Archive for May, 2011

#460 – After the Dance Is Over 3: Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

reggie wilson/fist & heel @ columbia college dance center, 4/1/11

Can you imagine if I was a novelist and I had to find a choreographer to come up with a dance to let people know they should buy my book?  — Reggie Wilson to Sharon Hoyer, NewCity Stage

Reggie Wilson’s collaboration with Congolese choreographer Andréya Ouamba, The Good Dance, Dakar/Brooklyn, starts with the notion that if Westerners ground their sense of the ethics and meaning of life in texts—the Bible, the Talmud—then African and African diasporic cultural traditions use the dancing body as the central medium for communicating ethics and meaning. For Wilson, the “Good Dance” is an African version of the Good Book.

But this doesn’t mean that his group’s performance was filled with goodness. On the contrary, there was much sin and suffering, violence and rupture, displacement and disorientation in The Good Dance.

The dance is centered not only around bodies of people—people who come from around the world, people with all different size and shape bodies—but also bodies of water, in this case the twin histories of the Congo and Mississippi Rivers.

Deep, troubled, muddy, powerful, both these rivers, which appear in The Good Dance not as contiguous currents, but rather meted out in plastic bottles of water. These plastic bottles get assembled and reassembled, kicked and thrown, gathered and redistributed throughout the performance.

Each bottle, each dancer, each segment of the piece, each gesture itself becomes a fragment of a larger story, a dispersed sampling of a larger essence, the contained traces of a wellspring, the confluences of a delta, the preserved essences of a larger whole that cannot ever be reassembled again and must, instead, be danced into a narrative, a river of meaning produced from the fragments of liquid contained in our polymer present, never to quite decompose, quenching thirst even while poisoning with impenetrable residues.

There were multiple flows to Wilson’s magnificent and moving creation:

  • He broke the fourth wall by speaking to the audience while balancing a bottle of water on his head, at first it seemed like a break from the dance until slowly another dancer entered the stage, dodging and darting around Wilson, trying to knock him from his perch at the center of the piece, an example emerging of domination and the arts of resistance.
  • The music and the gestural language of the dancing continually linked African and African-American traditions, persistently noting connections that were powerfully referenced throughout.
  • Wilson dragged his dancers around at times, as if to play out power relations between a master and his subordinates at all levels, from the symbolic to the actual.
  • Most of all, his troupe collected and doled out their bits of the diasporic river traditions, picking up in new places, borrowing and imitating, crossing cultures as if trying to get to the bank on the other side and back again, alive, navigating the churning rapids, finding beauty in the baptismal moments between.

Wilson’s dance was a purification ritual, to be sure, but it was also an initiation into deeper awareness. It seeped into your consciousness with the silt of history. And like receiving a message in a bottle, a communication from the stormy deeps, one felt filled with wonder at the vast distances that expressivity can travel, the ingenious modes of survival and adjustment that humans absorb, preserve, and send along. We are bodies of water, after all.

But during The Good Dance, one also grew aware of the extended traumas of dislocation in the African diaspora, and the fragility of those hurled along on rafts of this diasporic culture, which was splintered and lashed together as those in its currents undertook makeshift improvisations, dramatic affirmations, and forceful negations and repudiations. To keep their heads above water was no small thing.

The Good Dance‘s mix of wonder and terror was more than good, then, it was great. And it was rendered beautiful by its turn from wisdom found in a frozen body of authoritative texts to knowledge gained through a carefully-corporealized text written with bodies.

Links:

*After the Dance Is Over offer a few belated posts about contemporary dance performances this year in Chicago.

Posted in African Culture, American Culture, Culture Rover, Dance Culture | No Comments »

#459 – After the Dance Is Over 2: Same Planet Different World

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

same planet different world @ columbia college dance center, 3/10/11

In choreographer Joanna Rosenthal’s corporeal take on the gender dynamics of classic film noir, muscles seemed to be led by other parts of the body. Bones, sinews, and tendons did the propulsion. Or, sometimes, it seemed like some kind of string was pulling and yanking on the dancers, as if they were puppets, dummies, or, perhaps, real people helplessly trapped in cinematic archetypes, mere projections of selves instead of active agents.

