With performances rapidly approaching January 23-26th at the historic Washington Hall in Seattle, we thought it would be nice to share On Cacophony etc. (postscript), written by director Torben Ulrich for Angelina Baldoz and Beth Graczyk on the process for Cacophony for 8 Players.    

We also wanted to share that we completed our final residency December 5-8th at Performance Works Northwest as the 2013 Visiting Artists.  The support provided by Linda Austin and PWNW this past year has been truly fruitful and nourishing in the development of the work.  A huge thank you to Linda, Jeff and PWNW.    

Postscript - by Torben Ulrich, April 2013

So, the clock was ticking away, very loud, that afternoon and early evening before we were to skype, before you were going down to Portland. So it became increasingly evident that I couldn’t quite get those things together, those quotes, that at first I had thought about getting in there, or maybe not thought through well enough, since some of them I had not even located properly. There was one about Sahaja, a Sanskrit term, that I thought could come either just before or after the above ending lines, but where was it, and did it really fit, did I remember it rightly etc. So now it’s fast approaching seven, and Molly needed to format it and dispatch it, so I knew I had to let it go, and I thought: well, maybe next time, maybe when you come down in May we can add a couple or three, not necessarily to a piece of paper, but to the net of thoughts…

Then when we had heard from Portland that the four bulkier Players might fit, and we seemed to be on, I asked Molly if she thought it was an idea to add a p.s. to the above and get some of those quotes down on paper, so that we had them in a pile so to speak even before you came, and could use them, more collectively, as a diving board or whatever, down, up, sideways, spiraling (optimally, no splash when you hit the water).

And Molly said why not.

A first move in such a post piece, then, might be a step back, or the Step Back. We used it in the liner notes to the first film from the Lid, a step back from match play, a step back from practice, from running intervals, from weights, from the wall, from the ball, until you get to the step itself  and maybe further. We tried to articulate that, Body & Being was the title, remember, the coming together, if possible non-dually, of the physical movement and the mental, the twelves, the grid etc.

The step back, in a different vein, can also be traced back to Heidegger, who said: “The first step to vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents – that is, explains – to the thinking that responds and recalls.” 

Then David Wood, in his book entitled The Step Back (2005), took up that theme, under the heading Toward a Negative Capability, a term coming from Keats. In her turn, the nice Korean-American writer called Jin Y. Park picked up this thread from David Wood, in her work called Buddhism and Postmodernity (2008), where she starts chapter 10 stating that Wood “characterizes postmodern forms of ethics as a ‘step back’”:

Without any irritable reaching: pretty good trope. Negative capability, too.
Refraining as action. A step back as a step of (continued) vigilance. Which way would that be, remaining quiet, would that be back or forth: always being situated in these oppositions (and then, on the dance floor, back or forth being just two different directions, or maybe not even ‘different’).
And then, in terms of time, of temporality, of timing, a step taking time, a step at the right time, traditionally those two, more opposition – as Agamben notes in his work The Time That Remains (2005):

The other day, or maybe a couple of weeks ago, when we revisited at the Yerba Buena, seeing some of that Shen Wei work, with perhaps 22 dancers on the floor of the ‘stage’, and us folks, the public, milling around on same stage, in between them, I thought perhaps that might be an example of chronos in which there didn’t seem to be much kairos. (But to be fair, going back to my childhood, the Danish ballet, the elves, the trolls, the princes, perhaps not a great abundance of  the kairological there either.)

So the step back, in chronological time, from here to Denmark, linking up with Hans Beck, with Bournonville, with Andersen, we come to Kierkegaard, a primary ancestor to try, impossibly, to live up to, right here, in this context, his connection to the Royal Theater, the frequent visit to the ballet, his language of the leap, the moment, the right moment, the landing, the passion, lidenskab, repetition, paradoxality, the stop, standsningen, silence, trembling, the works of love: staying with the kairological, how our task would also be, in Portland, to make a fabric of these terms, not as terms, rather voicings, rasas, rhythms, rags. Not as terms, rather as timings.

