Posting for Dennis (until he's up and running on blog)

Heyall,


Sorry I’ve not been so present on blog, w/ideas, and lately at rehearsals. I’m sure I’m not any busier than yall, just much more disorganized. I haven’t felt I’ve had too much to say or write on “the end” as I would like and I believe my drawn out process of moving as well as other personal endings/commencements are filling any space I might have to generate ideas and text.

That written, I do have a few things brewing:
--images/film of mushroom clouds and time lapse photography of mushrooms juxtaposed or overlaid on each other.

--from Paul Stamets “How Mushrooms Can Save the World” Stamets documents(photos included) of a oil-soaked lot and how growing oyster mushrooms on the site transformed the place from toxic to usable once again. And on top of that, when the mushrooms were done with the toxin, they in turn we r e nder e d ible. Just about brough t ears to my eyes when I first heard him speak on the radio about this potentiality.

--a question and this can be rephrased but something to the effect of “Do you have time?
For the end of the world?

--use epigraphs/quotes from expert/scientific etc. sources about where we’re headed (or even example of hope?) as sound or visual bites read by the audience/painted on the wall/projected on screen/dancers as sound bite is sampled, etc. etc. These things feel easier on the audience (and my aesthetic) than overt visual images of the end. Prompts/reminders of the environmental/diplomatic(or un…as the case may be right now)/foreign policy posturing quotes should pretty effectively scare any audience. I’ll bet there are some in today’s news. Maybe overlay thes e pigraphs on the video/images of thend that might counter the overtness of the visuals. Oh and to lessen the overtness even more or reveal the palimpsests in our own minds/consciousness the images and quotes could/should probably not be coordinated. The quotes could have their own order and length of time to be read as this usually takes longer to absorb and the images are much easier to pick up visually so could be flashed rather quickly almost subliminally.

--overt breat h olding strategically placed as an example as th e nd of an exhalation or inhalation to begin anothe r ound if we allow for the outward/inward of the breath to be meta phor the universal expansion-contraction.

--possible visual cliché alert: but clocks on walls as in newsroom but instead of cities we label each clock with differen t imes for th e nd: nuclear, global warming, peak oil, etc.

--I don’t have all the resources in front of me, namely a friend of mine who participates in these things called “peak oil” meetings that checkout when oil will run out, what are the results, what can be done/attempted to curb our use of the gooey stuff.

--this friend projects before thend of the century when we runout of oil we will not have the sustainable farming largenough in urban areas to feed the masses so the masses will revolt bringing the beginning of thend. I think he’s written an article on this so I will get to yall when I get it.



“are you okay?
w/the end of the world?

--couple more things my friend told me about: that an example of our karmaround thenvironment is that in the post 911 no flyzone the lack of planes and emissions (measured by balloons) actually allowed the earth’s temperature to rise—that is, we need to the pollution to act as a screen/shade to replace the ozone we’ve depleted;
that in cutting down rainforest we’ re leasing deadly virus’ we have no way to deal with; finally, that the act of creation has it’s downside as exemplified by the lava cooling in the ocean and the microscopic particles of glass and sulfuric acid that if ingested are deadly.

--if we deal with the threat of nuclear war (the current TIME magazine cover w/Iranian leader and Bush warning of dangerous miscommunication), then it makes sense to me that we go back to where this threat was realized, where atomic bombs were dropped (u.s. on japan of course) and use borrow pay homage to the culture that came out of “th e nd of the world” for a people. What I’m getting to is that it seems to make sense to me that we use (even a lil bit) the art, dance form, butoh, that (sorry if yalready know thistuff):

…emerged in the late 1950’s in post-atomic bomb japan. It was created by two dancers, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, who sought to create a new uniquely Japanese form of expression that completely rebelled against the Establishment, and both Eastern tradition and Western styles.

I suggest this as a writer who likes to embody the structure of that which I’m writing about at times as well as writing about something topically or thematically. The writing that Dillon and I (correct me if I’m wrong Dillon and I’ll speak/write for myself) through Mills College and otherwise: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E (anguish) poetry came out in the early late 60’s and early 70’s [And I’m not writing tha t he piece should become butoh, because that is not what you do (at least what I’ve seen). Again, “homage” is the word that feels best to me. Homage to culture(s){Japanese, art, dance) that comes from just what we are trying to understand/comprehend through our writing/dancing/researching. If we are looking for a hypothetical, butoh is the organic thing that came from a real end. It feels right for any of us who’ve had exposure (of course, better some real training or due to time constraints at least one workshop w/a butoh dancer/teacher) to butoh to find a place in the piece (the nuclear/nucleic tic tick tick boom) for ankoku butoh “the dance of darkness” to enter and show us through the form and then in our own bodies what we’ve been looking for outside us. Again just a suggestion.

And I know that Cara you want the piece highly translatable for the audience. And maybe butoh can be too slow or too abstract for a lot of people but if we place the butoh section well in the piece--like just having one dancer/walker(I’d love to try) do a slo w alk/movement acro s stage or the all the dancers drop into again the nuclear/nucleic part that harkens back to an end and attempts to look to another one—then it can be contextualized by everything else yall/we are doing.

--the butoh influence could be used like Cara’s writhing rise from the mucky muck minimizing the use of limbs, what if the dancers as birds began to fall out from the group and began dropping and losing the ability to use limbs/body parts, then moving from this (a limp is an obvious example) until immobilized or ground into the ground. I see a body losing use of its/arm/wing and trying to rise w/out it’s use until it’ s ucked into the mucky muck; loss of leg; head; hip; etc.

again, sorry th is all so late.