The dancing suggested that power might emanate from outside the self, applied from larger cultural forces to the body rather than coming from within. Forgotten elements of the past—the violent, lurking past—are still with us, the dance suggested, even if they are in black and white or out of print.

Bodies were sent corkscrewing down other bodies, twisted over themselves, ripped from the contemporary dance setting into the spoken soundtrack of a hard-boiled detective story. Bodies got lost in a descending swirl of bleak tragedy, trying to find their bearings in a world whose initial nostalgic air quickly gave way to a contemporary terror.

One was wrenched out of hip discernment into the violence that lurks in modern life, cells of celluloid whose bars were ripped asunder. Come off the reels, the anguish of cynical calculations led to an inevitable terminus, which was, given the film noir setting, perhaps a preordained conclusion of violent tragedy, one whose chalky outline of a dead body was barely covered by stylish retro garb.

Link:

*After the Dance Is Over offer a few belated posts about contemporary dance performances this year in Chicago.

Posted in Culture Rover, Dance Culture, Film Culture | No Comments »

#458 – After the Dance Is Over 1: Mark Morris

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

mark morris dance group, socrates @ harris theater, 2/27/11

 

Mark Morris’s choreography has always struck me as grid-like, with the ensemble moving in straight lines, either horizontally or vertically across the stage. But one of the most moving moments in Socrates was when the dancers looped back, quite literally, lacing themselves through the grids of their previous movements.

There was something elegant about the combination of rectangles and circles: not the tragedy of Socrates so much as the surprising appearance of ancient Euclidean pleasures in contemporary dance.

Link:

*After the Dance Is Over offer a few belated posts about contemporary dance performances this year in Chicago.

Posted in Culture Rover, Dance Culture | No Comments »

#457 – Social Movement

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

derek marks’ paintings turn moving bodies into social movements.

If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution! — attributed to Emma Goldman

Derek Marks’ paintings are not revolutionary in any formal way, but I nonetheless find them hauntingly and powerfully moving.

They are Matissian in the best sense, very familiar but enchanting and subtly subversive as well.

Derek Marks, Girls Dangling: Summer Green (2010)

I use the word moving here quite literally. For the bleeding of figure into background and background back again into figure suggests a larger evocation of motion, of bodies moving through space.

Quite obviously on these canvases, many of them quite large, there is a physicality, a corporeal presence represented. But there is also a kind of cultural kinetics at play. As Marks links individuals together through paint, his works express a sense of the larger emotional—dare I say even political—energies generated by collective motion. One glimpses not just “dangling” bodies, but also, somehow, the formation of social bodies: a gang, a group, an assembly, a class, a meeting of the bodies as well as the minds.

Derek Marks, Girls Dangling: Silent Separation (2010)

These are much more than just glimpses of girls. At one level, that’s all they are, of course. But there is more to these glimpses. There is, to my eye, a parental perspective to the paintings, like seeing your child playing when you arrive to pick her up from dance class or school. There is a warmth to them, an affection, an appreciation. There is also, I think, an undercurrent of sadness and anxiety at how the child is separating from the parent, moving on, finding her peers.

There is even, perhaps, a darker shading to the paintings: a generational voyeurism that hints of jealousy, an envy of youth. The paintings celebrate the girls, but feel excluded from them too.

Derek Marks, Girls on a Square (2010)

And something else, too: the potential power of collectivity. Even as these figures individuate from their parents, they also conjoin with each other. At some weird, just-barely discernible level, these are representations of some of the deepest wellsprings of social formation outside the family. They capture the activities of shifting togetherness at a young age.