David Wood, again, links some of these elements together in another book, Time after Time (2007): 

The passion of temporal enactment. The possible passion in the inter-enactment of eight players, dead, alive, in between. David Wood, in that same book, has an interesting concept he calls ‘time-shelters’, and in a certain way, maybe that would fit here a little bit how I could also conceive of the sculptures, and ourselves, the eight of us (or nine or more), the various ways we are composed, complexities of memories, metabolisms, markers of time, pulses of mind, gut, skin…:

So, he says, the outside within, the boundaries of inside and outside, we are still a little in that two-some landscape, the ins and the outs, then within these there are new boundaries of number, eight players, four levels, nine Muses etc. But we’re still trying to come up with one coherent work, aren’t we, that cacophony for those players. I was thinking of those words from Jean-Luc Nancy above, where he counts the Muses and ends up with what he calls the singular plural, I always thought that was a useful term: not a single conception, but after nine nights, before the divine order:

A fundamental double law, let me get back to that one. But before we wrap it up (and now the clock’s heard ticking again), I came across this fragment which we hadn’t looked at before, I think, on the nine, nava, rasas in George E. Ruckert’s book Music in North India  (2004), where he talks about the four and four and  “how the first eight moods would leave the audience with a feeling of the ninth, peace”:

Then in a book on Deleuze and Religion, edited by Mary Bryden (2001), there is a piece by Michael Goddard called “The scattering of time crystals: Deleuze, mysticism, cinema”, where Goddard quotes Michel de Certeau who has some good lines, I think, on “somatisation” etc. I thought of adding those lines in particular hearing of that exiting news that Angelina would join the Players, so to speak, and embody, somatise, articulate, express, both the compositional and the choreographical orders:

One not only plays one’s body, one is played by it, double dutch, maybe 
approaching Nancy and the double law above, the singular plural.

So finally, finally, we get to with within the realm of Sahaja, as mentioned in the beginning of this long drawn, too longdrawn p.s., sahaja (as an adjective) as maybe the realm of the co-emergent not-two, sahaja being Sanskrit for being born (ja) together with (saha), also according to Per Kværne’s book An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (1986), and where he also talks of sahaja in Western ways in terms of ‘simultaneously-arisen’, the indivisibility of transcendence and immanence, of bliss and gnosis, samsara and nirvana  etc., and in addressing the songs in the book themselves, he says ‘once their essential structure becomes apparent: they reveal the nature of the ultimate state through the systematic ambiguity of their imagery’. Then later on he says the following, and I say, again, love you and ask forgiveness for putting you through this long ordeal:

We just finished another invigorating residency down in Portland at Performance Works Northwest, April 4th-7th. We had the opportunity to share some of our work in an informal showing alongside fellow artists-in-residence Emily Stone and Lucy Yim.  A warm thank you to Linda Austin, the board of Performance Works Northwest, Lucy, Emily and our audience.    

In preparation for this residency, Torben wrote a beautiful letter to Angelina and me regarding our collective project.  It is filled with such incredible insight, humor, heart, and intellect, and offers a window into the basis of thought and intention on the Cacophony project from Torben's perspective.  With Torben’s permission, we’d like to share it with our readers, in hopes that you might find as many jewels of inspiration as we found in reading it.  Look for Part II - On cacophony etc (postscript) in an upcoming blog post.   

On Cacophony etc. 

Dearest Beth & Angelina

Some stray lines around the title of our joint project, Cacophony For 8 Players, that are in no way intended to impose a certain view or even an uncertain view as to the meaning of those three words and that number, so here it stutters away...

As a preamble, let me share with you, and Molly, what happened just before settling down to write this. Or let me go back even a little bit. The other day, when we talked on skype, we told you about the new space upstairs, in what we always called the music room or the library or the library & music room, and how it’s now minus the treadmill and the rest of the stuff, for you to indulge in, when you come down, to spread out your wings, your feet, your ears, your imaginal ways etc.

But we don’t think we shared with you how, up on the wall on the left as you enter, we had put this enlarged photocopy of a page from a Morton Feldman score entitled “For Samuel Beckett”, for which we have the music, and if we understand it right it’s meant as a dedication, but in any case we thought it was a nice way to combine, with two favorites, the understanding of a library & music room.

