13 propositions

[The trouble with love-at-first-sight encounters is it’s hasty gesticulation to risk almost near admission of indeterminacy complimented by an infallible cortical rush that soon domesticates to an anticipation of failure dressed up ready for the next evening's party. Failure definitely sounds sexy. More so when the manicured completeness of the landscape has slowly become unbearable, when grunge is making a miscalculated comeback, when plaid and paisley is the new black, when those teenagers two decades back deliberately slashed jeans as cool, when the body is withoutorgans, when void and empty is comforting, when thick descriptions of the boring occupy endless pages of a manuscript repeatedly rejected and indefinitely postponed, when punctuation has been overused because the exotic has finally refined the appearance of a cosmopolitan global citizen.]

Here (1) failure is repackaged as the necessary x to sustain the tension that binds. A (2) failure that is symbolic of the obtuse of stability, (3) like those preemptive gestures that allay the fear of the impossible. (4) Failure provides the possibility to keep the phantasm of the ideal intact and tedium of habit admissible. (5) Failure allocates space for permutations and peripheral investigations. (6) Failure poses as motivation to reframe the ordinary and organization of the world as we observe it. (7) A failure that is at the same time a concealment of the tendency to manufacture eloquent excuses to prolong indecision and disclosure. (8) Failure is fragment consummate, an oblique strategy that is productive and cooperative because it is a rejection of finality. (9) Failure is the beginning of an impossible collection. (10) Failure is not exhaustion but romantic and affectionate. (11) Failure stands as the memorial where meaning is generated, worn-out and stripped of necessity. (12) Failure is a reason to start with nothing, work with nothing, and (13) reflect upon excesses that have yet to occupy space.

Hence I was neither surprised nor expecting when I realized soon enough that disorientation, distanciation, contradiction and exhaustion back-and-fort almost near frustrating negotiations were specifically the kinds of collateral damage to be paid and secretly aspired for when in the situation of performing the self.  Should there be anything I could comfortably admit to, is that it was that I choose the back room at 72-13’s rooftop as a space to stage my proposition simply out of curiosity. A proposition that (1) did not even exist, but a (2) proposition that conveniently stood as an excuse for: “I need a little bit more time to figure it out;” a (3) proposition that masked my tendency to evade the museum of dance/dancing bodies, in fact one that almost came off as an avoidance of dance; (4) one that strangled the urgency of time and malleability of space; (5) one that tested the tolerance for uncertainty; (6) one that resisted the temptation to create something new; (7) one that attempted an ambitious transgression; (8) one that was meant as a choreographic and spatial constraint; (9) one that sought to escape a predetermined content; (10) one that was almost near empty of immediate meaning; (11) one that will manifest itself in the process; (12) a proposition that should put indulgent decision-making to a halt; (13) a proposition which proposed nothing in particular but a regulating liminal in the face of the endless possibilities of creating a work/ing.

Out of the 13 propositions I could occupy myself with for the duration of the 6 hours that would transpire, I decided against any particular one. Maybe choosing none meant choosing them all and finally admitting with albeit hesitation to the fluctuation of ideas, (1) to a body that has ceased to have a center, (2) to a body that doesn’t need a center, (3) a body discontented with the dichotomy of material and immaterial, (4) an aging body, (5) to a renewed body, (6) to an emptying body, (7) to an impossible body, (8) to an archival body, (9) to a body resisting inscription, (10 ) a failing body, (11) a multiple body, (12) a disembodied subject, and (13) a permeable and porous body.

Disorientation is probably one of those conditions that a performance situation capitalizes on, or one that a dance practice secretly admits to. Working is mostly spent towards the dissolution of work and non-work, towards multiplying the modalities of making things (im)possible and then breaking down the comfortable segregation of life and work. And yes, now I admit to this failure, I cannot break down life and work. Nowhere was this amplified but in the Musee de la Danse where one by being in the frame is already framed in the work, where even the private mental space has been co-opted in this temporal zone.  In Expo Zero Musee de la Danse: there was nothing at all, no objects or artifacts to be cataloged, screened, segregated, isolated, fetishized, and create narratives for and out. There was only the frame. (1) Should we reinforce the frame? (2) Create ambitious anomalies within it? (4) Or unframe it totally? (5) Assume its failed end? (6) Admit to its failure? (7) Bring the outside in? (8) Embrace its finality? (9) Create fragments? (10) Leave markings or traces? (11) Ignore it? No, there was no ignoring the frame. (12) Strangle it? (13) Reframe it?

