MR Festival 2008: Ringing Rocks by Karinne Keithley

by Karinne Keithley
MR Festival Spring 2008: Somewhere Out There

On Sunday about 23 or 24 of us got into a few vans and drove to Pennsylvania’s Ringing Rocks park to go hit rocks with hammers to make them ring. Composer Seth Cluett met us there, set the structure for the day, and later we performed his composition “fleeting and massive” for multiple video and audio recorders and a few families. It’s worth asking what that has to do with movement research, which is I think this:

Community is expansive. As a microcosm of the festival, perhaps representing heavily the audiophile portion, our vanloads demonstrated that the downtown dance world, sharing a radiant node of our history in the Judson mythos, expands laterally and reciprocally into practices of sound, text, and documentary. Most of us there have several practices (and now we can all claim to be geologic instrumentalists to boot). Thus Somewhere out there–our festival’s title and motto–describes something like a condition of mind. The quiet argument that a sound excursion is a movement excursion is an excursion of mind.

Perception and recording work in a loop. As we scrambled over the amazing boulder field with our hammers hitting rocks, following the traces of pummel holes and divets left by earlier hammerers, we limited our spectrum of attention, organizing hand-eye-ear to find the sweet spots, calibrating swings and rebounds. On coming across a good ring, there followed an inevitable stop to record, at least half of us brought along sound recorders, others had cameras, some both. The recording verged on obsessive, but the interest was toward use. So collecting for future use the work of our fine tuned hand-ear-eye coordinations pulled us into a kind of simultaneous presence and futurity, which speaks to a way that the compositional world we inhabit has shifted alongside the rest of the world, to take these tools of hyper presence, and the pleasures of hyper presence, and enfold them in the poetics of documentary and collection. There is some free play between the events, their experiential duration, and their transcription and renewal in documentary space. So to follow Ana’s archive post, there was on this trip a confluence of experience and archive that seems characteristic of a moving/researching stance toward the world around us.

Doing is performing is seeing yourself seeing. The focal point of the day was performing Seth’s score, played on the rocks from instructions that we hung around our necks with twine. I actually put my sound recorder away for this one, but I hope someone somewhere will link an mp3 of this… As we went through the score, Seth video and sound recorded us, adding requests as we went. We quickly transfered from being the objects of the experience to willing participants in his composition. It became the experience of ourselves doing the thing for the record. My favorite moment was, hiding behind a rock (and hoping the super nasty looking spiders would stay away) watching Jon Moniaci standing to attention in the rear of the group, counting and hitting. My other favorite moment: a performance just for me, as the card of instructions, hung around my neck, shaded and limited by the visor of my hat that archived two significant moments of my life in its handwritten inscriptions, curled and dodged in the wind like a kite in the San Francisco marina. Something about the context of being there as part of the movement research posse brought me back into that slow, attentive appreciation, and allowed me to see that as it was happening.

My other favorite moment: after a little nap near the waterfall past the boulder field, walking up to Chris Peck who asked, “you were recording that, right?” If I ever come back round to making my basement tapes, expect the sound of rocks.

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