I want Tim Etchell's job

...I want Tim Etchell's job.
www.timetchells.com
www.forcedentertainment.com

I am overwhelmed with the minuteness of Being in America (as an alien, no doubt worse, from a tiny island with no diaspora-based cultural-capital, no doubt worser) that I come home greedily to watch Grey's Anatomy on the internet after my days at work-plus-rehearsal, failing which (when I discover that 1am Friday does not yet mean "Fridays online") I watch the full 2-hour launch special of BRUNO AND CARRIE ANNE'S DANCE WAR.  I thought I was allowed this much escapism since I am not having any sex, but then I see the lifework of someone like Etchell's and I think: my God, there is so much I have not done in order to become a cultural icon.  

I can do this!  I think, I watch, I write, I save every damn program note, I draw, I defile (Ok confession: I spent a season drawing on stickers and only once did I actually paste one on the subway), I make dances, I make texts, I make videos, I like to improvise, I want to work on improving my improvisation, I want to do this with a core group of similarly-motivated people but I can't find any as ...I dunno, hungry? as me, it's true that I sometimes want to look pretty which is evidenced to myself every time I check myself out in window reflections, it's true that I presumptuously judge which is evidenced by how I condemn myself to social and creative isolation by drowning my enthusiasm every time I check myself out in reflections because I think I am too vain for depth.  I want to write as freely as I do on this personal blog when I am writing about performance and cultural phenomena but without the constant triple-time self-referencing, but I don't know, this is just what happens with my words.

I got the feeling today that Steffe only loves me as a reflection of himself, not as my own person and a potential part of his life. I sensed that he doesn't know what part of me is real and what part is a fantasy he is afraid he made up.  I thought perhaps I have the same fears -- but I am used to thinking things through more, and I understand that this feeling of "dissociation" affecting me now (feeling a little unrecognized) is part of the cost to love him.  I know that this is who he is, and similar to how I struggle with the loggerheads of passivity and action, he struggles with the conflict between dreaming and self-concern. We both get lost in other people. I get lost in them to the point where I am either doing nothing with them or doing everything without; he gets lost in them in a kind of universal love that makes the details disappear--a place where he can and often does get lost.  I know you can't really choose who you love (so it is not like I no longer love him because I had these feelings- I am trying to get to know him and myself better), but since I am treating this like a relationship I sure would like him to do the same.  Steffe, I need you to say you want us to happen. But I know that is too much to ask. 

Transnational Zeitgeist

Happiness Committee formed in Perkins Cole
At the Chicago office of Perkins Coie, partners recently unveiled a “happiness committee,” offering candy apples and milkshakes to brighten the long and wearying days of its lawyers. [Law is] an industry in which about 20 percent of lawyers over all will suffer depression at some point in their careers."
Crown Prince of Qatar invites Singapore Civil Defence Force to help build Qatar's civil defence academy
This is actually old news, but I am damn proud.
Taser International releases new product line
A handy new holster from Taser International Inc. holds not only your stun gun but a music player too. 
The latest Taser -- in a leopard print and costing $379.99 -- ''provides a personal protection option for women who want fashion with a bite,'' said Chief Executive Rick Smith.
Buyers for the Sayang Singapore showcase get 1 free ticket for every 5 purchsed if they say "I love Singapore" when ordering tickets
A very small part of me deep inside aches because I could be one of these people

Tim Etchells:
"I think it comes back again to absence and presence. We feel presence more acutely when the possibility of absence is raised. That's why one's interested in deletion, in absence. Because to think of it points back to the absolute uniqueness of presence."

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
“Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what's worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don't know how to see.
You must set about it more slowly, more stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.... Don't say, don't write 'etc'. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if it seems grotesque or pointless, or stupid. You still haven't looked at anything, you're merely picked out what you long ago picked out. Force yourself to see more flatly…”

Title of titles

In conversation with Morgan today, we develop some interesting leads in terms of titles to make pieces to, oblivious to bored sales associates in FOXY LADY clothing store on 14th street.

"Never before seen!"
Perhaps, in the style of New York:
"Never before seen...even by the choreographer!"
"Never before seen...never before rehearsed!"

Killing time and killing feet circling blocks (that is an oxymoron - rather said, around the block and between and back again) we discover Chinese fashion apparel in the store next to HERS where almost every item is individually housed in plastic and most every item, in comfortable flashback to my Hong Kong/Singapore past, is usually passable except for one, or two, fundamental flaws.  This penchant for the designed faux-pas can also be coined:

"So close, yet so far"
Or
"So bad it's good"
Or
"No, we really mean it, this stuff is impossible, but you can get away with it if you are tall and skinny or Yves Saint Laurent"

A woman wearing a purple leather skirt and shag denim sweater and 3-foot-long rabbit ears walks into a yoga class full of optimistic, yelling bunnies. The men in the class are naked and perform downward dog with their dongs at attention. The class ends with a communal Bananarama chant and the simultaneous consumption of a 30-foot Italian hero.

