Amidst the Notes: RIP Pierre Boulez & David Bowie

Pierre Boulez,
by Carlo Bavagnoli

I've been of two minds about the recent deaths of two leading figures in the world of music, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), and David Bowie (1947-2016), mourning their deaths while also feeling the need to acknowledge key faults--which are not commensurate, let me be clear--that marked the characters of both. Both were musicians of original vision and talent, and born performers. Both left a deep mark not only in the musical cultures of their native countries but in the US and globally. Both wrote music that I turn and return to periodically, for differing but aesthetically and emotionally necessary reasons. So I feel sorrow and grief at their deaths, but at the same time, perhaps akin to the form of negative capability I maintain when reading certain writers like Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot, I keep in mind certain criticisms of them, even if the elation and admiration their music brings sometimes temporarily evacuates that criticism. (Keguro at "With(out) Predicates" offers one of his characteristically profound, moving and concise meditations on the necessary distinction between acknowledging the flaws of a deceased person and haranguing someone who is mourning that person as a way of forcing them to engage in such acknowledgement.)

Pierre Boulez was perhaps the towering figure in avant-garde Western classical music in the second half of the 20th century. He became one of the leading composers and judgmental exponents of new music, championing certain composers, especially those of his generation, as well as key figures in the French tradition, and the leader early 20th century modernists. He pursued a parallel career as a conductor, beginning in the 1950s, and perhaps most famously, led the New York Philharmonic from 1970-1975, a tenure that still provokes mixed reviews, though his focus on contemporary composers and the 20th century repertoire was undeniable, and remains unmatched by the Philharmonic even today, in 2016. His conducting style, without a baton and noted for its precision and clarity, brought the modernist composers Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Bela Bartók, Maurice Ravel, and Edgard Varèse in particular to life. His own work showed their influences while moving in its own direction; just a few years ago I saw Messagésquisse performed at Columbia University, and it was more beautiful and stirring than any recording of it I'd ever listened to. Boulez, however, could be extremely harsh to the point of cruelty in his criticisms. He famously proclaimed Arnold Schoenberg "dead" at the end of an eponymous essay in which he trashed Schoenberg's failure to fully exploit the possibilities of the dodecaphonic system he had developed, and published the essay shortly after that pioneering composer died. Boulez cruelly described the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as "the third pressing...of Mahler," and cast Karl Amadeus Mozart off as "trite." His fallings out with fellow musicians, including his former teacher Leibowitz, and former experimental compatriots John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, are well recorded. He also apparently never publicly came out of the closet as a gay man, though some critics and many fellow musicians knew about his sexual orientation and relationships. I take all of this into account, but also point to his music itself, which at its best--and there are certainly high points--is the lasting testament of the man.


Pierre Boulez, Répons - Ensemble intercontemporain - Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2015.


 Pierre Boulez, Messagesquisse - Eric-Maria Couturier - Ensemble intercontemporain, Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2014.

David Bowie, 2016

David Bowie championed another kind of 20th century music, or several, rock & roll and soul-influenced pop. Born Robert Jones in Brixton, London, he initially launched his career in the late 1960s, and first made the charts with his song "Space Oddity," which introduced the figure Major Tom, whom Bowie would revisit later in his career. In the early 1970s, he created the queer, glam rock alter ego character Ziggy Stardust, the titular figure of his LP The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and transformed the public figure of the male rock icon through his overtly androgynous persona, which he concluded with Diamond Dogs. Throughout his career, Bowie remade himself, shifting into "plastic soul" in 1975, with the album Young Americans, which featured the overtly queer "John, I'm Only Dancing," one of my favorites, includes one of my favorite songs, and 1976's Station to Station, with the track "Golden Years," which he performed as one of the first white musicians on Soul Train. Subsequent shifts included the adoption of electronic elements and collaboration with Brian Eno, a stagy pop style with "Ashes to Ashes," and his biggest hit, which was one of the top tunes during my senior year of high school and freshman year in college, "Let's Dance." Bowie continued to record up through the final months before his death, issuing his final album, Blackstar, just days before he died. He acted in films, including the still striking and bizarre The Man Who Fell to Earth, an unforgettable vampire in The Hunger's sex trial, and an equally memorable Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat. David Bowie flirted with Nazism in his youth, adopting some of its trappings as a kind of fashion statement and aesthetic performance, and also had sex with an underage girl, the first of which I knew, the latter of which I didn't, and both disturb me tremendously. On the racist front, he did speak out more than once about the racism in the music industry, famously calling out MTV's overt discrimination while on air; as to whether the song China Girl is heard as something other than the Orientalism it ostensibly is a matter for others to uncover, and whether he ever atoned for what essentially involves the abuse of a teenager I cannot say. I can speak to the electric feeling I felt as an early adolescent watching him perform in a plastic suit, and later drag, with gender performers Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi, which I link to below.

