wear an extra cap for me

It is hard for me to imagine that it has been two months since I finished at Laban.  And now Friday is our graduation ceremony and my email and facebook are littered with comments of excitement as my peers reconvene in London for the ceremony.  Pardon me while I get all sappy for a moment.

Jealous is one word to describe how I feel.  But it isn’t entirely accurate.  ….well….  I do feel jealous to not be there, enjoying time at Laban and the pub across the road, catching up, laughing, reminiscing and waxing nostalgic about a time not long gone.  I know there is a lot of fun to be had.  But I am happy, also.  Happy to be graduating and to have done so well at this past year that meant so much to me.  Pleased to be earning a higher degree, and proud of myself for doing it.  And now, pardon me while I pat myself on the back.

I am proud of all of us, actually.  All twenty-something students who will graduate officially in two days.  We all worked very hard, and contributed all that we could this past year and a half.  Many of us left our homes and most of us risked quite a bit, personally and professionally, to pursue these degrees for a variety of reasons.  And all of us, to whatever degree, dealt with difficult times and upheaval, and still managed to persevere through our courses.  And we learned.  About each other, about performance, about random things like British slang, Greek expletives and the bureaucracy of fireproofing laws.

So, congratulations to everyone.  To my MA Choregraphy’s: Shana, Nadine, Jen, Katerina, Kathleya, Stacy, Laura, Legia, and Qing.  To my MA Scenography’s: Chris, Gemma and Stephanie (and the part-timers I never really got to know).  To my MA Performance’s: Delle, Tom, Lisa, Ian, Bennie, Amy, Tara, David and Ryan.  To my MS Dance Science’s: Kristyn, Pippa, Debbie, and all the rest that I never had the time to connect with way down there in your corner.  And to my fellow MA Dance Theatre’s….my penguins: Antje, Stella, Elena and Jon.

Congratulations.

Some semblance of summation

When I booked my flight to move back to San Francisco from London, I was a bit wary of having two full weeks after handing in my thesis.  I am not one who is happy with a lot of idle time.  But, of course, the two weeks flew by, and now I am packed and getting ready for my flight tomorrow.

I suppose I should write some sort of archive (eek, this is a loaded word for me now!), some thoughts of my year as a whole.  How daunting; no matter how I approach it, it will be incomplete and somehow frustrating for that.  But, nevertheless, here I go…

London.  Dirty, big, wide, largely ugly and entirely vegan unfriendly (except for some token gems and others I’m sure I missed).  The energy of the city was hard for me to really enjoy.  Stella and I once talked about our London gripes and she mentioned her thoughts on why London was so dirty and unfriendly.  London is famed for being ‘the world’s city’, meaning that it is filled with people from all over the world.  Not many people born and raised here, and many thousands of students.  This makes for a population who feel no personal ownership over the city.  There isn’t a sense of love and desire to care for the city as your home.  It is a place where people come and go, spending a year here for school, a few years for a one-off job, a decade or so trying to make ends meet before running out to the country or back to whatever nation they originated.  I think there is validity to this theory, and if nothing else, certainly adds to many factors that made it hard for me to fall in love with the city.

But, there were many upsides to London living, some of which make the move back to San Francisco quite hard.  While I just said that I think the city is quite ugly, some of it is stunning.  The old buildings, cathedrals, and landmarks are a wonderful addition to city life.  There is such an abundance of history here.  But, mostly it will be the community that I miss.  I have found a niche here, that I will need to find in San Francisco.  I will miss the Tate, and other arts institutions here that offer an array of provocative, important art.  Because I have been here doing academic research, I have found and been introduced to an arts community that uses a sort of intellectual rigor that I had not found in San Francisco.  Now, of course this does not mean that it doesn’t exist, I just feel like I now have the daunting task of finding a new community and making myself at home there.