Of course, I’m really straying here, but if I’m still circling even a little bit, it’s around the word “for”, the meanings of “for”.

Then, since we talked to you, we received another Morton Feldman cd that we had ordered, called “Three Voices (and, after some space) For Joan La Barbara”, maybe you know her, she also has sung with Cunningham and Cage etc., but I didn’t know this piece, and thought I should, also in connection with our project, since she recorded this three times over on her own. Or, in performance, twice on tape over speakers and one live on stage (with a text from a Frank O’Hara poem). Now, the meaning of “for” here is probably a little different than the “for” in the Beckett case, isn’t it? Maybe a dedication, for her, but also music for her three voices, a score for three voices: where the composer’s voice is both inside and outside the work.

Then, a little while ago, and what I thought was amazing, I thought I would check, up in the library, what or if Morton Feldman himself had said something about this work (also since there were no liner notes with the cd). Then on page 272 of a book called Morton Feldman Says, I found these lines:
                                               
                                            One of my closest friends, the painter Philip Guston, had
                                             just died; Frank O’Hara had died several years before.
                                             I saw the piece with Joan in front and those two loudspeakers behind 
                                             her. There is something tombstoney about the look of loudspeakers. I 
                                             thought of the piece as an exchange of the live voice with the dead ones 
                                             – a mixture of the living and the dead.

Something tombstoney, pretty good phrase. And that further connective to our work, the mixture of the living and the dead. Pretty amazing, I thought. And having seen it, I thought, maybe we ought to share that Morton moment first. End of preamble.

Or, to stay there another moment, as a kind of threshold or bridge to what I was coming downstairs to write a few lines about. To stay a moment with the way Feldman saw, or heard, his own piece: three voices, an exchange of the live voice with the dead ones (and maybe his two friends were still alive when he actually wrote it, composed it); and so what I mean, there’s also his own voice, as composer, and then there’s his later voice, the way he articulates his thoughts, now as a listener. How many voices are there, how many players?

Dearest Beth and Angelina, and Molly too, we’re still circling around our title, the meanings of “for”, etc. So he, Feldman, writes something, something for someone, this time it’s three voices for La Barbara, but here, in terms of “for”, if it’s a dedication, it’s also something for her to sing, several times over. So how many “fors” are here? End of bridge.

Cacophony. Comes, it’s said, from the Greek, from kakon and phonia, bad or evil sound, like in the old dualisms, good and evil etc. But isn’t it a collision of sorts, a clash, that it’s come to mean, or maybe it was there all along, a compound, a dissonance. So maybe a cluster of sounds, displeasing. Then came Schoenberg, according to Kandinsky (around 1911):
                                                 
                                               Schoenberg starts from the principle that the concepts 
                                               consonance and dissonance simply do not exist. A so-called 
                                               dissonance is simply a further-removed consonance.

Going back close to our zero moment, back at the Erickson, waiting for Angelina to join us, those Schoenberg ways were of course already there, as were the idea of overtones or undertones of irony. And remember, what we had just seen or heard we thought was a tad trite or banal or bombastic. So right from the start there was this notion of a dis-sonance, something with a little more juice, a little more tension, something that might be a little dis-pleasing to some, a bit less smooth, whiff of mockery, irony itself stirring up some trouble. Something maybe disturbing, for some (later: dropping those balls on the floor). Repeating: for some, that word “for”, some foul sounds for some...figures, friends, performers, players.

At that very early moment, for me, maybe there were not eight, immediately. But within a few seconds there was the thought of a dual economy, both in terms of logistics and budget, and at the same time in terms of the living and the not-so-living, a two-by-four that would resonate with many of the structures of the eightfold, across the fields, and also keep this tension going, via the word “for”, spilling into the ninth, the exceeding, our own voices, conjoined, the white thread, woven through (if we could live up to that).