Are these, then, somehow, the motions that shape the making of social identity, of gender and class and race and region, of self and group, ours and theirs, isolation and community? Could they be childhood’s social movements that, later, shading different ways, become a social movement? Or are they precisely the motions of youthful bonding that later, deep in the self’s relationship to the group, to society, stop such a movement in its tracks?

Derek Marks, Girls Dangling (2010)

Links:

Posted in Arts Culture, Culture Rover, Gender Culture, Political Culture, Visual Culture | 3 Comments »

#456 – History as Knish-tory

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

cooking up past pasts not past: michael chabon’s the yiddish policemen’s union.

Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a historical novel about a history that never happened. For this reason, one is tempted to call it a counterfactual-historical novel since it imagines the past of a future that did not occur. But even this isn’t quite right. Chabon’s tale is too playful, too interested in actual history, to be dismissed as mere counterfactual fantasy. The novel is closer to Benjamin’s notion of history, which is fitting since the novel is haunted by the history of the holocaust. Chabon presents the past as a distant constellation in the sky, a space onto which we project our dreams—and our nightmares.

At first, you don’t notice it in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: history. At first you are simply in a new place, but hearing an old story. We’re in Alaska, but with Isaac Bashevis Singer, or even Kafka, in a Yiddish Central European ghetto. Wait, no, we’re in a hard-boiled detective novel, something that Paul Auster might write, with a healthy dose of Pynchon (whose last publication also used the detective genre to explore a past historical moment, in his case the sixties counterculture). Wherever we are, everything is dislocated, fragmented, and jumbled together in the haze of Detective Meyer Landsman’s hangover, which starts the novel.

Gumshoe-cum-snowshoe novel? Hard-boiled egg and chicken-fat novel? Shamus story? Humphrey Bogart with his yiddeshe momme?

The immediate plot grabs your attention as Chabon begins to fill in the background details of Meyer Landsman’s life. But as the novel develops, one begins to see that there’s a larger history informing the story. Chabon has situated his novel within a path not taken, the aborted effort to make the Alaska territories open for resettlement by Jews fleeing Hitler. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this effort actually succeeded.

But the brilliant move Chabon makes is to never explicate this larger history. Instead, he folds it into the story, like the meat in a cabbage roll. You bite into the leaves of the plot first, following the wrinkly, comical surfaces of Landsman’s misadventures. It’s good. But then—oy!—there’s a far richer, more fulfilling flavor within.

He picks up the shot glass that he is currently dating, a souvenir of the World’s Fair of 1977. …He lifts the glass and toasts thirty years gone since the Sitka World’s Fair. A pinnacle of Jewish civilization in the north, people say, and who is he to argue?

— Michael Chabon

The detective story that is in the foreground of the novel echoes two deeper mysteries that the reader must solve: first, what happened in this history? Second, what light does it shed—askance—on the existing history of the Jewish diaspora in the aftermath of the holocaust?

It’s as if Walter Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis in 1940, made it out of Spain and lived. Only there’s something different going on here.

Chabon has a different take on Benjamin’s notion of how we should understand history. Rather than “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger,” as Benjamin famously suggested in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Chabon shifts the equation. He seizes hold of a moment as it flashes up in a memory of danger. Which is to say his entire novel takes place within a moment that never occurred, but which is filled with dread, which somehow comes to count for more than the actual past.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. …a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin

In the corner by the door stands the famous Verbover clock, a survivor of the old home back in Ukraine. Looted when Russia fell, then shipped back to Germany, it survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Berlin in 1946 and all the confusions of the time that followed. It runs counterclockwise, reverse-numbered with the first twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

— Michael Chabon

If Benjamin imagined history as Klee’s Angelus Novus, with its gaze on a pile of debris as a storm of progress pushed it relentlessly backwards into the future, then Chabon pictures history as something else from Benjamin’s imagination: it is shot through with “splinters of Messianic time,” which is to say the past always consists of all the pasts that did not become the past, but which remain, suspended, in the stars, intact, constellations of potential futures as yet undetected.

