s boards, sleep in the same bed, and produce more
blanket-like policy that avoids exclusion of any kind at any cost. What the last
meeting person fears most of all is collateral damage.
They endure. They know they are not really loved or even appreciated but they
persevere until too many have forgotten that they have nothing to offer, zero to add
and are totally void of conviction. Those people would never give up their salary, but
love to complain about bad budgets, they are full of see-through excuses “-We would
really like to present your work but…” – you are so lame you can’t even tell me up in
the face. They persevere until they are just part of the landscape and impossible to get
rid of.
Scrutinize yourself, do you actually have an opinion, or do you prefer to repeat after?
Take a stand, I know it’s impossible but just do it. Get ready to lose your honor, if it
can’t be stated on the basis of expression to take a stand can also mean staging the
impossible and living the consequences. You won’t be successful, because your
position will not be confirmative to all and everybody, but are you ready to give
yourself up for general accessibility. Are you that cheap? Sell out without return. Take
a stand, and you will fear –but at least you will know you are alive.
Fuck opinions, they like you, like creativity, imagination, concentration and
enthusiasm. Take a stand, stop thinking vis-à-vis policy, act categorically, be fanatic.
Utilize instruments you can’t master, play Helmut Lachenmann and do it as loud as
you possibly can. No, louder than that and with a sub-woofer.
How Fascinating
“-I think we have reached a good mixture”
Is that a good moment? Yes, absolutely if preferable conditions rhyme with
comfortable, appropriate and recommendable. So what do I propose? Am I so naïve,
so naïve that I haven’t comprehended that such assault is open doors and as effective
as a communist party in 2010. Totally self-protective and counter productive in
respect of any change or differentiation. Isn’t it a bit too easy to accuse every single
individual on the planet, not even involved in dance, for being absolutely worthless,
void of any guts, having bad hairdos and being ass lickers. Not exactly pro-active or
63 sensitive to reality, and evidently just a matter of being mediocre and jealous. Indeed
I think it all fits fairly well with my signature, but then am I going soft in October?
Fuck no, I’m so not. I’m gonna go on kickin’ in open doors, being obstinate beyond
embarrassment and burnin my boats in all directions. I have no smaller ambitions
than to be absolutely abolished.
“-I think we have reached a good mixture”
I like it, the population of good mixture people will obviously support the categorical
position cuz it affirms their accuracy, and whatever half crazy artists have of course
no impact. So we have really reached a good mixture, and I’m an excellent little
topping on the good mixture tart. But fuck, how can it pass without at least a small
outcry that somebody proposes a dance performance called “Anarchiv” and that it is
presented for a paying audience. Where else would such a title pass? Oh, I know, in
that department of black metal music that has renounced Satan. Another
embarrassing title: “Are We Here Yet”, Pö-leeze – is that all we can announce after
twenty years of activity. Full of tacky images of dramatic moments, enigmatic spaces,
bodies and on top of that a collage of minor texts and interviews giving witness to the
activities of an amazing individual. I hope Martin Scorsese will make a documentary
about you. One thing is for certain you will spend the rest of your life surrounded by
people that suck you like vampires and will abandon you the moment you are not
reproducing job opportunities, security and a spicy touch.
William Forsythe is not a god, stop being so fuckin fascinated. He just makes dance
performances, and they are not necessarily good. Haven’t you fuckin devotees
understood that you are doing the guy a bad favor? If you at least told him that this or
that was plain bullshit, he’d have to consider – but now, come on, give the dude a
hand, stop confirming. Stop being so fuckin fascinated. What is it, really what is it?
Tell me, tell me right now what’s so special, what’s so specific? You have no idea, you
just like to be amazed, like to be around creative minds.
Somebody tells me, about the last work of I can’t remember the name, “-It was really
well done” – Yeah, first of all that’s an insult to the artist. What do you mean, well
done – that’s like – announcing that you voted for the liberals because the
candidates’ wives were really well dressed. Well done, means superbly packaged
indifference. And you know what the person said, before the well done sentence, that
he wasn’t sure about the content. I guess you also take an interest in good wine. You
fuckin hobby sommelier.
Somebody announcing himself as a gourmet, get the fuck out. Those people are value
conservative liberals with a bad breath. They preach good mixture, and address their
wives with a well-balanced chauvinism. They are bad in bed and are happy when
others experiment but prefer mod culture.
Well done, my ass. You have designer chairs in your too small kitchen.
“-I think we have reached a good mixture” – no no, hold it some more ranting about
fascination.
In the studio, the dancer being grateful for being allowed to work with the elevated
choreographer – - you know, of course those dancers or whatever position that they
take obviously appreciate the work for totally the wrong reasons, usually because it’s
classical references and for the joy of dance – - fascinated. Curious about everything
the choreographer says, amazed about every detail. Oh, that’s disgusting: “-He has
such an eye for detail” or “-It is really in the details that his genius can be felt.” Or –
Gööööööö – this one “-Yes, but you know if you haven’t worked with him in the
studio…” Don’t be so fuckin fascinated.
One more thing, everything that touches on chaos theory, abandon ship! Chaos
theory is for fascinated people, it’s like the chemistry box for eight-year-olds, or like
64 for people that think it’s exciting to visit the attic and all those mystical things. Chaos
theory is for people that prefer no solution and business as usual.
“-I think we have reached a good mixture” – that’s what the dramaturge working with
the fascinating choreographer proposes. Get rid of your dramaturges, they work for
the dark side. And if they ever propose a text by Foucault regret that you ever hired
the person. Rid yourself of the dramaturges, they just want a job. Look, the manager
is at least honest about it: if you don’t make money the manager, your producer will
simply leave, immigrate to another continent. But the dramaturge he is a fuckin
snake. Do you think he works with you because of your work. No way, he or she
works for you because you provide fame and a place in the sun. The dramaturge is a
dramaturge because he or she has nowhere else to go.
It is time for dance to emancipate itself from the stuck up minds of dramaturges and
let the body lead the way. Dramaturgy is a fundamentally discursive practice that
disregards the body and its movements. It is time that we release the body from it’s
hostage situation. We have to free the body from the kidnap drama before it starts to
develop some Stockholm syndrome, starting to defend the dramaturge. Only if we let
go of our dependence to the dramaturge, only if we realize that they are snakes that
feed on our practices, only when we acknowledge that the dramaturge is a double
agent hired by the local venue or the art council can we bring dance into the future.
The dramaturge is somebody who once read Patrick Suskind and denies it today,
somebody who promotes coherence.
“I think we have reached a good mixture”
I’m happy, and I am announcing myself as the spokes-person for good mixture. But
dancers, choreographers, laborers in dance and choreography, promise me one thing:
make your own good mixture. Stop being fascinated, relying on the dramaturge or
chaos theory. Stop making dance theatre, stop talking on stage, stop using theatre
tricks, stop expressing happiness, don’t trust the effects proposed by deconstruction.
You are the ones that make it happen, so make your own good mixture and fuck em
all.
Why Don’t We Have Sex Instead?
What is this talk about the spectator emancipating himself? Oh, I know it’s old school
and so 2005, but I still hear it out there, e-man-ci-pa-tion – that’s a good word to use.
Bah, most dance has no desire to emancipate anything at all and perhaps they’re
better off with their curious yet surprised view on the world. No emancipation. No
way, it’s just business as usual. You know that choreographers have no idea. No idea
what they are working on nor why. It’s just some inner feeling that makes it happen,
sort of mix between poetry, I want to be an artist and business-mindedness. The
worst is interest. Bleuurgh! “-I’m interested in…” this is bad, very bad. What do you
mean you are interested in…? I believe it means the cultivation of unconventional or
even foreign capacities remaining within a given territory. It also means to postpone
a possible statement and remain negotiable. People that are “interested in” won’t
stand up for their shit, totally not ready for the emancipation and that’s where we
misread Ranciere. Eat this, if our spectators emancipate themselves they won’t come
back to the theatre.
Emancipation is for art what sex is for the discothèque.
I always thought that the main purpose for the disco was to have the guests rush
home for a bang-fiesta. That the colored light and sweaty music was there to make
65 you and me absolutely crazy – so it’s getting hot in here – we’d perform oral pleasure
already in the taxi. How utterly disappointing to realize that discothèque isn’t on a
mission for free sex. They don’t even want a bit of petting or a sensual moment
without clothes. Furk, what happened to idealism?
In fact, it’s the other way around: disco is there to make us go home alone, to skulk
back to base solo, wake up miserable or fiddle with ourselves until we doze
off exhausted ridden by dreams where we have sex with an ex that left us for
somebody younger. A Greek composer, or an eco friendly furniture designer. But,
oups – back to the disco! Exactly that’s what the disco wants, it wants us to come
back, again and again. They don’t make money on us practicing multiple orgasms or
even trying out the strap on. The disco, my friend, The Disco is performing the
promise of wow… fuck me, harder, that was sooo good. And it will do its very very
best in letting you down night after night, night after night.
If The Swedish House Mafia is on a mission it’s not sex on the beach when the sun
comes up, it’s about making Ibiza free from sexually transmitted inconveniences. If
you are into sex, stop dancing. Of course we already knew that musicians all are
sexually frustrated, but the DJ is an individual with a deep sexual trauma, something
about guilt, coming too early, or size, and thus substituting the sexual act with beat
mixing and a back-spin. – - I’m coming – - But the disco is, I must confess, slightly
benevolent to one night stands. On the basis of repetition, let’s have another one
tomorrow… – and fear, like the pest, that you and I start a relationship. The disco
hates kids, it’s the evidence for failing to fool us in relation to that promise. The disco
wants you to stay, it wants us to sweat and dance and drink as fuckin much as
possible, every night, until six in the morning and let’s go on. That’s what the disco is,
for making money and we don’t shop when we are doing it again on the hotel room
floor.
Same with emancipation, dance and theatre don’t want it. Just the promise and it
should fail time and again. I like it, when we go see those critical dance and theatre
groups, they are so incredibly theatre – you know something is loose upstairs – the
elevator is not going all the way to the top thing – that they don’t even know that they
are performing the promise of an emancipation that they wish to fail. Emancipated
spectators know that theatre is stupid, they don’t come back. So next time you are
about to take off for a dance show, forget about it and have sex.
Myself? I’ll go see a show now. What could be better on a Sunday evening…
Spit On The Dramaturge
The dramaturge is a useless person for useless choreographers. Full stop. That’s just
it! From a classical point of view, like – who the hell is an artist that needs assistance
with the work? I’d never hire a dramaturge, it’s an announcement, loud and clear: I’m
useless, have no idea what I’m doing and I’am totally confused. A dramaturge? What
is this person supposed to do, what on earth could he or she offer. Research, yeah
sure, but obviously the dramaturge will only present what is reasonable, what is along
the lines of a present agenda in dance and choreography. But why, because the
choreographer’s job is to confirm the validity of the dramaturge and therefore a
dramaturge will never take the risk of being dismissed. The dramaturge is for dance
and choreography what a parole officer is for a freedom.
But, you say, there must be some example of… dramaturge? No, there can’t be, cuz
the job as such proposes “mediocre”. Either you are a dramaturge and totally
irrelevant or you’re not. Dramaturgy is like waste sorting, an excellent method to
66 postpone the collapse, but so not saving the world. Dramaturgy is the antithesis of
innovation. It’s one of those activities defined by more of the same.
From a more contemporary perspective, you so don’t need a dramaturge. You know,
the dramaturge by definition defends classical values of art. Why? Because if they
were not, they’d be artists, scientists or mad professors, which obviously is a no no
for the dramaturge, since it would undermine the autonomy of their position.
Denounce every study program in dramaturgy. Dismiss every dramaturgy
conference, seminar or little course. Spit on the dramaturge and their occupation as
you spit on psychoanalysis and it’s supporters: Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, all those
terrible British filmmakers – Uhhh, there are too many of them, the list is endless.
Denounce Slavoj Zizek, blame him for expanding psychoanalysis into a generic,
universal world view. Psychoanalysis is evil, it’s the little brother of consolidating
capitalism, and exactly like dramaturgy, it is there to bring your sick mind and your
anomalies back into normality. Dramaturgy is the antichrist of revolution.
Seriously, a dramaturge that occupies him or herself with psychological effect or
accuracy, no no – or symbolic meaning OM-fuckin-G – that’s unforgivable. Dance
and choreography is great, exactly because it doesn’t represent emotions, psychology
or anything in that direction. We have a lot of feelings, emotions and what not when
we dance but praise the lord we do not represent psychological states. Abolish
symbolism and keep up the dance.
Dance don’t need no explanation. And a piece should stay the hell out of some self
explanatory hick up. Don’t do this to yourself, it means self-instrumentalization, cuz
you’d like the explanation to fit the world, make your work accessible. – - Die – That’s not your job, insist on hermetic, enigmatic and totally incomprehensible.
How can it be that all those programmers and art council staff, managers, coproducers, jury members and post-performance talk people always want us to be
radical, experimental, demanding, out there, mind blowing, questioning,
destabilizing and then, the second after, everything should, must, unconditionally be
explained, packaged, given context, again and again explained. If we want anything
radical, anything to have a lasting impact on instability it won’t give itself to
explanation. Dude, we talk about folds, right – not explanation. The whole world
talks about complexity and all we ever wanted was explanation, accessibility,
accuracy.
The dramaturgy is the in-house version of packaging, making your great, totally
ridiculous ideas handsome, well-meaning and decent. Don’t fire the dramaturge, how
could you, you don’t have one – but set the whole dramaturgy department on fire.
They are for dance and choreography what ecology is for the world: a defense of
outdated, non functional systems, a celebration of self-incapacitation.
We don’t need no explanation, stop babbling about context. Fuck the dramaturgical
embrace and use your fists. Do it again, spit on the dramaturge.
Surfing The Void
Oh, you thought I’d let you go that easy. Not yet, maybe not soon. Fire your
dramaturge. Fire your dramaturge. – - how tiring – One more time: Fire your
dramaturge. It doesn’t matter if he or she shows up once a month it’s still the
dramaturge. It doesn’t matter if you listen to him, or if you keep him on a leash, it’s a
dramaturge. Fire him.
“-Yeah, but I need him, cuz I’m in the piece and it’s important to have an outside
67 eye.” Oh yes it is, but not a dramaturge. Call your mother, ask your brothers ex to
come by, they also have an outside eye and I tell you it’s totally much more outside
than the dramaturge. The dramaturge is a parasite, he sucks you dry, he makes you
make good pieces – but they won’t sell – and you tell the world that he is okay the
moment he is in your evening program, on your webpage, on your mind. You
authorize him or her, you are responsible, isn’t it enough that your work is being
destroyed. Do you need to tell others it’s a good idea too? Don’t do this to all these
upcoming choreographers that don’t need a nanny, and still believe to believe in
themselves.
No wonder Akram Khan went down the drain so fast – the dramaturge. Watch out,
the worst kind of dramaturge speaks Flemish. Not that I think any of those
choreographers could do work that is worthwhile sitting in the dark for, but it would
certainly be much better had they fired that disgusting spineless creature in time.
Perhaps one or two of those choreographers, or whatever name we could come up
with cuz when seeing their shows I can’t ever count to more than eight or perhaps
nine seconds of choreography, the rest is more like charades and capoeira
enthusiastic dancing around. The dramaturge never knows anything about
choreography. He has read a few books, and written some opportunistic texts about
multi-culturalism, a lab in Vienna and any admirable choreographer with structural
subsidy.
But let’s call these peole choreographers for now, and yes, perhaps one or two of
them might have stopped hadn’t the dramaturge encouraged them, one more – “I
know you can do it. I stand by you all the way through.” – that’s what the dramaturge
is so good at; being a parasite that keeps the host alive forever. The dramaturge is for
dance what restoration is for visual art.
The dramaturge is original in the most predictable way and preferable with a
historical touch to it. He is so nostalgic that his sexual fantasies feature older women.