If, later on, we talked a lot about the rasas of Muni, Abhinavagupta’s addition, the myths of Graham, the I Ching of Cunningham and Cage, we never said that much, I think, about the Muses, the symbolism, the inspirational and representational aspects, across the spectrum of the arts. Not that we necessarily need to go into that, by now. But in order to also see some following quotes from Kandinsky, see what he means by Monumental Art, maybe we could just insert a few lines, the opening moments from a work by Jean-Luc Nancy, published in 1994:

                                              The Muses get their name from a root that indicates ardor, the quick- 
                                              tempered tension that leaps out in impatience, desire, or anger, the sort 
                                              of tension that aches to know and to do. In a milder version, one speaks 
                                              of the “movements of the spirit.” (Mens is from the same root.) The 
                                              Muse animates, stirs up, excites, arouses. She keeps watch less over the 
                                              form than over the force. Or more precisely: she keeps watch forcefully 
                                              over the form.
                                              But this force springs up in the plural. It is given, from the
                                              first, in multiple forms. There are Muses and not the Muse. 
                                              Their number may have varied, as well as their attributes, but the 
                                              Muses will always have been several.

Their number may have varied, as Nancy says, as well as their attributes: it’s a force, he says, that springs up in the plural. Which may be the gateway to those Kandinsky quotes (But just playing with the eight- form a moment, let’s say we here, but not otherwise, omit Miss Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, then we have Caliope who was said to be the Muse of epic poetry, Clio of history, Polyhymnia of mime, Euterpe of the flute, Terpsichore of dance, Erato of lyric poetry, Melpomeme of tragedy, and Thalia of comedy).

If we view the Muses as figures, see them in front of us, they may inter-play, moving between each other, in a sort of horizontal line, rather than in a dimension that has more of the feel of a verticality. I say this, first in relation to Kandinsky and the way he seems to articulate his ideas about the side-by-sideness of the arts; but also in order to, later, get into these different layers of interpretation, how our title may be understood to contain or refer to territories that through the ages may have been seen in a more vertical way, intertwined, still sort of stacked.

Let us here not abandon Miss Urania, maybe she’ll guide us, into our tension between the eightfold and the ninth, bridging then or setting up the dynamics between the horizontalities and the verticalities, their meshings (not forgetting the temporal).

Kandinsky, then, and what he says about Monumental Art, a couple of fragments here, starting out from, as he says, the painterly, ‘pure pictorial composition’, chapter 7 in this 1912 edition of his book called in English “On the Spiritual in Art”:
                                            This dance of the future, which is thus raised to the level of the music 
                                            and painting of today, will in the same instant become capable of 
                                            contributing as a third element to the creation of a form of stage 
                                            composition that will constitute the first work of Monumental Art.

                                            Stage composition will consist initially of these three elements:
                                            1. musical movement,
                                            2. pictorial movement,
                                            3. dance movement.
                                            Everyone will understand from what has been said above on the subject 
                                            of pure pictorial composition what I mean by the threefold effect of 
                                            internal movement ( = stage composition).

And these lines from around the same time, from an essay called Content and Form:

                                            This monumental art is the combination of every art in one single work, 
                                            whereby (1) each art, while remaining exclusively within the bounds of 
                                            its given form, becomes a joint begetter of the work, and (2) within this 
                                            work, each art is brought to the fore or relegated to the background, 
                                            according to the principle of direct or inverted contrast.
                                            That is, the principle according to which this work is constructed 
                                            remains the same as that which likewise constitutes the unique basis of 
                                            creation in every individual art.

So I think we should be attentive to how he talks about ‘initially’, and then later on (in the Bauhaus period 1919-1923) expands on that three-some, now setting up six fields or “artistic means that, taken together, offer the greatest possibilities for a monumental abstract art.” (notice also how he now adds the word ‘abstract’): 1) Architecture, dealing with space and dimensions, 2) Painting, dealing with color etc., 3) Sculpture, comprising individual spatial extension, 4) Music, comprising sounds and temporal extensions, 5) Dance, with movement in space and time etc., 6) Poetry, the human voice, its spatial, temporal components.
And to Kandinsky’s six, may we be bold and add a seventh, compositions in Light (thank you, Amiya), and an eighth: the Cameramatic, compositions in photo-filmic ways (Maya Deren, etc)...

