New Project + good news

So, for those of you that read this blog who don't know me, some exciting news:
I've been selected as a Van Lier Fellow* for Dance Theater Workshop's 2008/2009 season!

I was nominated at the beginning of the summer (along with a good friend and fellow artist) and spent the summer working out an application. DTW asked each school participating in their college partnership program to nominate two dancers that had just graduated, and out of those 16, my friend and I were both lucky enough to be asked in for interviews (along with two other dancers out of the sixteen). In the end, it was narrowed down to two, one being myself! (a later post on the grossness of having to battle between friends like that, and that feeling of getting it).

The fellowship includes:
100 hours of studio time at Topaz Arts in Queens
a paid internship at DTW (which i'll be doing feb-august of next year)
a mentor (yet to be decided) who i'll meet with 12 times throughout the internship
workshops on grant writing, life as a dancer etc.
discussion groups with other DTW artists
and free tickets to DTW's entire season!

This is obviously a * HUGE * deal for me, and honestly hasn't even really sunken in. Suffice it to say, it feels like all the work that i've put in for the last four years has really been recognized. To have DTW say that they're excited about what i'm doing is probably the most exciting part of the whole thing. It feels damn good.

In my proposal for the fellowship, i detailed both the dance and hypermedia work that i've been doing (and sharing with you, ferocious reader). As part of the proposal, i noted that i would be chronicling the work that the project entailed here, on the Urgent Artist. So, you're in for a new project that's both interested in movement making and hypermedia theorizing/actualizing.

Here's the just of the proposal:
- make a piece using the same basic structure of "spots of time" that i used in my piece-before-last, "the What's Left Over After". The idea of the "spot of time" is Wordsworthian, but i came across it through Joyce, in the way that he uses it in Ulysses. The idea is basically that there's a single event (the one that sticks out for me in Ulysses is Bloom and Molly's tryst in the countryside with the seedcake...god what a scene) that multiple characters orbit around - somehow stuck on what occurred (each noticing different parts and taking different impressions). I really like the idea of making these little events, and really getting them the way i want them - crafting a "reality" for the "characters" in the dance. Then, once these self-contained "spots" are set in stone, the piece is choreographed by decaying and interconnecting the spots - taking the event of the spot, and showing it from multiple viewpoints and memories, as well as giving it a context beside the other spots that are occurring. So. What i'm doing for the fellowship is just making these spots. Really taking the time to get them right. Ideas for spots so far include: "13 variations on a car crash", "glassbox", "headphones for lillie", "the timeline", "Him and Her", "catalog of dreams i've had since", "you fucker, you punched me in the throat", "sugarcubism at the Picaso museum", and "drunk woman song". I definitely won't end up using all of them. It's just a starting point.

- I'm also invoking hypermedia yet again. After all this non-embodied theorizing, it's high time i get back in the studio with it. So i'll be filming every rehearsal, just like last time. I want to look especially at how hypermedia (and film footage of everything) is helpful to me as a choreographer - actually, how it can evolve me and restructure the dance-making - as well as if it can be helpful to the dancers in a parallel way. I've also asked a technologist friend if he wants to sign on to the project and play with "artifacting" our makings, but i'm waiting to hear back if he's available.

So those are the two main points. And that i'll be blogging about it all the way. With you. I hope you're excited for this! Or maybe just waiting and seeing. That's okay too.

So to end, here are some things that I want to explore in the piece itself:
- using an understanding of video editing/FCP mindset to make movement (especially playing with slow/superfast motion and with retrograding but with that re-wound look)
- visual art component (in the last piece it was the letters, i'm seeing red string and plywood sheets for this one...)
- as always, hard falls
- the way a bird looks when it flies one direction, then all of a sudden has to change to a different direction
- partnering-heavy duets, some of them using sexual actions (like kissing, not a whole lot more, don't worry...that's another project) as movement
- ideas from Chuck Palahniuk's "Rant" (which i HIGHLY recommend)
- brief, exact, drunk unison
- images from specific dreams i've been having
- cubism as a structure for editing and re-working movement

So that's that.
As ALWAYS, would love to hear any ideas and/or responses! I'm in the process of looking for music still (not even for the final project - just to get me thinking), and one more male dancer. If you know where i can find either, give me a holler.

