Tagged with Obama

Trusting the Experiment

No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year–ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge–and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.–Nietzsche, The Gay Scienceiceland1

To embrace life as experiment requires courage. Courage and trust and joy in the unknown. MLK and Obama trusted the often unseen best in us, and in so doing allowed us to trust the best in ourselves. And what is that best part of ourselves?  The part that asks: What if?  The ability to wonder, to question what we know. The space to leave a dance open; to trust that the audience can be a part of the process of investigation while the dancers explore said process. It is this openness to experimentation that is an antidote to fundamentalist thinking and totalitarian systems at any level.

Come February the ZsaZsarian’s will take up this task of experimental, experiential experience. Who knows what will happen?

state of the art

Why do I stay in this country? Why am I not an ex-pat, a foreigner, an
American abroad? Why do I continue to make art in a landscape where I am
still scraping together the money for the rapidly approaching show in order
to pay dancers and artists and personnel who are paid way too little for all
their sweat and hard work and dedication anyway? Why do I rehearse in a
studio which often has no heat? Work a day job? Lose sleep writing grants
and press copy?

Obama answered that question for me today. He reminded us all that this
country is a big work-in-progress, a big performance in the making: Pull the
microscope out. Remember where we are in our national trajectory. The US is
not a finished product.

When I was working on Pulling the Wool: An American Landscape of Truth and
Deception, I learned the Gettysburg Address. I was completely taken by
Lincoln’s words, by the articulation of this country as a grand experiment:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all
men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure...

We have been testing this over these last 8 years. Obama’s inaugural address
was a reminder that this is an improv– that we don’t have to go off the
rails, that we shouldn’t give up hope, that we can take control and shift
the improv and enter a new phase of the experiment. That the verdict is
still out on whether a nation so conceived can long endure…

So what does this have to do with art? I make non-commercial performance,
art that falls through the cracks, that pokes at the status quo. I spent two
months in Norway this fall, where there are ample artist grants, health
care, oil money…   A year in Belgium, where dance companies are funded…
A summer in Berlin where you can live cheaply and make art without as much
struggle. Why stay here where artmaking feels so untenable, where the
equation never balances? Why not jump ship like so much of the dance
community which has already left for greener pastures?

I realized today, as I stood in Times Square, watching Obama’s inaugural
address surrounded by people of all races from all countries, that I believe
in that experiment. I believe in the improv. There is an energy to it, a
life to it, an openness that I have never felt anywhere else. In the same
way that I believe in the possibilities of artmaking, I believe in the
possibilities of this country. When we are working on a piece, I always
struggle with how much material to “set” and how much to structure
and then leave open– to leave room for life, spark, surprise, energy. To not
create something that is made, done, packaged, over. And that is what I
value about being here, and being American— that I live in a place that is
about what gets left open, not what is set.

So I pay the price of making art in the midst of a market collapse, a
society in doubt, a country that has strayed from the idea of soul. And
today, I thank Mr. Obama for reminding me why.

Gettysburg Address manuscript

Artifact: on the eve of a new era

Election night 08 at Lincolns knee

Election night '08 at Lincoln's knee — photo by Matt Mendelsohn

At the gentle nudging of T, I have crawled out of the internet rabbit hole of online polls, political blogs and photo slideshows of President-elect Obama to bring you this artifact. I’m still coming to terms with the new reality of a having a leader who has a grasp and understanding of reality as well as a vision of how to achieve the ideals set forth at the founding of America.

Jill, I’ve been thinking about your last post and wondering how much the political climate of the last eight years has contributed to the bipolar swings between maudlin emotionality and nonchalant banality in the dance community. I’m too close to it all to have any perspective. As of Nov. 4th, I can say that I feel like I’ve emerged into the bright daylight of possibilities from spending eight dark years in some strange haunted house of horrors where my perceptions were thwarted at every turn. The Rove-Cheney-Bush theatre of the absurd and their confederacy of dunces are in their final weeks as headliners and I am so relieved.

I laughed, I cried, it was worse than Cats.

I’m also curious to see what the next four or (hopefully!) eight years will bring for our community, our nation and the world. I wonder how we artists will respond.