Then if we have these eight players, fields, art, disciplines, ‘artistic means’, as Kandinsky says, are we seeing them, albeit in space, sort of side by side, together in a juxtaposition kind of horizontality? Now, not to get caught in the conceptual nettings of all this, another set of dualities, of the horizontal and the vertical: apart from the above six ‘means’, later on Kandinsky has an eight-list, where he places the following ‘elements’ underneath each other and says that these ‘elements should be subjected to analysis’ (Program for Bauhaus 1920):

                                              1. Color
                                              2. Plane
                                              3. Volume
                                              4. Space
                                              5. Sound
                                              6. Time
                                              7. Movement
                                              8. Word

So, to take up his instruction, please analyze, please analyze these eight elements, these eight players. 
Okay, here we go.

Then there’s this other ‘vertical’ stuff, where you have a stacking of horizontals, meanings, going in an upwards direction, it seems, this layering of old, what the scholastics called the Quadriga, the fourfold way of interpreting (the Bible etc.), those classical hermeneutic levels: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), the anagogical (or mystic). (And they used ‘Jerusalem’ traditionally as an example: the literal was the city itself, the allegorical was the city viewed as body of the Christian Church, the moral was the word Jerusalem to be understood as an image of the individual soul in its faith and its peace, and the anagogical, meaning ‘leading upward’ in Greek, was maybe something like the ways leading to union in Christ, abiding with God, the Godhead within, and so on.)

And, to open this up a bit, how we have much the same kind of foursome in the Jewish tradition, Rabbinic, Kabbalah, where the four levels of scriptural meaning are contained in the word PaRDeS, meaning paradise-garden, into which four rabbis of old entered together, but only one of them, Rabbi Aqiva, ‘returned safely’. PaRDeS, as an acronym, may here be understood as follows: Peshat as the plain or literal meaning, Remez as the allegorical, the hinted, Derash, as the homiletic and moral meaning, and Sod as the secret or mystical interpretation.

Then, still with your kind patience, we may take this around a bit, the foursome, first to Islam and the Arabic language, where I thought this note from William Chittick was nice:

                                       An old joke among orientalists tells us that every Arabic word has four 
                                       meanings: It means what it means, then it means the opposite of what it 
                                       means, then it has something to do with sex, and finally it designates 
                                       something to do with a camel. Part of the truth of the witticism is the 
                                       way it indicates how Arabic is grounded in everyday human 
                                       experience. The rational mind tends to push the meaning of a word 
                                       away from experience to “what it means,” but the imaginal mind finds 
                                       the self-disclosure of the Real in the sex and the camel...it is in the 
                                       world’s concrete realities that God is found, not in its abstractions.

That was taken from Tom Cheetham’s book on Corbin, called “The World Turned Inside Out”, 2003. There’s also, from Dr. Ali Duran, the following concerning Levels of Meaning in Holy Scripture, The Holy Qur’an: “Traditionally in the esoteric traditions, understanding of Quran is regarded from the perspective of the student, and is usually divided into four levels of understanding”: Shariat, Tariqat, Maarifat, and Haqiqat, where Shariat is the exoteric level and the literal meaning of the verses of the Quran, the visible; Tariqat is the beginning of the hidden; Maarifat is the station of gnosis, bringing into understanding the subtleties of the Quran; and Haqiqat, the fruit of maarifat, where the gnostic, the one who knows, becomes annihilated in al-Haqq, the Divine reality, and subsists only through the will of Allah.

Brief interlude: Hey, what’s the mystic meaning of cacophony, what’s the invisible meaning of eight, why did only Rabbi Aqiva come out alive?