Do you think Don Corleone had a dramaturge? No, he had a hit man. Do you think Al
Capone surrounded himself with some skinny dude with a notepad and an older
laptop? I don’t think so – no he had a muscleman – oh no, not very intelligent – who
was ready to take a bullet when shit hit the fan. I tell you one thing, your dramaturge
will duck and cover in the dressing room the moment the soft breeze of collaboration
turns into stormy arguments.
Fire him.
Get this, programmers often have a background as dramaturges. A lot of them… don’t
trust them! They don’t have opinions they just appropriate, they are thieves that store
their goods in a garage, so greedy they wont even sell their TV-sets on eBay – they are
so not pirates, they don’t steal in order to maintain themselves mobile or become
sovereign. Dramaturges are by definition proprietary, they are interested in looking
like creative commons but no fuckin way, they are parasites.
There is one reason to use a dramaturge, and that is a bad one. Programmers of a
certain type will be more benevolent to your propositions and co-production asslickin’ meetings if you also talk about your dramaturge. Don’t bring him ust talk
about her. And when, which will happen the dramaturge wants to come with you on
tour, it’s not for you, it’s to get another job. Have him stay home and continue to
fantasize about…
Why, I mean the programmers benevolence? Oh, obviously the dramaturge is
evidence that your show will in no respect challenge anything at all. This is the wet
dream of festival directors something that on the paper gives a taste of advanced, is a
little bit kinky or pushes the limits but after being surveilled by the dramaturge will
come out perfectly conventional and without any ambition.
68 This is the real problem with the dramaturge, they are hired by Conventional Inc. and
are there to reinsert your ideas and your work into language, signification,
comprehension and context. The only moment when the dramaturge is doing a good
job is when he or she utters: I have no idea what this was? I have nothing to say
about… and then in embarrassment leaves the room never to be seen again. Never.
That’s the moment when dramaturgy works perfect.
And here comes a sharp corner. We know that critique is over, ideology as we know it
is passé, that there is no outside of capitalism and the lot. Thus, what we can do?
(With a French accent) – We can lie down and die… or we must look for something,
or some thing – as you know capitalism has already commercialized affect, we
consume our own subjectivity, and the world runs on the basis of rent, not profit
(which of course is great however fearsome) – We must look for some language, some
communicational “vacance”, some incompatibility that denounces an experience with
any kind of reference to modes of production (power, knowledge or subjectivity) visà-vis modernity, capitalism, institutionality, psychoanalysis. I’m a totally gone,
fucked up mad. Yes, I’m arguing for an excessive authenticity, for something worse
than autonomy. Autonomy presupposes some kind of relation, however absent,
authenticity is harder, it presupposes a cruelty – a cruelty that would make Antonin
Artaud shake – a cruelty that signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision,
irreversible and absolute determination.
Firing the dramaturge is the first step towards cruelty, towards authenticity, and that
second is an unconditional belief in theatre. This might sound paradoxical, and I’m
not speaking of mimicry as a way out, but rather about theatre, in it’s pre-modern
forms, as a means for the production of a second world – a sort of autonomous mode
of perception – hyperstition, a system without connectivity to present realities, an
schizoid authenticity – super-imposed yet incompatible with reality. It is here that it
will happen, it’s in the crack, that authenticity will open itself to us, and cruelty reveal
itself as determination. It’s not an urgency in the 90s sense of hunting the real, no
way – this is authenticity as a means for corruption, putrefaction or decay as building
material. It is being as a differential field of cruelty.
The new dance, has nothing to do with Belgium and Flemish choreography [spit on
Fabre and Vandekeybus, they are you just self-obsessed conservative men that think
inter-disciplinarity is another word for revolution], it can have no dramaturge – it is
not composed, it is not organized, it is so not dance theatre [spit on it] — [spit on it] –
- it is cruelty and it is theatre with a big T. It is nothing close to fascinating, it isn’t in
the same city as variation or “different”, it is authenticity not in the sense of
transcendence but as difference-in-itself, it’s black out, it’s exterior, it is surfing the
void.
10.000 Motherfuckers
Fire Fire Fire Fire – something happened – today we are forgiving, we even forgive
those whose name we don’t use – not for the Potter reason – but obviously because it
embarrasses so badly. Fire fire fire not somebody but today it’s fireworks. Firefuckin’-works and glam, glamour, gala, bubbles and glitter, total festivity and
carnival. In the office of Spangbergianism the staff have been shaking their booties
since early morning. We’ve been slamming tequila from sunrise on without
interruption and conspired about who’s gonna play the protagonist in the Hollywood
version: James Goodman, is a good candidate but the casting directors have also
negotiated with both Jack Black and Hooman Shariffi. Already confirmed is Meryl
Streep in the role as Krõõt Juurak and Michael Gambon – otherwise known as
69 Dumbledore – as Xavier Le Roy. Gambon has agreed to perform the character as long
as Spangbergianism is played by Robbie Coletrane. Rumors have it that Joaquin
Phoenix will appear as Jan Ritsema, but this is yet to be confirmed.
And yes, the party will go on, send flowers, donate some money, demand something.
Ha ha, we will not close shop yet, that’s not what we celebrate. Nope, sorry, the
editorial looks forward to continue making you suffer, shake your head and keeping
up the attitude, even deepening, of stating totally obvious platitudes as if they were
fresh like the NYC dance scene. But first, before we give it all away… a few words
from our sponsors:
FIRE THE DRAMATURGE
And remember, choreographers and dancers don’t ever, ever, EVER do something
that includes interactive or installation. Computer games are interactive; sex is not,
nor skype, fist fights or filesharing. What the hell is a non-interactive installation, or
did interactive suddenly start to mean communication human to human. To me the
Pierre Huyghe installation becomes interactive the moment I start thinking: this is
shit!
You are a dance artist, you identify yourself as a choreographer – stay the hell away
from installation. A dance installation is probably as stupid as performative interior
decoration. We like betrayal, oh yes, but only if it includes all sides. Choreographers
that make installations, especially if the attempted structure involves the artists and
his entourage, betray their art form in the most embarrassing way. Put them in jail
and have your dog swallow the key. Installation is objects and things spread out in a
room, dance and performance is not, it’s action and intensity spread out in time.
Installations are sitting in the museum, or in the storage, on the basis of eternity.
Dance, choreography and performance have one thing that is specific — it’s over
when it’s over. There is nothing left but some indifferent rumor.
No! No no no, I didn’t use the word, and I didn’t think about it. Stop using the word
“memory” – Stop Stop Stop. It is bad for dance, it is bad for you! Every book you have
that spends time on memory and dance, burn it. It’s not enough that you put it aside
or throw it away. BURN IT. Those books are written by academics and historians,
people that were born sentimental, that by definition are conservative, argue that a
futon is a really great alternative and don’t garbage their eau de cologne before the
bottle is really empty. Those are people that would have liked to be poets had they
just had the courage. Those are people that wet their lips when they come up with a
historical connection and wouldn’t read Zizek because it’s cheap to quote from
popular movies [real academia, real philosophers don’t use examples, obviously], not
because he is a fan of Woody Allan. Those are people that would come spontaneously
the moment they fiddle a Madeleine cookie into their defensive writing. Texts where
they speak about Isadora as if she was a friend and thus valued, and still write the full
name of the three choreographers that they have decided to devote their lives to.
We’ve had enough of memory, those defensive self-proclaimed ambassadors of dance
have made dance back into the future, mourning its past and proceeding into the
coming without having the slightest idea. Avoiding the next, and staying with a
gramophone. [there is one thing more disgusting: performative writing. Now I’m
vomiting on the floor of the office where everybody else is partying like monkeys, I
mean lions – what the fuck, they all transformed into a wind or is it grass now. This is
so not disco, we promote sex in front of dancing.
A word to academics and historians, you rot too slow. If you could just make dance
and choreography putrefy really fast we would have something to celebrate you for.
Stop defending shit that was bad already in the first place.
70 Passus, before we come back to interactive and whatever. You talk about doing
something different, something really – you know – … different. You want to make
another kind of, something really… remember if you want to do something different
it also implies that you’ll have to leave something behind, and in your case this is
dance. Sasha Waltz, Philippe Gemacher, Franz Poelstra even Mathilde Monnier,
Jerome Bel, Boris Charmatz, Rachid Ouramdame, Grand Magasin, Regine Chopinot,
Alain Buffard, Xavier Le Roy, Maurice Bejart, Anglein Preljocaj, Emmanuelle Huynh,
Jean-Claud Gallotta, Hervé Robbe, Maguy Marin, Christian Rizzo, Philippe Decouflé,
Alice Chauchat, Cecilia Bengolea, François Chaignaud and Anne Collot are all
convinced that what they are doing is totally a different kind of dance, that they are
on to something really really other and new.
There’s just one problem they will never allow for the necessary collateral damage.
They will never, never give up dance, never do something that cannot be recognized
as choreography proper. If you want to do something different the first thing you
have to do is to forget about dance and fuck choreography.
It’s not enough, not even half way okay to engage in some interactive or equally
idiotic installation – if you want to work in a context of installation you have to give
up dance and choreography, performance and moving around. Instead of trying to
remain yourself and one, allow yourself to become other and differ. It will imply fear
and cruelty but there’s no way around BS. You have to become a visual artist or you
will just be embarrassing.
As we are anyway at it, don’t collaborate with artists from other fields, spit on
interdisciplinary. Don’t consider it something good that visual artists are doing
performances. Denounce Allan Kaprow and remember what you hate most of all,
what you hate most of all is reconstruction. That is choreography’s benevolent
response to academia and backing into the future. Fuck memory, and fuck that
mumbo jumbo about presence too.
You know what, Spangbergianism just made it to 10.000 views. Hands in the
motherfuckin’ air.
Ps. Spangbergianism is pro certain kinds of collaboration – that of our readers. We
are 100% solidarity, we betray all sides without exceptions. Are you responsible?
I’m Takin’ It On
This is so fucked up! What did I do wrong? I haven’t done anything else than opened
a blog and you… you, you literally abandon me. Like birds you all emigrated out of
the valley of Spangbergianism. I thought I was one of you, but there I was sitting
slamming the keyboard and when I turned around, you – you guys – - had just taken
off in awesome choreographic formations without a single pip or held back little
squeak. I trusted you… You could’ve at least tapped me on the shoulder. A tiny
gesture with the thumb would have been enough [come-own], but… no… no… you…
just left.
I thought we were friends? That we stood behind each other. Bro… Like really,
whatever situation, backin’ each other up like like – - like real cowboys, or gangsters.
Yeah, as in thug life, you know. Word of honor – - no sorry I didn’t mean that – …
repeat… thug life, you know… Like, full of… betrayal and backstabbing – -fine okay –
- in dance we don’t push crack, which is probably good – I mean to avoid – - but
yeah, like betrayal and backstabbing – - damn, but at least, you know, solidary to the
71 life style. “-I might be a lousy and insignificant thug. But nobody, no-body, can take
away the fact that I am a thug. Thugs might play it double and be dirty, but a thug
stands up for thug life.”
“-Ugh!” – or whatever native Indians used to say (“-OMG, and now he is a racist
also…”), but, wait a minute, how fuckin Ugh are you to your posse? How high on your
list is solidarity to the art form and its practitioners? Mine is currently at the lower
end of the scale, if it didn’t go throgh the floor already. /–/ I’m fallin’ /–/
Look at this. If there were any sense of community in dance and choreography, in
performing arts and mass dance movement how the hell does it happen that I have
collected 10.342 views since the 22 August. Yes, that’s right it’s August, not
September. Like, how do you think Kenye would react to that? I mean like, he might
just set up a really fruitful collaboration with Ann Liv Young. [let’s pee on the beef
together] I’m not kidding the dude is unstable?
Now I tell ya, even a gold rank thug from Bed-Stuy would find this wkd. How do you
think Jay-Z would explain 10.000 to Beyonce. Fuck you guys, think about my
girlfriend for once? What do you think, should I just – - say it – first thing, or is it
better to let it rest until she asks, or like wave it away pretending like nothing, or
maybe like confess it and hope that she will pity me. Place her hand on my face and
whisper something like “-Oh, Spangbergianism… baby… don’t blame yourself…”
OMG, that would be so rotten. “-I’m finished with you, go away? – - I HATE YOU!”
Yeah, like what would you do with a girlfriend that like by default acts forgiving and
caring. Fuck that, I want a punch in the face, ordered to sleep on the sofa, no on the
floor (the kitchen floor, with ice cold tiles). That’s what I’m talking about, that’s a
thug life bitch girlfriend – and tell you one thing, she is monogamous and don’t fuck
around with interactive or installation, or performativity or bitching about you not
keeping up your interdisciplinarity account. Nope, she doesn’t listen to house music.
So here I’m on the kitchen floor/I’m jumpin out window [the last line sang by a sort
of R’n’B chorus]/Crushed to pieces [and the back-up girls again] – - Ah Hey Ah Hey
Aoaoaoooo Aoaoaoooo — I’m jumpin out window.
Impossible Impossible, what I am to do with my life! Impossible… If at least I was
a French choreographer. Whatever! – - 10.342 views and this in 46 days, yes four
fuckin six d a y s /—/ that’s like I have to jump out the window over and over and
over and over again, repetitive like every Brice Leroux piece throughout history. It’s –
- I can’t ever have enough.
I thought we were friends, like really – you know “word-up” friends.
Stop it finally, we’ve had it now! “-Irony is so 90s [roll the eyes], so Sloterdijk –
gööööööö.”
In fact I think 10.000 is kind of cool, but this isn’t the self-promotion blog so forget
about that one too. In brackets, we love self-promotion – we love Cecilia and
Françoise, we deep dig Jan Fabre – wow, we love them fore there genuineness: “-If
you don’t buy the piece, it’s your fuckin problem. You just don’t know what you are
missing.” – - “-Forget about it, sweet talk or not, if this is what defines dignity to you,
get a life. No get two lives.” To diss self-promotion is like “-I heard about it, but didn’t
read it [“The Grammar of The Multitude”] …yet.”- -hmm, fascinating – - or to not get
the point that opportunism is the new resistance. You know this is the time of tactics,
fuck strategic. So, stop thinking you are special and sell you’ ass. Just don’t try to do it
with a human face.
We are too few, but no we don’t need friends. No, we don’t want people that need
maintenance, that don’t tell you to sleep on the floor, that don’t fuck you over. People
72 that consider judgmental negative, that think open minded is a good thing, that
forgot that sifnigicant isn’t another word for meaningful, that write program texts
including the word thread, people that one week into their festival talk about being
exhausted. I can of course go on as you know, but I’m just so damn happy those
douchebags don’t raise the numbers.
We are exclusive and fuck ‘em all. We are too few, but we don’t need friends. We just
need to be many. Sign up for a mission without cause, dress for the final battle, but
no fuckin’ way join the community.
You know “it’s not for fun, neither for you nor for us”, reality is catching up with, no
more fun and games. I’m on a mission – and I have a girlfriend whose lingua doesn’t
know mercy – even if I have to do it alone, and you might call me Robert Scott, I’m
takin’ it on – I’m telling you: I’m takin’ it on… 100.000 and no sleep. I’m a
practitioner of dance and choreography and I’m about to die.
Look Who’s Talking, The Or Something Like That Community
8OCT
I’m finished! I’m fuck-in’ finished! I say this only once: I’m fuckin’ finished! – Oh that
was three times now. Yesterday a call – - a desperate call – - a DESPERATE call for
help. Didn’t you understand? Didn’t you get anything at all? Did it completely pass
you by like a Prius the parking lot of the cultural administration? I didn’t come to
your mind that it wasn’t some minor flu. An itch or mosquito bite, an annoying fan,
but like real – - like the shit, no talking, last call, Elvis totally left the building, that it
was a matter of life and death. Like LIFE and DEATH.
