Armageddon is not a foreign policy

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=84335

working

IS this working? Am I finallly part of the Subjects To Change Dance Company blog site? The world won't wait for me. I want t to be able to control time but I can't, and it is fast and ferociously living it's life, with no regard to what I want.

the signs of the end

I'll reproduce (and attribute where I'm able) the responses to the question at last rehearsal, "what are the present signs of the end"

(anon):
-people disconnected from the earth
-people disconnected from eachother
-cancer
-lack of resources
-technology
-corruption
-gene therapy
-the ease of destruction
-traffic

Sarah's left hand:
the amount of refuse and garbage dumps
the amount of wastefulness
smog in major cities
Animals disappearing/extinct/threatened
ice caps melting
weird seasons seasons for cities: oranges freezing this year, hot winter in New York, etc
hybrid cars b/c companies are forced to come up w/ alternative vehicles
Al Gore winning an Oscar shows more awareness for climate change

(anon_
*rise/increase in disease (cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart, emotional, mental, etc.)
*environmental deterioration/changes in nature global warming, extinction
*increased separation btw poor and wealthy/ unbalanced distribution of $-materials-capital
*increased stress
*earthquakes in SF! haha not really but sort of
(editor: actually, I think earthquake phenom is worth talking/working about- how often do you hear people predict "the Big One" where it sounds just like they're predicting an asteroid collision or WWIII)

Gretchen:
- disease - cancer - poisoning our bodies with the things around us, pollution, clean air issues
- depletion of natural resources - populations of animals/plants going down -the interconnectedness of the food chain being disturbed
lack of clean water, lack of sustainable ways to grow/get food

Dennis:
Bush Iran/Korea
melting ice caps; hole ozone layer
everywhere if summer; holy ozone, unwholly ozone


The overlap is very interesting, in terms of reflecting where we're at as a group participating in some common culture. For the May/MAP performance, I want to propose working in a sequence which sort of catalogues present realities, also possibly connecting them to the ways in which they become "evidence" for more apocalyptic visions both in science and religion. For instance, wars in the Holy Land might mean moving the doomsday clock up, because Iran is possibly working towards nuclear arms, while it also mean moving the Rapture clock up, because that's supposed to be part of the prophecy in Revelations (though I can't figure out how peope get to that reading). I feel like I want this to be heavy on imagery, possibly even newsreel/Hollywood stuff, so I want to hold it off the plate for a bit.

On the elite/populace concept: To recap, I've been thinking a lot about how the notions of the end of the world always seem to contain or entail some elite. In the Jehova's Witness version, they even pegged the number that could be "saved" on judgement day at 144,000 (why that number I haven't found out yet). In the case of the new science on global warming- very few can understand and grasp, and I want to say maybe no one can grasp all of it, as it comes from so many specialties (the IPCC report has something like 40 credited authors, 200+ panels members, and a small army of grad students behind it). But for us and for our audience- we're what the Catholic church calls the "laity", the common person who can't even read (literally can't read back in the day, now "can't read" in the sense of can't nevigate all this information intelligibly). More than anything else, I think this common situation with our audience may be the way we build sympathy and involvement and anything useful out of the piece.

Along those lines, I want to open up some dialogue on how we present information. Sarah had very useful things to say about the walking exercise last rehearsal. Hearing snippets of the IPCC read out loud may be the most difficult way to digest that information. That difficulty might be artistically interesting. If, however, we find we want some of the "content" to get across, to ourselves and the audience, we may have to think about creating other kinds of space. My question to the group is:

What kind of information do you want in your own thining about this? What modes of communication could you effectively receive them in?

I don't want to say that our answer to this question will solely determine how we treat the science in our piece, but I do want to give it some consideration.

flight patterns

just some ideas about what would be interesting to wash over the bird scene....

homework

thanks for your time this weekend....
here is your homework:
please find one relevant statistic and envision a way to stage that stat with bodies. This can be through a movement, or simply by segregating the bodies into interesting shapes on stage.
please be ready to show at our next rehearsal,
Saturday 3-5 @ ODC theater.

FINE!!!!! I'll Post a message about an image (GOD!)

Juuuust kidding...On to more dismal and ominous things, I'm thinking about some kind of desolate, barren, desert-like wasteland post-war and destruction that wasn't necessarily naturally created. An aftermath of a nuclear war...I'm thinking in red for some reason, but it doesn't have to be red...maybe hot and arid (arrid? I don't know how to spell but I have faith that you'll understand me)...For some reason I'm thinking there might be an image like this in one of the Terminator movies, probably 2 or 3 because I believe it's what the future, where the T-Man comes from, looks like but I could totally be imagining that. I don't want a mushroom cloud or anything explixcit like that, I want something that shows what's left after it all goes down, dismal and horrible but something's left so maybe eventually something else will come.