Next, if we go to the Indian Continent and the Vedic tradition, Rev. Thomas Hickey says there are “four levels of intelligibility” (Sanskrit: nama) with corresponding levels of world or form (Skt. loka/rupa):

                                        1. Vaikri- written or spoken level of gross intelligibility, corresponding 
                                        to the gross world.
                                        2. Madhyama- middle level or level of subtle intelligibility, 
                                        corresponding to subtle world.
                                        3. Pashyanti- celestial level or level of causal intelligibility, 
                                        corresponding to causal world.
                                        4. Para- transcendental level or level of pure intelligibility in which 
                                        there is identity of name and form (Skt. nama-rupa), corresponding to 
                                        Pure Knowledge which is Ultimate Reality (Skt.Veda/Brahman).

On the Mahayana and Vajrayana (Buddhist) side of things we might go to that work called “Tara’s enlightened activity” by Khenchen Palden Sherab and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal (2007), where under the heading ‘The Four Systems of Meaning’ they say:
                                      
                                      The four modes are the tshül zhi. Zhi is “four,” and tshül is 
                                      “systems,” “modes,” or “aspects.” The first mode is the word meaning: tshig gi
                                      tshül; second is the general meaning: chi’i tshül; third is the hidden 
                                      meaning: be dön gyi tshül; and fourth is the ultimate meaning: thar 
                                      thug gi tshül. From each of these modes of meaning emerges a 
                                      particular approach to meditation and practice. Thus, we will apply 
                                      each of these four to each of the Twenty-one Praises to Tara. In this 
                                      way we will reveal and display the full depth of meaning of what these 
                                      great masters taught.

Whaddya mean eight players, four by two? Those meanings of the past coming down to us, preciously: repeatedly, it seems, structured in fours, four levels, four approaches, four... And those of this evening, as we join together, Beth, Angelina, Molly, T, each with our own ways of seeing things, yet coming together as one, one voice so to speak, the ninth. The ninth making something, a phoney cake, for eight players, levels, lands, portlands, eight directions, eight dustbins...

Then there are, if we hang around the Indo-Tibetan ’hoods-woods, the eightfold path of Patanjali’s Yoga, 1) Yama, 2) Niyama, 3) Asana, 4) Pranayama, 5) Pratyahara, 6) Dharana, 7) Dhyana, 8) Samadhi, understood sometimes as discipline, ethics, posture, breathwork, pulling back of the senses, attention holding, meditative absorption, and ecstatic awareness, even as these translated terms (as with so many others) should be given more attention, or consideration, or imaginalization or...
And the eightfold Buddhist path of the Way to the ending of suffering, right vision, right resolve, right speech ...until we come to right samadhi.

And then, and maybe this should be the last, since now the clock is ticking and I said to Molly maybe we should send this to you prior to our skyping at, yes, eight bells, and you could chew on this, and throw up, prior to an ecstatic landing in Portland, the eight kinds or classes of Consciousness in a Vajrayana setting: 1) ground-of-all consciousness, 2) deluded consciousness, 3) mental consciousness, 4) visual consciousness, 5) auditory consciousness, 6) olfactory consciousness, 7) gustatory consciousness, 8) tactile consciousness.
To which Ati yoga or Dzogchen school people often add a ninth, maybe a little like Abhinavagupta does with his pure peaceful thread, or like we do, with our ninth, even if we cannot get it very clean. Saw a nice word the other day, think it was in a book by Agamben, quoting someone called Richards: inter-animation.

But our old friend inter-weaving still holds up pretty good, may this reach you in good spirits (you’ll have needed them, by now), sending you all my Love, and from Molly, and from the old weaver Tantipa, who a long, long time ago is said to have sung these lines:

                                        The weavers of this world
                                        Produce varied textiles on their looms,
                                        But thanks to the teachings of my master,
                                        I’m now a weaver of all that there is.
                                        With the thread of esoteric instructions
                                        And the shuttle of discernment,
                                        I weave the fabric of fivefold gnostic nothing
                                        On the loom of the undivided expanses of awareness ...


(Written by Torben Ulrich, April 2013) 

This past December and January Angelina Baldoz and I (Beth Graczyk) traveled down to work with Torben Ulrich in San Francisco for an enriching four days of developing our work together and continuing the research for Cacophony for 8 Players.  

