Things like these

Perhaps we need to teach ourselves to 'watch' so we can 'do' with empathy. Empathy was the least of the words I had expected to hear at a workshop on choreography, composition, theory and performance making. Of the pleasantly complex spontaneous combustions we had during the workshop on the Biopolitics of Biography (yes, it was as sexy as it sounded), whatt struck me most was Janez Jansa's four hour lecture on "what is performance". He had a performance on that same evening, which we were all going to watch. I faintly intuited that the next four hours would either be excruciatingly tedious or erotically enlightening. Of course, it turned out to be the former. Janez is a charming maverick aside from being a genius, he exhausts any subject matter with persistence and intelligent humor. No one really likes to ask this question (at least not from my part of the world). No, I take it back, no one bothers to answer these kinds of question. For it is always sexier to engage in rhetorical banter rather than taking apart our most 'obvious' assumptions with the meticulous seal of a craftsman molding wood. Not having any proper education in art, only because there exists none here in the islands, I was mesmerized, my expectations overwhelmingly met to say the least. Yes, the experience was pretty much like an orgasm. The one mind-fuckers like to have.

To see the obvious is always the hardest of tasks. Especially among artists, who constantly face the weight of metaphor and haunting call of 'creativity.' Yet for the next ten days of our workshop: intense talking and doing, we were asked to do the opposite.  That is to read and name the obvious, meanwhile holding off on 'creativity,' gaining time and abandoning metaphor.  Hearing this for the first time, I was utterly confused. Why? Because I have heard it one too many times, the mantric voice of the undead: "be creative, use your imagination."

I am returning to this experience for a number of reasons. Foremost is the gripping urgency of reflection that come as one crosses the edge of something. Its been a year since The Lovegangsters, so it seems most fitting if not a matter of necessity to look back at the year that has passed and map the future course of this love affair. Secondly, 2008 was a year that I found myself often sitting on the other side of the fence, as a spectator. Sometimes I can't help but think I am also a performer disguised as a spectator. But what of the spectator disguised as an artist? Questions that gnaw at me each time I find myself witnessing a performance. Surely, are not artists the worst people to have in the audience? The snooty ones, who can easily dismiss something that does not appeal them. Or the distracted ones who can't wait for everything to be over and proceed on to the after-performance drinks. 

Sometimes, even as a performer I feel the same way too.  Especially when clearly everybody is just going through the motion. In my younger years, I would easily take this personally and go through emotional self-effacing fits asking myself "Am I not good enough?"  Yes, the psychotic face of a dancer that many do not see. Unfortunately inescapable when the medium is the self. This is why Joao Fiadiero, the partner-in-crime in the said workshop makes perfect sense when he advises to set the parameters of a work-performance beforehand, despite such overwhelming connotations on performance being cathartic and forms of emotional release. I am of course referring to: Ronald McDonald slashing wrists or burning flag; shaving pubes; or being lost and taken into trance-like dance channeling the inner babaylan; and many other other brutal masochist expressions of pain, beauty, confusion and propagandist political statements. Circumstances that put the 'self' in a very precarious and risky place. Yes, I know artists live along the edge. But I cannot help asking myself is there not any other way? Is there not a parallel way of communicating aside from such self-mutilating acts of vulnerability and frailty? If indeed there is, where is the secret map leading to that known place?

Take the example of a dancer onstage, judged and watched according to her skill, competence and eloquence of her body portraying a message and ideal.  Joao in an interview asserted that "dance doesn't go through the body" as response to some dance experts meditation on the brutal strictness of classical dance training. As expected this statement provoked a general discomfort among the public. Later  on he clarified that of course what he meant was that "dance is not just of the body." Here I guess is reason why I still insist on calling myself as a choreographer and/or dancer despite churning out works that elicit the usual "huwat?!" 