The Musee de la Danse is about creating an archive. But of what, dance? How is it possible to create an archive out of dance, which is not merely an object of bodily practice but a result of the frames of spectatorship and theatricality? Maybe, because as human beings we are confronted with decay that we cannot but help think about what we leave behind. Martina Hochmuth in her introduction outlined some of the propositions generated over the last three rounds in Rennes, Saint Nazaire and in Singapore: "museum that help us face our fear of death, can we deny the system as art makers, how do we want to be governed, imagined nation, museum of things, museum of dance, failure of the utopian, museum of illusion, museology of the museum, impossible collection, articulating doubts, memories of bodies in Cambodia, strangling time, choreographic strategy, architecture..." The list goes on. Aside from the recordings and memories of the event, what is left behind but these propositions? Maybe these are already enough. Probably these propositions are not meant as testaments nor documentation of an imagined museum for to do so will render it unimagined, which will definitely bring proper failure, one we cannot afford to have.

 photos by: Heman Chong

 

The perfect place to sit

You cannot have your cake and eat it too, the elderly post-it reminder stuck on the adolescent corkboard of things to do. Surely not when resources are constantly sparse. Not for the aspiring middle class suburban emulating all things cosmopolitan. Not for the colonial bastard struggling with language. Not with penetrative scars that temporarily heal only to be pried upon sooner of later just because of habit. Not for the dog trainers who have left town. Not for the recently orphaned. Not when habit passes off as deceitful copies of love or cheap convenient replacements. Not for the alternate waiting in the wings. Not when surfing, switching, and swinging are modalities that cannot be ignored.  Not for those force-fed with litanies and manifest destiny waiting for those who have patiently combed the road of penance. Not when I suspect a tangential hint of Jacques Lacan, “I love you, but inexplicably I love something in you more than you and therefore I destroy you.” Surely, the stubborn tendency to bypass direct confrontation with the encounter is chillingly familiar to anyone raised under the protective custody of men in white frocks. Conjuring the bloodied procession of those men who ritually absolve themselves of their yearly accumulations of guilt, under the scorching high afternoon sun–bestial and divine.

And it is precisely the void that motivates anxiety, an emptiness that the body and mind automatically fills. The way we cannot resist completing a beloved’s sentence, or connecting jigsaw puzzle pieces, or fragmentary pictures, broken lines, mending holes and patch ups. The same way the stage begs to be played on; the dancer incapable of stasis and inapproachable of change.  The submissive body easily influenced and swayed. Insecure and inept.  Partial and mutilated.  Sometimes, even over-stimulated to a point of numb.

Quip if you see so deemed. At the risk of sounding like thirty something fool too young to lash out veteran dictums meanwhile too old to be naïve, the uneasy perversion of an outside looking in position is just too irresistible to pass. A position while refreshing detached voyeur appealing is also necessarily awkward. For the prying loops of context are as inescapable the way my fascination with the stage sustains hallucinations of occupying both sides.  Whether seated as a spectator or a performer, the same reading and uttering skills apply. The theater’s frame, after all can never be underestimated. It’s far to liminal to escape. And the dance happens both from where we are watching and where the watching is witnessed because the spatial given is both its point and excess. The audience might as well be seated in the performance as performers, benevolent anarchist dictators with silent scheming plot to shift the focal point of the stage. And if this were simply implied would they recognize it, or is enunciation necessary? Or would that be too blunt? Where struggle already implied, the perfect spot could be nowhere near because it is not that important.

For again we need to ask how do we consume a performance? How to consume dance? If models do exist, will it instantly point out to the lens of a little child inside a candy store, fascinated and in awe, who goes home with diabetic saccharine-induced warm and fuzzy feeling.  If consuming were an analogy to reading then Ballet Philippines’ Masterworks must have been any dork’s Saturday afternoon nightmare. Why? Because the pieces in this program refused to be read, it defies any gentrified reading and co-optation into a content-driven world. Instead it stood tall and proud, close to saying that craftsmanship was enough. The form is the medium and hollow. Inside is Grotowski’s onion void.

Opening its 40^th season, the company looks back at its own history, possibly because they say life begins at 40 that a sense of posterity must be tackled. What is most refreshing though is not to see the range of works spanning the last glorious years but historiographic direction that this sets which could might as well be a model for other Philippine dance companies who have survived despite their country. Where dance has always struggled with the written word and document, the show fills in the void of current history. Masterworks stands as a family album of the company’s repertoire featuring the works of it’s important choreographers Agnes Locsin, Tony Fabella, Edna Vida, Alden Lugnasin, Alice Reyes, Bam Damien and Denisa Reyes.

