TORONTO, ON — Scientists have found a control switch that regulates stem cell “pluripotency,” the capacity of stem cells to develop into any type of cell in the human body.
The word pluripotency informed my performance of Y at SOMA Fest. Pluripotency is the potential of a cell to develop into more than one type of mature cell, depending on environment, aka: that the DNA of a cell can fully transform through the living. This term came up through my performance research earlier in the day in Santa Monica as a source for my dancing – a question to dance with and a knowing, at the same time.
Y (Pluripotency) was also led by by the seasonal element earth, and the great history and environment of the gallery space of Highways, LA. I was inspired to be on top of many many names drawn with marker, as I nestled, sweat, and danced to tunes in my white cell after I painstakingly taped it up. Over the hours I spent warming up into the space with the ebb and flow of the other performers and folks that work there, I came to read over and over and learn many of the names, and realized they were all dead, I am thinking from AIDS because of the famous ones. I read them attentively.
As Arawana Hayashi spoke of the traditional Japanese dance form she practices, bagaku, she told the story that we in bodies as the living have the ability to resonate the environment with our movement, and stomping on the earth helps the ancestors, considered radishes, grow. In bagaku, to dance is literally to nourish the departed, which in turn supports life. Perhaps this is some other inverted/non-linear/creative link between lineage and pluripotency?
I wonder about that aspect of alchemy/magic how it is timeless in a way, that through our actions we can shift the past (…..) is pluripotency something like that? I feel that some time when I do my movement practices, I am changing the very roots and connections of my heritage. Moshe Feldenkrais talked about this, and how being mobilized for action, all action, indeed was a kind of being independent of heritage – a terrifying concept and yet an empowering one, at the same time. There are so many perspectives: art, science, sacred. It is a thrill to be able to work with the approaches, curate them, draw from them, and live arts seems to provide some critical space for this synsthesis of epistemologies – dance as poetry as research as….
I wrote this and said it to the crowd before I entered into the cell:
This circle is on top of the earth
The earth here in LA is golden
In this room, the circle covers words written on the floor
They are names of the beloved
who are gone.
Let the names rise.
Y is a piece of ongoing performance research since 2002. More info here. It is currently a piece that takes place in a big cell, a la Daffy Duck, with a sound score both live or recorded by Kadet. Original 30-second dramaturgy came from George Lugg, whose great idea was to let the circle grow from the wall to take over a whole area and envelop. And mysterious influences by sharing studio space with GT. David Hurwith called the big circle environment classical! Upon request, he gave me a 30-second dramaturgy for this Highways version to help me understand earthness in cells, which he described as a gentle pull that draws the matter-ness/that-which-has-weight within towards the center.
Kadet,
I am listening to the sound score this morning you have been working on and I wanted to let you know that it is really incredible what you have done – made some of the previous words of Y come alive into a new breath with your own mark so strong and clear. Somehow, through the alchemy of your making, the words have retained their story yet they are taken out of the literal into sound and texture and space. It is very moving, and I look forward to seeing what we are moved to do in the moment on Friday night.
What I am working on is how I am setting up the space. From center to opening….a kind of pulse in the arc of it? Not sure how to achieve it yet, but it is brewing. I want the circle space to be quite small this time and I’ll cover it with aluminum foil. Silver- metal- fall, the chinese energetics obvious, and there are so many associations, like reflection, the mirror, and the mirror pieces I worked on in Troy, like when Eric Hoffsten covered his whole dorm room with foil freshman year – the phenomenon of it was so goofy, and so cool for the punky nerd gothness of it. The idea, then, is kind of funny, and the joke is a portal to a different kind of joke, one that is more resonant with the power of the piece: as a kid, one of my favorite things to do was to eat Ring Dings, and yes, they were delicious with their chocolate coating, and slimy sweet partially-hydrogenated center layer, but it was about the afterwards that mattered, that I would then have in my hands a precious piece of tinfoil that I could work with, clean, and clear. My job was without any question, to smooth it out. This gets at an essence of the purification of metal, but for this Y, what is even more compelling is that the tinfoil is like a tablet for writing, be it making forms or purifications through erasure. I want to set up a construction for Friday where there is a tablet for writing that may not be visible but connects to one of my own ancient first-art writing rituals (Another had to do with Andes Candies, but that is for another time!). The breath and purification, and the contraction and expansion of fall/Metal, associated with breath and elimination (Lung, Large Intestine). We are in the eye of it now, the Y of it.
I can’t even yet deal with the fact of 11/11/11. It is really too beautiful and potential to understand, with the full moon coming up tonight and the Hunbatz Men’s crystal skulls on their way west to LA: http://crystalskullsevent.com/index.html
So, let’s dance and make the music, and see what happens. I am interested in how bright the moon will glow into the space on Friday.
I have been noticing in my own work that there is all this construction and revision and consent and creation and real-time that takes place, and then in the end there is an aspect to making the art where it turns in and has to be offered up for my own vital force, that that indeed is the way to engender the deepest effect, and that for me this is around the writing, and it is through this aspect that the meaning is made, the signature signed, the life breathed into it. As I discovered years ago through my work with inscriptions, this writing is not so obvious and not so literal, rather there is this realm for me called writing, or righting (or wrighting), where the meaning is inscribed into space, into the body/environment. I feel excited to see what can emerge through the foil, and feel further en-deepened through your invitation for me to blog on it all
Hugs, mg
These photos were taken by Amar Chaudhary, fellow performer at Milkbar 11-11-11, Oakland CA (with a video still by Ian Winters, as well). Y is currently an evolving duet with Kadet, who in this incarnation of Y grew it, dynamizing the score and incorporating Y text into the piece using my recorded voice with her audio mastery; it shook it up in a beautiful way. Somehow the piece is expanding….
Though the habitat of the piece condensed into a smaller sphere (and because of it?),
It busted open......