I took you for thug life and some attitude. Fake it, it’s fine – - totally Ok, you know
like the tattoos – - I don’t want that either – - Yes, ok I surrender I have one, but just
one and fuck you – no, it has nothing to do with tribal and I didn’t wear latex in the
end of the 90s – - But nope, the numbers didn’t sky-rocket, no servers were clogged
up. I heard no shooting, nothing was reported – - Oh yeah, yesterday was the
Swedish premiere of “The Other Guys” – that’s what happened. But like, do I look
like a dude that identifies with Will Ferrell? No, I don’t! – - I mean, I did like him in
Anchorman – - comes with the trade – - a blogger is also a journalist of sorts – - like
an interior decorator is an artist, and theatre is an art-form?
Yeah… Yeah – - I’m going in the theatre. Seriously. Yeah. You gave me up, didn’t
support me when I needed you so badly.
I’m going in ze te-atre. I mean like – - I told ya’ll: We support only betrayal of all
sides. (An Axl Rose -) Yeeeöh, what could be worse, more satanic – like becoming a
professional snooker players, taking up a dialogue with the British dance scene,
starting to ride a fixie bike, that’s peanuts, Christmas decoration – oh, of course – to
start up a career as a house DJ – doing something mean. But the theatre, huh ma’fcka – - that’s diabolic, so bad. That’s like cold war CCCP bad. This is farewell, the last
tremblin’ line. The final finito, the last episode of the last season, the network is
closing down, the arivaderche to bloggin’, the last Spangbergianism. Goodnight, cruel
world, ghood nite, I see you in the mornin’
[Pause]
[Pause]
73 [More pause]
[The global dance scene mourning a moment of sunshine]
[People speaking lyrically about the golden era of choreography and dance]
[Others, about an apocalyptic moment, when real, radical, Deleuzian (-You know
what I mean?) change, really was
there]
[Legendary]
[Epochal]
[The emptiness of going to bed without the daily Spangberianism]
[Indifference in life, feature film length ruminations on the meaning of life…]
[Pause]
- – and then the go go chorus is fading in, the bass drum showing up in the
background, a guitar… handclaps – - boom boom chick, ka booka-boom chick chick
[and it goes on, repeat it – catch the groove] – aha eeeeeha – aha eeeeha – ahahahaaa
– - smoke, lots of it. Colored lights, LED goddamnit – and there… a shadow… vague
yet so determined – humble yet such conviction… “-No no, I’m not talking about Phil
Collins… “ – smoke – colored lights – the sound of masses, a roar – - Just kiddin’ – Spangbergianism is back. Just wanted to feel it, feel it like you missed
me – like Skype sex with oneself. I carry two laptops, dude.
“-Is this thing on?”
“-Power to the people! We’re living in the 31st century…”
Be egotistic, be OTT, modesty is for superheroes. I celebrate you! I promise, on my
life – my mother’s grave – I support you. Be bold, be blunt, be obstinate and naïve.
Right fist to the heart. I back you, thug life.
And you know what, it’s always OK “to not know what something was”, what is not, is
to be sufficient with not knowing. The expedition isn’t over until we make it home.
“-Do you know what you did in your last piece?”
“-Sure you do, for approximately three minutes, and that’s what somebody else – your low life dramaturge – wrote about it.”
“-I don’t hear shit!”
It’s okay not to know, but make sure not to sleep on it. It might stick to you, and your
life is over. And it’s never acceptable to produce a piece in order to make the
spectator confused, especially – and this is a deadly sin – if you don’t know exactly
what you are doing yourself and can communicate what the fuck it is. Never.
NEVER… this is fuckin with people, and that’s not a fat ass betrayal, it’s simply greed.
“- Are you French or are you just part of the “or something like that” community? Oh,
then you don’t need to feel lonely, there are loads of ya. Facebook is a small place in
comparison to the vast territory of “or something like that”, a fairytale far far away
and so easy to bring to one’s heart. How many times did you say it last time you
74 talked about your work, or maybe times is not the word, but rather how many percent
of your conversation did it occupy, seventy five? Welldone that’s better than last time
we met.
Be intuitive and OTT, it’s fine okay. Let ideas fall on your head don’t be embarrassed.
They do on good looks, pick ‘em up, and leave them no peace. Intuition is wonderful
and amazing: that’s like hot sex instead of a Skype talk with your producer. But fuck
you, intuition is not enough, that’s when we have to start working. And there is no
way around, no escape. No escape. Take it on! Take it on!
Power to the people! I love you all, all of you, all of you ten thousand six hundred and
thirty three practitioners of dance and choreography about to die.
Bring the boats back, tomorrow we are going content.
Aimless Conviction
“-Are you having an open relationship” a friend asks me and I wonder what that can
mean? Sure, I know it means something in relation to sexuality, but of course only
within certain limits. Usually not defined until it’s already too late and afterwards we
don’t speak with each other for years. Hate, or is it rather greed, is spreading because
we were so open.
In fact we, or you, weren’t open to anything, we were just securing a certain
negotiability in respect of our individual subjectivities. We spoke about it in whispery
voices and referred to previous experiences in vague words, we didn’t want to lock
each other and new love up, celebrated liberty and told each other about the
importance of not transforming love into an institution. If we’d been art students
we’d be inscribed in the individual study plan at the art academy entitled: Free Art
(well, used and “formulated” in Sweden): make art, be free, everything is open as long
as it sleeps with exhibition contexts and makes out with the white cube. I wonder if
they have a document in the art academy that defines what that program actually
implies. The program Free Art (Freie Kunst or Fri Konst) is exactly as liberated as our
open relationship. It’s easy peacy to vote for openness but to live the consequences is
not always that sportif et tres chic. [Wkd, it’s Saturday morning. Did I see Sarah
Jessica Parker in the mirror this morning… Don’t think so and yet a sudden
realization, this is my good advice Sex and The City moment.]
Yepp, that’s how open we are, approximately not at all! Open in our present regime
means to maintain one’s self-employment even when entering an institutional frame,
never to give up availability expecting nothing and never investing more than what
you know you can bring back on short-term basis. Open and affirmative is today’s
answer to 19s century peasant economy, secure the future, don’t invest without
security, trust nobody and stick to yourself. It, open and affirmative, is this seasons
name for survival economy and means essentially that I can afford you. My openness
depends on my capacity to assume your investment negotiated in respect of my
capital. If you exceed the capacity which can be afforded, it will be cracked, and such
crack can not produce strength as it is built on proximity and not on structural
reliability. Openness in this respect implies an escalating regime of surveillance as
the stakes are getting higher (you suddenly gave her a key, he paid for the flight
tickets too… and didn’t you look for a flat…) and yet open open open open… – until
every move potentially breaches the agreement: “-I so don’t want to stand there
75 without you and you run off with that Greek composer.” Openness is the word neoliberalism use for paranoia.
When the choreographer, three months before rehearsal starts trying to convince
you, accompanied with a pleasant hand gesture: “-I’m really looking forward to an
open process” you know what it means – sneak out the back door. If he or she moves
on ranting about sharing and affirmation, don’t sneak but speed for the nearest exit!
Contemporary dance and choreography is slam packed with open, open people, open
work, open programs and openness in general, flooded in fact, and we obviously
know that it is the name of the game if you want to survive, hire a producer and make
it onto the market.
You are invited to sleep around the best you want and we might not even work on one
thing. We do parallel play like kids, next to instead of on top of. Sure, we know that
choreographers are never interested in any form of radical openness, but you – the
doer is calculated as affordance. You are supposed to satisfy the choreographer also
due your excursions in other territories and obviously the moment you are allowed to
invest, the choreographer is certainly about to use his or her opportunities to
capitalize on you. And will first demand his or her relative freedom in return and
when the breach happens, turning her back on you forever, backstabbing as soon as
there is an opportunity. [Jens Sethzman you have my sympathy and I will not forget.
A breach of openness must never be silenced.]
Dance and choreography of today is constituted on the basis of such liberal wellmeaning affirmative openness. Dance is circulated around a permission that can
merely result in a panoptic economy that eradicates any attempt of expansion,
experiment, deterritorialization or consideration of an outside. We must terminate
our desire for openness independently if it is concerning the body, concepts,
choreography, practices, processes, production, products or whatever p-word as it
only makes us more constipated, worried, psychoanalytical [spit on it], closed and
paranoid. The only thing such an openness can produce is mediocre sex with the one
you think you love, next to a fear that your investment will not be returned, which
means no amazing fuckin’ with somebody else neither. You will be on surveillance
instead of having group sex with the neighbors.
A self-proclaimed perfectionist, somebody that sais this about himself, what a shit
thing to do to oneself: “-I’m a perfectionist, you know!” – - fuck off, don’t touch me,
get out of my house, you are not my daughter any more, this is disgusting, get help,
you need treatment. The auto-perfectionist is a person that has interiorized openness
into the subject and enjoys it with a certain sadistic pleasure. You don’t have to be
particularly clever to realize that the perfectionist will shun radical openness for
anything. Perfectionism in this sense is precisely about securing investments.
You can always do a perfectionist warning self-test. Scrutinize yourself. Are you
normally happier about the original proposal than the finished product? Are you
sometimes disappointed in the people you worked with because the result didn’t
come out as you had expected?
If yes, this is a bad sign, a very bad sign. You are a perfectionist! You are a
perfectionist, and you will never make anything happen, just surveil your own
activities and die poor. You will be successful in life but will be remembered solely by
Milos Forman.
Get rid of your perfectionist attitudes, your childhood trauma was bad but don’t let it
stand in your way. Just because you felt left out as a kid, that you suffered anxiety
attacks as a young teenager, don’t allow yourself to make that render your work and
your time as a grown up suck too. Stop it. I’ll back you, I totally will! Thug life-style
word-up.
76 Affirmation therefore must be understood as a capacity. Affirmation of the self
implies an initial openness that can spark a further dynamism.
Fuck openness, any version: it’s a closure. Openness is not the absence of closure on
the contrary, radical openness, is a matter of engaging in strategic closure, a kind of
self-imposed restriction that forces you to produce solutions without direction.
Strategic closer is the method of a radical openness, an openness that breaches and
opens to a real outside. This is the openness of a character to which the perfectionist
cannot access precisely because it is not offering itself to criteria such as good or bad,
light or dark; it simply isn’t dialectic. The perfectionist is a sucker for dialectics and
will propose things like: without dialectics we can’t think and mean it in a positive
sense. A radical openness gives up dialectics, waves bye bye to creativity and
imagination, in favor of an innovative action, or better as innovation today appears to
take place not as breach but as a slow process of so-to-say daily upgrades which are
so slow and fast that we don’t notice them transforming our subjectivities. Better –
an immigratory action, which here becomes associated with a kind of a state of
exception. Innovation can be traced; can be subject to reversed engineering, and it
remains well-meaning however turbulent, but immigration instead is apocalyptic in
so matter that the subject cannot return, and either must live life mourning the past
or grab whatever new opportunities. Immigration, as opposed to the formally
indifferent modification of the commodity, involves a distributed decision that
cannot refer to any normative condition or application of grammatical rules. Rules,
as Wittgenstein observed can never stipulate their application.
Immigration is not simply something that breaks rules (simultaneously affirming
them in the act of transgression) but an action that changes the grammatical system
itself, operating in a space where the grammatical rule cannot be distinguished from
the empirical event. This space is the space of radical openness, a space of zero
reliability and arbitrary power, but as we have seen it can not be approached, in any
sense, least not through protocols of openness, but can only be set in motion through
the insertion of closure, of incompatible protocols that entangle the subject to the
extent that he or she can but fuck up magnificently. A kind of dynamique d’enfer, a
satanic dynamic that opens the subject, space or time to an endless corruption.
Radical openness is change produced without prior unity.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you want sex to be amazing the first thing to do is to go
monogamy. Closure is the new multiple orgasm, radical openness is that – seriously I
have no idea moment of – - aimless conviction.
The Anachronism Contemporary
Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time are those who
neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. They are, and
here it comes, in this sense irrelevant. The contemporary, in its more radical sense,
does not mean to be in time, to be fashionable, on the top 40 or in the magazine. No
way, the stuff that ends up in the festival program is there precisely because it has
slipped out of the contemporary with a one-way ticket to those ordinary things that
can be evaluated. The contemporary is precisely that which is beyond good and/or
bad, that has yet to gain a position in the landscape we call history, or perhaps even
time. In the contemporary there are not fifteen minutes of fame, not even fifteen
seconds in the light. The contemporary is brief, very brief, and this brief moment is
scary, very very scary.
77 Why do rock stars drink and shoot up? Because they are under pressure, forced to go
out there and make the audience experience the contemporary, the now, that
presence, night after night. I don’t think so. It’s not because they are stupid or “live
the dream”. The real deal is that they are mourning, mourning the contemporary that
made them and is forever gone. Once popular there is no contemporary.
The rock star engages in the self-medication called Jack Daniels, and the manager
adds social everything, including the blondes, which makes the situation even worse.
What the star mourns can not be healed with party, conversation or good-company.
It is the opposite; he mourns the exuberant loneliness of the contemporary. The
contemporary indeed is a moment that lacks identity, where the individual is
sovereign and hence not conditioned by any law. The contemporary lacks any
orientation points, any addresses or stabilities. The contemporary is smooth and
mind you, there’s not even a horizon. Sounds boring? Well, it is and it isn’t, the
contemporary doesn’t concern itself with such categories exactly because they are
based on valorization, comparison and forms of representation. The contemporary
could almost be thought of as an Artaudian concept, because indeed the
contemporary is cruel: it is absolute horror and absolute bliss. It’s death, orgasm and
pure immanence.
Somewhere Michel Foucault writes that one should be happy if during a lifetime one
has just one or two unique thoughts. I think Foucault was right, although up until
now my understanding was that not even super smart people think unique things on
a daily basis. But what if Foucault meant the opposite? Praise the lords that unique
thoughts don’t pop up on a regular basis, because unique in its radical sense
coincides with the contemporary, and the contemporary hurts. The moment when
you do end up in the festival program or fashion magazine, I can assure you that the
pain you will feel will be conventional, and your sole agony is of being kicked out.
Lewis Carroll granted the world some serious knowledge in his poem “The Hunting of
The Snark”, in which a curious captain and researcher is about to set off on an
excursion to hunt the mystical Snark. Naturally a map is needed. After extensive
inquires the captain returns and presents the map for his crew, that after having
worried, now celebrates their captain’s faculties for bringing a map that is an absolute
blank. Because, as they concur, conventional signs such as equators and poles,
longitudes and so on, with certitude will not bring them anywhere remotely close to
an adventure, even halfway to where the Snark hangs out. An adventure is a journey
to you-don’t-know-where.
As the poem proceeds we get to know that the Snark is rarely observed and that
narratives of encounters with the mystical creature are even more uncommon, not
least because it is said that any person making eye contact with a Snark is
transformed into stone. What if Snark is another word for the Contemporary?
Institutions can by definition not be contemporary, but are always out of time,
fastened to history by clusters of more or less recognizable rules or codes of conduct.
Yet, institutions persevere exactly as long as they are gratuitous for some kind of
society or context. It is of course we, each of us as individuals and groups that grant
institutions their existence, simultaneously institutions provide context for our
existence, granting us identity and consistency. Without institutions, in a broader
sense of the word, we wouldn’t be able to communicate, collaborate or have conflicts.
So, as much as we find ourselves trapped by slow and heavy institutions reeking with
bureaucracy and alcohol smelling paper turners, we should value our institutions for
what they enable. They enable constraints. Institutions provide us with a sense of
consistency or safety that enables movement, dynamism, navigation: a safety that
grants the possibility for differentiation.