Whether a fool-proof plan to resuscitate Ballet Philippines’ glamorous past or a last ditch attempt to catch up with the rest of the hip contemporary practice in Manila, is too early to say. Nevertheless it is no secret that the company has been for the past years, struggling to keep up–no thanks to bureaucracy, no thanks to retired dance stars, no thanks to shrinking funds for art, no thanks to decrepit national art institutions, no thanks to Youtube, no thanks Hong Kong Disneyland, no thanks to poor dance education, no thanks to the ageing body, no thanks to glossy society pages that perpetually reduce dance to ‘high art’, no thanks descriptive dance reviews masquerading as criticism. Maybe it will take more than trendy fashion magazine posturing to take dance out of art’s glamorous trap. Still, is this even a fair expectation when dance has remained solely as an expressive metaphor of an idea, aesthetic craftsmanship and affective short circuit? Never fully taken apart and ignited for their discursive potentiality.

The program opens with Agnes Locsin’s seminal work Igorot, heralded back in the 90s as the defining Philippine dance moment, with its brave attempt to fuse ballet and traditional ethnic dance. Booting out snooty old fashioned culture scholars and historians who accused Locsin of near sacrilege by donning the traditional male loincloth, bahag, on the athletic bodies of her female dancers meanwhile struggling to stay en pointe. An act seemingly vulgar but equally invested with complex condition of the convoluted postcolonial where we witness the brutal supplication of a westernized ballet body to heard as ethnic, hence Filipino.  Whilst dancing on pointe, executing the standard quick virtuous feet movement reminiscent of Swan Lake’s Four Little Swans, the dancers’ upper bodies negotiated the traditional vocabulary of the ‘Igorot dance’: flexed arms spread out to the side punctuated by aggressive upward motion of the shoulders, the torso unmoved, the head stiff maintaining the regal stance of ballet almost like muted silent witnesses to the dismembered movements of their limbs that seem to have been violently attached to its center. Is this restraint or hysteria?

Locsin’s piece hints at the hysteric rupture of the ballet body struggling with its own romantic pre-historical ethnic past or dare say identity. Practically proposing a stopgap measure to assuage the traumatic wound of colonial castration, by way of amplification–reintroducing the asexualized androgynous dancer body onstage. While this piece have been constantly nitpicked for its lack of authenticity and even cultural irreverence, taking the traditional male loincloth out of its  ‘proper’ context, Locsin manages to depict the castrated female body by plugging the genital void with its obverse counterpart. Maybe the crass fusion of ballet and ethnic dance is a sort of acknowledgement of it’s own irreproachability. The charm of Locsin’s work probably lies not in its innovative movement style, that she has been popularly known for, but in its own admission of the contingent gap between ethnic and ballet. Slavoj Zizek, on the formation of national identities come to mind: “the will to gain political independence from the colonizer in the guise of new independent nation-state is the ultimate proof that the colonized ethnic group is thoroughly integrated into the ideological universe of the colonizer.”

And if Ballet Philippines, has built a reputation of forging the links between the west’s ballet and third world colonial Philippines is best seen in Edna Vida’s pop sensibility-Manila Sounds-campy dance extravaganza suite. The rather literal dance renditions of Ryan  Cayabyab’s “Mamang Kutsero,” “Limang Dipang Tao” calls out to Manila’s retro kitschy Hollywood past. And while it may easily be construed as dated and surface entertainment it stands as the most accurate. Illustrating how our bodies are gripped not between east and west but between the retro and contemporary, modern bastards that we are. Never really finding a distinctly reduced precise identity but a schizoid whose ontological charm lies in its own crisis. And it is exactly its lollipop dance sweetness that fulfills the one-to-one correspondence of form with content and the performing body.

Manila–a teeming megalopis of 12 million people, smog, serious unemployment rates, hints of global cosmopolitanism clinging on to an idealized future is Alden Lugnasin’s Swimming in the Ilog Pasig.  Un/dressed under the metaphorical cloak of swimming fishes in the city–the dancers struggle between land and water, fails in both–becoming instead lamella. The same way our beloved Pasig River has become neither land nor water.

Tempting as it may seem, the horizon of pushing content and overcoming redundancies of narrative, the choreographic project involves a kind of writing that exhaust the structure of language itself. Here it seems that it’s almost vulgar to strip the affective qualities of a dancing event. For who does not want to empathize? Even the coldest bitch ice queen will not deny the empathic lure of crying every once in while. For what are all those tear-jerker movies for?  While Denisa Reyes’ Te Deum may easily be read to depict the “struggles and aspiration of the Filipino people” under Martial seems reasonable, to do so simply misses the dramaturgical point of the piece. In fact Reyes’ Te Deum is the truly choreographic piece in this program. Seen in the precise spatial design of the stage and temporal dialogue with the music. It’s strength lies in the form. Never mind the content. Here Reyes writes dance, in space and time, exhausting its own vocabulary that pushes the viewers to reflect upon their own experience of watching. Not because of any drama, or virtuous physical feat, or pleasing music, or fantastic stage designs but specifically because it is minimalist, Spartan and redundant.