And even still if it were only of the body, we all know by now that our bodies are nothing but an empty plain of composition? So what makes this idea of an empty body controversial anyway? Perhaps like the Santa Claus rumor, who we all know does not exist, or the manananggal who is bound to appear soon now that elections are just around the corner, there is a reason why we choose to believe in an empty signifier knowing full well that fundamentally there is nothing else we lose but the dignified stance of logic or upholding our petty bourgeois good Catholic upbringing? We need a certain leap of faith to sustain our interest or curiosity in something. First we need to accept something and then weigh our options. Joao speaks of something similar when he urges us to hold off on reflex action and temptation to create meaning at the first instance of an encounter. Instead he proposes to wait, wait for images to come, formulate hypothesis and then choose which probabilities to pursue. This may sound extremely simple to do but of course it is not because one single image, though finite in significations carries a multitude of history and baggage. Paradoxically the key point is to maintain the 'empty space.' An empty space which is not a 'nothing' space but an empty–open space of potentiality, a positively charged open empty space. The positive void between the legs.

What lies behind the appearance of a live performance? Is it meaning, affect or procedure? And what is it that propels our obsession as artists and non-artist spectators to unearth signification out of the experience? I don't have the answer either. But what I do find fascinating about the act of watching is seeing how 'things unfold' and see how 'things are.' Perhaps less concerned with understanding the meaning behind a piece of work. I have been told once that I'm like this little girl pointing out to her playmates the fact that we are playing. Yes, I like naming situations and do draw pleasure in it. Almost dead self-referrent in its end.  It's the structural procedures of the creative process appearing in the work that appeals to me. Meaning flirts with the everyday, as if it were the only thing that mattered. Appearances are meticulously interrogated to squeeze out every recognizable signification there is. Perhaps what makes watching a violent and confusing experience is our perceived general conspiracy that force us into the exercise of weighing appearances and the silent test of the malleability of 'things as they are.' For what are all those manuals for looking for, if not to raise a generation of spectators generally preoccupied with that which is hidden in a picture. 

At one point in the workshop, we were advised "not to influence the future" that is fighting off the preoccupation to write the progression of a narrative towards its motion. As present is at once already past, the only possibility that is left really is to retroactively write the past. With our 'present' action enriching the content of the past. The phrase "the past is a foreign country" comes to mind, for someone growing up in a nation with an uncomfortable relationship with its historical past and threatened with amnesia I can't help but find it agreeable. One cannot escape the human tendency towards 'development.' Look at how we obsessively await the latest mobile gadgets or the widening reach of broadband internet connection even in barrios without proper roads and water supply. What is beautiful in this concept apparently is its admission of the present and almost violent-zen like resistance to that compulsion to create something new. Having just come from the Regional Dance Summit organized by the Goethe Institut Jakarta Regional Office, where buzzwords of tradition and contemporary were made to wrestle each other, I am in quandary whether it really matters to pit these two categories apart. And how is it possible to clarify these concepts without being trapped in conventional techno-historical aesthetic assumptions? Is it even possible? Are there other epistemic models out there that will free us from the limiting constructs of history and associative aesthetic cover? I don't know either. What I do find interesting is that for countries like the Philippines, tradition is a concept we can barely grasp. In contrast to Vietnam and Cambodia, surviving from the excess of political turmoil and cultural persecution, contemporary is as slippery as tradition. Probably Indonesia dance artist Sudarno is on to something when he says "there is no tradition." Hinting at the past and present as the current. And hence contemporary?

So what has empathy got to do with things like these? Bertolt Brecht rejected empathy as means for making theater and instead insisted on the alienating the audience to compel them to see the disturbing reality of social life on the stage which will compel them to act otherwise in normal life. Meanwhile Antonin Artaud insists on a experiential association with the theater of cruelty in order to feel. Empathy as defined is the ability to understand and share in the feelings of another. Perhaps watching and doing a performance goes beyond understanding meaning but is in understanding the procedures that make it as it is. In seeing 'the way things are.'