Academia.  oh how I’ll miss thee.  So much so, in fact, that I am now contemplating a PhD.  I have a few important decisions to make before that happens, though: what would I want to research?, would I want to return to Laban or London?, what do I want to do with my career?, am I comfortable being over-qualified for much work?, when would I want to do it?, etc.  In the meantime, though, I will keep my options open, my mind sharp and my reading current.  You never know….

Also, in the meantime, I will try and find work.  Full time, with health benefits….hopefully.  I will be entering the job market at a difficult time, and know that I face a potentially long period of unemployment.  Similarly to my trepidations surrounding scheduling two weeks between grad school and moving, this potential idle time makes me anxious.  So, in my return, I will try to fill my life with as much as I can so as to avoid boredom-induced depression!

And, let’s not forget my creative career.  My degree was in practice as research, so if you have been following this blog you know that I have been presenting creative work throughout the year.  This has been created both individually and in collaboration.  I will continue to try to make as much work as I can, and present it as often as I can.  I will be looking for venues/galleries to present it upon my return.  I will also be working on a new project, a development of a video experiment I started earlier in the year.  First step: buy a new camera since mine was stolen a few months ago.

I will also continue to collaborate with Elena, Antje and Stella in a group we have started named after our first piece we made together: Trio, or Trio Collective.  Since we are going to be spread all over the world (London, Madrid and San Francisco), we are working through a blog platform.  We will be sending each other tasks, performance or otherwise, to complete.  The tasks, our responses, and other relevant musings/writings/links/research will be posted for all to see.  It will be an open process, and is just getting started.  It is hard to say how it will eventually look and act, but we are all very excited to continue working with each other!

And then there are of course all my other friends.  The Greeks, the Brits, and the other Americans who are remaining expats for the time being.  I will miss you very very much.  Please take care of yourselves, and keep in touch.  My year would have been fundamentally different without you.  I owe this wonderful year to you!

San Francisco, again.  I am nervous to return, but also very happy to.  Jim and I will be moving in together, which will be a wonderful chance to settle in a bit after a year of being unsettled.  He was quite a trooper to fly back and forth across the world over and over again.  The long-distance was hard, but we made it, and have a fabulous house to move into on Tuesday!  I suppose I am most nervous about my prospects professionally, as I know my friends will welcome me warmly.  I know the dance scene in San Francisco so well, but don’t want to fall back into a comfort zone of part-time jobs.  I also see my work so much differently now, and am not sure what my engagement will be in dance.  I have not even danced in many months.  I have been working in still arts and would like to continue to do so, while keeping an open mind in terms of movement.  However, needless to how much choreography I do, I still consider my work as performance.  So, I do feel like I am entering a new world, vaguely familiar, but I am the one that is different.  It will take me time to find the right place, the right community, without losing my old friends and colleagues for whom I have so much respect.

So, I suppose, in conclusion (conclusion?), I leave with mixed feelings, leaving good friends, rejoining good friends, leaving a big adventure, starting another.  Thank you to all who have supported me and who continue to do so.  I would be lost without you (how sappy….but how true!).  Off I go!!

Also, I will keep up this blog for my creative work and other bits and bobs.  So, keep checking back!

6, 424

It has taken me a few days to recover since my final exhibition that was presented in Laban’s graduate school showcase on Tuesday.  But, I am finally ready to share some of the experience (now that I have caught up on my sleep and gotten over my cold).  The way the graduate showcase is structured is that over the course of three evenings, all M-level students show the practical component of their research for their final project.  The general public is invited and the performances work as a professional event.

Each evening ends up have a pretty wide variety of work being presented: exhibits such as mine with no live performer, installations with a live performance component, more conceptual performances with little to no dancing, video and film, and dance performances structured in a more traditional way.  So, as to be expected, the work varies widely.  Some of it is tremendous and some less impressive.  Everyone’s work is graded during the course of their evening, so stakes are high.