David Bowie - Let's Dance, EMI Music.


David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69

National Poetry Month + Poem: Langston Hughes

It's National Poetry Month, and also one of the busiest in the year for me (giving exams, reading theses, etc.), but I am aiming to post poems regularly this month, if not every day, then at least several times per week, or at least more frequently than I do in any given month (though I do periodically post poems, including several of the last few weeks, I think.) As I did in each of the past few annual National Poetry Month posts, I also am going to pick a theme and try to stick with it. Last year I focused on poetry about poems, thinking about them, writing them, reflecting on them in and as poems, a fruitful theme that led to a wide array of poems. For some reason I thought this year about poems about the night, which sounds rather inappropriate as Spring is nearly upon us, but let's see if I can find 30 poems about the night--broadly construed--to post.

Let's begin with a poet I hold perhaps more highly than all others, whose work I've been reading since childhood (and once had to memorize), and teaching this spring. It and he never ceases to surprise me. By it I mean a deceptively simple poem, entitled "Dream Variation," and by he, I mean Langston Hughes, whose evocation of the night, whose darkness and beauty he analogizes to himself, is immediately evident. This is a poem he wrote for children, though it works too for adults (and I can imagine it being set to beautiful music, notated or improvised). Read it aloud and hear how he creates a whirling music, informed by the blues, that lifts the poem, like the poem's speaker who has been twirling till the night arrives, off the page, not unlike the dancing he also invokes in both of the poem's stanzas.  For some children, the affirmation in the poem's penultimate line would come as a lovely surprise--a needed one. To get closer to the spirit, through dance, and poetry, and thus to the natural world, the world behind the surfaces of the visible, to become a tree and simultaneously one's deeper, truer self--the poem suggests all of this and more. Enjoy, and if you get the opportunity, have a twirl!

DREAM VARIATION

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me. 

Copyright © Langston Hughes, from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Works for Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing. Volume 11. Edited and with an introduction by Dianne Johnson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

PARK Scores @ LentSpace, NYC

Two summers ago I blogged about the first version of Park, a collaborative project that combined the talents of poet, scholar and translator Jennifer Scappettone, dancer and choreographer Kathy Westwater, and set designer Seung Jae Lee in creating a multimedia public, open-air performance at the Freshkills Park on Staten Island, which had once been the notorious Fresh Kills Landfill, the largest trash dump in the US. Yesterday, in lower Manhattan, Westwater staged PARK Scores @ LentSpace, a temporary public site at the intersection of 6th Avenue and Canal Street, right near the entrance of the Holland Tunnel and just at the edge of the now high-rent but formerly industrial Tribeca and SoHo neighborhoods.



According to the press for the event, "In 2010 and 2011, at Fresh Kills Westwater created scores that respond to and evoke the experience of the site in its current liminal state -- no longer landfill and not yet parkland. Not unlike Fresh Kills itself, PARK scores continue to be re-imagined and remade beyond the iconic site, including now at LentSpace. Owned by Trinity Wall Street, LentSpace is licensed for use to Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for temporary art installations. It is also vacant land Occupy Wall Street attempted to inhabit after Zuccotti Park."



I was originallyunaware of the Occupy Wall Street connection with LentSpace, but I thought about it as I considered the environmental and ecoliterary aspects, of the performance. The 2010 performance had the vast, transformed spaces of the Freshkills Park at its disposal; LentSpace is far smaller and more enclosed, though it too, because of its provisional nature and multiple points of entry/exit, felt like a space that could and should be reconfigured in multiple ways, including improvisatorily, and the performance appeared to take this into account. Also, the earlier version required that the audience meet up in advance and take the ferry over to Staten Island, but this PARK score, however, had built into a far more transient audience. People could and did come and go as they pleased, some sitting through only a part of the performance, others staying as I did until the end, still others unwittingly (or perhaps they did realize what they were doing) walking through part of the performance space, which itself then became part of the performance.