Amongst the many voices of inspiration that Torben brought forth to discuss was french philosopher Henry Corbin (1903-1978) and his work MUNDUS IMAGINALIS (1964).  You can access the full writing at a website devoted to Henry Corbin: here. 

One aspect of many that I find inspiring about this work is the proposal of an intermediate space between the intellect and the sensual world, a space in-between the tangible and intangible.  In an image saturating time, the proposal of the imaginal inspires me to play with the disintegration of a visual image into a feeling, sensation, sonic and kinetic embodiment.  It also relates to the sensation of reading texts out loud, somehow lifting the textual image off the paper and digesting through the vocal cords, the body, allowing the words to vivify, potentially creating a momentary space where the the words loosen from static meaning and co-mingle with the  sensual confines of a specific body in a particular place. 

 "For it is not necessary to strut about like a conqueror and want to give a name to things, to everything; it is they who will tell you who they are, if you listen, yielding like a lover; for suddenly for you, in the untroubled peace of this forest of the North, the Earth has come to Thou, visible as an Angel that would perhaps be a woman, and in this apparition, this greatly green and thronging solitude, yes, the Angel too is robed in green, the green of dusk, of silence and of truth. Then there is within you all the sweetness present in surrender to an embrace that triumphs over you." - Henry Corbin, excerpt of Theology by the Lakeside, 1932

At Vashon Island, one month later, Angelina and I enjoyed a residency with Peggy and Allie at a gorgeous location immersed in nature - both the woods and the water.

We continued with the idea of the imaginal with solo walks in nature, unleashing the possibility of observing by loosening the definitive borders of observer and observed.  Opening up our bodies to sensual empathy for other bodies, be it a knob in a tree, a dirt corridor, a collection of pebbles, a chaotic intersection of branches, or the rippling of water over a rock.  At the end of these observations we took some time to reflect on how these bodies "affect other bodies, or is affected by other bodies" (Deleuze on Spinoza (1970).  We then generated simple written phrases to define these bodies in terms of affects or affections which we used as scores in the studio.  

Here are some of the scores.  To be used individually or paired.  

To remain.

To drench.

Transparent yet cloaked. 

Navigation, corrosion.

Gentle, persistant.

To tie together.

Illuminate shadows.

Follow the path repeatedly, but each time anew.

Shutter the air.

Enter as you leave.  

Contours of stones, carving away at sediment.  

Empty on the surface.  

To change the speed of air.  

Inevitably going, taking with and re-depositing.  

To invite.  

What is solid?  

The outside reflecting what is inside.  The bone as branch.  

To curl & curl & curl & curl.  

To change temperature.  

Hardening skin, heavy, set solid.  
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There are many more aspects of the residencies to share, but it is good to share in small nuggets.  
As always, we are so grateful for the time to research and spend generative time together exploring these ideas. 
  
A special thank you to Molly Martin, Joan Hanna and Karen Nelson for participation and generosity.     

In other news, we recently became an associated program of Shunpike, a 501(c)(3), and were named the 2013 Visiting Artists for Performance Works Northwest in Portland, OR.  

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Tuesday, November 20th, 2012 we enjoyed an intimate evening at Vanessa DeWolf's Studio Current, a cherished creative/performative space on Capitol Hill in Seattle.   Angelina Baldoz, Allie Hankins and I (Beth Graczyk) shared material from our Portland residency, and Kt Shores, Steven Gomez, Corrie Befort, and Elby Brosch shared a quartet that developed out of the Confluence & Rebellion classes.  

The evening began with a reading as a large group - each of us holding a different text but reading out-loud as if it were one text, allowing overlap, interruption, and silence.  We ended the evening with a lively discussion.  Here we share with you audio excerpts of  the group reading, a small sampling of the texts, and audience responses to the dance/sound in drawings and words.  

The readers included: Kt Shores, Elby Brosch, Vanessa DeWolf, Steven Gomez, Corrie Befort, Bill Befort, Nancy Befort, Margaret Wilhyde, Evan Foster, Paige Barnes, Mark Haim, Koushik Ghosh, Adam Sekuler, Shannon Stewart, Joyce Liao, Angelina Baldoz, Beth Graczyk, Allie Hankins and John Stolk.    

