tender buttons - still life

all in the Dattah-piece is going towards the idea of Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons" and her use of language there, confronting the still-ness of nouns, in contrast to the continuous action suggested by verbs and adverbs (read for reference her "Lectures in America", in this context especially 'Poetry and Grammar')

it looks like quite a bit of composition is about to be set already.
maybe it's the sequence that will be open???

and I like the idea of a still life to compare the relative tendency towards being static which I find is the result of setting composition in advance. just how far will it go?

I also like that I get to treat movement in terms of text as is done in literature, which it really is when it is put into composition, really just the same, just another aspect of living as we do, put in a different context. therefore I enjoy that there is no music as yet. i hope so will the dancers.


I also notice that it is a very musically-oriented composition so far, accents and dynamics such as are important in music are obviously important to me here, I happen to think a lot in rhythmical patterns before they become actual body movement..... this may be overly from a musical kind of thinking, and not at all apt for a movement composition with its own laws drawn from moving bodies... but i am willing to give myself enough leeway to work this piece out and see as i get along. ☺

fall 2 - Dattah

I've been asked and am about to create a dance piece for Dattahdans a group of young people (mainly professional designers and in training) who are dancing together in Delft, NL
and had decided to use this concept for them. it's still clear that that should happen.

there was this idea of using movement only, to let it decompose into nothingness, whimsy, decay, even degeneration. i believe that's still a thing I have to be doing and I really want to go further here than my known conceptual backgrounding of a piece leading to improvisatory scores.

I want to go further into Open Form Composition with this, present a mood as an element to be recreated each time and it will be the question how, what has to be done in order for that to happen, for energy to be filtered and shaped thus.

will it be ....


and I want to further my daring for specific movement, to forster understanding of a movement as a thing in itself, as a directive element, not just a subservient fulfiller of a goal or a task or some 'higher' concept (brrrr~!)

the movement be the message (as if that wasn't enough)
kinetic thinking, emoting etc = a way out from the trappings of only functioning on vocal-based language, there's so much more, emotional, movement, smells

texts made of movement
(love to Gertrude Stein and her Tender Buttons' !!! ...)

brown season...

fall is brown season in 'temperate climates', retreat of energy from outer forms towards the inside, stored later, for winter.

decay, letting go, many shades of brown, to gold, dark red, greenish etc.
yielding of richness, mushrooms growing from the dying (de-composition) releasing energy.
burlesque and grotesque

harvesting and afterwards
mud and humus, fermentation towards new life in a next possible cycle.

material

in contrast to grey. which can be the sky, brown is connected with matter, the earth, soil. it has limits, it will only allow so and so much movement. in nature as well as in resulting societies. ties, necessities, codes, duties, nothing given to you unless you work for it to change and become fruitful (culminating in Protestant / Calvinist ethics, that which Germanians developed out of originally Mediterranean Christianity after having tried to assimilate it through Roman culture and its assimilated Greek / Hebrew / Oriental understanding ...)

if i continue the analogy with painting in Europe from about the 15th until the 19th century, I perceive an irresoluble tiedness to soil and mud, no escaping here. there was brown everywhere, organic, various shades of it, into reddish, or greenish, or yellowish, or whitish or greyish. but always brown, too.

no wonder it was sought to escape and transcend that, the aim of so many Mystical, Gnostic?, Ascetic, etc.

to get away further from the animal's exposedness to hunger, illness, and ever threatening annihilation. (seemingly not much given there either, or very little)

however, it is clear by now, that nothing substantial (!) will happen, unless this very organic, earth-bound existence is fully understood and accepted. any society or part of it that tried to escape further and failed to maintain its organic base, has so far perished, because it no longer could continue to feed itself. a famous example: the French aristocracy before the revolution of 1789.

there is also another way round: the failure of European cultures to accommodate the American experience of ease and movement in the 1920s, and hence their forced retreat into diverse kinds of Fascism (e.g. with Nazi-brown, but also black ...)
by contrast what a liberation in the colourful designs in fashion in the 1950s and 1960s.
(two video-examples that I've found on the web: No.1 and #2.)


no matter how, by again examining brown and organic matter from today's understanding that everything is vibrant with energy, but that there is also a vital base in organic understanding where the mind can literally be made to incorporate the laws of physical existence, I believe we can get another step closer to successful transcendency.