The clock of time ticks backward in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It ticks and explodes in a million directions. Drawing humor from the absurdities of diaspora and strength from the traumas of holocaust, the novel’s reverse flow has something to tell us about the way we think about history now: keep telling stories.

**

Incidentally, it seems to me there is a great study to be done on Alaska in the American cultural imagination. One thinks immediately of the strange, unfolding saga of Sarah Palin, but there’s also more, from the mega-successful Into the Wild to the now-forgotten Ken Kesey novel Sailor Song, from the uses of Alaska in Disney cartoons to the reality TV show Deadliest Catch, from the indigenous art of Native Alaskans to the use of Alaska in novels such as Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

**

Links:

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Literary Culture | 2 Comments »

#455 – Gloves Off: The Tantalizing Irony of Virtualized Artifacts

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

manipulating evidence (in a good way) and touching history.

X-post from Issues in Digital History.

While the buzz in digital history is currently emanating from “data-mining”—amassing large amounts of evidence in searchable digital form in order to develop algorithms that might detect new patterns and interpretations about the past—my work this quarter with students on a digital history of the folk music revival using the Berkeley Folk Festival Archives in Northwestern’s Special Collections library has made me consider a different side of the emerging field of digital history: not data-mining, but rather data manipulation.

Wait, we don’t manipulate data! That sounds like a bad thing at first, but what I mean is that the digitization of archival materials not only allows greater access to historical artifacts, but also, potentially, enables new ways of examining the materials in those collections. Whereas once librarians had to guard materials in order to safeguard them from decay, in digital form we can investigate artifacts in all sorts of ways.

We can rip them up, reassemble them, twist and turn them around and inside out or outside in; we can play the tape backwards, splice it up, conjoin it to other sounds; we can zoom in and out, set things in virtual motion, or make them still for a closer look; we can annotate in new ways, we can bring competing interpretations together around archival evidence with an immediacy that can be revelatory; we can place artifacts in relation to all sorts of other materials and information.

When it comes to historical archives, the irony of the virtual is that it actually makes materials more tangible. It allows us to take the gloves off and really touch history.

Of course, we have a long way to go in developing the right tools and creating the right conditions for more robust online learning environments that allow for the virtual examination of historical artifacts. We still need to figure out what tools work well for what materials, and how institutions can enable innovation of new tools by users themselves. We still need to work through legal and ethical issues of copyright as they pertain to special collections materials. And we need to figure out how digital repositories will continue to interact with their ancestors, those crucial material repositories; which is another way of saying we need to better understand how the real world and the virtual world intertwine in ways that make the pursuit of knowledge and the strengthening of historical competencies and, most of all, historical inquiry, expand.

As we nudge the materials of the past forward into the virtual realm of the future, let’s smudge that future up more with the past, shall we? For we can now leave our fingerprints behind on these thingless things.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Historical Culture | No Comments »

#454 – Digital History Beyond Bells and Whistles

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

interpreting interpretive digital history.

X-post from Issues in Digital History.

In my class this term—Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival—I have increasingly noticed how easy it is to perceive of the digital merely as “bells and whistles” and lose sight of what to me is the key question in the emerging field of digital history: how do digital tools, design, interactive components, and other capabilities allow us to interpret the past in freshly productive ways?

This slippage toward what we might call the “wow factor” is fine in one sense, for bells and whistles sometimes start out merely as decorative adornment or clanging attention-getters or just a lot of hot air, but then they turn out to reverberate far longer, and lead toward breakthroughs in interpretive historical meaning-making. What starts out as a gimmick sometimes becomes a key insight, or at least a tool for clarifying a historical question or issue.