This PARK score, employing movement, play, and sound, utilized four distinct areas of LentSpace. There was the gravely arena, in which Westwater and the other dancers, in various combinations. worked with a large, silvery rectangle sheet of mylar (I think that's what it was), which became a cloud or clouds, or smoke or smog, or fog, or haze, or hills or mountains, or a lake or sea or ocean, or waves and tides, or a tent or buildings, or lungs or a heart or a stomach, or a ball or heap of garbage, or debris or anything else in any of the above places. There was a long, elevated bench, one of several ringing and enclosing the arena space, on which one dancer, first with the accompaniment of a second dancer beside her and then alone, walked on platform shoes made of tree stumps. I could only watch her intermittently as I kept praying she would not take a misstep and harm herself. The third space was a large table, draped with black cloth, on which several different combinations of dancers performed. This was hardest to see from where I stood, but eventually I walked around the ring space to see them up close. And then there was the open area around the performance sites. The musician, Shiraishi, took advantage of this and the possibilities of how the sound would carry, as he even walked through the crowd playing a piercing figure on his saxophone.



The performances made me think of so many things, including refuse and re-use, of capitalism, consumerist excess, appropriation and reappropriation and repurposing (including détournement), of the natural and the (human-)made, of text and context, of the body, the human and the post-human, and of process and continuous transformation within the context of art, and particularly dance, music, and performance, with their incredible capacity for presentation and representation, precision and ambiguity, ephemerality and resonance. I even thought of LentSpace itself, and of the city, changing and rapidly gentrifying, all around it. Out of something almost forgotten, but in private hands, something very temporary and offering a place of sociality and refuge had come into being, and, for one day, an even more specific and temporary event, a performance, had offered those present something quite special.





I was also much more aware of simultaneity and multiplicity as I stood watching, photographing and recording the performance: to give one example, there was the interplay between Shiraishi's music and the ever-changing ambient soundscape of workers, people eating lunch, the food trucks, the traffic and Tribeca and SoHo streets nearby; at the end of the one of the videos I'm posting below, you can hear what I consider to be one the signal urban sounds: a siren. It, like the performance, was a wake-up call, though nowhere near as interesting, or moving.



The participants: Choreography: Kathy Westwater; music: Tamio Shiraishi; poetry: Jennifer Scappettone; set: Jae Lee: performers: Hadar Ahuvia, Ilona Bito Tessa Chandler, Hilary Chapman, Belinda He, and Kathy Westwater, with Tamio Shiraishi on multiple analog and digital instruments.

International Day Against Homophobia + Donna Summer Passes

Today is International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO), the global day set aside to battle homophobia, one of the persistent and pernicious forms of oppression affecting US and every other society across the globe. As the late Barbara Smith wrote in her essay "Homophobia: Why Bring It Up?" (The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1993), "Homophobia may well be the last oppression to go, but it will go. It will go a lot faster if people who are opposed to every form of subjugation work in coalition to make it happen."

I've posted several times over the years about this important day, its origins, and even interviewed the person, Francophone (Martinican) author, scholar and activist Dr. Louis-Georges Tin, who played a key role in helping to establish it. In light of the recent anti-civil rights vote in North Carolina, the denial of judgeship to a gay man, the murder of a transwoman in New York, the countless cases of bullying and abuse of lgbtq children, teenagers, and adults, and the continuing furor that has followed President Barack Obama's and Vice President Joseph Biden's positive comments about same-sex marriage, it's quite clear than in the US, at least, though we have come very far indeed, we still have a ways to go, and at the root of all the examples I lay out above are what Barbara Smith and many others for decades have identified as a foundational form of oppression: homophobia.

But homophobia (and its attendent kin, heterosexism and heteronormativity) aren't problems just in the US. All across the globe, often in the face of state and popular opposition and worse, people are battling homophobia, often inscribed as religious dogma or cultural norms or traditional values, even though in many cases these "traditions" are as much the result of historical and political formations, and in places like sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, of colonial discourse and policies, as the "homosexuality" the reactionaries are fomenting against and labeling as alien.  So today and at various points throughout the year, visit the IDAHO site or affiliated sites, read up on the causes and effects of homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism, and do what you can toward eliminating these forms of subjugation and oppression. They destroy not just lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, but ultimately the lives of everyone.