I would like to consume an Italian hero.
If you do not wish to get my drift, you may stand upwind.  Hakuna matata pranayama.

Notes to Self

Trying to look at myself objectively for the purpose of the new year and in the hunt for red conviction.  I tell Emilie with breathless flourish that perhaps I should adapt to accepting myself for who I am, in the sense of someone who is motivated by continual interest rather than long-term goals.  Yet later on it is easy to doubt myself because everyone respects a purpose-driven life (hence the hardcover, best-selling book). And lack of purpose doesn't get you a job.
So I am closer to letting this life go than I have been.  I am reading up on dance therapy and realize that it's goals could be my mission statement if it weren't for just how uncool that would be.  "Dance that helps people" -- that's all.  It helps me. It could help you.  It could also help you understand other people that you would have no access to, verbally, or otherwise. 
Among the many things I am spending my time looking up on the internet, vocationally these currently include:
--yoga certification
--maintaining my pilates certification
--journalism: print (periodical, magazine, publishing, editorial):: arts and cultural criticism/writing/discourse (riding the wave of my studies and my interests) / medicine, health, the body (riding the wave of my current job that I am at this moment running late for and my growing professional interests)
--London
--Amsterdam
--California
--greencard
--fuck greencard, London
--London International School of Performing Arts (voice, mask, drama, movement, space studies)
--Singapore
All things vocational must have a context, many things passionate have no home.
I have been watching dance and theatre performances since I've had a mind of my own.
I am tired of being sad, being sad is tiring.

Assessments for 2008

Someone likened me today to someone I would rather not be likened to. She is nice but an emotional heavyweight and a messy thinker.  Uh oh. Is this me?

I don't want to make sense, but I think I don't have to not make sense so publically.  It's well-fitting to my age hypothesis for my life (18 at 14, 25 at 18, 32 at 23, 4 at 25) that technology has finally caught up to my needs (I willed them into being): voice over internet protocol, web blogging, photo blogging, idea blobbing.  Everyone and their third grandmother now can be a quiet entrepreneur.  Everyone can be a hobby artist.  Artaud, Rimbaud, Sartre, Hughes -- take an IP address and shove it.

It has taken me 7 years of living away from the home I always lived away from to send a video wave for the holidays. I can spend endless amounts of quiet time scribbling happily into blank journals and typing into private desktop widgets. When I am on an airplane and I imagine it crashing, I think first how to save or resuscitate, if necessary (mouth to plug?), my Powerbook, because if it died I wonder if I would be able to move on.

No no, Nostalgia.
No nostalgia.
Mo' nostalgia.
Nostaglia sounds Italian.
Nostaligula sounds Shakespearean.
My horoscope advises me to get ready to be as big as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers this year.
I am a little upset with myself that I found an author who works in line drawings and scribble-thoughts at the San Francisco MOMA Museum shop and forgot to write his name down.

I am not alone.
I am so alone.
I am only not alone when I am alone.
I am running out of space.
I forgot already what it was I actually wanted to write in this entry that was substantive and ambitious. 

Oh shit here we go: My Top Ten List of Performances in 2007

Not in any particular order:

TINO SEHGAL: This Situation
Where I saw it: Sammlung Beggruen, Berlin
Sum: A curious happening involving synchronized walking and posing bodies, quotes from the best and worst of the 20th century, and the occasional unison phrase: "Welcome...to this situation".

SASA ASENTIC: My Private Biopolitics
Where I saw it: Podewil, Berlin
Sum: A brave, hyperintelligent, and endearing (if not seductive) young man delivers a lecture-demonstration problematizing the definitions of contemporary dance. Set includes laptop, academic research, vases, stick-on body fur, a shrine, audience participation, a couple dance sequences, and a significant amount of the performer's conviction and sweat.

SARAH MICHAELSON: Dogs
Where I saw it: Haus 1, Berlin
Sum: The most traditionally avant-garde thing I have seen since the documentary Ballet Russes. More balls-in-hand (and silken-night-gown-on-dagger) than tongue-in-cheek, this London/New York doyenne of dance-theatre delivers an evening's hallucination of razor sharp, repetitive movement sequences, subtle yet bizarre light projections, and fills the auditorium with pink-lit stage smoke to the point where theatre and audience sublimate.

CHRIS HARING & LIQUID LOFT: Art of Seduction Posing Project B
Where I saw it: Semper Depot, Vienna
Sum: Operatic lip-syncing, pristine white breasts, shag carpets and whirring fans, all in the most beautiful old stable (?) space imaginable, this fabulous site-specific experience sashayed away with the Venice Golden Lion Award earlier in the season. Superbly talented cast. Entertaining and engaging scores so well executed you can't complain it's too sexy to be art.

