performances!

Saturday, November 25th 2006 - 14.30h
Wolpop Festival - De Koornbeurs, Voldersgracht 1, Delft (NL)
5,- Euro (for the entire festival?)


Friday, December 1st 2006 - 21.00
Locus 010 - Vlasmarkt 1, Rotterdam (NL)
3,- Euro


Today we got the piece in its virgin state! The first time that it all flowed together well, very close to what I had imagined / hoped for to happen in many ways. It costs the performers a lot of concentration and energy, and many of them needed to shake off some of the accumulated energy.

it is special to experience how full and on the verge of tight the piece has become, due to the detailed richness of the presented material (which by now is in a rather set order, only the question of who will do which bit is fairly open) it could almost become too heavy.
there's where breathing comes in, relaxation from better experience, having done this more often.

let's hope for the best!! (it looks like i can't be at the premiere in Delft, but certainly in Rotterdam where we have the evening for ourselves...)

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.

i find brown is organic-center, all colours mixing.
it indicates organic accuracy, refined and highly complex of energy-patterns and their balances. there are so many shades of brown, all up to gold back to olive, to deep dark blackened brown.

(grey would be the planning-board version, that's what happens with pure light, mix all colours and you get white/grey depending on the intensity. i also found this out when i was experimenting with colours on the web-page of les enfants du paradis)

this is something that i believe was (internally) known to our predecessors in the European societies in history. one example i know of are the paintings of Jan van Eyck, his portrait of the man holding a carnation (NL- "anjer", D- "Nelke"). German painter Otto Dix tried the same theme but in 1912, and there is no sense of depth or space or this refined organic accuracy, it was not the point anymore, not part of the experience.


i am also interested in the consequences of being organically accurate, it takes a great amount of refinement in perception and control/actions. computers are the exact opposite of this, they are made from extractions of metals, silicones, and electricity, much more crude and simple patternings than organic cells.

so still-lifes interest me as well now, and i am still interested in conveying energetic immediacy in everything that i do and publish.


Gertrude Stein wrote -so she said- without such editings she just wrote things down directly, and i find it still can be felt in her writings. it is the difference of letting the connections of the moment work together, instead of altering them or even cutting them, again from a point of reflection/death/virtual.

in the end all comes back together in the organic existence reality of our lives our dimension place planet, the condition which our ancestors were so intent on escaping, escaping mud, disease, illnesses, hunger, into the mind, the abstract. and ever since the lessons were that if one doesn't include our physical, organic aspect of existence sufficiently, a lot of those good intentions are about to fail.



organic knowledge of processing means there need be left time for processes to take their course and happen. it means the acknowledgement of multiplicity and complexity, but also a keen awareness of threshholds and limitations, how far something can go of itself.

this is a kind of wisdom that i believe is getting lost a bit, as more and more of our virtual aspirations are being possible and realised ever the better, at the same time that is what these ever more drastic and far-reaching realisations teach, that one gets to better and better understand organics. a far way to go from 'brown'... ☺

images

START

having returned from Budapest I start a new series of work (again) (i know), all on the colour BROWN. I am not 100% sure yet where this will lead me, but again, I invite whoever is interested to follow my thoughts along the way.

greets
Thomas Körtvélyessy