***

Taking a tip from the ever-on-it Reggie H., and after my longish tributes yesterday to Carlos Fuentes and Christine Brooke-Rose, I'm going to link to his great blog, Noctuary, which features a post on IDAHO and on Donna Summer, who died today of cancer at age 63. She was without a doubt the Queen of Disco, a trailblazer in a musical genre that played an important role in the emergent post-Stonewall gay and lesbian cultures, while also serving as one of the soundtracks for 1970s African-American and urban Latino and working-class White folks more broadly.  Summer, a native of Boston, received five Grammy Awards, and had a string of hits, including "Love to Love You, Baby," "Winter Melody," "I Feel Love," "Heaven Knows," "Hot Stuff," "Bad Girls," "Dim All the Lights," "On the Radio," "The Wanderer," and the unforgettable "Last Dance," from the corny movie (that I loved), Thank God It's Friday. As Reggie H. says, she and other disco artists were the forerunners of a number of other subsequent musical genres, and despite the public backlash against disco (which did not exist in my house, where we listened to her and Chaka Khan and Tavares and the Bee Gees and everything else from R&B and soul to jazz and fusion), disco's and Summer's influences are still thankfully with us.

At her peak Summer was an icon, with a powerful voice that could pack ten different emotions into a melody, a public persona that embodied desire and possibility, and a figure who seemed to function both within the world of her songs as well as outside them and the limits of the society around her.  I was too young to go to discos during her heyday, but I can vividly remember skidding around a roller-skating rink as her songs boomed from the loud-speakers. In her post-disco fame religious conversion stage, which coincided with the eruption of the AIDS pandemic, she openly espoused homophobia, turning on one of the very communities that had brought her to fame. It was a horrible shift, which ultimately damaged her career as well, but she eventually apologized for what she'd said and done. One of the things I always consider with someone like Summer is that her behavior should remind us that homophobia can exist inside all of us, even in those who have been friends and allies, even in those of us who are queer, and so today, let's remember Summer and raise a skate (or a toast) in her memory, but also let's vow to bury homophobia once and for all. One of my favorite Donna Summer songs, "MacArthur Park"-"I don't think that I can take it/cause it took so long to make it/and I'll never have that recipe again/Oh noooo" (how true those words were for her, though she never really did lose the recipe, even posting a chart topper in 2010 with "To Paris With Love"):

Marc Bamuthi Joseph's & Theaster Gates's rbGB @ Chicago MoCA

I am not a dance critic nor a dance scholar, let me make that clear. I point this lest I incur the sort of situation that allegedly occurred a few years ago when some kind person cited this blog in a dissertation on dance. It startled my (very generous) colleague who's a leader in that field and happened to be participating in the dissertation defense. So please, dear reader, read these remarks as those of a fan and nothing more.  I do love dance, I love to dance and I love going to see dance performances. I don't do this enough, I'll admit it. Fortunately, last week, I got my tail into gear and headed down to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to see red black and Green: a blues, the collaboration between Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living World Project and local artist and urban planner Theaster Gates.  This was only one of several events that Joseph/The Living World Project held at MoCA, from April 12-14. Others included a conversation with former Obama administration official and environmental and jobs activist Van Jones; and SHareOUT, which turned the stage over to a number of young Chicago poets and activists, including Young Chicago Authors, Kuumba Lynx, YOUmedia, FilmLAB@1512 and AgLAB@1512 of the Better Boys Foundation, and The MCA Creative Agency. 

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (foreground) dancing, Theaster Gates through door

For red black and Green: a blues, Joseph conducted field research, including interviews and community-based events, for several years, in the four cities--Chicago, New York (Harlem), Houston, and Oakland--that formed the compass points for the performance, which he and collaborators Gates, Chicago native Traci Tolmaire and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati also structured according to the four seasons, four cycles of life, and four rooms of a shotgun-style house (porch, kitchen, bedroom, front/living room).  With Gates, he realized the house metaphor through an interactive and versatile stage installation, a mobile house/set seemingly built out of scraps (an organic, green set), titled The Colored Museum, playing off the title of George C. Wolfe's famous play, that the public could view during museum hours, and which provided the setting and backdrops for each part of the performance. One of the exciting aspects of red black and Green: a blues, was being able to join Joseph, Gates, Tolmaire, and Shepherd down on the stage at the beginning of the performance. Everyone attending, as well as the ushers, were invited to mill about, observe them, find a spot, engage. They not only interacted with the audience, singing and speaking directly to us, handing out watermelon slices, gently ushering us about as the installation-house-set underwent its initial reformulations, but our presence, I think, probably shaped how this first part of the event unfolded, provoking some improvisation. The space itself, then, became embodied, not just by the performers, but by the audience.