They say it is the circumstances that interest us. And curiosity that sustains us. The perfect place to sit is obviously not in the prestigious parterre boxes of the theater nor the far reaching ends of the balcony where the partially deaf old man sits but in the in between space of watching and comprehension. To stay there is as close to saying that even if I cannot empathize with you I can still love you because I love more in you that is not you.

Cross my heart and hope to die

Cross my heart and hope to die...

PATRICIA EUSTAQUIO'S Death to Major, Viva Minor

Translation threads along the tenuous border of deception. Along comes the inevitable process of either reading too excessively into a piece of 'text' or totally missing the point. Such is the double-edged condition of having to look at 'something.' To take things as they are is usually the most difficult of tasks. For maybe it's the fear of boredom, which hovers above any creative process. Yet even light, the purest of concepts, is never what it seems. Experiences and history cloud perception. Like a pill, the illusory tint feeds the machine of our imagination in turn igniting an obsessive preoccupation to painstakingly extract and make meaning out of nothing. For there must always be a reason behind everything.

 In performance, the artist is left to the task of merely setting up a situation upon which consequent action shall take place paradoxically on the other side of the fence where the spectator sits. Eventually what was once not known reveals it’s self, slowly lifted out of the frame the way an animal is being skinned, exposing both its strength and frailty. However the theatre unfolds as imagined landscape associates itself with that which we see in front of us in space: the systems and its procedures are gradually recognized; meaning emerges; and the mystique lifted to trigger the performance itself, like a bullet fired to the air. Never mind the seeming impossibility of isolating fiction from real life, the way memory keep betraying our dreams and flirt with the present. What matters is how with such clarity of intent and zen-like persistence that the artist manages to preserve the tension and maintaining the elasticity of time in the same manner that glass is tempered and bent. Good expeditions require sound navigation if not precise maps and spatial instruments.

 The pleasure of being transported out of the confines of the ordinary is a projected ideal we unconsciously carry. Now even more I have become fearful of the process of translation. Yet the half-witted perversion mixed with satisfaction of being let in into a secret is too appealing to pass. And so if a temporary resolve must be taken, translating accommodates a degree of constructive deception. Because no one wants to take things as they are.

 Patricia Eustaquio's Death to Major, Viva Minor lets in on this constructive deception, masking the beautiful and grotesque, lifting the veil and revealing the void that waits underneath. A reluctant ode to the twelve preludes of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, purposely aiming for the simple virtuosity of the music via its periphery. Despite the looming temptation of painting as visual metaphor for music, Eustaquio deliberately denies the viewer just this. No, this is by no means a visualization of a moving piece of music. She temporarily suspends her 'creativity' instead heeds the opposite through "simple imitations: hollow odes and vacuous praises" (P.Estaquio notes, 2008). The collection begs off the seductive appeal of metaphor that imbues projected fantasies about Bach's music. And yet seduces us back to the composers' mind through the symphony of objects crafted out of mindful understanding of the behavior of the materials she has chosen to work with: knit, lace, wood, leather, and ceramics. Meticulously fashioning delicate objects out of 'lowly' craft materials relegated to the 'decorative arts.' Sculpting out an absurd storybook picture into the shell of where used to stand a piano school. 

 The works in this exhibition is inspired by Eustaquio's investigation of and into music choosing one of Bach's prominent work, the Well-Tempered Clavier. Considered as one of the most influential pieces of music in Western classical music,  "for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study." The work is a collection of preludes and fugues for all 24 keys of the keyboard, indiscriminate of major of minor keys. It has since become a primary book used in piano schools to familiarize students with the entire range of the instrument.  Eustaquio examines her own position to music: "If I were to talk above my head about music I realize I would be a monkey on a typewriter. And yet this is what I've set out to do in this collection...though perhaps it is with slight mockery that I produce works from it: an act justified by my absolute ignorance of music." Citing Schopenhauer who speaks of music as the highest form of art as it is the manifestation of will, of idea itself. Generated from it’s own language. And if indeed music, art for that matter, were a language Eustaquio approaches it like a child through simple imitations. Composing her own tribute to music, creating a symphony of abstract things fashioned from the humble understanding of a listener.

