Day Two - uses and needs, uses and needs

So what's the logical next step to solve these problems?

Almost two years ago, i began to accumulate some ideas under the general heading of "hypermedia" and proposed and exploration of these ideas as a senior thesis to the powers that be at Sarah Lawrence. Having been a student in Tony Schultz's dance technology class for one semester my junior year, and then returning to it for the entirety of my senior year (you can check out our class blog from this year - Dance Machines - here) i was extremly impressed by the new way of thinking that Tony presented us with.

Rather than using programs that already existed to express artistic ideas and projects (for example: using Final Cut Express to edit a dancefilm or using a time lapse program to capture footage over the span of a few days), we were suddenly being asked to think about the intended final project first, and then design our perfect machine that would help us create and capture it.

To me, this seemed like a drastic shift in my thought and creative process; it was like someone had suddenly made me a very small god. As a creative artist, my understanding of my "job description" has always been somewhere along the lines of creating the "best" piece of art that i can (whatever that means) within (and sometimes breaking with, but always in relation to) the "rules" of a stage or film setting. Suddenly i was no longer asking myself how to create the "best" piece i could for stage or film, but how i could create and engineer a completely new system that would best support and showcase the work that i was making. Do you see how exciting this is? It's reinventing the wheel so that your Chevy Impala (that for some reason truly is unique, has immense unknown value, and is vastly Important to you) runs like a charm. It's reinventing the wheel so much so that (by the time you're done) people will look at your car, and declare it's value somewhere near to that of a jaguar becuase you've engineered it to be that valuable.

Anyways, the question becomes: what do you include to make the perfect dance showing machine? Well, what is it's purpose - what is is being used for? As stated before, this machine addresses multiple problems and therefore has multiple uses. Here are a few possible uses:

• as a teaching tool for potential/current audiences (teach: ways to look at dance, analytical vocabulary, the foundations of the craft that we choreographers use such as time and space, the way the specific piece fits into the larger dance cannon, the way this piece relates to other contemporary pieces, etc. etc.)
• as a teaching tool for teaching choreographers and dancers (teach: specific creative processes, a comparison between choreographers, "background" information in the study of specific dances, etc.)
• as a marketing tool (grab the attention of potential audience members by giving them a "sneak preview" of the piece they' can buy tickets for, educate them on the piece's creation so that they might further enjoy seeing the final product in performance, impress donors with an inside look into the creative process, reach out to people who wouldn't usually want to see a dance performance etc.)
• as a revenue source (sell the final product to interested audience members/company supporters at performances or online)
  
• present a representation of the dance (as identified yesterday as so so so much more than just the performance) that is more holistic, encompassing, and truthful than presenting pieces that are solely performative might feel to certain choreographers (read: me.)
• as a historical artifact of the dance that was created and performed
  
• etc. etc. etc. etc. The possibilities are endless.
  

So what, then are the specific aspects of the dance (according to me) that the hypermedia would need to capture and represent? Of course, this is a small and incomplete list, but it's a start:

• ALL rehearsals, showings, performances, studio times, etc. - anything that shows the physical time spent in the making of the piece
• the performance(s)
  
• references and usage of other works of art within the piece
• references to other dances, both from the choreographer and other artists
• the context (both artistic and cultural) that the piece was made in
  
• the dancer's experience of being a part of the process, understanding of the piece, etc.
• the choreographer's experience of making the piece
• comments from dancers and choreographer at different times throughout the process
• comments and questions from audience members
• the work of any and all collaborators on the piece
• interpretations of the piece from the choreographer, dancer(s), collaborator(s), and audience members
  
• that THERE IS NO WRONG WAY TO VIEW OR INTERPRET THE PIECE!

Tomorrow: Hypermedia Revealed! I'll let you know (and show examples of) everything that they hypermedia is made of. How excited are you??!?! Very.
Stay tunned!

Day 1 - Identify the Probem(s)

So here we go - day one of my Kloster-woman mini tirade/educational exposition of hypermedia.

Before we get into the technology, bodies, or theory of what hypermedia consists of, it's important to understand where my perceived need for it comes from. Why does PMD (postmodern dance - i'll use this here to represent the time period that i'm referring to, not necessarily the specific values or artists) need it? What is this new technology attempting to save us from? What problems does it attempt to address?

Ultimately, from status and stagnancy in our work, and from the eventual unspeakable:
having to stop making work.