Tommy Shepherd, making music

Let me say that Joseph can dance his behind off, as can Tolmaire; Gates can sing; and Shepherd can create any beat you might envision. But they all sang, and danced, and made music. They sang and danced and made music out of seemingly nothing, out of anything, out of everything.  They all also embodied the various people--characters--Joseph had interviewed, harmoniously fitting together the documentary material, Joseph's stirring spoken word poetry (I mean, this man can write and perform some poetry!), the dancing in multiple styles, from ballet to hip hop, the singing (which included Gates's and the others' performances of standards, blues songs, and original pieces), to create an embodied whole that suggested a larger vision.

The audience heading back to seats after the first part of the show

With each shift to a new season and city, a new cycle of life, came a new configuration of The Colored Museum, and at every point, even during the transitions, Joseph or his collaborators kept things going and flowing, though they also were not afraid to show the seams. Other elements of the multimedia performance included still and video projections on the back walls, judicious use of materials like seeds and bowls and water, lights and darkness, and taped music.  At one point, after the Harlem scenes, I was convinced that everyone had danced and sung themselves out, and if Joseph just decided to lie on the stage and Gates went silent but for a blues hum, I wouldn't have faulted them. But they kept moving towards the finale, and by the end, their aims had become clear. A reporter sitting next to me remarked at the end of the event that she would be reflecting on this performance for some time to come, and I had to agree.

red, black and Green: a blues

The red black and green subtext of the performance, i.e., blackness, as well as the blues, I think, were clear from the beginning, but I was curious to see how they would tackle the Green. The complexity of black--and brown, and working-class--people's relationship to the environment, natural, built, always constructed in social, economic and political terms, was complex. red black and Green: a blues made clear that any blanket pronouncements about a green approach that did not take into account historical and material conditions, the diverse and sometimes divergent perspectives of people who were often living in a state of multiple displacements, the rich connections between and across cultural circuits, was bound to fail. Joseph himself is Haitian-American, the son of an immigrant; in one scene, he portrayed himself talking to his son about the Black Panthers, and his and the landscape's relationship to them. His working through of their legacy for him and for his son, and for those who'd come after and might not know how they effected change and yet were not able to accomplish some of their goals, but left traces on those who came after, left traces in the landscape itself, marked it, was quite moving. His son, he suggested, was able to pick up the threads.

A scene from red, black and Green: a blues

The deft weaving of global and regional traditions, alongside critical and intellectual engagement, in embodied practice, was the highlight of this performance. Yet it never felt like a critique turned into art, or intellectualism for its own sake. The embodying of concepts, words, movements, gestures, voices, practices, of the space itself, occurred in a thrilling, unforgettable way. If red black Green: a blues comes through your city, don't miss it. I am looking forward to whatever these amazing artists come up with next.

Theaster Gates, after the show

Tommy Shepherd, after the show

Traci Tolmaire (on right), chatting with fans

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, at show's end

Merce Fair

John Cage & Merce
Cunningham

Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham (1919 - 2009), choreographer and dance pioneer

:: formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) at Black Mountain College (1933-1957), in 1953; it is performing its farewell dances this year, 2011; its school and archive will continue

::Merce Fair, July 16, 2011, Frederick P. Rose Hall

Excerpt from MCDC's Squaregame (1976) | Courtesy of Cunningham Dance Foundation - Music: S.E. Wave/E.W. Song by Takehisa Kosugi


Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds, mylar balloons in natural light, used as the décor for MCDC's Rainforest (1968), Atrium, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Columbus Circle, New York City


Cunningham's realization of John Cage's painting score Steps, in the Benjamin Menschel Arcade, Frederick P. Rose Hall


Some of Cunningham's dance scores/choreography charts, in the Archive curated by the New York Public Library and Merce Cunningham Dance Company archivist David Vaughan, Edward John Noble Foundation studio, Frederick P. Rose Hall

Rashaun Mitchell

::Among its original corps, dancers Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Paul Taylor, and Remy Charlip, and musicians David Tudor and Cunningham's life partner, musician/artist/philosopher John Cage, the MCDC's founding musical director
::Current Music Director: Takehisa Kosugi - Current Director of Choreography: Robert Swinston - Current Executive Director: Trevor Carlson
::Notable collaborators with Cunningham and MCDC over the years have included visual, plastic and fashion artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Rei Kawakubo, Roy Lichenstein, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol, and musicians including Gavin Bryars, Gordon Mumma, Conlon Nancarrow, and Sonic Youth
::current company Brandon Collwes, Dylan Crossman, Emma Desjardins, Jennifer Goggans, John Hinrichs, Daniel Madoff, Rashaun Mitchell, Marcie Munnerlyn, Krista Nelson, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Robert Swinston, Melissa Toogood, Andrew Weber