My piece, 6,424, is a development of the work I did in June in which I crocheted.  The little blip that was in my programme to describe the project was: This exhibition came out of ideas regarding limits and boundaries: between the document and the performance; the time of encounter versus the time of construction.  Through this research I have engaged with performance and its documentation, investigating what could happen when documentation is all that you encounter as an audience.

So far I have gotten quite positive feedback from the whole thing, and I am personally pleased with it.  I have enjoyed working in this different format, although not necessarily tied to it for the long term.  Here is my flickr set of images from the night.  Enjoy, and I wish you could have been there!

I’m not sure….

…but I think David Horvitz might just be a genius, although his website is a little hard to figure out.

Thesis-writing…the beginnings

Below is the first draft of the Introduction to my dissertation.  Interesting: hopefully.  Rough: definitely.  If you have any thoughts, I’d be happy for feedback.

Introduction to 6,424: Time and the role of the document within the discourse of performance. (title tentative)

About a year ago I began crocheting as a sort of meditation, a way to be still with my thoughts: to use the cliché, I crocheted to lose track of time.   Crocheting has since inadvertently become the center-point around which my creative research has expanded.  It has become a performed activity rich in symbolic possibilities.  Images of domesticity, femininity and leisure quickly come to mind.  Through knotting and unraveling I have examined notions of construction, destruction, the mundane, productivity, temporality and absence.  This project and its accompanying writing is thus a continuation (perhaps a culmination) of this ongoing research.

Ultimately presented as an exhibition, 6,424 was the result of several months of creative experimentation[1] into a series of research questions on the temporal understandings between performance and its subsequent documentation, and on the loss of memory that seems to underpin both.  My primary research has been into the seemingly divergent modes of temporality designated to ‘live’ performance and its documentation, beginning with the photograph and quickly expanding to other forms of documentation.

Heidi Gilpin, in her 1996 essay Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move?, composed a series of questions; it has become one of those passages that returns again and again to my thoughts and my writing:

The possibility that presence, once it is no longer traceable, is also no longer part of our memory of it, is deeply disturbing.  How is it possible to forget what was once present?  How can such forgetting be tolerated responsibly?  How do we enact this memory, even if it is through a performance of absence?  How can absence be performed? (p. 114)

I wonder, then, what presence has to do with memory?  And from Gilpin’s questions, the relationship between performance and presence, performance and memory, and thus performance and time (‘presence’ and ‘present’ maintain etymological connection) seem implicit.  However, what if these relationships are not assumed?  What can happen if these relationships are questioned?

Thus, I start this research with examining performance and its documents[2].  Two related, and indeed interdependent forms that are understood differently in their engagement with the material at hand (a body, an action, an audience).  One disappears and one remains.  Yes?  Or could it be that the documents of performance could participate as performance (or, for that matter, the possibilities of documents to participate as performance without there being an initial live performance)?  How is it that we can re-think performance and documentation in regards to their temporal readings; is it possible to release the document from its state of perpetual suspense, or to consider performance as possible in a duration of the document?  And, if so, what are the implications on the different forms?

For 6,424, I chose to create a durational event, a performance of crocheting.  I found a public location, and took it as my place of work.  Each day for a week I went there to crochet.  40 hours.  Throughout the week I documented my performance in as many ways as I could, both privately and publicly.  Each hour of my workday I asked a passerby to take one photograph of my activity.  40 photographs.  Following this durational performance I took the fabric through additional methods of documentation: measuring, tracing, imprinting.  Ultimately the exhibit shows these documents and nothing else.  The fabric, a large, meticulously constructed piece, was absent and veritably destroyed through the excess of documentary strategies.

The following writing serves as a theoretical ‘document’ to this documentary work (a bizarre meta-document of sorts); it provides insight into the writers, theorists, ideas and artists that influenced my process both initially, throughout and in reflection.  I begin in the present tense, investigating the prevailing understanding that performance is a form that disappears in front of our very eyes, slipping away as time goes by.  I consider writing by Peggy Phelan, André Lepecki, Philip Auslander and Rebecca Schneider.  Chapter 2 turns to 6,424 as I examine the first part of this creative research: a durational performance of crocheting.  Here I discuss the influence of artists such as photographer Manuel Vason and performance artist Tehching Hseih as well as the choices I made and problems that arouse when undertaking a durational event.