More to come!
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* The Van Lier Fellowship is a program of Dance Theater Workshop and is supported with funds from the Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust

From the Land of Digital Natives.

Back (well almost) from the long week of apartment hunting and interviews,
i return with a new wealth of information!

I was lucky enough to get to have lunch with a very special lady, Emily Sharp, who does all of the AOMC's website design and is a general digital goddess, and she gave me a new term/idea to play around with: digital natives and digital immigrants.

Now, i'm new to this idea, so if you want more information check this out instead, but here's a recap: a digital native is anyone who grew up with the massive storm of tech advances (mainly personal ones like computers, mp3 players, i-everythings) that we have today, and a digital immigrant is someone who (regardless of their tech capabilities) did not grow up with these technologies being an everyday part of their lives. So. The cool thing about this is that people are starting to really challenge academic and other learning systems with this divide - are the old systems of learning appropriate for this generation? How can new tech systems (or spin-offs of the technologies that "those damn kids" already use become academic tools? Or, as Emily put it, "Should a school try to be facebook?".

This, as you might imagine, is drawing a bit of controversy. For many technophobic individuals and institutions, reactions to this new questioning borders on what Bennett, Maton & Kervin (2008) in their research identify as moral panic.

So hold on that thought.

The other thing that i've been doing this summer is (ravenously) reading any and everything by Chuck Palahniuk. So far: Rant, Fight Club, and Survivor, which leaves me reading his short story collection "Stranger than Fiction" right now. In his essay "You Are Here" (which i highly recommend) he paints the scene of a hotel-based convention where people fork over money to have their seven minutes to sit in front of a producer or tv exec and pitch their scripts and screenplays. He talks about the new influx of people who are suddenly writing their own screenplays - a new and very big trend - citing five reasons for this "explosion in storytelling".
1. (he argues) free time
2. (he says) technology
3. (he points to) material
4. (he notices) education and
god bless him, 5. disgust.
His overall point being, for the first time, people aren't having experiences that they make into stories to sell, but rather the other way around. He writes:

"Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Ever funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity.
A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential.
Where a story no longer follows as the result of an experience.
Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.
Sort of like when you suggest: 'Let's not but say we did'
The story - the product you can sell - becomes more important than the actual event."

So of course this is a little alarming. And I imagine that some of you, who have been arguing that this is the very problem with hypermedia all along (especially Ilona) are slapping your palms to your forehead and grimacing, as if to say "how can you have heard us say this so many times, and only now be getting it through this thick skull of yours..."
HOWEVER.
(because there's always a however)

I find these two ideas very much in conversation, and the two of them, of course, chatting with the idea of hypermedia.
For better or for worse, this is the culture that we live in. And regardless of your personal comfort with technology, just as your parents are digital immigrants no matter how good they are at texting you (and no matter how proud they are of it), you (for the most part - i'm not sure who actually reads this) are a digital native.
So yes, spend a minute or three complaining about the situation (with or sans moral panic, your choice) but then realize that it's the society that we live in right now.

My point is this:
YES. hypermedia (and screen writing, and video game design, and novel writing for that matter) all hold the danger that the presented "experience" is valued over or the reality that it was based on, so much so that the reality begins to be less important, less real. But it strikes me as interesting that we now have the opportunity to look at how our work is working within this system and mindset rather than just bitching about how much we dislike it and wish it was the way it used to be. This is the future! Why not play around a little before we condemn?

My point is: hypermedia is just a system that a digital native came up with to deal with the world that they knew as normal.

My point is: hypermedia is in the same vein as a school board considering how to digitize the curriculum because the students no longer have any interest in paying attention to writing on the board.

My point is: it's still so early in this discussion that we shouldn't be throwing anything out, just because of the possible danger that it holds.

My point is: when a caveman wrote the first book, the other cavemen may have thought 'why do we need these words to tell us about hunting a boar? Why don't we just do it ourselves?"

Chuck's point is:

"One positive aspect is, maybe this awareness and recording will lead us to live more interesting lives. Maybe we'll be less likely to make the same mistakes again and again...Controlling the story of your past - recording and exhausting it - that skill might allow us to move into the future and write that story. Instead of letting life just happen, we could outline our own personal plot. We'll learn the craft we need to accept that responsibility. We'll develop our ability to imagine in finer and finer detail. We can more exactly focus on what we want to accomplish, to attain, to become."