PARK @ Freshkills Park

I've posted several times about my colleague poet/scholar/translator Jennifer Scappettone, who teaches at the University of Chicago and who was one of the primary forces behind the wonderful visit of some of Italy's leading experimental poets to the US a year ago.  Most recently I wrote briefly and posted photos from her performance at the Red Rover experimental poetry-performance series in Chicago. At that event and after, Jennifer told me about her spring residency at Freshkills Park, which is the new incarnation of what was once the largest (29,000 tons of trash a day) landfill in the US, the notorious Freshkills Land Fill, in Staten Island.  As part of her residency, she worked with choreographer and dancer Kathy Westwater, and architect/designer Seung Jae Lee to create a site-specific dance-poetry-performance version of one of Westwater's pieces, "PARK," at the park, and I decided not to miss it.

Below are photos and short videos from the performance, which required getting to the Manhattan Staten Island Ferry terminal at 9 am this morning, riding on a bus from the St. George Ferry terminal (on which we got an excellent introduction by Freshkills Park Outreach Coordinator Doug Elliott) to the park, and then visiting two different sites at which the performance unfolded. It was, to put it simply, unforgettable.  I'm no dance critic so I won't even try to describe it, but I did appreciate how the performance metaphorically and symbolically explored ideas concerning our consumerist, throwaway society and our relation to garbage/waste/debris, our (re-)constructions of "nature," "land" and "landscape," our struggles to communicate, community and atomization in relation to the natural world and (human) bodies, and, throughout, the role of time, in a setting like this still-unfinished, still-transforming "park." Kathy Westwater's and Jennifer's performance of insideness and outsideness, and their conceptualization of participation, involving themselves, the performers, the audience, and the surrounding landscape--with the wind providing an ever-shifting soundtrack, as the videos attest--was also enlightening.

Here's the writeup from the Freshkills Park blog:

It seems like no New York City site has truly been inaugurated as a public space until it has hosted an avant-garde dance performance.  Our time has come!  A group of artists and performers organized by choreographer Kathy Westwater has developed a movement-based project responding to their research and on-site study of the Freshkills Park site over several visits this spring.  PARK, as the project is called, isn’t a traditional dance performance—more a combination of movement, writing, and game playing.  It is “concerned with our construction and consumption of nature.”

Kathy and her dancers have previously performed PARK in locations as varied as Yosemite Park and Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea.

And now, the photos and videos:


Jennifer Scappettone (in white, in foreground), with dancers and audience around her

The dancers on the first hill

One of the string phones at the second hilltop (note how far it stretches into the meadow)

Obama Sweep + Dems Kowtow + Australia Apologizes + Ronald K. Brown's Moves

Barack Obama (at right, USA Today, Rick Bowmer, AP) swept all three--the Potomac--primaries today, but most incredible, just incredible to me, was the Obama blowout in Virginia today. It wasn't a caucus, the state has a lower percentage of Black voters than some of the other Southern states (Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, etc.) that he's won, and while it has trended purple, Virginia is still quite conservative. I know this personally from the years we lived there.

Hillary Clinton's campaign thought she had a chance in the Old Dominion. Yet Obama won Virginia by a huge margin, 63%-37%, basically winning in every region (Northern Virginia, the Tidewater, the Blue Ridge mountains, the border counties with North Carolina, the southeast coastal areas) except the southwest, and also posted these numbers, according to the NBC exit polls: he won among Democrats 59-41, he won among independents 66-33, he won among Republicans (!) voting in the Democratic primary 70-26. He won among White male voters 55%-45%, among Black voters 90%-10%, and among Latinos 55%-45%. Among White women, he lost to Hillary Clinton 42%-58%.

But most remarkably, he received 274,000 more votes than her, and combined, they outpolled all the Republicans on the ballot (McCain and Huckabee, as well as Ron Paul, and the ghosts of Romney, Thompson, Giuliani, etc.) by 479,230 votes. That is nearly half a million more votes, or about the margin by which Gore defeated W in 2000. I think this bodes very well for Obama, very well for the Democrats in general, and ill for McCain, the presumptive nominee, and whomever he picks as his running mate. McCain in fact received yet another scare from Huckabee. Voters are obviously both energized and fed up, and these higher Democratic vote totals (save for Alabama and Georgia, I believe), both in the primaries and in the caucuses, are a harbinger of November's results.