Chapter 3 moves toward the future but also backwards into the past.  Here I analyze Derrida’s Archive Fever and return to Schneider and Auslander to think about the performance document.  Through this chapter I hope to question the utilitarian role of the document as a preservative, as something that secures a performance by carrying it into the future while adhering it to the past.  I also discuss the use of specific media in the document, namely photography and film.  Chapter 4 returns to 6,424 when the product of the durational performance, the fabric, is then documented.  I discuss the process and outcomes of this documentation.  I also consider the effects this documentation has on the performance that preceded it.  I look to poet Kenneth Goldsmith and again to André Lepecki to confront repetition in the face of performance documentation.

I turn to Marc Augé and his book Oblivion in Chapter 5 and consider the loss of memory implied in the work of performance and documentation.  Writer Adrian Heathfield serves as a lens through which to consider this loss and its role in the structuring of our reading of the temporality of different art forms.  And finally, I conclude by reflecting on the presentation of 6,424. I consider the form it took, the use it had as being an effective tool for this research.

---

[1] In the course of several months of experimentation, ideas shift and re-focus and I have allowed myself to be carried away with these ebbs.  I have briefly outlined some of the various creative tangents in the Appendix of this document.

[2] Alongside of documentation I also looked into the archive, beginning with Derrida’s Archive Fever. While documentation and archive compliment each other, it is important to recognize the distinction between the two.  I elaborate further on both in Chapter 3.

Laban Graduate Showcase 2009

Trio

Small excerpt of a larger work presented in London in June 2009, and in Berlin in July 2009.  The piece began through researching ideas of reconstruction, appropriation and recycling.  We chose three base pieces to work off of and used task-based strategies to move away from them.  Through the process we considered formality, staging, pacing (boredom…?), dramaturgy and created a whole slew of arbitrary rules that we used to form the work as a series of short scenes.  The resulting piece, Trio, is quite far from that base material; in fact the piece is more reminiscent of the work of more current European performance makers than anything.

Trio is nothing like anything I have ever made, and I had a fantastic time collaborating with Antje Hildebrant, Stella Dimitrakopoulou and Elena Koukoli.  We challenged each other, asked a lot of questions, and ended up making something I could never have made on my own.

uniqueness…

“As the elementary lexicon of democracy demonstrates, individuality is indeed a repeatable, atomized, serial paradigm.  Each individual, in and of himself, is as valid for one as he is for any other; he is equal because he is equivalent.  Uniqueness, on the other hand, ends up rendering useless both the concept of repetition and the principle of generalization that nourishes the individualist theory.  Uniqueness is an absolute difference, which, as [Hannah] Arendt never tires of arguing, changes the very notion of politics.” (Relating Narratives, A. Cavarero, p. 89)

Berlin

I have been worried about not having the time to travel before I fly back to the US.  Continental Europe is so close, so cheap to get to.   But somehow, in the midst of writing a thesis and putting together an exhibition, traveling seems to slip on the priority list!  So, you can imagine my delight in having the opportunity to attend a post-graduate conference in Berlin a few weeks ago.  I would get to travel, see Berlin, present work and be able to rationalize the time missed from working with gaining time for networking and learning from other students and professors.  Everyone wins!

I arrived in Berlin on a Saturday, and proceeded to the location of the conference to hang my exhibit 5,133 (the same that I had presented at LABAN in June).  It was an incredibely different space – dirty, industrial, enormous dance studio – compared to LABAN’s hermetically sealed whiteness.  The exhibit was hung until Tuesday and received some positive feedback from the few I was able to talk to about it.

