When your book meets life: Last night I saw Keith Hennessy‘s Turbulence, and when I picked up my book this morning, I read this:
“But what if the global networks that are commonly invoked to speak about flows of people, ideas, capital, and commodities were thought as a mass whose organization is not reducible to the regularity of the grid or the mesh, and has properties such that, like felt, we
could find an important provocation: the possibility that all spiral strands in a swath of felt cohere without necessarily connecting, even the most ostensibly connective meshworks might well have nodes that will never touch, that will maintain a tense and tensile proximity without ever connecting? ….. The word text and textile share the same etymological root, the Latin verb texere, meaning to “weave.” Felt has a different composition altogether. It is a non-woven fabric, a body without axes, created through the multiple random interlockings of spiral strands. The material owes its structural integrity to the chance bindings among its irregular spiral fibers. Felt is arrived at through leaving-to-chance – even if it is a methodical and meticulous leaving-to-chance…. ”
The double-entendre of the word “felt” does not go unnoticed. The book this text is from is called “Felt” by Chris Thompson – about a meeting between Joseph Beuys and HH the Dalai Lama – how the seemingly uninspired gathering actually led to so much over time. Performance has this, can be this- a provocation for deeper enmeshment, more meaningful connection, and a barometer of alienation. – we don’t know what will come of it, and that potential is bittersweet.
Turbulence as a performative event, brought together a ton of strands, as a work it defined its space through the composition of the framing, the edges, the flows, the navigations, the behaviors and persona shined through. To bring the wildness of spontaneous decision-making is not in anyway new, but with these set of parameters, these people, Turbulence might be making a felt that pushes us into novel forms and perturbs us to face the ways we strive for comfort, or make order and use aesthetic impulses as a means to mean. Beautiful work by the performers – Julie ,Jorge, Gabriel, Empress Jupiter, Emily, Laura, Jesse, Hana, Ruairi, Jassem, Keith, and the guests Ray Chung, Anna MW, and Brontez Purnell.
Go to YBCA tonight in SF if you can. It is worth it.
In the van with Abby, Beth, and Kira — talking of the show- somehow perhaps this quote speaks to an underlying address of the piece in relation to economy. Perhaps, more apt, the piece is an enmeshment of a group of individual’s own views and grappling with their own economies as expressed through performative action?
I do wonder also, after seeing the interconnectedness of the group, how were they touched by this, how were we moved, when do the enmeshments open up for us? – this interests me. And what is this to feel the other? Although this isn’t necessarily a primary thread in the piece, it shines through like a glaring meteor with the discussion of love and acts of caring’s enigmatic nature amidst a highly challenging world. Afterwards, I am hungry for some real talk about economic breakdown, as if what we saw was a demonstration of the breakdown from all the talk. — what does the body do when it is amidst a break down? From the dissonance, there is certainly potential
And one more felt quote: “we regularly find fabrics enlisted as metaphors for processes of integration, organization, cohesion-on a micro- and a macro- scale. The weave operates as the default formation for any fabric enlisted as a trope for organizing discourse; does the figure of a non-woven material like felt displace the grammar of our terminologies enough to open up new territories for thinking a multitude formally, to render it as the fabric of interhuman intrigue? …There is…no overarching definitional structure for felt, at least not in the sense that one can predict the particular configuration that a bit of felt will take onnot in the sense that one can forecast where certain strands will connect, or fail to connect, with others”
Pretty uncanny for Turbulence. hugs, mg