But let me not stint Maryland or DC. In Maryland, as I type this entry (about 75% of the precincts are reporting), Obama is winning by a 60%-37% margin over Clinton, who alone has received nearly as many votes (220,000 vs. 225,000) as all the Republicans combined; Obama is ahead with about 359,700 by himself. One of the best stories out of Maryland is the victory of progressive Democrat Donna Edwards over Albert Wynn, a teddy bearish corporate sellout who had repeatedly voted against his constituents' interests again and again (cf. Bankruptcy Bill, etc.). Nearly two years ago I highlighted her primary run against Wynn, which she lost, but thanks to online supporters, she was again able to compete, and she did it! The House will have won less DINO and one more Democrat whose platform directly addresses the needs and dreams of her constituents.

In DC, Obama defeated Clinton 75% to 24%. I think it's fair to say this was the least surprising outcome of all.

These vote margins have given Obama enough delegates to tie or pass Clinton, depending upon who's counting/how they're counted. The next state up is Wisconsin, which Obama should win, and then it's on to Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the first two of which Clinton is banking on. But I'll save that discussion for another day. For now, once again, congratulations Senator Obama!

‡‡‡

Now the bad news: today the Democratic-controlled US Senate capitulated (again) to George W. and Dick Cheney, and voted 68-29 to give the telecommunications industry retroactive immunity as part of a bill vesting the president with expanding powers to spy on American citizens.

(W spokesdissembler Dana Perino even accidentally admitted today that the telecom companies spied on US citizens. Because they were "patriotic.")

It also shuts down pending lawsuits against the telecoms, possibly ensuring that we might never learn what the W administration was up to with its spying, not only after the September 11, 2001 attacks, but, as a trial involving former Qwest executive Joseph Nacchio has shown, as early as a few weeks after W and Cheney took office. In fact, Helen Thomas's question about this earlier spying led to Perino's unplanned candor. (And we should never forget the dramatic Joseph Comey testimony about the administration's attempts to force John Ashcroft, on his sickbed, to sign off on activities so troubling that he refused to do so, and which Comey also refused to do.)

One of the chief toadies this time was Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, who all but turned procedural back flips to deny the advancement of the Justice Committee bill, which did not include telecom amnesty was scrapped in favor of the Intelligence Committee bill, which gave the telecoms everything they wanted, and to ensure that any Democratic challenges, led primarily by former presidential candidate Chris Dodd and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, were defeated. The other was the pusillanimous Jay Rockefeller, who, assuming the role of a ventriloquist's dummy, repeatedly recited RNC and Bush administration propaganda on the floor of the Senate, which was apparently persuasive enough (or cover, either way) for Democrats to join in on the "surrender to terror" and give Bush a huge valentine. This bill, as Glenn Greenwald noted today, is so outrageous that it actually empowers Bush the right to ignore its statutory effects if he so deems it necessary.

The Republicans, unsurprisingly, voted in Bush-enabling lockstep (and yes, that includes those "moderates" like John Sununu and Olympia Snowe), as they have done since 2001, while the Democrats could only muster 29 votes in opposition. Nominally, of course, they control the Senate; in reality, they remain marionettes for corporate lobbyists and the W Gang to run ragged as they see fit. Barack Obama voted no, as did his fellow Illinoisan, Dick Durbin, both of New Jersey's Senators, and the handful of other consistently liberal members of the pathetic, phantom majority (Dodd, Feingold, Kennedy, Kerry, Murray, Cantwell, Boxer, Brown, etc.).

Hillary Clinton did not cast a vote.

At this point, this egregious farce will become law unless the House stands firm when the bill goes to conference, as it did not approve telecom amnesty. I should add, not that it matters a dime, that polls have shown a clear majority of Americans do not want the telecoms to be given retroactive immunity. There are laws already on the books protecting them if they act in good faith, but apparently, as we've seen again and again since 2000, the laws of this country do not apply to this president or his cronies. Nevertheless, the folks at Firedoglake are trying to get people to contact their House representatives via petition. Please do go this route, but even better, send a fax or letter to your Representative, telling her that you do not want the telecoms to receive immunity. W's lawlessness, which will probably never be punished, should still be investigated by a court of law.

As for the US Senate, just go here, find your Senators, and praise them or rant by phone, fax or email. (Praise if they've done the right thing for a change always is important too.)