But sometimes a gimmick remains just a gimmick. Which makes me wonder it there is something odd about the digital: it shifts us so quickly toward form and format, toward technical issues and complexities, that we can quickly forget the ways that digital history is still history, still devoted to the discipline’s difficult but essential task of using evidence as a springboard to develop interpretations and meanings out of the past in conversation with existing theories and arguments that are themselves grounded in explications of evidence.

Did books have this same quality back in the day? Were book makers and readers so taken by the Gutenberg press that they turned from the information in the books to a kind of superficial (or maybe even a deep) obsession with the form and technical capacities of print? I’m guessing they did. Certainly other communications media—radio, television, film—have done this. Form and content are never unrelated to each other.

So, we can draw upon a deeper history of technologies of communication and publication to make sense of our own moment. But so too, we can just simply keep our eye on the ball of interpretation, as it were, in addition to the bells and whistles of digitalness fancifulness.

If the digital pulls us toward aspects of history-making that can, at times, turn out to be superficial, we must right ourselves. For the purposes of digital history, even if you can’t get the video file to load correctly right away, even if the technical problems persist,  you can—we must—still think about what’s of use in putting the video file there in the first place. What’s the point of the digital for interpretive work? And, wait a minute, what in the first place is historical interpretation?

In the case of my course, the digital is only worth the effort to make it sing if it does so in duet with these core questions. Without interpretation as the central issue, all there is in digital history, it seems to me, is a dull thud or a shrill whine. Bells and whistles alone only make shallow sounds—no resonance. But the digital can, if we approach it effectively, inspire a far more robust engagement with the nature of historical inquiry itself.

This central issue of interpretation has, in fact, appeared so many times during the first weeks of my class that I have taken to always referring to the final assignments that students must complete as “Interpretive Digital History Projects” rather than just “Digital History Projects.” This forces students (and me!) to keep reminding ourselves that we are seeking to explore the digital’s potential to illuminate interpretation—whether about the history of the American folk music revival or the United States during the twentieth century or the archival materials in the Berkeley Folk Festival collection or some other relevant topic—rather than obsess over how to get all the bells dinging and the whistles tweeting.

Sure, we ultimately want flash and plugins and apps and embeds and links, we want to wow ourselves with digital derring-do and technical savoir faire, but only if our amazement serves our deeper quest to interpret the past more profoundly.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Folk Culture, Historical Culture | No Comments »

#453 – Talkin’ Sixties Historiography Blues

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

ramblin’ round your historical subfields.

X-post from U.S. Intellectual History blog comments.

Thanks for the post Ray. You got me going here on the topic. Apologies for the long, rambling post.

I wonder if it’s useful here to think particularly about intellectual history in relation to 60s historiography?

To that end, an unheralded overview of the decade is Howard Brick’s Age of Contradiction, which mapped out the ideological underpinnings of the 1960s around the theme of binary contradictions (authenticity and artifice; community and mass society; systems and the distrust of order; etc.). By going deeper into intellectual currents, and covering a wide range of texts and cultural artifacts, Brick moved past the now-stale contrast between participant memoir-history (I was there, man!) vs. post-60s generational resentment (will you ever get out of the way, baby boomers!).

But more to the point, I’d argue that if we build upon Brick’s work, one starts to see a number of schools of thought on the decade worth further consideration and clarification. Here’s three I can think of right away. There’s probably more.

(1) Movement studies: even more than participant-history, what defined so much early historical work on the 1960s was an effort to make sense of the amorphous but powerful movements on the left. How did their component parts (civil rights, peace movement, anti-Vietnam War, liberals, unions, New Dealers in government, communists, social democrats, counterculture,  communes, feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights movements, youth movement, etc.) fit together. I think these studies often revolved around debates between splitters (Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, for instance, solidified the contemporaneous distinctions between “politocs” and “freaks” as well as between men and women in around the rise of women’s liberation and between blacks and whites around the rise of militant black nationalism) and lumpers (Doug Rossinow’s amazing The Politics of Authenticity, which uses the case study of Austin Texas to notice the overlap between political activists in SDS and the counterculture). Sara Evans work can be included here, as it notices the roots of second-wave feminism in the African-American civil rights movement. I think you could place Jeremi Suri in the lumper camp too, because he creates a very broad definition of counterculture (Betty Friedan counts as countercultural in his recent article for JAH, Jeremi Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975,” American Historical Review 114, 1 (February 2009): 45-68) in order to link domestic and international politics. You could include many other studies. What they all share is the question of how the parts fit together ideologically to constitute an explosion of cultural and political energies in the 1960s.