78 Jacques Derrida (OMG, this piece is developing into a literal tsunami of name
dropping), as the indecent post-structuralist that he was, proposes that nature
doesn’t exist, but that there is only naturalization and denaturalization. Nature as
such operates outside discourse, outside culture, and we humans have no access to it,
and therefore nature cannot exist, or if it does we can’t know about it. Perhaps it is
somewhat a shot in the dark to argue that institutions are non-existent (text indeed
being one), but it might possibly be generative to consider, however paradoxical, that
there is only institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. The alphabet provides a
frame for a production that deterritorializes it, similarly to how the museum offers a
frame for the possibility of transformation of aesthetic experiences.
It is in any case far too easy to blame institutions for anything at all, but as
institutions propel some kind instinct to survive, which of course will become even
stronger considering that sustainability also must apply to institutions, or worse:
recycling, it can not not propose itself as a oneness, a unity. This, I believe, is crucial
and a malady of the ignorant, if institutions are understood in respect of, so to say,
Existence, i.e. as static and “eternal”, and as a one, what is left is only to lie down and
die. But if on the contrary understood as temporary and as constructed, i.e. a
multiplicity, there is unlimited potentiality in both institutionalization and
deinstitutionalization. It is all up to you or us, but remember it will be an easy battle
because it is fought only, and this is axiomatic, through conventional signs, and
remember again, institutions feed on, metaphorically speaking, fossil fuel (so passé),
whereas you cultivate the contemporary, which is pure intensity.
Beware of those who complain about the evil of institutions, most probably they are
sponsored by them, or being hired as double agents in institutional espionage. Those
are the forces in society that produce the institutions’ static, especially considered
within a neo-liberal regime where complaints have been rendered a commodity.
In the late 70s the same Michel Foucault wrote a short note on, what he called, a new
time of curiosity: a time when a ubiquitous social democracy would give us
individuals some slack, when homogenization would be past tense, the free spirit
would flourish and institutions would let go of our lives. Today, some thirty years
later, Michel Foucault’s words, however grand, have acquired new meaning and
resonate like a neo-liberal manifesto, a call for an unconditional individuality that
needs no interventionist state, no institutional consistency. What neo-liberalism
wants from us, and I mean in particular from cultural producers, is minimal effort
and maximum revenue. This is rendered through a minimum of institutional bodies,
considering The State as an institution and consumption as its opposite, and, further,
revenue as always already conventional and hence measurable. Thus neo-liberal
governance is by definition in time, or, in other words, the absolute enemy of the
contemporary.
Long live our institutions! They make possible the anachronism of the contemporary.
Stop Having a Body, Stop Calling Yourself Dancer
Prologue: Stop talking about yourself as a dancer. You are not a dancer! Perhaps you
have enjoyed an education in dance, perhaps you have taken a few dance classes or
been to a disco? But you are not a dancer. Something thatis, announces itself as
static, as autonomous in the most uninteresting of ways, as independent in the sense
of not being part of the game. The moment you announce yourself a dancer you also
give yourself the romantic artist image, or even the image of a worker or laborer.
Dance is something that ones does, not something one is. And as long as we
announce ourselves as dancers we have to be loyal to all dancers, we are the same
79 existence. No no no, dance is something that we do and I don’t have to confirm what
you do! The moment dance becomes something we do, we can like each other and
dislike each other’s dance. If dancer is what we are then the dance expresses our
existence, this is a very very bad moment cuz it means there is some horrible core,
nucleus or essence that you possess. Dance is something that we do, like driving a
taxi, being a civil servant. We like it a lot but don’t let that make it into a calling, some
internal urgency or a reason to not get paid properly.
Moreover as long as you call yourself a dancer and identify with being a dancer, other
people will continue to talk about you as a lower existence, something that is less
important and is something that shows you how beautiful and tough life can be. Fuck
that.
Same thing with the body, stop thinking about the body as special.
This is good.
“- What are you doing?”
“-I’m thinking. What are you doing?”
“-I’m bodying.”
We should stop the stupid idea of having a body and instead consider our bodys as
activity, as verbs, as movement and becoming. As long as we “have” and “possess” a
body we are always gonna feel violated by language, discourse and the rest of
representation. But when body is something we do, we can possibly start speaking
about a body politics, or rather a politics of the body that is not essential, universal,
natural and whatever, it is not “myself”. Göööööö! Your body has as little do with
yourself as sex has to do with love, or the museum guard with that awfully fucked up
bad exhibition, Top Gear with cars, or the body with organs.
Let’s go: We still have to learn what the body can do, writes Michel Foucault. He, the
thinker of the body or the thinker laboring in thought through the body, elaborates
on the body in an epoch, in a time when the body is still firmly situated in a
disciplinary regime. Certainly not the subject, mental capacities or language, such
simple matter had already been emancipated from feudalism and truth, but the body
was still firmly buckled up in the backseat a pre-modern vehicle. The sentence “We
still have to learn what the body can do”, could function as a summary, for the oeuvre
of Foucault and his engagement in the liberatation of the body from its disciplinary
confinement, his writing opens for a body that performs, that has been given
permission not to exist.
The soul is not a prisoner of the body, it is the other way around, the body is
imprisoned by the soul, is another proposition by Foucault, confirming our suspicion
that western society has produced the body as an object, an object that exists. But is
Foucault not simply reversing and confirming the equivocity that needs to be
terminated, namely the hierarchical divisions between the body and mind, mind and
soul, soul and transcendence, in favor of a univocity in which given hierarchies are
terminated in favor of play and tension between intensities. Univocity implies the
permission of a body performing, performing on its own premise and not in respect
of, or in relation to… which it always does in a system determined by equivocity,
where the soul is not the body, but its initiator, is, so to say, kept responsible for it.
Hence, the saying the soul is the prisoner of the body, and equally but in reverse the
fear of cyberspace stealing our bodies away: we will be bodyless brains. Univocity
enables the body to form its own systematic, an order not of things or nouns but of
verbs or actions, due which it can transmit eternity in a completely new manner. This
body is not descriptive due eternity in respect of which it is always epitomized as
failure, but instead part of an eternal process. This body is mortal, temporary,
organizational yet not organized, subject to disciplines yet not defined by discipline.
It is not settled, sculptural or architectural, it’s on the move, it is choreographing.
80 Foucault, however, don’t simply reverse, but opens for a body without organs.
An institutional body without organs, an educational body without organs,
a structural body without organs, a bullet proof body without organs, an
expressional body without organs, a mediated body without organs. A body without
organs is not a smooth body, it is and must maintain itself striated. The matter is not
if or to what extent striation explicates, positions the body but instead in what respect
and vis-à-vis what dynamist striation is undulating and multiplicit in respect of
direction. The moment the body leaves a referential striation entirely it will obviously
either collapse and detach from representation – thus disappear – or be re-inscribed
in its entirety, recoded. The body without organs is not an organless body, of pure
potentiality but is rather a surfing out of representation onto a complexity unfolding
without reference to prior unity. Foucault’s seemingly dialectical argumentation thus
empowers the body, gives it opportunity to negotiate liberty.
In a way Foucault’s entire oeuvre could be said to labor for the production of agency
of the body, an agency that also resonates in relation to modes of subjectivity, i.e. is
not self-referential but expansive and active in processes of coagulation of social
apparatuses (dispostif). In a late interview Foucault suggests that the problem with
homosexuality isn’t that boys make out or that girls roll around with each other, but
rather how gay people potentially can and will reform ways of life. Disqualifying the
family as the singular mode of life, performs and extensive threat vis-à-vi the
dominant social apparatus of the western world.
A more complex issue is how and to what extent the departure from discipline is not
simultaneously the introduction into another regime. The moment discipline moves
out, control moves in, striation is little by little substituted by the soft machinery of
control and the body is, so to say, sinking into a rhizomatic terrain due which it can
make no resistance, especially not in respect of quasi-permanent structures. Foucault
operates from a climate where citizenship is understood as given, and provided by the
state, a state that in post 68’ France, and all over western Europe, is ubiquitous and
in particular in respect of a left on the verge of collapse under a burden of empty
political discourse. It is also possible to read Foucault’s proposal as a hesitant gesture
in relation to control. He is aware of smoothness of control both in relation to
expansion and a sort of self-perpetuating society void of ideological consistency, a
society of unlimited opportunities, of endless potential when it comes to neoliberalism, and of endless surveillance where liberty has become both currency and
imprisonment.
Self-precarious gestures with their different expressions emerging all over the
western world from the early 50s, from hippies to Burning Man, from selfemployment to yoga with their initial attempt to destabilize structures (according to
Foucault), and later, say from 1989, as control society has made its irreversible entry
into the world on strategic levels. Yoga, tai chi and other bodily practices, also in the
90s practices in weird basements and in obscure weekend camps, becoming a matter
of identity and production, i.e. liberty as something that the individual can obtain
within a quasi-smooth terrain although always. The body here becomes an
opportunity for relative emancipation, i.e. identity politics.
Today however also the body and its interiority has become completely swallowed by
control and the body is given no what-so-ever opportunity to distance itself, liberate
itself from an omnipresent capitalism. If the body, assisted by hope for the best by
Foucault, at one moment could perform potentiality in respect of dominant social
apparatus, potentiality has today become the centre of political life. There is only a
capitalist body, the body is today cherished exactly in respect of its ability to perform,
to produce pure production. The body in itself has become potentiality, it is as we
have completed a full circle and are back on square one where the body as pure body
81 is value, in other words the body has no longer “good life”, no longer political, but has
become bare life, it has become arbitrary power, or economy as pure immanence.
Epilogue: “Be yourself” seems to be a suitable watchword for our present society. But
what does it mean? It has certainly nothing to do with the “Express Yourself”
proposed by NWA in 1983. No, there is no need for self-expression anymore, nobody
bothers to market it and its possible subversive intensity has inflated. “Be Yourself” is
not corporate interest in identity politics. It is, but for what reason, a call for personal
decision. It is, but for what reason, an empowering gesture. It is, but for what reason,
a notice on the basis that you make difference.
“Be Yourself” is the ironic, or depressing reality, of late neo-liberalism. “Be Yourself”
is We making money. “Be Yourself” is the short summer of the fact that trustworthy
dualism is over: life and labor, public and private, permanent and temporary, past
and present, virtual and reality. Or in other words bio-politics has turned into
arbitrary power (Virtanen). The human being as such has entered the political and
economical reality. Bio-politics as proposed by Michel Foucault has recently turned
on itself and we have entered a reality where the human being has turned into pure
potentiality, or following Agamben has entered a state of bare life. Thus “Be Yourself”
today equals pure economy.
Remember to never trust David Burne, and his mediocre singing about “Stop making
sense” – you don’t make anybody happy through not making sense, that’s just a bad
excuse. The only way out is pure tacticity. The power is no longer in becoming
authentic, but indeed, in the production of simulacra as simulacra. Translated to
bodily practices this means, simply, to invent somatic practices. Fake them, invent
them, and perhaps we can find another body hidden away somewhere under a
forgotten chair, or a vacant space next to.
Do like Jay-Z address the body like a microphone: “-Is this thing on?”
Only then can we say it, only then.
“-Is this thing on?”
POWER TO THE BODY
Fuck History
History and repetition appear to have been a slight problem for the 20th century
man. Never have we seen such a hysterical relation to preservation. Why; what’s good
with veteran cars, with vintage sneakers, old buildings? Bulldoze the crap away. Look
you don’t become an imperialist just because you want something to go. Just because
buildings are old they are not cute or climate friendly, no they are discriminating,
fucks ecology (which might be a plus) and stuck is aesthetically repulsive. Move out!
History hasn’t been good, but only through remembering can we avoid making the
same mistakes again. A paradox builds on an idea that history proceeds without
collapses, without holes, ruptures or radical paradigm shifts, but crawls along the
axis of time like a snail leaving a trace behind itself to know how to find the way back
home again. Consistently history has left a trace and its presence has faced the future.
The trace has had different qualities and sometimes consisted of some slimy goo that
made time crawl even slower. There is still a trace but today the snail seems to crawl
with the rear-end first and exploring the next cool thing with its ass instead of with its
tentacles. Enough of metaphors, I’m not a poet, I’m not an architect from Brazil.
82 If history is to repeat itself it also has to remain the same, remain at last identical in
respect of kind. Repetition, in the sense of history, as well as variation lives on the
ability to maintain oneself as one. Thus remembering history not only makes
repetition possible but insists on its repetition. Obviously change is not enough.
Change is gradual and not a breach. Change is positive and not connected to some
terror, it’s open and kind of a better version. Change in 2010 equals upgrade, and
repetition is inscribed so handy. The way out of the trap of repetition implies a bigger
risk, not a change within history, or the historical development, what is needed is to
change what history itself is. History as we know it is open and forgiving, sympathetic
and violent enough to disgust us, but never bad enough to make us kick it out of the
system.
Stop making reconstructions. Just stop it. Dance and choreography is in a bad
enough state as it is. We don’t need to dive back into its more or less tacky past, it is
already horrible and it will not get better if we turn to already used material. Let it
rot.
Whatever you think you are doing when you resurrect older pieces, when you do
Trisha Brown’s “Accumulations” with your students or force them to dance
something so embarrassing as “Trio A”? Every time they dance some of the so
admirable 60s stuff they are not operating here and now, every time you have your
students do contraction they are not doing here and now. Reconstruction is nice, it’s
sympathetic and good. In school it violates the students and makes them admire, but
as the person reconstructing the whatever piece basically never met the
choreographer but does it like third, fourth, fifth hand it is all in the wrong sense.
However, it is of course so much better than to have to listen to the artist’s anecdotes
about how amazing it was when… and circumstances this and that, and New York at
that time, how… Jezuz, save me from reconstruction. Save me from Yvonne Rainer,
and save me from Deborah Hay. And save me from all others who want to make
money on past sins. Stand up loser, if you don’t have anything better to offer than
surveilling history then stay home, close the door one last time and stay home. I
prefer mucho better that history repeats itself than to have to endure the original or a
reconstructed “Trio A”.
And for you who reconstruct other people’s work, shape up: we know that you are
just doing it for the sake of money, value, fame. If it was important for you, and not
for the market, why don’t you just keep it in the studio? Oh, the programmer saw it
by accident and you were totally innocent. No, you are just too mediocre to do
anything decent and need someone else’s wave to surf, and so does the programmer.
Obviously it is perfect, if you do a reconstruction of whatever, the programmer can
make money on both you and the choreographer that you reconstruct. Oh, you think
you do it for some kind of historical accuracy, and what do we need that for? You
think it is important for others to get to know about this and that piece, why? Because
you want to say you invented it, found it… Because you want to reclaim your history
stolen away from you by performance studies? But hey, was it that good, let them
have it. They didn’t just take the good part they also took all that crap that your
countrymen did that’s a little bit embarrassing. Let the Americans have it.
Even more compromised is exhibitions that attempt to draft a narrative through
recent history in respect of some more or less pertinent notion. Stop resurrecting old
pieces, stop it stop it. Especially stuff from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Nothing is getting
better because there is something from that time around. Stop it. Permanent
collections are fine but damn that’s another story. How many times do I have to see
that time delay piece from Dan Graham, how many times do I have to consider that
horrible corridor by Bruce Nauman, and even worse [I know I’m a racist] how many
times do I have to encounter Lygia Clark. Leave it behind, leave it behind. Fuck those
rubber bands, forget that plastic net to carry home you fruit, and especially forget
83 about these big pieces where you are supposed to sense whatever it is yourself and
your spirit. No, thanks. I don’t want anymore, and you know those piece are just
there because the dead artists foundation thinks it’s a good idea, and because you are
a coward. Every time, e-ve-ry time you put up a Clark you are not exhibiting
somebody else woman, Brazilian or anything else. Every time you insist on Graham,
fuck you. I like it too but hey why the hell do you have a museum store. The reason
why you want to show those things is because you have no better ideas and most of
all because it feels good, cuz everybody else did before you.
