So happy to see this.

Well done!

As a dance artist currently working outside of institutional support and as a world citizen interested in how some contemporary dance theory and ideology can make its way outside of dance scenes, theaters, museums and colleges, I like the project.

I value education and the depths of the contemporary dance field, but I think there’s much work to be done outside of insular, codified and inbred, inner sanctums of dance…reaching people on the streets or at home watching the screen without it being curated, sanctified or made for other artists are a couple of ways. This year I made experimental videos of dances in commons. The videos accentuate heightened states in public and random connections with strangers. I want to crash Netflix with them or create an alternative for these and others’ videos to reach non dance audiences.

How far could this Le Mouvement project go? It could be very good for the work and for the public if it arrived in multiple cities and towns, unannounced, not publicized, not marketed to a dance or visual art audience, but approached by the artists as an experiment and a practice in aesthetic activism for any public present.

Anyway, I got to participate in Luciana Achugar’s Otro Teatro at The Walker lArt Center ast winter. From that work, I can imagine The Pleasure Project outdoors. I also saw videos. I think an outdoor shopping center is a perfect venue for that work.

I think there are variations for “counter-monument”. One variation- Where the ephemeral nature of movement/being- Lepecki’s self-erasure, Agamben’s not fully forming (into ideology), Delueze’s differential presence-never arriving into the present, staying in affect rather than crystalizing into effect… potential is building as it did with Ghandi’s passive resistance, but the artist is doing nothing as well as undoing (the consumer body before monuments to the dollar, euro, peso or franc – the various buildings housing consumer opportunities that line the streets).

Because the modernist binary, vendor/patron is a divide despite illusory efforts to blur boundaries with interactive marketing, loyalty memberships and incentives, the artist subsumes the consumer and transforms it in the undoing- where space is found and pleasure is possible. Power is decentralized through a meditation on the senses because shopping ceases (as the public empathetically connects with the dancers undoing). The Pleasure Project ritualistically breaks (Massumi’s) affective relation between consumer and corporate state propaganda, otherwise inseparable.

Beginning in 1974 I began MOVING WITH ART, an ingallery exploration and series of workshops and presentations in Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA. Making kinetic responses to all the changing exhibitions in the art center, I continued to train docents at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Palo Alto Art Center and several others. MOVING WITH ART has continued into the present with responding to visual language through my dance movement improvisation.

At DC’s Kreeger Museum in 2011, I danced a Picasso Painting and instructed/ inspired docents working with you. Glad to see this continue in museums!

Patricia Bulitt

creek.dancer@earthlink.net