1. People don't know what to do with PMD.

People don’t know where to place postmodern dance. While we as a dance community existing in academia may have taken classes in dance history, or at least been educated through asides in dance classes about lineage and styles, people outside the dance community who find themselves viewing dance may not have ever been exposed to this.
New choreographers attempt to redefine what postmodern dance is at a very rapid pace through the self-proclaimed authenticity of their own new work; even if choreographers don’t acknowledge that their work is in response to work in their near historical proximity, postmodern dance is founded on the tenet of breaking with what came before and defining one’s own unique style and outlook. The dance community may be aware of how to contextually view new work, but a non-dancer would have trouble tracking the constant evolution and re-definition of the genre. This leads to problem #2:

2. We make dances primarily for an audience of "dance people".

While i don't think that there's anything particularly criminal about this - why not make art for the specific niche of people that will understand it to the fullest extent? - i think that staying in this place as an entire arts community is actually really hurting us, an inherent weakness that we've yet to address. Many people who are not writers read books, many people who can’t act see theater, and many people who can’t operate a camera or write a screenplay see movies. When non-dance people continually feel that they “don’t get” what they are seeing in a dance performance, thy begin to lose interest with why PMD is important or interesting. Why is this?

3. Ephemerality and permanence.

How many times have we herd the phrase "dance is ephemeral"? Since January, nine. I counted. Ephemerality becomes the excuse for why dance can't be studied, becomes the reason why it's hard to pin down, becomes the nail in dance's economic coffin. Why? Because it actually is. While there are certainly aspects of the ephemeral nature of dance that are extremly positive and exciting, dance's ephemeral nature is the major roadblock for the majority of "non-dance-people" who "don't get it". The audience member is put in the position of not only having to come to terms with an entirely new foreign vocabulary and mode of thought, but also to remember as much as they can about what they are seeing, in the time span of a single piece, sometimes only minutes long. "Some postmodern dance is emotionally resonant with many viewers but some, like a movement equivalent of Joyce’s cryptic Ulysses, requires investigation and study... [audiences then] flat out feel like they “don’t get it” and are provided no way to work towards their idea of what “getting it” might entail. They think that they are supposed to take something from the performance that they have never been told how to understand or appreciate, and feel lost, overwhelmed, and put out by something that they would have, at one point, been excited to be a part of. We then get the view of postmodern dance as cryptic and self-indulgent because we as choreographers are uninterested in or unwilling to teach the audience how to watch what we give them. Additionally, we have yet to create a way to convey to our audiences everything that we are able to see in it as its creators...It is not only interesting, but crucial, to involve the audience beyond the performance and in so doing, create some sort of support system so that the audience has evidence and consciousness of the ongoing process of watching, processing, and understanding a dance piece." (Thesis, 4-5)

3. "as long as the audience can connect to something – one movement – anything, that’s fine with me.”

NO.
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
This is killing modern dance. While the sentiment is on target (that the audience doesn't have to understand or feel attachment to every thing that happens, but hopefully moments will feel important, clear, and moving to them even if the whole is cryptic or dense) the widespread adoption of this tenet is (and i'll say it again) KILLING us. Think about it: if you went to see a dance piece, and you took one thing away from the entire (let's say hour long) performance, wouldn't you want your money back? I would.
Why are we as choreographers settling for “one thing”? It seems inherently compromising to our work, and even more unfair to our audiences. It is a cop out to say that we are satisfied with a singular thing resonating with our audiences. What we really want is for our audiences to understand that there are many things at play in each performance, in each piece, and even in each singular movement, and that any one or combination of those meanings or understandings that they see is inherently right. So perhaps the problem isn’t that audiences aren’t able to “see one thing” in a performance - perhaps out problem is that, as choreographers, this is all we’ve asked them to do. Theo and i were talking about how a characteristic of postmodern work (of many forms) is a lack of caring. He writes:

"The post-modern mindset (identical to hipster mindset) finds caring to be the greatest human weakness, as it renders one victim to heartbreak. The result is a body of work, or a culture of individuals, containing no heart, who care about nothing, and who's pieces are merely illustrations of aloofness. After all, how can anything fail in a world where all rules are meaningless constructs?"

Let's just put it out there: i Care about my work. i Care about the meaning(s) emotions(s) interpretation(s) and ideologies that are present in my work. And i, the choreographer, CARE that you, the audience, see and connect as many of them as humanly possible.

4. "If we tell people how to look at our work, it cheapens the work and makes it less artistic"

again my friends,
NO.
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
When we educate our audiences in how to look at dance, how to understand connections between visceral movement and subvisceral components (subvisc = “The implicit meanings and themes inherent in the viscera of a dance performance.” just like subtext = “The implicit meaning or theme of a literary text”), we simply give them tools to work harder as viewers with. As we give our audiences tools to work harder, we set the standard for ourselves as choreographers higher and higher. If our audiences are working harder, then we better damn well be making work that takes more and more ability, more and more understanding and craft at watching, to watch.