Stop the archives. Forbid them. I don’t want to have to see people sitting in there with
head phones and a flat screen being fascinated by Ana Mendieta. She was, and oh she
was so before her time, but not anymore. Make a hole and put it all away. And when
you are anyways at it, dig a hole for Mike Kelley as well, he is, he is, he is the Woody
Allen of visual art. Spit on him, or no spit on the place where the hole was where you
buried all that crap. Spit on it.
I like history, but not this one. I don’t like any versions of it, and certainly not today
when history also has become commodity. History is excellent and it’s all so
contemporary. Yet it is time to turn to history, to turn back. Not around, it is time to
turn back, to a moment, to historical instance, to which our contemporary discourse
is not compatible. We have to turn back to history constructed on another paradigm,
on another mood of thinking, on a way of coping with the world that we are simply
foreign to. We have to stop making ourselves open to our history and instead turn to
a history that is so closed, so locked away, so hard and stubborn that that only way to
deal with it is by changing who we are.
No, I’m not interested in repeating it, or to re-live it. I don’t cherish feudalism,
knights, dirt, slavery and which burning or whatever, but in turning to history that
cannot be understood. Engagement in something incompatible to our own historical
paradigm is the only way that we can change history in a radical sense, by making
ourselves open to an absolute closed system, not because it is “closes” but because it
does in no respect belong to us. Only then can we produce a history that wont
promise to repeat it self, that want make us feel fine, but actually shiver of fear. Time
machines is not enough, no no it just criss cross between known moments in history,
we need a time war machine, an apparatus that can catapult us out of our very
understanding of time itself. Perhaps it is not we that needs to be or not afraid of
repeating history, but we should instead offer our self like a good meal to history to
make it repeat us. It will be catastrophically unpleasant, a morbid festival. Make
yourself a fresh meal for history.
Fuck Your Circumstances
We all agree to the idea that art, whatever expression, reflects its mode of production.
You make your work in a studio that’s twelve by twelve and you will inevitably make
twelve by twelve art. The moment you close the door behind you and start creating,
you will make work that is not exactly open, transparent or inviting. Set up a process
of three months and you will obviously make a three months process work. Thus, if
you don’t want to make work that looks like Alain Platel’s make sure not to set out for
a five months rehearsal process. Or, if you don’t want to make work that resembles
Meg Stuart’s keep away from video documentation. Seriously, if you from the start
estimate to make work that can be documented, work that, so to say, fits in a video
camera, work that can be converted to some notation, or fiddled into some searchword story, your work is just not radical enough and already defined by the mode of
documentation. Ban people that speak about the importance of documentation. Your
84 work won’t be better because the documentation was high-res or elaborated through
some fancy software.
If your artistic endeavor is supported by the state or not doesn’t make you more or
less independent. The sort of dance that we do always belongs to the state, no
exceptions! It’s always already inscribed in the stage machine, like where would you
present your work if not within the atmosphere of the state. By the way, if you have
BalletTanz lying around in your work environment you will do BalletTanz dance. I
think it is a very good idea that you stop doing that kind of dance. Terminate your
subscription, mega-loser. Stop it and throw away all your back issues. Make sure to
erase the name of anybody who ever wrote for the magazine from your mind. Now!
I’ll tell you something. You totally don’t remember me. Yes, I did. I confess, and I was
even proud about it. But I stopped, or perhaps they just stopped asking for
contributions. So your work is funded by the art council, and you know who sits in
the jury deciding who will and will not… that’s the circumstances that govern your
work… No wonder you make shit.
Dance and choreography, art whatever, is business. Nothing special, selling
choreography is like selling cars, dealing and wheeling on Craig’s list or renting out
your flat far too expensively. But then, if your work is resonating of its mode of
production, aren’t you then making business dance. You are not making money but
yet you are commercial. Tadam, I knew it! You run your business well, very well. You
always send in the reports on time, perfect bookkeeping, and you make dance? Yeah,
so what you do is a perfect bookkeeping dance?
Hmmm, perhaps not even dance is that linear, but watch your ass, before you know,
it’s the accountant that makes your stuff as touring becomes priority and keeping the
business together is your magnum opus. In any case, whatever conditions you work
under, you have only one thing that should concern you. It’s simple, banal and
hellufalot of work: master the circumstances and make sure never to fall victim for
them. Make yourself king of the circumstances that are at your disposal.
If you have no money to rent a studio, stop complaining about it and spend the time
working somewhere else. There are lots of big rooms in the world where dance and
choreography can be made amazing. The local nightclub, the town square, the beach
or the phone? You want to work in a studio because it makes you feel like a
choreographer. Choreographers don’t work on the beach, surfers do. And you are so
keen to feel and look and move like a choreographer that you’ll never give up your
precious twelve by twelve studio. A space that you probably have given a name,
göööö. If you ever visit the choreographic centre in Montpellier, you’ll know exactly
what I mean. Moreover who says making work in a big room is a good idea. Fuck
that, make choreography in small confined spaces. Make it in the bath tub and it
might come out like an early Jerome Bel piece? Make it whilst you commute to work
and it’ll be mobile work. OMG, people that complain about having a day job, and not
blah blah dance – they make day job choreography – not because they have to but
because they want. They are just so happy victimizing themselves under the burden
of being a waitress. Fuck that, and make your waitress choreography, show some
dignity.
Aha, dude – This is exactly why making yourself king of circumstances is a
gargantuan enterprise, the adventure of you life, because it means you’ll have to give
something up. To obey, support or whatever circumstances is sweet because it feels
good, boosts your identity. At the same time only if we challenge circumstances can
we produce something that will not be just more of the same. If you have a company,
sell it! If you have a manager, bitch like you were Argentinian! If you have a
dramaturge, fire him! – I say it again — If you have a dramaturge, FIRE him! – Two
85 is not enough: If you have a dramaturge, fire him. No send him to another galaxy.
He’ll be very happy cuz he probably also admires Douglas Adams, and still laughs
about the tacky jokes about a planet inhabited by bed sheets. Jezuz. If somebody
wants to make a book about you and your work, run run run! If you have a studio,
rent it out – but make sure not to rent it to something dance.
So you say, but maybe if a dramaturge is such a bad thing maybe I should keep him,
produce closure and hence make myself open to radical change, to breach? Might, be
a good idea but when it comes to the dramaturge this is not a fact, because he or she
is somebody that always operates vis-à-vis priority. Making yourself king of
circumstances is exactly a matter of passing through a distinct closure, or perhaps
even better the moment of mastering circumstances, i.e. emancipating your
production from its mode of governance, you will necessarily configurate an open. Or
perhaps, the moment of emancipation from circumstances implies a shift from
multiplicity to multitude, that is a space of innovation or becoming.
Obviously, this process implies renouncing identity. To rule your circumstances will
by default make you appear like a fool, an idiot, irresponsible, unprofessional and
laughable, naïve or childish. Yes, emancipation, in this sense, proposes a certain
refusal to negotiation, or a least a refusal to a change in the terms of negotiation, a
suspense of negotiation until the field has been reset, rebooted. This can only take
place by some kind of unconditionality, such as fanatism, obsessivity, non-provoked
postponement, total irreliablity, some sort of humor. Humor in the sense of
collapsing signifier chains: a joke is the deliberate formation of signifiers that at the
same time construct consistency and incompatibility, that produce incoherence
where coherence rules, or in other words that is both and and and or at the same
time. The joke, the mastery of circumstances, opens for a space of innovation, for a
space where the subject can no longer possess the sentence I feel, but is deferred to a
position that is being felt.
We all agree that the mode of production governs the result, the production or
product. FUCK YOU, not any more it does! Refuse it, refuse it. Just goddamn
repudiate. And this, as you know, means one kick ass thing: BETRAY ALL SIDES.
Medium Rare Middle Class and Saturday
A few years ago I called the Swedish Embassy in London. Nothing particular in mind,
but as a well-meaning participant in the cultural sector I take dialogue to be
something positive. The next few minutes showed how utterly wrong I was. After
introducing myself, it didn’t take ten seconds before the person on the other end
exclaimed, with a haunted yet on the verge aggressive voice: “But you know, we have
no money!”
The sentence echoed over the line as if recited in a cathedral: “But you know, we have
no money, no money, no money, money…”
Hell knows from where it came, but I heard myself respond: “But that’s great”, and a
short however excellently calculated pause followed (As I said, I have no idea from
where this came.), and I continued knowing that confusion was rising on the other
end, “Then we can have coffee every afternoon the whole week.”
Silence. More silence… and then… “What do you mean?”
“Well, if you have no money, I don’t see any reason for you to sit around in the office!
So let’s go for coffee.” That was the last silence I heard from the cultural attaché in
London, a few moment later the line broke.
I can assure you that had I been more consistent in calling embassies there would
86 have been so much more silence and broken lines. Yet, there is apparently enough
money in embassies to pay somebody to answer that phone.
Recently, in relation to a medium sized exhibition project, Tate Modern sent me an email requesting that I, the exhibitor, should apply for travel support from Swedish
authorities. I figure Tate Modern’s turnover is approximately three or four thousands
time bigger than mine. Do I have an assistant? Christ, Tate Modern literally swims in
assistants. I’m impressed, from that position you need a lot of guts to ask a poor artist
to pay for his own trips. (I know, there are no poor artists anymore, but still it sounds
better.)
The other month, performing in Sydney I realized, to my surprise, that my
appearance was funded by Goethe Institute. I did indeed live in Berlin for some years,
but I was never registered as a citizen or had anything to do with German funding
authorities. I must admit it was slightly embarrassing to Guten Abend and Danke the
cultural attaché, but thank God for Margie Medlin’s indecency.
Art and its practitioners have always been helpful for benevolent international
relationships. Excellence, eccentricity, drug habits, popularity or virtuosity will
always be subject for admiration, it is just the institutions, venues and audiences that
change, or do they? Is what we today experience the end of an era when embassies
and governmental policies will change, not because they can but because they are
over? There’s still hope.
Internationalization has obviously two sides, a transmitter and receiver, where the
idea is a win-win situation and everybody is happy. Nation to nation and the artist
should smile both when shaking hands with the major and when receiving the check.
Doubtless it is the “nation” part of international that has created leverage, and the
artist has often operated as a bribe for more or less legit business (everybody knows
that CIA funded exhibitions in Europe after WWII).
When embassies have no money and exotic is something we explore on Youtube.
When the nation-state loses its position and cultural exchange is governed by low
tariff airlines the win-win situation seem out of hand. Is it perhaps time to stop
seeing an option in embassies and explore the “inter” in international, i.e. fuck
cultural exchange on the level of representation and let’s instead see how artists
produce agency because they are all over the place. Not necessarily due exhibitions,
performances or readings but because they are there, creating long term relationships
on grass root levels.
Twenty to thirty years ago a few creative managers in the cultural sector realized that
art could be understood as an export product. They mimicked business propositions
used by commerce and engaged in a sort of cultural colonialism. What if not Belgium
was one of the first, repeating the crusade they started in Africa some hundred years
earlier? Monopolization appeared through the set up, in particular, of European net
works, not only in respect of distributing national products but also through the
handling of other countries pearls of cultural production. Wasn’t that exactly what
happened during, and just after the iron curtain fell. Artists and groups first from
Balkan and then further east ware, so to say, bought by European managers and
toured with out reservation on the European market. But as much as IT-business had
to over heat so did the hysterical touring and use of Balkan based artists and groups.
After a few years nobody wanted to know anything about the now over explored
newcomers in the European friendship. A colleague from Zagreb once told me:
“French, German or Belgian groups are programmed every year. We were top of the
food chain for one, possibly two seasons. Now we have to wait another decade for the
next summer of love”. Quite clever deception: we bring you aboard in order to make
87 sure you don’t make any fuzz, and business as usual. The Belgian dance group
“Rosas” visited ImpulsTanz in Vienna for the seventeenth summer in a row in 2009.
It however appears that supporting international touring of larger and established
artists and groups lack efficiency. Not only does it cost a lot of money, the amount
and quality of exchange is minimal. Those companies tend to utilize the fast-in fastout scheme which implies close to zero exchange, if what we mean with exchange is
something more than the hour on stage in a state funded venue somewhere, and the
obligatory review in the local newspapers. This model of exchange is based on the
notion of lack of information. Elaborated through fax and fixed lines, when Brussels
was far away and Madrid was next to the end of the world, when a copy of the season
program for Kaai theater or Theater am Turm was hard currency. Today Brussels,
Berlin and Bratislava is more or less one and the same, for years connected through
residency programs, dance platforms, EU collaborations and more cheap airlines. If
we like it or not the national part is passé, today its all about inter, which in short is
to say: success is equal to having as many players active, as much as possible, in as
many contexts as possible, all the time. What matters are personal relations, not to
ship cultural heritage in the form of products from capital to capital. What counts is
to be there, in the workshops, residencies, collaborations, impro jams, breakfasts,
seminars, dinner parties, magazines, summer universities, parties, beds, informal
networks and so on.
This is not a tendency but correlative to general transformations of society towards
post-Fordist production. It is no longer products and their circulation that is key, it is
organization and management that counts. It is no longer about selling many of the
same, as the good old T-Ford, but selling a few of many, like Amazon or Google. This
is sustainability today, small entities everywhere. Swarm intelligence in front of
flagship cultural export.
Moreover it is all about openness and sharing. How does it come that major
choreographers never give workshops or hang around and exchange with the local
community for some days before of after their performances. It isn’t because they are
so busy or have board meetings to attend. It is because of priority. Or rather, it is
because these artists and choreographers live on a romantic notion of secrecy or even
mystery. At best an audition but a workshop never. The Grand artist is supposed to
be super-human. The brilliant artist and choreographer today, however, is the one
that sticks around and engage in the local context, that produces desire for more and
further encounters, not the ones to be admired and put on a pedestal. Transparency,
sharing and personal engagement is the name of the game called neo-liberalism.
It is our job, the artists, to speak up and stand tall, and convince our funding agencies
that touring is over, especially for the countries that weren’t part of the initial
internationalization. It is a waste of time and resources to try to win a position in the
international touring circuit. The business is dead and newcomers will forever be
patronized. Only if we invent new and contemporary strategies for international
engagement will performing arts have a change to flourish. The fees might be smaller
but they will last longer and I tell you, we will be immune to the cathedral echo “no
money, no money”. We won’t even hear it, because we don’t need the money, we
wont need the ignorant, white wine soaked smile of cultural attachés with zero
knowledge of our beings and doings.
So let’s skip the nation and work on the inter. Why stick to funding our own crew
when we can support knowledge and research intensive projects and relationships
diagonally across boarders. Let’s put a stop to the vertical funding mechanisms
operating in favor of the Nation and the already established, and instead engage in
88 small, personal, temporal and dynamic collaborations.
This is the time of cognitive capitalism and who has the knowledge? We do!
Dance Is Dead, Long Live Dance
The other season the national venue for contemporary dance in Stockholm advertised
their program with a comparison to arena rock. Fuck yeah, that’s an excellent move
in order to grant dance an autonomous existence.
The idea was simple. Imagine that what you’d see in the, so called, House of Dance
would be as cool as Deep Purple, Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna or Metallica
in the football stadium together with forty eight thousand others.
First of all, if I’d be interested in arena rock then I’d buy a ticket. I don’t need to
imagine anything to go see dance. Second, if I’m interested in dance and
choreography the wet dream isn’t exactly grandpa boogie or four dudes from
Australia with the intellectual ability to haul “-Yeah!” between every two songs.
It’s kind of hard to comprehend why a national venue for contemporary dance want
us to reproduce an image of three generations of lower middleclass family idyll
dressed up in fan T-shirts and etc paraphernalia, downing over prized beers from
plastic cups and singing along to songs older than most choreographers. Third, who
had the excellent idea that a venue for contemporary dance would gain credibility by
comparing it self to the most populist kind of entertainment the world have ever
invented. And fourth why would a venue financed to the last penny by the state high
five with commercial event culture at its worst. That’s like a reversed cry for help, or
like – arena rock equals contemporary dance, so why on earth support dance with tax
money when you don’t pay shit for Deep Purples forty-sixth visit to your city.