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Australia has finally decided to apologize to its Aboriginal peoples for decades of sustained state, individual and symbolic violence, and social, political and cultural discrimination and marginalization. New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has asked the Australian parliament to approve an apology he will deliver at tomorrow's opening session. The apology states in part that "We [the Australian state] apologize for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians." The text is particularly aimed at the "Stolen Generations," those thousands of Aboriginals and mixed-race children who were stolen from their families and raised by whites as part of the state's white supremacist social policy, which, in 1930s Northern Territory "chief protector of the Aborigines" Cecil Cook, aimed to "breed out the color."

Unfortunately, the apology appears to be mostly rhetoric and no action; the Aboriginals will receive no reparations, remuneration, nothing, at least no time soon, beyond the Labour Party's earnest words, which also include a bit about "a future where we harness the determination of all Australians, indigenous and nonindigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity," because, as you might have guessed even if you know nothing about Australia, by every social index measure, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are worse off than white Australians. Mmm hmmm, sounds familiar.

One thing this news brought to mind was the concept of apologies, what they aim to achieve, especially beyond the symbolic, and why it's so difficult for some people to utter or issue them, or why they think that grudging ones (cf. David Shuster to Hillary Rodham Clinton) or non-apologies are sufficient. Here's an extremely brief piece by Jess Perriam on philosopher Aniello Ianuzzi's discussion of the philosophy of apologies. Ianuzzi says:

"Increasingly in today's society, it's perhaps becoming harder still because in many ways we're becoming a more individualistic society and also in many ways the black and white between right and wrong has become very much blurred."

"Therefore people don't generally believe they're wrong anymore."

Dr Ianuzzi gives this the definition of 'moral relevatism' and explains it like this, "We believe we have the rights and abilities to make our own definitions of right and wrong, and therefore we can impose our views on others."

"The ego gets in the way and then of course, sorry becomes that much harder."

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On a happier note, today the New York Times's Felicia Lee (one of my favorite reporters from that paper) focuses on the work of one of the major contemporary choreographers, Ronald K. Brown. Lee provides some history on Ron's company, Evidence Dance Company, which he founded in 1985 at the age of 19, and goes on to talk about the often groundbreaking work he's done over these last 23 years, emphasizing in particular the ways in which the African Diaspora is central to his work. Accompanying Lee's article is a fine photo essay (say what you will about the Times these days, but its photo slide shows rarely fail to catch the eye). Below, Ron, foreground, rehearsing his piece "Upside Down," with members of his troupe. On Tuesday night, Evidence opens its annual New York season at the Joyce Theater. (Photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)

Reggie Wilson & Andreya Ouamba's "Accounting for Customs"

This morning, I thought to myself, I rarely avail myself of free cultural activities in the area, so when I made sure to catch choreographers' Reggie Wilson's (at right, Nan Melville for the NYT) and Andréya Ouamba's "Accounting for Customs," a dance piece that Wilson and his company, Fist & Heel Performance Group, staged on the steps of the U.S. Custom House, which is at the tip of Bowling Green, in New York City's oldest neighborhood.

According to Claudia LaRocca's writeup in the New York Times, this is Wilson's second site-specific piece in New York, and a prelude to a larger project with the Congolese Ouamba, "The Good Dance (Congo-Congo and his search for the Good Dance)," which will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2009. Alistair Macauley's laudatory review is here. I would concur with all his points: Wilson and Ouamba used the stairs to great use, literalizing the ideas and metaphors of and relations between the body, custom(s) and the Custom House (an old seat of government and colonial power); the dancing felt fresh, particularly when the dancers engaged in synchronized moves that broke up into asychronous but mirrored passages; and the music selection really underlined the dances, especially the final piece, which sounded (to my ears) like high-life. The piece, really was too brief, though. As hot as it was today--and I was dead center in the sun's focus--I could have stood out for at least another 15 minutes to half hour watching these dancers perform.

Here are some photos from the performance. (Blogger allows you to post videos now, but I didn't succeed in posting the one I took, so I'll keep trying.)

Reggie Wilson and his crew, at the mixing board.

Near the beginning of the dance, as the dancers rolled themselves up the stairs.

Massing at the bottom of the bannister.

More of the performance.

One of the dancers breaks the fourth wall and joins the audience for a few minutes.

Another dancer, en pointe.

Near the end of the piece, the dancers descending the stairs.

All of the dancers, and Ms. Ouamba, assembled for a bow.

Here's a short video clip of the performance that I originally tried to post via Blogger, but had to do via YouTube.