Critical Correspondence

MRPJ#7/State of the Body: Extras

“The complaints aired that evening ranged from echoes of the right’s belief that art and politics were oil and water to other voices recalling the feminist porn wars of the early ‘80s. It seemed to be predominately women that spoke. A photo of a vulva taken by a lesbian accompanied by text linking queer issues with reproductive rights was denounced as appaling by several. As always I wondered whether the speakers really were afraid, as they claimed, of the misuses men might make of these images, or were speaking out of the revulsion they were taught to feel towards our female bodies. At base were the usual reductions: you were either privileged or oppressed and the oppresions are ranked with questions of gender and sexuality either at the bottom or dismissed altogether. Most hilarious were those who identified themselves as members of the “movement community” and couldn’t figure the connection between dance and the body. A little like missing the link between language and literature, but then I guess I’m part of the stasis community. There was the public health and housing activist who turned libertarian when it came to public arts funding. Predictably we heard many times from an angry straight white man who declared the Journal ‘not inclusive.’…The debate at Judson Church was typical of the entire controversy. By staying within the frame established by the right, the left missed an opportunity that could have led to much more than reform of the NEA. While the left frequently dismisses as trivial issues of culture and sexuality, it should be remembered that the right, unfortunately, rarely makes the same mistake.”

–from Downtown Sex Panic and Missed Connections by Holly Hughes

In celebration of Movement Research’s 30th Anniversary, Critical Correspondence is reprinting monthly excerpts from each of the first 30 Performance Journals. We will be featuring representative and relevant articles as well as each of the issues’ editorial note. It is both enervating and challenging to look at the historical map that precedes our time – the continuity of mission, the diverse attempts to “word” a practice, the voices that have gone and the ones that keep returning, the ongoing development of discourse alongside political struggles.

Performance Journal #7 is a follow up to the controversial Journal #3: Gender Performance. In the quote above, you can read an impassioned Holly Hughes challenging the artistic community’s responses to the journal and all the media attention that ensued. This follow up journal takes a very wide focus on how to continue the legacy of engaging with the body, with art, with politics. It includes interviews with Bill T Jones and Elizabeth Streb, descriptions of various artistic projects and trajectories, Susan Klein writing about Klein Technique, Wendell Beavers musing about technique in general, and the visceral nuanced prose of writer Laurie Weeks whose Small is featured this month. You can also read the Editors’ Note and the full table of contents. Perhaps the article that manages to marry the personal, the formal, and the political in one clear and multidimensional package is The Person at the Table – Scott Heron describing his project where for 5 Mondays he handcuffed himself to a table in the East Village. One day he handed out this paper…

I choose to sit here for 12 hours today.

I hope to benefit from new perceptions of time.

Today I am not speaking.

With some luck I will hear less Lite FM today than usual.

I could do this practice in the country, but I would probably fall asleep.

I want to inspire you to try a crazy scheme.

I will use the beauty I see in you to remind me to see my beauty.

***

I sit in honor of all the dead and dying.

That includes me and you.

***

I want your attention. In return I give you mine.

I also want a boyfriend.

Many of these Journal issues are available for purchase at Movement Research. As always, we welcome your comments at the end of each reprinted article, or at cc@movementresearch.org. We are also posting table of contents for each issue for your reference.

“Constantly moving through time and space, the dancing body is physically present and yet always in the midst of becoming absent. Learning how to really see that body is a complex task that requires an awareness of the kinesthetic and aural, as well as the visual and intellectual implications of dance. While we may know whether the dancer is a he or a she, Anglo or Latino, able-bodied etc., the action or theatricality of the performance can place that knowledge in jeopardy. In performance, the dancing body can work over, play with, and exceed its own socially marked identity to disrupt those categories and disconcert the audience’s reception of that bodily image. By moving through, instead of locating her (him) self in such narrative positions, the dancer is thus able to slip in and out of meaning before it becomes stabilized.”— from Through Yours to Mine and Back Again: Reflections on Bodies in Motion by Ann Cooper Albright

“The tools we use do more than just shape our movement, they become part of our bodies. The hand that uses a hammer and wrench every day is a different hand than one that pushes buttons or “strokes keys” every day. It looks different, it moves differently, it knows different things. The eyes that proofread a written page are trained, shaped, and patterned differently than eyes that look at a computer monitor. The muscles get habituated differently to repetitious movement, the quality of light coming into the body is different, the way the head is held on top of the neck and how much the head moves is differently affected by one kind of technology than by another…. Dancing is where I create my own architectures, my own patterns and visions. I control my breath, my eyes, my confines, my movement habits. It allows me to feel like I can take my body on a vacation to less enculturated and less cultivated imagescapes, perceptual fields, and kinetic spheres. It helps me stay free.”–from My Culture Colonizes My Body by Sarah East Johnson