“Hallo Stockholm! Can you hear me?”
Dance has for hundreds of years been haunted by history, the lack of it, and the
nonexistence created by said lack. Dance is like a ghost next to other artistic
expressions wandering the corridors of the world’s école des beaux arts like an
anorectic Nicole Kidman, or perhaps Heath Ledger with intact The Joker make up.
Dance never made itself a position in the history of philosophy, except as a cute
metaphor, because its ephemeral status, nor did it attract much attention in the
encyclopedia showing up over the last few hundred years. Dance has been banned
from history because as, Peggy Phelan wrote in the legendary chapter 7 in her book
“Unmarked” from 1993, performance becomes itself through its own disappearance
(softly quoted). And yet dance has, or so it seems, made an immense effort to get its
ass into that history.
Yet, something is peculiar with the arena rock capacity that dance lacks. Not
necessarily the humongous audiences or the amazing apparatus set in motion, nor
devoted fans, hysterical behavior or even the massive manifestation of a group. No,
it’s on the other side. Up there on stage. Dance has no Keith Richards or Angus
Young, there is no half century old choreographies that make teenage girls faint, no
concert dances to which father and son can groove. Damn, I envy those rock ‘n rollers
the satisfaction to scream along like football hooligans: “Let’s dance, put on your red
shoes and…”
But why is there no arena dance. I always wondered if, for example, a large-scale
theatre presents ten evening with an established local company, which is often the
case (Rosas in Kaai Theater, Cullberg Ballet in The House of Dance), why not, instead
of ten performances with a thousand people per night, rent the local ice-hockey
stadium during one night for ten or fifteen thousand people. Then somebody else, not
89 so established, could do research on the stage or present an experimental piece.
“But”, you say, “you wont see no nothing. The dancers will be like ants. I mean dance
is something that must be experienced live, and not through over sized video
screens.” But is it really? How can it be that dance loses it’s authenticity and the
experience its potentiality when supersized, when nobody seem to have a problem
with Rolling Stones being genuine rock ‘n roll in front of a few hundred thousand
people? And don’t tell me that concerts aren’t about image, if it was about the sound
then why don’t you stay home with your headphones.
“But isn’t Riverdance arena dance?” Yes, it is but that’s not to be compared to Rolling
Stones but more in line with Celine Dion or The Beatles on Ice.
I believe that the reason has nothing to do with experience. More over I think dance
would be great in Madison Square Garden. It would be different of course, but why
not great? No, the reason is money, control and power! If Rosas or Chunky Moves
would perform in stadium venues the economy circulated would be something totally
different, and the moment when there is an option to make money, lots of money, at
least three things follow: 1. subsidy units would have to consider it’s support; why
should tax money finance dance companies that can fill stadiums? 2. if dance could
produce revenue a busload of harsh motherfuckin’ businessmen would knock on the
dressing room door, 3. dance would transform into a commercial expression and thus
lose some, or all of the privileges of state supported culture.
These are the simple reasons why even the most exclusively big companies forever
will occupy the big stages but never go arena, and this is supported by venue and
festival directors, because, whatever they say, their watchword is: If we mustn’t
change why even think about it? It worked last year so it will probably work this year
as well. Why transform when there is nothing to gain?
The central problem of cultural circuits that relies solely on one single wallet (The
State) is that there can be no competition, no real lobby or backstabbing. Why?
Because, even if my theatre sell so many more tickets, I’m still not gonna make
millions? So why? And you respond: “But there are other kinds of people, presenters
and curators with guts and ideology. People willing to take risks.”
Yes, there is but risks that only can take place on levels of variation: a little bit better,
worse, more, less, daring, conservative and so on. Without doubt, those people are
precious and need unconditional support (there are some in Australia), but since they
are still running smaller organizations and weekend festivals it is obvious that there
are forces in the landscape that prefer business as usual.
State funded culture could be compared to the legal aspects of arms dealing:
monopolization and centralization of power produce obscene economical
asymmetries and any kind of resistance or attempt to produce transparency is killed
through silence, because everybody is guilty.
Yet, something interesting is happening. Right now, in front of our eyes. There’s a
new kind of war emerging, produced through a different kind of society, through
different kinds of strategies, different economies, elaborating different modes of
ownership, distribution and accountability. There is only one problem, on a new kind
of battlefield success will obviously also be different. This must be a success that is
not recognizable and cannot be recognized by “important” players on the present
dance market. However, the situation can be reversed, and to “our” favor. As long as
new modes of success are not compatible with established modes of evaluation, it
poses a threat to the established. The question today, is whether, and how, small
emerging cells of activity, through informal collaborations, can nourish emancipation
and structural transformation of what dance can be. Personally I’m absolutely
convinced although it will cost, and today is when we start paying. Hell, if we want
change there will be collateral damage, and this implies that we have to stop
operating through forgiveness and “a little bit”. I say, fuck a little bit, if we want
90 transformation let’s fuck a lot… or I mean, we are speaking about a necessary
apocalypse, or give it another name: unconditional betrayal.
Dance is dead, long live dance.
When something dies something new can emerge, but if dance has no history, this
means that either dance is new, like NEW, all the time, or is rendered immobile
exactly due its lack of history. Is it possibly so that dance precisely because it lacks
history cannot issue transformation, and at the same time because it has no history it
cannot produce contemporaneity? Further, is the lack of history also the reason why
dance cannot turn commercial, as the production of history is linked to ownership
and objects? Perhaps we should look for some arena dance, not because we want to
end up at the Wembley Stadium but because it promises sufficient stability to
produce change, contemporaneity and commerce. Isn’t it weird that as much as
dance mourns its lack of history, it’s programs and festival are void of any attempt to
create it? This is of course not a matter of unveiling a history already existing, which
would evidently consolidate dance as we know it, but to insist on telling history from
the battlefields emerging right now. Our history, freed from historians and over
weighted academics, belong to everybody and fucks history, in order to produce it.
History is not behind us but something we create by remembering to forget.
Fresh Rigor
Make short and concise pieces. Write short and concise blog entries. Your
responsibility as a choreographer or performance maker is to produce fresh rigor,
visual pleasure or stunning whatever it now might be. First of all, a critic, dance
writer, programmer or parent that writes, or in any other way utilizes such terms
should be put under a stone and forgotten. Second any choreographer that aspires to
anything of the like and doesn’t react to such terms by instantly terminating his or
her career should equally be put under a stone and forgotten. Make short and concise
pieces is the worst advice one can give, the most horrible condition that can be given.
Short and concise pieces are approximately as rotten as the Bush administration,
operating through pure and simple fear. We will save you from the evil other, but
until that moment the assault can happen every second. You just have to do one
thing, pass over all power to an interim non-democratic governance and it will be
super duper. No it won’t, cuz state of exception has transformed into business as
usual. What once, for good or bad, could be thought of as an energy booster, an
intensifier that carried the potentiality of self-destruction, that could crush a
flourishing structure has now become the cleaning man upholding fear as mode of
maintenance.
Even if every single dance created were complete shit, critics would write about its
qualities, invent reasons to desire half-ass composition, even come up with some
argument for why Trisha Brown still is valid to present in a festival. The critic has
only one job, to secure his job and produce enough mucho fiction for somebody to
pay him or her. You are no different, what you fear is the obliteration of your job, and
don’t come about here and mention calling. Even if we hadn’t already renounced
passion, calling and enthusiasm you never had any, you are just doing a job. And
that’s on the other hand your lucky day, since you are doing a job you know it matters
how you do it. However, in this situation life and labor has so nothing to do with each
other, only if we detach our work as dancers, choreographers or artists can we make
up for all those years of an assumed prolongation between the body and expression.
Remember to say no to Jackson Pollock, he is the romantic leftover that brought the
body back into painting when those modernist dudes were almost done with it. And
91 then Basquiat – Help me, and now it’s not just the male body but also an outsider
and slightly whimsical one – - (that movie, so should have been done, Julian
Schnabel not entirely sure).
We should celebrate improvisation, of any kind and looks as long as it breaks with
any connection between body and ambition, contemplation of the immensity of
human nature and artifice. Only if dance and choreography breaks with the body can
it claim the body.
Make short and concise pieces is not an option as the production will insist on
coherence, we can not turn to creation for advice, we can not call upon the creator to
terminate visual pleasure. As we know only the mediocre archeologist worships
things brought out of the body of the earth: the fetish functioning as the evidence of
an established relationship to, a type of transcendence. The real archeologist
worships the earth in and of itself, he or she doesn’t look for arguments or excavation
but organizes contingencies that in themselves operate as gnosis, a kind of
immanence.
Use decay as building material, as architectural mess, only destruction will bring to
end shameless expressions such as fresh rigor.
Book Late
“-What do you do with an e-mail with the following letters in the Subject field:
“Urgent”?” “-What do you do? – - “-Exactly, you forget about it… for a long time, a
really long time!” – - “-How do you react when the subject of an e-mail tells you the
following: urgent, urgent?” “-I didn’t hear… / pause / exactly, at least until lunch you
react on any kind of human contact by showing your teeth. If you still were human
one could classify your behavior as seriously pissed off, a kind of Samuel L Jackson
’98 pissed if you know what I mean?”
“-Are you asking me about when you receive an e-mail with the subject: URGENT
URGENT URGENT! – - You know what you do… or will do, and terra firma should
just be happy it hasn’t happened cuz your rage would be devastating, – - so
devastating that like the final episode of “Heroes” would be approx the intensity of a
fart model Mademoiselle XXS.
A creature that responds to any kind of urgent, in whatever typeface, size or font, is
either a curator/programmer or educated in Belgium. Don’t do it, it makes you a
small person. If you answer an urgent mail you forever and automatically receive the
newsletters from Olafur Eliason, Portikus and Performa with a personal greeting
from Roselee. Any one person that sends an urgent mail has pronounced an absolute
disinterest in anything at all, or at least in sex, group sex and orgy. Mr Urgent Mail is
enthusiastic, positive but defensive and could say things like: “-For me, it’s important
that a show has diversity, it’s important to give context and an entry point for the
visitor.” Don’t answer the urgent mails, those that do transform into werewolves
every full moon – - SVP – - if you only think about responding but decide not to, you
might get away with a medium punishment – - a lifetime as performance artist with a
passion [OMG] to cognitive behavioral therapy – - if you answer I tell you, you are
stuck in causality. Doomed to action, dramaturgy and America. Urgent is an
investment term, it’s another word for openness, i.e. an estimation of affordance, of
investment. Urgent equals enthusiasm, and what do we think about that? Rot in Hell,
you fat fuck!
92 FYI, Goldsmiths is not a good idea and anybody who use the word “urgency” in
papers, talks, discussions, reference Homo Sacer and at the same time has a thing for
ex-activists – - un-friend them, block them, erase them from your address book,
pretend that the line is very bad, tell them that Carolee Schneemann is a great artist
and spread rumors about that person preparing a show or book or interview series or
anything with Martha Rosler, that… will be published by e-flux journal.
Burn your boats, and do it now! Visual cultures [in freakin pural] is as much garbage
as anthropology is grace/…/ Oh, shit that was a fairly fuckin deep Freudian slip!
Anthropologists, at least after Vailala Madness, totally answer urgent mails, not even
with a simple re: urgent, but they insert a new subject, a proper one, and I don’t mean
like SUCK MY COCK. Somehow it’s weird to consider the idea that there are people
calling themselves anthropologists. What do you do with an artist that announces an
interest in anthropology, especially if the interest is empirical and sort of autopoietic.
Well, maybe that department finally ran out of stock, you know the sort of
performance artist that announces work like: not going indoors for a whole year, or –
- Fuck me – - remain tied up with the boyfriend for an entire year without being
allowed to touch each other. That is so embarrassing, it might create a system crash
on wordpress. You know what, this blog post will not be available in China.
I’m interested in people and the formation of relations. Stop it, stop it, and please
please please don’t do performances about your sexuality and your traumatized
childhood. Fake it for gods sake, FAKE IT.
Stop anything that has to do with activation. Stop working with young people. Stop
anything that has to do with posters. Renounce community art. Insist on closing the
pedagogic dept during your show, even if it’s a group-show. You know what, you
don’t need to pretend that you negotiate if you should or not do the that show in
Dubai, just go there and leave your anthropology at home. Curiosity is not a good
thing, for Chris sake stop making studio visits, don’t come to showings or some tiny
ass performances in an artist run space. Stay home and read Max Stirner.
Subject: Travels – - five months before the show the mail drops in the mails box, with
an endless tirade concerning how important it is to book flights in time. Look, do I
know where I’m going the day after today, no I don’t, do I know anything about in
five months. No, I so don’t, fine now I know… since you tell me I’m booking a flight
for the so and that date in like another epoch. More importantly, who do you
announce yourself as. “-If we can save a hundred euros, it really makes a difference…“
– - dude, fuck off! First of all, make your accounts, you are saving the wrong end. Get
rid of the office, stop inviting Alain Platel, Isaac Julien or Woody Allen, and don’t
think that I don’t know. Second, is that how you want to establish a relationship? –
by booking flights in time. You are only interested if it’s booked five months in
advance and economy economy economy class.
Friends of the family: Don’t visit festivals, shows, events, anything what so ever – especially not boyfriends — that state things like: “-Oh but that’s very good cuz there
is an RyanAir connection.” — Great, yeah essactly. Is that how much you dig your
girlfriend – so much that you propose a visit with a lowfare flight and six hours
busride to each airport and the flight – I forgot to mention – is at six forty-five. “-Oh,
my love, it’s noproblem, I’ll get up at quarter past two and take the bus” – Good
fuckin’ bye. But good cuz your partner will be so wasted and fucked up, wined up on
Ibuprofen that your sex will be totally worthless and will fall asleep before you come.
The whole weekend is a long waiting to go to the airport and again, totally the wrong
timing, three twenty on Sunday afternoon.
93 Fuck Gatwick, Fuck Schönefeld, Double Fuck Charleroi, and whole orchestra fuck
Beauvais.
If any of those destination pop up – CANCEL. And if this person is a friend, no
he/she isn’t. – - If you still feel weird, send a mail to Frau Hundred-Euro-Makes-aDifference and tell her your dog died, that your city was hit by a tornado, that you
have to go to the dentist, anything. And I promise on my mother grave, if you lose
some money I will cover your ass.
Parentheses: One more, how is it possible for a festival not to be able to wire money
to my account. How, does it happen that some idiot in Spain needs me to send an
official letter that the account in question is really mine, and it can’t be a PDF. This is
great, and at the same time the same idiot has forgotten that I cancelled and didn’t
show up for the panel on city interventions. – yes, this is true, seriously – back to
cheap flights hell.
The moment you say yes to Luton your work just made it to the farmer’s league, the
second shop, to the unemployment office, to an artist in residency, to artistic
research. You are mediocre. Demand, Demand, Demand INDEPENDENCE.
“-Don’t be funny now, you know that’s impossible”, you say. Of course it’s fuckin’
impossible – independence what do you think – but check this out, it is more fuckin’
impossible to sit your ass down in a low price airline, with the autopoietic argument
of “studying people”, and an urgent message.
Don’t do this to yourself, don’t lower the stakes to nothingness, don’t allow yourself
to believe in what’s good for you. Don’t let them tell you how important it is for an
artist’s career to associate with a production house. Get it, your gallerist wants to fuck
you, your money and your super model girlfriend. You are better, cooler, sexier,
groovier – - as long as you didn’t set foot in Städle – you are more evil, dark, fanatic
because at least you don’t want to fuck your gallerist’s assistant, daughter, wife,
brother, lover or balcony.
Be a fox, an urban fox. Betray all sides and book late.