(2) Conservative studies: in the last twenty years or so, as historians have grappled with the political and cultural success of the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” with the rise of the neoliberal New Democrats and the neoconservative right in American politics, there has been a loud call to capture stories and histories beyond the social movements on the left, to expand the historical tableau. David Farber and Jeff Roche’s essay collection on the conservative 1960s comes to mind here; Michael Flamm’s work on law and order; Nancy McLean’s study of contestations over the workplace and economic justice includes much on the right; and many other books. I think it’s fair to say that this subfield has fully arrived on the scene within the profession, even if there continue to be more cartoonish Woodstock hippies free love portrayals of the 60s in the popular imagination (why the lag here seems like a really important question!).

One book that moves between these two subfields of left movement history and conservative history is Rebecca Klatch’s work on the ideological links between libertarian right and left in both SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, those “Rebels with a Cause”) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Klatch, a sociologist, noticed that the libertarians found common cause in the counterculture’s anti-authoritarian, individualistic wing, where, as David Farber notes in a fabulous essay in the collection Imagine Nation, edited by Michael William Doyle and Peter Braunstein, about “outlaw” drug culture in relation to state power.

(3) Mass culture – Counterculture: Maybe you could fold this in to the movement studies focus, but I see many 1960s books of recent years concerned with the question of how culture industry related to the politics of the counterculture in the 1960s. But I’m separating it out here because it seems to me that this focus, like the conservative subfield, emerged out of later concerns with the commodification of dissent and the so-called “conquest of cool” in the 1980s and 90s. Tom Frank’s work is crucial here: his study of the advertising and marketing industries located the transition from mass culture to niche marketing and the selling of rebellion in the 1960s. Other works have tried to complicate Frank’s ideological undermining of some kind of stable, authentic counterculture movement in the 1960s. Julie Stephens’ unheralded book, Anti-Disciplinary Politics, is chock full of insights into the counterculture’s intersections with culture industry. Nick Bromell’s Tomorrow Never Knows is a memoir-history in the old school model, but it goes right at the topics of rock music and drugs that dominate popular representations of the 60s, and it does so with subtlety and sophistication. Fred Turner’s work on the ideological connections between counterculture and cyberculture, dating all the way back to systems theory in the research labs of the World War II years and transforming the search for harmonious community into rather nasty forms of neoliberal information economy exploitation, and Sam Binkley’s study of the counterculture’s ideological groundwork for the post-Fordist production and consumption of lifestyles, also bring far greater sophistication to Frank’s ideas about the conquest of cool. What all these studies share is a concern with the intellectual twists and turns of countercultural desires and their reincorporations into (or creations by!) corporate consumer capitalism.

I actually would argue that the field of 1960s history is poised to move past both the participants vs. non-participants binary and the conservative vs. radical history paradigm. At the center of this turn is letting go of questions of success or failure and turning instead to the ways that particular events, stories, archival source, memories, artifacts continue to resonate in contemporary perceptions of dilemmas and problems in American life as they relate to the deep wellsprings of American ideology and sensibility. Intellectual history (and cultural history too, I think) have some of the best tools for accessing this. Despite how much has been written, I think there is a surprising amount of work still left to do on the 1960s.

Posted in Culture Rover, Historical Culture, Sixties Culture | No Comments »