Selected excerpts of read texts:

"Merleau-Ponty's writings enact a steadily renewed resuscitation of wonder at the exuberant mystery of the real.  He worked tirelessly to draw philosophy to a sense of astonishment at the wild-flowering weirdness of the world in which we find ourselves before abstract reflection weaves its spell on our senses.  Further, he sought to awaken reflective reason to its own genesis in the world of untamed perception, and to ensure that philosophy and the sciences would begin to frequent that dimension of direct, non discursive experience - testing their conclusions against the irrefutable eloquence that things display when we meet them in the flesh, taking guidance from the specific ways such elemental encounters always resist, in some manner, the formulas we use to explain them."   - David Abram, Earth in Eclipse

"Movement never lies.  It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.  This might be called the law of the dancer's life-- the law which governs its outer aspects.  Then there is the cultivation of the being.  It is through this that the legends of the soul's journey are retold with all their gaiety and their tragedy and the bitterness and sweetness of living."  - Martha Graham, An Athlete of God

"it is said thus: atman's own nature is being [temporarily] colored by "laughter," "erotic love," etc. that can tint it into their own hues.  But, [all the same,] he remains this extremely white [colorless] thread which shines (nirbhasamana) through the conglomeration of loosely strung [semi-transparent colored] jewels." - Abhinavagupta, Abhinavagupta's Aesthetics (Natalia Isayeva)

"I think little and therefore understand everything I feel.  I am feeling in the flesh and not intellect in the flesh.  I am the flesh.  I am the flesh.  I am the flesh and not intellect in the flesh.  I am the flesh.  I am feeling.  I am God in the flesh and in feeling.  I am man and not God.  I am simple."  - Vaslav Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky 

Alexis Kane drawings, audience member:

Pamm Hanson drawings, audience member:

Thank you to those who came out for this event!  We are as always, so grateful for your support and enthusiasm for this project and its development!

We had a wonderful mini-residency at Linda Austin's Performance Works NW space in Portland, Oregon, October 25-28th, 2012. 

C48 dancer Allie Hankins and visual artist Micki Skudlarczyk joined Angelina Baldoz and I (Beth Graczyk) for a long weekend of playing and generating improvisational scores that were both rigorous and open.  Over-arching ideas brought forth included the subconscious influence of reading texts as a group, engaging in ritual actions that were responsive yet autonomous, cycles of generation and disintegration, and following the formation of a live unison duet.  We also continually returned to Angelina Baldoz performing a solo either on trumpet or on bass, and emanating material as a response to the experience of watching, hearing and feeling the form and content of her solo.  Micki Skudlarczyk brought in rabbit skins, yarn, wigs, and marigolds for raw materials.  The alchemy of our particular dynamics as a group in the specific space of Performance Works sensually influenced the tone, rhythm and energy of our actions.  

We engaged in a ritual of reading texts out-loud from the 8 Voices, as well as additional materials from Kandinsky, Deleuze on Spinoza, and Elaine Scarry.  The score we often employed utilized each of us reading different texts with the sensation of reading a singular text, generating new combinations of phrases, words, and ideas produced out of the action of meshing seemingly disparate texts. 

We skyped with Torben and Molly on Friday with the crew, and met up with C48 visual artist Steven Berardelli for dinner.  Peggy, Mark, and Amiya, the rest of our C48 team, were missed dearly!

We thank Linda Austin, Jeff Forbes, Performance Works NW, and Portland for giving us time, space, and energy to explore our ideas in a generative and supportive environment.  Linda and I are scheming for our second residency in early 2013, which will potentially include an informal public showing.  

November 20th, 7pm at Studio Current in Seattle, we will perform a score generated during this residency.  If you would like to attend, please make a reservation through our contact page or through Studio Current.  

Thank you for reading this and letting us share our fantastic residency at Performance Works NW with you! 

*Here are a collection of small video excerpts from the weekend.  This is raw footage edited swiftly to share bits and pieces.