 As in any tributes, the context will be haunted by shallow intentions and nit-picked for meaningful references. The work cannot escape the microscopic eye of a viewer who cannot risk to live in an absurd meaningless world created out of nothing–for there is always a reason behind everything. Eustaquio stares back at us by literally confronting us with shallow objects, skinned from their original context in a process almost violent yet poignant at the same time. Psycho-genic Fugue, a sculptural crocheted piece, alludes to a full-sized piano assuming its volume and former shape.  The crocheted white blanket, donning most homes to protect valuable furniture, stands in the absence of the piano. As if it has stood there all those years, gathering dust witness to history.  Divested and castrated of its utility. A poignant remembrance of its past perhaps? Or a silent violent erasure of its past, leaving behind a dense fragment of its former self? A fitting contrapuntal response to an instrument that now stands there as a ghost­­–muted, static, absent yet captivating.

 Whereas fragments meet to complete a big picture, Eustaquio holds off, keeping the viewer in anticipation. Freezing the moment of comprehension meanwhile saying it is done. The fragmented paintings never complete themselves, or so we think. She resists the temptation of repeating herself by not ‘finishing’ the obvious. Respecting the space between truth and comprehension. Exhausting the connective episodes for a narrative that completes itself in vitro. The image of a torn violin, a sneak peak to its distinct anatomical similarity to the human cavity or dyptich still life of a bird in differing states of death. She mutes the big orchestral sound to amplify the hissing noise in the background. Working with chance and carefully choosing the seductive accidentals that comes up. Whereas the viewer follows her lead, picking up incomplete pieces of a jigsaw puzzles. The absent spaces filled only by hollow events hinting at our memory. In fact this is all we need.

 And the ones left lying on the floor, seeming artifacts of half-forgotten dreams, betray an epic narrative that begs its own resolve–testaments to the frail beauty that lie in between the intersection of celebration and lament. Where a piece of music either calls its own repugnance or incessantly rings in the background, an ambient sound that bleeds into the wallpaper of a bedroom, unchanged all those years. The subtle movement of objects comes unnoticed as if their familiarity has left them subject to their eventual disappearance. Leaving behind but a trace of its former self, a carcass left to rot through time, fossilized and hardened.

 Memory according to Walter Benjamin “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater.  It is the medium of past experiences as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.” As we approach the past like an archeologist digging deeper into the ground, we ask ourselves how far back can we go? For “he who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to end of its segments.” In Death of Major, Viva Minor we are invited to stay in the folds, traversing the intersection of opposing forces that between presence and absence, poignant and violent, dense yet hollow, anxious and calm. 

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.' 

awakened from the stupor of breath

where the eye leads our breath will follow and then the body recognizes what for a time it has forced to forget. what lies in the middle of the empty core that grotowski so persistently dug up. a little confirmation of the void. the void that could only bring about death to what he has fought for most of his life. confronted with nothing? how was this so when he had always thought and pondered upon the meaning of his own struggles? when he has given up everything else but this meaningless task of skinning an onion. till death do part and till sickness unto death. death it was that stared at his face. nothing fantastic and then at that single moment of perverted comprehension he gave up, awaking to stupor of his own breath

pre-occupying metaphors

And then the damned awoke from their month-long intoxication heeding the call of their brethren. Fires burning out from the top of their head they all that was ever left only to dance and vomit the remnants of such unbearable light. Giving birth to the repulsive excesses of a lonely man, she walked on a stony path only to come face-to-face with what she already knows. The bruise on the soles of her feet, silent witness to her pain. The gaps in her breath and once lucid mind slowly disintegrating. It was all but too late, she has become part of the meandering landscape. Captured in her weakest and raging state. Screaming to be heard. Under the sweltering heat of the sun, betrayal strikes her as she feels her heart baking like a stone. Charcoal brown, nearing lost. Meanwhile, the distant borders grow unnoticed, passing off poison gas. Persevere the wise toad says, hold-off on change. Our lives are not to influence any kind of future, the machine knows what it needs to do. Wiser than man, wiser than the devil nor any other god.

sewing a plant for my little dog

inside the moving train, the dog has spoken about an impending doom. its proud owner bursting with tears. after all those years of waiting she has finally learned to cry and swallow her own helplessness. still those primal cries come unheard. maybe they have all grown tired. the cries fading like a hissing sound of a belching truck. black smoke color her already tinted hair. what is there left to do, she asks. for she must have for sure exhausted all possible reasoning that lend only but a glint into an unappealing future. there or in there the end has been foretold. or so she thinks? once in a while, the cat comes out to play. reminding her of this little secret kept under her chest. grandma comes to shout with her swelling hands. sewn out of the mantle of order, a thread set loose. leaving behind a trail of unfolded stories. histories that never make sense. love that never finds a way. where have they kept the key?