Opinions Is Like NYC Dance
“-Here we aren’t trying to reproach each other, you know, convince each other
through argument. We… it’s not very productive, you know. We are… rather, trying to
form opinions.”
The reason why Americans came to Europe twenty of thirty years ago advocating the
importance of abandoning judgment wasn’t exactly an accident or misunderstanding.
Oh, and by the way, tonight Spangbergianism is written from Amsterdam the
centrefold of lack of judgment and hippy education [Ehhh, the centre of bad
consciousness and Calvinism, I’m convinced it was CIA that sent these dance flappy
improvisers over here]. Remember to spit on Andy Warhol, he was a fuckin’ hippy
and supporter of stepping back in favor of indifference. Great business model, but
how embarrassingly last Friday. Look, it’s not cool to be a fan of Andy, it’s as fucked
up as admiring John Cage, or stating, after thorough thinking, that “The Bicycle
Thief” is the number one movie of all time [Oh, obviously I think so…].
So why did they? Non-judgmental… Because they came from another word, because
they arrived from a continent that was overwhelmingly homogenized, from a society
that had just disqualified a handful of upcoming economies in South America and
94 experienced ’68 with a pair of binoculars. They came from a time that had seen
Woodstock but still worshipped Balanchine, that had seen Easy Rider next to
Vietnam war, so of course they preached a whole bunch of go soft attitude things.
Let’s get precarious and free sex. But only in the warm-up, you know already in the
beginning of the 70s they all got constipated and moved, make their living on
teaching, teaching and teaching even more. – - Fuck Vermnont – - The dance scene
in NYC is a great environment, wasn’t it for a few too many of passionate oldies
safeguarding their positions or on the other hand, slightly younger really mediocre
people that maintain the importance of the oldies because they know that as long as
they are there, their comfortable position is safe and sound.
Renounce Movement Research, ask them to not just stop sending you their
newsletter, ask them to stop doing it to everybody in the whole world. Movement
Research is like a family day celebrating vintage cars, a class reunion taking place five
days a week every week in front of a five or six generations younger audience. If
dance in NYC should have any change, get rid of everybody over 30, seriously. – send Miss Brown to Montpellier – - All of them, producers, choreographers, setdesigners – all of them – and everybody called Barbara – no exclusion. All of them! If
you one more time produce a memorial evening, if you one more time do an
anniversary something show, it’s over forever. And the result is Dance Theatre
Workshop, an oversized venue without any attitude at all.
The non-judgmental that one day came over to Europe, and stayed too long, has
become so amazingly hegemonic in the New York that nothing what-so-ever can
happen. Also and of course because it is admired, we all want to go to NYC to feel the
authentic and become artists. No, there are no exceptions. Whatever you say, there
are no exceptions! No, you might think it looks different but it doesn’t, it’s just you
who want it so badly. It’s all the same soft bullshit watching out for some
authenticity, the same authenticity but from time to time punked up with some extra
high leg movements or a whatever an identity dance, where the ballet trained dancer
with a Cunningham legacy – oh dear self-pity – is doing some yoga inspired formal
choreography with a plastic sculpture of Madonna introduced to the behind. New
York dance is over, and the more we write about it – except me naturally – the more
nice and bad, and critical critiques we write about it and the pieces the more harm we
do. All you dance critics in New York, stop now. This is also good cuz then you will
not be able to complain anymore. It’s is remarkable New York City can pride itself
with the most provincial dance world wide.
Judgment is totally great. It’s absolutely necessary, and you can’t hide. The moment
we try to get away from it, other regimes will emerge and dominate discourse,
activity, feeling and sensation. Judgment makes production possible, makes
differentiation capable, non-judgmental interaction is not about to produce no fuckin
nothing except the sensation, but only in the beginning, of feeling free and creative.
Creative is a bad thing, you are not imaginative just because you jump around a little
bit crazy. Judge Judge Judge, and be categorical about it.
You wish to get rid of judgment for two reasons… Oh, I forgot the one about offering
space to each and everybody. Are you so fuckin naïve that this is your image of
democracy? Go home! It’s the other way around, democracy if that is even a favorable
concept, is based on the necessity of the individual or a group to claim space. The
moment with space is offered you and your fluffy colleagues will drown in your own
ability. Democracy has one fabulous feature; it makes you feel like shit. What you
produce is a feel good life where Bill Cosby will be President for all times. Judge
Judge Judge. Don’t feel shame. It’s OK if you are not articulated or have no idea. If
something is crap it’s all fine. You know, if somebody asks you to come to a showing
or whatever, if somebody comes up to you after the show and asks: “-What did you
95 think?” Don’t fall for non-judgmental – just spit it out: CRAP. Say, you loved it and
talk about it for far too long. Stop being from Manhattan, stop living in Lower East
Side, stop being proud about yourself for curating a little I forget the name festival,
that present ninety percent local artists that I also forgot the name of. Stop
collaborating with Movement Research and stop reading that idiotic magazine. Stop.
The reasons for why we don’t want to reproach each other, the reason that we don’t
want to contest each other’s argument is simple. The reason why we here want to
produce a little opinions or something is because we have no idea what the hell we
are doing. Because we don’t know what we are talking about and because we don’t
know how to run a class that is more then ninety minutes long and have no idea what
so ever about what a workshop is? The reason for why the NYC dance scene is what it
is, is because it’s full of mediocre people that know they are mediocre and love to
belong.
Be judgmental and you will know, at least you will have a fight, or get hit on the nose.
Judge to save yourself from release depression. Judge in order to shun critical
distance. Judge others and fuck being self-critical in order to make art that is not like
sleeping with a Celine Dion hit. Judge in order to be in time and remain too
ambitious. Be completely unreliable, judge left and right, use inappropriate language
and judge again. Anything that is worth talking about can stand an upright
introspection and will not suffocate for being called shit, crap or stupid. Judge the
NYC and you will, it’s so bad it’s not even crap. Judge French dance and you will see
that it’s also quite sad. Hmmm, I wonder when we will pop into something fun? You
know what, wouldn’t it be terrible to come out of every dance show with a blissful
smile on our faces. What about if all those dance performance you have endured
where really amazing, what kind of world would that be? A utopia of mediocre? One
thing’s for sure I don’t want to live there. It’s called Sloterdijk, it’s known as house
music, it’s called anthropology. Stand up, be a revolutionary. The time of the
revolutionary is over, so over, and yet stand up for it. Revolution, com padre. Don’t
you dare call me brother.
Speak Up
As long as you don’t open your mouth you can’t be held responsible for anything at
all. To defend one’s silence, at least in the Western world, is piece of cake but to spit
something out you better know what you are talking about.
But, look, this is education. It’s not class, it’s not nine in the morning. You have
chosen to be here, to devote a part of your life to learn something, and this something
is dance, art, theatre, performance – so you must be pretty fucked up, I mean you’ll
never get rich here, never get anything at all. It’s work, and work again, it’s about
getting your ass around the last bend. This is education and it has a job, it’s there to
protect you. To produce a site where you can play, here we are one for all and all for
one, and I’m Charlie with the angels.
I’ll never let you go, not until you decide to leave. So why don’t you grab the
opportunity, why don’t you take the chance of acting like an idiot, why don’t you ask
the question, why don’t you scream, “-Dude, you are talking bullshit”, or “-I don’t
understand what the hell this is about, get real” – look if you have a question that’s
hundred percent legit, and if I can’t answer it’s my problem. Check it out, learning,
school, knowledge, education is not about me being satisfied – I get paid – you have
nothing to lose, but everything to win, so raise your voice.
96 Don’t come say you weren’t allowed to participate, that you weren’t given the chance
to express your opinion or perspective. Don’t come saying you couldn’t follow. You
didn’t tell me to start from the beginning again, so? And why would you want me
around if you already knew it all? We are here to produce problems, new problems,
difficulties that make us think diagonally, make us have to fuck up. If you weren’t
allowed to participate, is it my problem or is it you who should stop acting as a
spoiled brat. You weren’t allowed to express your point of view. How hard did you
try? Hard? No you didn’t, I didn’t see you take out a knife, load your shotgun, I didn’t
see you getting blue in the face, I didn’t see you bring out a megaphone, did I? Oh, I
should be more sensitive, perhaps even ask you… No, of course I can’t, that’s
completely patronizing. You are not eleven years old, this is advanced level education
and you wrote a motivation letter. You are thirty years old and take yourself seriously,
you are in education but don’t consider yourself a student. You “are” an artist, and
you ask me to be sensitive and offer space? Open your mouth, and make sure you’re
articulate. Make sure you know what you are talking about, punish yourself every
time you use the hide behind “or something”, kill yourself every time you say “I don’t
know”. If you don’t make sure you know now and take the risk of expressing it, even
when you have the support of an education, you will certainly never dare to say
anything when you are done with school. It’s now you have the chance, you have no
money, nothing to defend so why not take the risk. It is after all better to fuck up
today, when you are protected by the thick walls of the institution, than to do it later
when you will only gain the contempt of programmers, colleagues and art councils. If
you are such a fuckin coward that you can’t open your mouth during your education,
how are you gonna stand up for your practice when you hit the market and it’s reality
time. Hell, the only serious students in Europe today are in Vienna. I love the idiotic
action of occupying the art academy. What difference does it make, nothing of course,
but those motherfuckers stand up to it anyway. And you, what are you, comfortable
shit heads that so enjoy to be guided, so happy not to have to take decisions or just
one or two artistic ones when it is already too late. You so don’t want to lose your
comfortable position of sitting back being served. It is a little bit too cheap to defend
oneself with and through passivity. Of course any resistance, any argument and
conditioning will strengthen what it opposes but are you ready to give up the battle
already before it’s been fought, just because the enemy will fight back. History wants
to stay alive, so if we don’t aim at killing it off it’s gonna stick around stick around
and contemporary dance will forever be covered in acne. Be serial-patricidal, kill kill
kill and before you do it, stop sitting quite in the seminar, but announce yourself with
a warrior’s roar.
And remember, you gals and boys in NYC that are younger than thirty, we support
you unconditionally. Take them relics out, decapitate all the zombies of the New York
dance scene. Spare nobody, and fight without strategies.
If you don’t open you mouth and take over, what’s your fuckin mission statement.
Are you signing up to some Confucian ideology of honoring the elders? Stop it, Asia is
nothing good.
It is my guess that, among other reasons, contemporary education have become so
good in preparing students for established markets that they simply don’t know what
else to do than to comply, be enthusiastic and perform criticality. It mustn’t be the
responsibility of education to teach students to fit in, rather the contrary: the task
should be the opposite, to encourage the student to pursue other paths, different
formats to stop confirming existing markets. This can not be done by preaching
counter ideology or by blaming the market, but rather through allowing the student
not to identify with what a dancer, choreographer or performance maker is, i.e. to
appropriate identity. It feels good and is comfortable to be a choreographer and it’s a
shaky path to create ones own territory. Education tends to license the student – “Well done, now you are a choreographer.” – but only as long as you remain the same.
97 Instead education should give the student permission, permission to act differently
and free him or her from the responsibility to confirm dance and choreography.
Think about it, an education that takes as its responsibility to maintain or surveil a
territory, it’s that similar to a research and development department that obsessively
tries to create last years model.
A few years ago the French thinker Jacques Rancière contributed to the our context
with a text entitled “The Emancipated Spectator”, where he argues that theatre is
stultifying per definition and as a way out proposes an activated spectator, that
without becoming a participant is able to activate him- or herself not on the basis of
identity but rather in respect of individuation, i.e. expanding the possibility for what
the individual can be. We should however remember that the emancipated individual
is congenial to our present political climate. Emancipation for Rancière does not
mean to be, or become more oneself, but on the contrary to contest one’s identity and
what constitutes identity (in general) in our specific contexts and environments.
Emancipation can’t be given, it’s war – whatever war means, but it is war – and
somebody’s not gonna get out alive. So stop running around in nice Camper shoes
and training clothes, stop being convinced about your assumed political neutrality [“I just want to do my work, don’t have time with politics.” Jezuz], bring on your
superhero costume and arm yourself. No, don’t collaborate, don’t work together with
some leftover schoolmates. This is your fight, and you have to do it alone. Be a hero.
Colonialist, take over, vanquish and do it screaming, shouting and forcing your way.
Don’t stop. Speak up, scream, roar, holler, fight.
Am I Back, Fuck No!
Conceptual is not enough. In fact it’s not even enough to accuse somebody for – in
twentyten I mean seriously and fuck me in the mid nineties same shit. “-You
conceptual…”
But I remember a worldwide choreographer dissing one French so called conceptual
choreographer for making dance with only three centimeters of the body: the three
centimeters just above a human being’s eyebrows. Probably the only time that that
choreographer, or rather, theatre-maker with dance routines, said something funny.
And – - I think it is funny for two reasons, the obvious one that it’s quite funny as an
accusation – Precise if you know what I mean – and second because exactly that
accusation is so embarrassingly obvious.
If we lay aside the notion that all artworks retroactively gained a conceptual level
from some moment in the early seventies, what does it mean conceptual? Uhaa, for
most it means nothing at all, but is a term that shows up oscillating from being
genuinely negative to something one says, that feels nice. You know, not that I know
what it means, or want to know, but it feels good. “-It’s kind of conceptual…” or “-Yes,
my work is a little bit conceptual…”, feels good but doesn’t matter. Next time you end
up having to talk to a choreographer, listen to how often he or she says “kind of”, “a
little bit”, “…I don’t know” or “something like that” – and you’ll see that there are
more works constructed to be connecting some “something like that” with a fair bit of
“… I don’t know” topped with a French cuisine sort of nouvelle “kind of” and “you
know what I mean.” No way, I totally don’t want to defend articulation, reason,
coherence, inner logic OMG no no no, but “kind of” and reason is not dialectical, nor
distinctly separated, they are, in dance and choreography, the same BS.
Conceptual is not enough. Nope, and what does it mean in the first place and what is
it’s relation to “concept”. Conceptual in dance, ehhh – means absolutely nothing at
all. At one moment somebody told me Hooman Sharifi did conceptual work – tadam
98 -, but he has a dramaturge – - which obviously is the first thing the conceptual
choreographer gets rid off – - Yes, of course in dance conceptual could also be
interpreted as over protective, paranoid (in the bad sense of the word), hyper
proprietary – - but you knew this – - so I guess in that sense whatever his name that
Norwegian choreographer is indeed a strongly conceptual choreographer – - “-Why
overprotective, what do you mean?” – Isn’t it rather funny that so called conceptual
choreography in the nineties was totally obsessed with authorship and it’s relation to
dance, movement and perhaps the body but oh no no – identity politics came later –
when what conceptual’s first dictum was to rid itself of the influence of production,
process, performativity and performer. Conceptual is stupidly male, totally defensive
and the first sign of malign control obsession. Conceptual, obviously the result of a
childhood trauma (spit on Woody Allen, spit on him), is the little boy screaming “-I
can, I can myself” – conceptual is the residue of the child’s failed emancipation. It is
also possible that that sentence wasn’t entirely serious, but who knows? It is also
possible that conceptual dance never existed? It did and it didn’t, exactly depending
on what conceptual would mean. Conceptual, in either meaning has nothing and
nada to do with concept or concepts. Considering that a dance could be conceptual in
the sense of representing an engagement with a conceptual framework, protocol or
procedure, then conceptual dance never existed, it couldn’t – as such representation
necessarily must disqualify time, at least initially or on the level of illusion, and
cannot depend on climate, circumstances and the performers’ feelings. Conceptual in
this sense is about remaining the same, indeed it is about consolidating the same, the
self, norm and leaning steadily on discourse or even worse linguistics. But if
conceptual means to think a bit before going to the studio and perhaps not just to
think scribbling in the notebook about creativity and chance operations but to apply
some repeatable procedures to one’s work then conceptual dance has been there long
before the name was given by the author.