Through the course of the week during which the conference was held we were able to see the work of other students, participate in discussions and hear lectures from several more established artists.  Some of the work was quite impressive and very thoughtful, and other work was less.  Of course this is to be expected, and even the work I didn’t like as much was interesting and appreciated for the questions it raised.

The energy of the week was certainly dampened, however, with the negative reception we received after showing Trio, the piece created for our module Research and Development.  Antje, Stella, Elena and myself were incredibly excited to show this work in a difference place to a different audience.  But that audience was not quite as thrilled by us.  After getting over the ego-bruising that came with being harshly criticized for the first time, I came away from the experience with a lot learned about presenting my work in a new place.

1.  Consider what your audience knows about you (or what they don’t).

We didn’t know a sole at the conference, and chose not to introduce our work to them beforehand.  This meant that they approached it with a set of assumptions based on what they knew about us.  Namely that we were coming from a ‘dancey’ institution known for its …dance.  Our course title is ‘Dance-Theatre’, translated into German as tanztheater, a specific form of performance coined by Pina Bausch (the famous German choreographer who recently died).  We do very little dance, and the dance we do is nothing like Bausch.  We inadvertently allowed the assumptions to control the reading of our work.  While unnecessary in London, an introduction to us, our studies, and our process would have served us well.

2.  The performance space makes a big difference.

We had originally presented this work in a traditional proscenium stage, and structured it accordingly (i.e. use of the wings, the curtain, house lights, the angle of the audience, etc.).  Part of our rationale for placing it in this sort of environment was to provide a contrast to our ‘un-theatrical’ actions.  We walk, we stand, we complete tasks, we move at a steady pace doing simple things with simple objects.  We do it with intention, in a matter-of-fact manner.  There is a certain absurdity in it…humor even.

When given the chance to present again in an informal studio, we lept at the chance.  I realize now that the piece lost something when transplanted into such informality.  This is not to say that it should only be presented in big, expensive theatres, as that would not be very likely given our state of being….well, not famous or rich.  But it is to say that the space impacts the piece and considering that might have led us to make strategic modifications to the piece, be they however small.

3.  People like different stuff.

I think that one speaks for itself.

So, the week in Berlin came to a close. Complete with a visit to the remnants of the Wall.  It was a challenging week, but not without its fun.  Plus it was great to travel with my 3 fellow MADT’s.  We make a great team!  And now, it’s time to get to work on my final project!

5,133

An exhibit by Michelle K. Lynch, presented June 24, 2009 at LABAN, London.

documents/drawings

Up one day and down the next.  Yesterday I presented my first exhibit of work that is not live.  It was a big moment for me, symbolizing a significant shift in focus (at least for the time being).  That said, I also performed and presented a live performance last night, entitled Trio, in collaboration with three fellow MA Dance Theatre students: Stella Dimitrakoulou, Elena Koukoli and Antje Hildebrandt.  Photos and reflections on that in a later post.  …one thing at a time.

5,133 is the title I ultimately gave to this collection of photographs, objects and drawings.  It is the culmination of a two month project of research into duration, documentation, and the mundane.  It is also the very first little seedlings of ideas for my final project for my MA degree.  What will develop from these ideas and beginnings will then be presented formally in mid-September.

In the coming days I am looking forward to getting more feedback on this project, so please ask questions, criticize and offer your thoughts.  I am open to hearing reactions, impressions and what-have-you.  Photographs from the exhibit are here, and more will be coming from helpful photographer monkeys.

On that note, it’s time to prepare for an upcoming adventure back to the homeland.  Tomorrow I fly to USA to attend a beautiful wedding, see my parents, sister, and dear friends who are sick and tired of me always being a minimum of 3,000 miles away.  I’m hoping for a good east coast thunderstorm while I’m there, a summer shower or two, getting stuck in an Amish buggy traffic jam, and a shockingly American 4th of July; I haven’t been to the east coast in summer for…5 years.

More on performances and travels to come soon.