JILL SIGMAN/THINKDANCE: Rupture
Where I saw it: Danspace Project, New York
Sum: No personal bias (I was close to being in this piece), Rupture is an almost transcendent totalizing and ritualized space full of eggshells, video screens, ladders, and smart, smart thoughts. Sigman's red-frocked solos coexist in parallel but colliding worlds with the group movement scenarios of her extreme-bodied cast. The text is as lulling as the movement is jarring, although once the conceit unfolds and audience is invited to participate in the space my sense of philosophical provocation is over and I want to be alone so I can rewind to the beginning again.

ALAIN PLATEL with BENJAMIN VERDONCK+FUMIYO IKEDA: Nine Finger
Where I saw it: Vienna
Sum: So unique is the experience to say "I've never seen anything like it before" that it is possible for an enjoyment of new alienation to twitter alongside one's rage at the injustice of the scenarios presented. Based upon the semi-fictionalized narratives of child soldiers in Uganda, outstanding performers Verdonck and Ikeda embody characters that I would name A Child Dehumanizing, and A Woman: Lost Mother of the Imagination, respectively. One cannot forget the opening image of a childish Verdonck yelling, "FUTUUUURRRE!" before leaping headfirst into a cardboard box, or his later discombobulations and violations of himself and of the Ikeda girl figure in his midst. The feeling if raw, the feeling is forgiving, the feeling is lamenting, the image is of a tragic Caliban who is so deformed at just six years old. I walk outside and sign a petition.

LUCIANA ACHUGAR: Franny and Zooey in the Nothing Festival
Where I saw it: Dance Theater Workshop, New York
Sum: A pure disco show where only lights move (all the guns in DTW's array) begins this celebratory collage of formalized female bodies, cats on a screen, a vagina that crawls to recede into the horizon, and a glorious mass of nakedness dancing to a YouTube clip of Dora performing Chicken Noodle Soup. If Achugar's previous work philosophy has been seen as "dance is labor" then hand me the overalls because labor, it seems, is liberation.

SUSAN RETHORST in the Nothing Festival
Where I saw it: Dance Theatre Workshop, New York
Sum: What at first glance may seem like a Dogma 96 domestic drama (multiple generations of women peppered amidst Rethorst's home furniture with stern and contemplative gazes) becomes an idiosyncratic display of gesture and action/reaction dance-ping-pong between bodies. One performer traces the outline of another, posing, with her hand, while another assaults a friend with a pillow and then herself replaces the couch. The work is a lacing of unique character threads; a polysymphonic harmony of unique body voices; each dancer is dressed with such detailed dignity and determination that Rethorst's piece is both comic and empowering.

JOSH FOX & INTERNATIONAL WOW: You Belong To Me & Death of Nations Installment 5
Where I saw it: Performance Space 122, New York

JANEZ JANSA nee EMIL HRVATIL interviewing MEG STUART
Where I saw it: Podewil, Berlin

Ok, ok, #11:

JEN ROSENBLIT/BOTTOMHEAVY PRODUCTIONS with ADDYS GONZALEZ: That Sick Sound
Where I saw it: Judson Memorial Church, New York
Sum: Rosenblit is a fierce heart on the stage, and she and her dance partner Gonzalez develop a fierce vocabulary of gestures that speak of frustration, insistence, surrender, and the journey. Their relationship in the duet is not at first romantic or filial but somehow connected in resistance to the foreboding space around them. What comes as a natural result of having the dance and the fantastic live music (performed by Jules Gimbrone and band) be of equal emotional weight and resonance is that, to the dance-focused viewer, the power of the physical seems to concede to sonorous, but dramaturgically this balance of elements leaves an airiness that gives room for the viewer to feel too ... and for Rosenblit to emerge (we hope) with more dancing to come. A well-deserved standing ovation from the Judson crowd.

::EXTRAS::

I liked, but lots of people liked better:

IVANA MUELLER: While we were holding it together
Where I saw it: Vienna

Raved about, and I missed it:

JEREMY WADE
Where it was that I missed it: Joyce Soho, New York

It was good, very very good:

LUIS LARA MALVACIAS: There is no such thing
Where I saw it: Dance Theater Workshop, New York

JONATHAN BURROWS & MATTEO FARGION: Speaking Dance
Where I saw it: Vienna

CLARE BYRNE DANCE & HOT YOUNG PRIEST: Rounds / The First Last Dance, or, The Last First Dance, or, An Ordination
Where I saw it: Dance New Amsterdam, New York

CRISTINA MOURA: like an idiot
Where I saw it: Danspace Project, New York

THE FORSYTHE COMPANY: Three Atmospheric Studies
Where I saw it: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY: Three
Where I saw it: Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York

Sorry, I hated it, and I'm pretty good about appreciating most things for something:

CHRISTIAN RIZZO/L'ASSOCIATION FRAGILE: comme crane, comme culte
Where I saw it: Vienna

SIDI LARBI CHERKAOUI & TONEELHUIS: Myth
Where I saw it: Opera House, Vienna

MORGAN THORSON: Faker
Where I saw it: Performance Space 122