Conceptual, have we forgotten, is not exactly a contemporary term. Mind you, when it
first saw the light in the museum it was more or less the fault of a small handful of
people that in their insecurity signed up to structuralism in order to at the same time
gain stability when modernism had lost its momentum and at the same time slip out
of whatever kind of political/critical work, taking to the streets or supporting the
revolution. Conceptual art was already 1970 a totally conservative blunder. Especially
in the case of Kosuth and Weiner conceptual had only to do with language and modes
of signification, whereas Berry and LeWitt at least had some fun. No Berry had a lot
of fun. We like, but whatever fun there are only two options: Kosuth showing that he
is smart and that art, beauty and aesthetic criteria is the result of more or less stable
conventions, or LeWitt and Berry inviting the visitor to take a look at the result of
some or other procedure. Smart, oh yes, but only to the degree where it asks a
question without contesting anything at all. Conceptual art is bogus in the sense that
it completely confirms the modernist regime of representation.
Conceptual is all about interpretation and has nothing to do with the production of
concepts. A concept is something that negates interpretation, a complex of potential
connections that evades localization, stability and repetition. Of course, the art object
is immer inscribed in global market economy and has no critical potentiality
whatsoever, but capitalism tends to forget that an object can be more than a oneness,
but can also function as a machine. As an object visual art, dance and fuckin poetry
has no chance, but it’s machinic capacity has yet to be thoroughly explored, i.e. the
machine as object is inscribed but the engagement it produces with the visitor is not
yet commodified, or it is – engagement is certainly commodity, but consumption of
one’s own subjectivity can still be charged. Concept work, which is exactly not
conceptual, in other words, is an art that instead of representing an engagement or
idea, produces engagement, and produces it in such a way that the visitor or
spectator can not maintain his or her comfortable position, that sets the spectator out
of balance and disobeys criteria and quality. It is so totally not communist, nor is it
99 liberal but it contests the very criteria of democracy. Concept art is anti-democratic,
no, it just doesn’t apply to democracy – it doesn’t vote, and it doesn’t not vote, it
fucks conditions. Concept art is an art that you can’t give an answer to, that you can’t
reproach nor leave behind. It’s an art that is so not smart, it’s the absolute opposite to
Maurizio Cattelan. It’s an art so void of good ideas, that completely fucks the idea of
“brilliant” and doesn’t give a flying fuck about its audience. “-Why?” – - Aha, because
it never had one, and never relied on one, but is producing one right now. Of course
concept art is very timely, it fades quick and doesn’t sell well. But it saves lives, at
least mine, and yours. It doesn’t postpone the crises but proposes the apocalypse. It is
exactly enough, or a bit too much. Concept art refuses the crisp “simple” of a really
good piece of art, exactly because those criteria in no way make us think differently,
but just sit there and like it. Concept art is irresponsible, demanding, it corrupts and
makes people throw up, it betrays all sides and has only one perspective – change at
any price. Pleasant, no not at all, it totally sucks, but at least it sucks, sucks like Oh
My Fuckin God. It’s Axl Rose, like abstract if you know what I mean. Conceptual is
not enough, propositions are worse than pickup lines, and theatre is not about
changing the set, it’s about – - it’s about – - it’s about getting the fuck over it, over it
to the extent where there is no, and I mean NO turning back. Are you ready, are you a
warrior. Unfasten your seatbelts, disobey speed limits, ignore customs and tax
numbers – - Mel Gibson my man – - , betray all sides and be a motherfuckin dragon.
Social Democratic Dance
The opening scene in how many Hollywood movies when the protagonist is released
from prison. We se him walking corridors moving towards freedom, a brief halt when
some dumb ass looking guard returns his now historical possessions (please, nothing
with sexual connotations), a watch, a mobile phone… and then he is standing there
outside the gates smelling the air of liberty and we know this movie will be so boring,
so shit boring whatever it is Hudson Hawk, something featuring Ice T or Steve
McQueen, Wall Street, perhaps George Clooney can get away with it – but only once
– We know it’s just a detour, a ride around the block and the dude will of course not
do anything else than run the same course again and again. So tiring, so
embarrassingly tiring. Don’t do comebacks, it’s no sexy – SVP – you are not worth it,
and your fans don’t need you resurrected, stay dead and enjoy it. New versions, is so
uncool, don’t build your celeb status on already earned graces. Buy in to super bad,
start from scratch, from the freakin beginning.
The release scene could be understood as metaphor for choreography. This is how we
do it, we get out and start again as if nothing had happened. We adore our sentence,
and serve our time real well so we get released in advance, and then we continue
doing more of the same. We are so eager to get back in the saddle that we don’t waste
a second on rethinking. “-Have to make piece! Have to make piece, new piece!” – we
stutter like some Frankenstein’s monster, and it’s just a matter about days, hours,
minutes, seconds, instants and we are back in the can again.
Choreography is like contemporary social democracy – the very epitome of stability,
self-pity and self-glorification. Choreography is: “-Oups we lost the election, like
major, what we can do? Let’s not change anything at all and put all our savings on a
deus ex machina.” Oh, yeah, we know that politics is theatre but does it really have to
be Greek theatre, look what happened to their economy? Social democracy a curse
from day one – as long as it lasted it was a brilliant answer to the sanded down reality
of democracy – but today, it’s not even a joke, not even a Dutch choreography, not
even in line with a German dance festival.
100 In the social democratic HQ, “-Hey Guys, anybody have an idea of an argument to
build a decent opposition?” Silence… More silence… Really a lot more silence. “-Yeah,
I have one… this one is good.” “-Tell us, tell us…” “-Ok, here it comes: the others are
wrong!” And the social democrats celebrated all night long. Bright idea! Let’s build a
future on the motivation that the others are wrong. But shit we forget what the
alternative is, they’re just wrong. Very wrong, and more taxes preferably and more
money to retired people. Total absence of vision. Same story with choreography, let’s
change nothing at all, and by the way the others are really wrong, i.e. everybody who
have just a tiny bit of a different ambition. However, in dance and choreography the
situation is even worse than in politics, as the guardians of the system – whatever the
system could be called – are also faithful social democrats. And this is a mysterious
thing, in dance and choreography everybody is against everything and yet it’s the
liberals that are in parliament, or perhaps the parliament is empty we just didn’t
check. Because, even if we could get out of our precarious situation we are fuckin
happy with the comfort position, playing the underdog that knows he will never get
the chance to run the country.
But perhaps it all started with Pina Bausch. The bitch from Wuppertal is the Vater
der Nation, that royal social democrat that made things livable, danceable or
something -eable and now we all live in a scabby utopia cut of a second rate Guy
Ritchie movie with Brad retouched. So lame. Ingmar Bergman wasn’t cool, Liv
Ullmann no thanks, “Scenes From A Marriage” however am-a-zing television it might
be renounce it, curse it, voodoo the shit out of it. Spit on Bergman like you spit on
Woody, spit on social democracy with the same diabolic energy as you spit on the
Freud House. Send social democracy and choreography to eternal life on Maresfield
Gardens, to breathe the pestilent stench of Berggasse. And that’s obviously where the
prison scene comes back – the moment when Gordon Gekko exited he could as well
exited psychoanalysis becoming a well-behaving social democrat again. Demand life,
no chance of release. Demand lifetime.
It’s pretty much amazing, not only are social democrats curiously lousy in producing
opposition. When the Swedish losers of red and green coalition today put out their
alternative budget to the one proposed by the winners they proposed a something so
void of potentiality, vision, ambition, desire, life, prophecy, cool, sexy, attitude that
even their most devoted fans cried all the way til afternoon tea. This is choreography:
since it didn’t work last year let’s try one more time.
No, certainly not. I’m totally convinced about choreography. It’s my cup of tea, it’s
what I do for a living, it’s the way I live, it’s the print on my damn socks, the name of
my dog, fuck you too – I dig it, and I’m surprised – group dynamics I guess – but how
come that choreography hasn’t spiced up its self-image since the invention of gun
powder. Get it, nobody fancies liberal politics. It’s like French cuisine in Manchester,
like Veuve Clicquot in a paper cup – exactly – great but for the wrong reason. The
sole reason why liberals have any chance in Europe today is simply because they are
funkier than the grey sauce of cemented rhetoric that has opened up a disco on the
leftwing – yes, absolutely non alcohol – totally – what were you thinking.
Choreography today is so free from risk that it can but lose and on knock out. Or in
other words, social democracy is as groovy as the New York dance scene.
Who the fuck does the branding for the social democratic parties around Europe? A
laid off dramaturge with two weeks course in graphic design financed by they
unemployment office? Or is it the same agency that does the marketing for all the
seven hundred and ninety six black box theatres in Europe including Tanz im August,
oh I get it. Yeah, cool. For Christs sake PAF has a better campaign. I’m not saying that
dance and choreography is about marketing and simply attitude but check it out, that
does not say that we should practice politics as if a marching band was the only
marketing instrument around. We won’t win with a bunch of clarinets, dude.
101 Barely a month ago social democracy lost the Swedish election with bigger numbers
than ever before, what do they do? Yes, it’s the second lose in a row, never happened
before, so what do they do? They proudly announce to the population that they trust
the party leader and are convinced that next time… What the fuck, what do you think,
that the greyest woman in the history of mankind suddenly will start to groove like
Beyoncé or go as angry as Pink, nope – it’s more likely she will sing another duet with
Rod Stewart or start a barbershop ensemble with “We Shall Overcome” as the newest
hit. What kind of music did you use for you last piece? Oh, another really interesting
minimal techno collection. Sexy!
So we know we are fucked, what do we do? Yeah good idea, we hook up with the
green party and the leftovers of the communist party and since we are so totally
convinced about our own excellence we are completely unprepared and the first thing
that happens is that we dive head first into the wall of more, less, more, less, a lot, a
little, more, most, less, nothing, taxes, climate, jobs, taxes and are still convinced that
we will win the election without a single element of consensus. No way, I totally don’t
argue for consensus as the mode of collaboration, but for the love of Satan get real
and don’t make a scene on direct television. If you don’t know how to open your
mouth, or even say your name, select one person to talk for the whole orchestra. No,
the left is so keen to govern the country and so convinced of themselves that they will
of course collaborate but will not change their policy for anything. Soon soon soon,
you will see – like an eruption communism (which is a word that the left has already
forgotten) will flourish and we will bring back the world to justice, good tone and
public space is public space and only one television channel. Long live…
Communists, leftists, greenists, dancers, choreographers, festival director and
bloggers get your shit together. What do you want, what is your vision? No no that’s
being realistic! What’s your fuckin vision? That everybody is given a chance, yeah rule
the world on that basis and it will certainly be brave. Openness, yeah – also a great
concept. Open to what on what basis, to everything? Also a smart concept to run the
business. You have no chance, you will remain small, insignificant, comfortable and
not even laughable. Clench fists, stop fuckin collaborating, stop listening
understandingly – take decisions, run the others over, show no remorse, ban house
music, point with your whole arm, fire your producer, dramaturge and your setdesigner husband. Stop admiring anybody at all! Beat somebody up, throw yourself
headlong into the fight, it might be the last one (fights are rare these days). The
others are not wrong, it’s you! So stop fuckin complaining and make it happen.
Complain louder, loudests! Say NO!
Weird Ass Novum
Don’t wait for me! I’m not gonna come up with any solutions, no proposals, no
promises, no nuttin. How could I, what do you think? Do you live the stupid idea that
I write a blog to convince you? Are you nuts? I’m writing this because of pure and
simple despair. Not because I know anything, not because have anything to offer. I’m
not writing this thing in order to stay human, or in order to fence myself off the brink
of madness. No, I’m very happily sane and normal. I hate showings, sketches, drafts,
modesty! Showings are a cry for help. No to autonomy, no to DIY, no to management.
Big no to production houses that tell you what to do! Insist – insist on the right for
the independent artist to apply for subsidy. No to autonomy, be dependent, be
without ties, but rely on everything. Arbitrary is already here. Be absolutely naïve and
approach the work without the slightest defense. Say no – shout curses in their
direction – - to those that consider minimal cool. It isn’t, it’s conservative, graphic
designerish, male, Christian, heteronormative and stabilizing. It is another time now
102 – arbitrary doo-ip doo-ip – - you aren’t making revolts by insisting on keeping it
minimal, on staying on your spot – on reading Deleuze, or categorically not doing it.
There is no time for revolution, no moment of ripe, time for harvest.
Fuck minimalism, it has no, nothing, nada, zilch capacity in 2010, and was never
admirable. It was necessary at some point, as an act self-castrating of the one who
you were not, but it was never transforming anything what-so-ever. No no, it only
made the other, the dominant discourse look even more ridiculous. Minimal is the
music of architects, it’s the music for those whose name is Francis but call themselves
Frank, it’s music for hard on the outside and gooey on the inside (just like me).
Minimal is for people, who when taking somebody home for a one night stand excuse
oneself for the mess in the apartment. Minimal is for those who find it weird to
masturbate fantasizing about things that don’t exist, or like fuckin a multi-vaginal
mother dragon instead of a suburban MILF or the local plumber. Minimal is for
selling: yeah, even if it’s boring, i.e. diverse, like a Swiss army knife it’s one thing and
that’s always something that stupid folks find appealing. Minimal is for people that
make fresh pasta on Saturday afternoons and can talk for hours about their espresso
machines. – SHIVER Go romantic. Go go go. Go Rom-a’n-tique. Yes, exactly minimal is for guys who won’t
admit. But fuck them, we have nothing to defend, we engage in what others’ call
shame. We don’t care if it’s kitsch, tacky, OTT or whatever we just can’t stop our
fanatic tour the force into the depth of sensation, sentiment, atmosphere, ambiance –
but fuck quality, never quality – this is about amount, immeasurable amount. Long
live New York Dolls, all over the place. Embarrassing and overwhelming. Nothing
well balanced, tempered, sympathetic, dramaturgically correct – “continuous
transformation” who the hell invented that. Oh no, don’t misunderstand me – continuous transformation is like secretly believing in God but cursing him on a daily
basis. Continuous transformation is like being afraid of the dramaturge abandoning
ship. Nothing with those sexy attributes will ever make into any best of… except
mediocre. Nothing of such will make it into contemporary. What’s contemporary
dance? What you are talking about, there is none! And if there were you wouldn’t
recognize it. You know, just like Andy Warhol insisted on wanting to be a machine
but obsessed about being human, minimalism is precisely the same gööööö gesture,
actually desperately affirming life. Stop that, no it’s not a time to convert to some
belief system, there is only one solution: to become a Finnish science-fiction writer
called Hannu – and how easy is that?
Dance is not about the affirmation of life, not about the pleasure of investing in the
endless possibilities of a join. And btw stop talking about modernism with that
double tone, like as if it was the time when everything was so great but you can’t
allow yourself. Just adore it, worship it. Stop that ashtanga shit you are up to and go
modernism. Be a sucker for modernism, but not for what it was but for what it can
make us now. Don’t look back, never! Bring the back-up to speed, here and now, face
the future and take off your glasses. Fuckin’ drop em, it’s getting hot in here. Round
asses, wet hair. Be a romantic and change the word, be a sucker for modernism and
stay dirty. It’s only Zizek that considers Deleuze pre-Felix work misunderstood and
for the wrong reason. We roll around in it searching for the G-spot and we refuse
duos, couple dance and submit to Artaud without a second’s consideration of
Derrida. And we are totally obsessed with materiality as much as we despise
architecture. That’s were incommensurability lays dormant, our job is just to mess it
up. Let’s go out there into the desert and lateralize – - we live like foxes [avoid the
wolves, they epitomize the flock] and move like swarms. We are men without bodies,
tentacles attached directly to our heads, we live with the octopuses of the sand –
digging canals, organizing new surfaces, we are problematized ontology: unthinkable
without surprise. We are very very old, ancient like smoke: weird ass novum.
103 104