5. For PMD, Product is not equal to Process.
So looking back today (6/10) i realized that this was the one point that this post was missing, so i'm adding it in in hindsight. In dance (and i have always felt this way) performance, to me, is not an acceptable (or at least highly problematic) translation or representation of the process to the audience. Now, i know that the point of performance isn't really to show the audience the process; the point is to show the final cumulation of what you've been making. However, it's always seemed so unfair, un-encompassing, and simply untruthful that the performance never really shows all the gems and excitement of the process, which to me (and i would argue many other dancers) is always the
best part. The dance isn't the performance. The dance is the preparation, invention, audition, context, rehearsal, revision, interaction, showing, reworking, performance, feedback, reaction, and all the emotions and logic associated with those steps of the process. So why are we showing the audience the dance instead of the dance?

and last,
6. The PMD economy is failing, in free fall, kaputz, dead, done, dying.

"I am always surprised at the number of dancers and choreographers I talk to who seem to feel no need to rebel against this system in hopes of changing it. I have often felt the pull of multiple jobs, and my desire to make dance a livable profession comes from my desire to have more time to devote to the work that I love and find important – the making of dances. If dance artists were able to devote their entire work life to dance making rather than downwards of 15 hours a week, then the subtleties and sophistication of the work at hand would increase dramatically. It is important for me to express that this goal then seems to be not entirely an economic one, but an effort to make a shift in the was that artists are able to produce and enrich their work and themselves as artists. By talking about it economically, we are not invalidating the artistic and invaluable nature of our work, only looking at our creative processes realistically within the system in which they function." (Thesis, 9)

The DTW blog recently had a discussion about the need for artists to embrace marketing here, and it's exciting to know that (even while some artists remain adamantly opposed to letting marketing have a place in their artistic vision) many artists are beginning to look into both mainstream and alternative methods with which to propagate and support their art.

SO.
These are the main problems that my "hypermedia solution" is attempting to address.
In the coming days, I'll lay down some of the theory that the program is built on, talk about the process of making and programing it, and post some samples of the program here as well. I would love as many comments and challenges as you care to leave - the only way that i keep developing this work is through the constant evolution of it via feedback of other creative artists and audience members.

More tomorrow!

New Mission.

In Chuck Klosterman's 2006 Esquire article "I wanna get free" he discusses the (non) possibility of any type of American revolution. It isn't depressing to hear him reason that no revolution is possible due to our culture's non-interest, non-unification, and non-participation, it's depressing to read that statement and not feel like arguing against it because there's really no part of that statement i don't agree with. But that's besides the point.

What drew my attention was a passage where Klosterman points out that he's "not really a rock-throwing kind of guy." He writes:

"Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives; as such, the only people qualified to lead a present-day revolution would never actually do so. Contemporary leaders are not rock-throwing guys. And this is a problem, because it's the rock-throwers who get things done."

Now, he also concedes that "moreover, I assume the type of person who hurls rocks in public is not the type of person i would agree with about anything", but i'm going to put that (as well as my undying love of Chuck Klosterman and nonsensical need for him to perceive me as intelligent) aside for the moment. While part of what he's speaking of is American lethargy and political "manners", he's also speaking to the mind-body schism that i find to be so pervasive in our culture. The thinkers are thinkers and the doers (read: movers) are doers.

So this has caused me to take on a Klosterman-like project: for two weeks i'm going to post on hypermedia every day. I will try to be as clear and concise as possible and, in fourteen days, provide an overview and simple exposition of what the hypermedia is, how it can be used, and where it might be going. I'll also try to get a bunch of the footage and shorts that i've shot posted as well.

Over this last semester i've felt a lot of opposition (from both dancers and non-dancers) regarding the my work trying to redefine/revolutionize the politics and economy of the dance world via hypermedia. Reading this essay, i was reminded who we as the intellectual dance community are: the artist intellectual mover yeller provocateurs of our generation. Therefore: here comes the brick through the window - unapologetic hypermedia.

Introducing...(sneak preview #2)

here's another sneak peak out of the "bonus footage" section of the hypermedia - enjoy!

Sneak Preview...

Welcome to the Urgent Artist/Hypermedia!

Hi all!

Welcome to the Urgent Artist - one of my (as in me, Sarah A.O. + as in me, the A.O. Movement collective) blogs. This blog is designed to facilitate discussions between artists about the theory and ideas behind their work. I'll be posting most of my work about hypermedia here, so you can follow me as it evolves.

This is also a great place for questions -
both so you can get answers and i can get feedback. Feel free to ask anything or start discussions, my goal is to be as active as possible on here this summer.

I've posted a little in the past (both re: hypermedia and other parts of my art) so feel free to scroll through. I'll try to post more so you get the meat of the hypermedia project in the coming days!

As always, thanks for stopping by!