Monday, 9 November 2009

GENERAL THOUGHTS



It’s All Relative (a place to put general thoughts)

hi guys, just created a category called VIDEOS. thought perhaps it's better to concentrate all the links in one place instead of having it inside separate categories as it may be easier for locating them. as a reminder, there is another folder called PICTURES. if you have published (or are going to publish) any video / pictures on you tube, picasa, flirck, etc send me the links to include them inside the folder, please. thanks, andrea

It’s All Relative (a place to put general thoughts)


when Chris spoke during his workshop about liminality and its relation to the rites of passage I was not sure I’ve agreed with that relation.


during the Research Seminar, thanks to nick’s contribution, things started to get clearer for me. it was probably at that point that the initial excitement i felt about liminality started to fade out…


what I still have in mind though were the relationships about birth, development, death that the sites suggest to me.


however, as I started my walk in search for the hospital something else came into focus. and it was the amount of bars, metal bars, I kept finding almost everywhere… bars as frontiers, bars that divides, bars that signal -kind of warnings?-, bars that speaks about differences.


i took lots of pictures on my way to the hospital as my interest suddenly moved towards social institutions and new questions came about.


interestingly, the play-ground is 'guarded' by it and so the hospital and the cemetery. what is the function of the metal bars in social institutions…? are they only found in spaces/places related to social institutions…?


as I stood in front of the old hospital the first thing that came to mind was the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest… tell you more about it soon, have to leave now… 
xx
andrea


GENERAL THOUGHTS












It’s All Relative (a place to put general thoughts) – Louise







Thoughts/notes on the locations and liminality etc:
The places assigned, among other things, can be seen to track human life – childhood/innocence (school playground), work/progress/culture (man-made hill), ageing/hope (hospital garden), death (Jewish graveyard).
Literally, the hardest places for us to access are the playground and the graveyard. (Childhood) innocence and death are the hardest places to reach and yet the only two places in life that all humans experience (birth – complete innocence – clean slate upon which to write a life. Death – the wiping of all future possibility, the liminality of life, the transitory nature of the moments by which it is catalogued in our minds, becoming still and coming to a close. Yet to the living, death (along with childhood innocence) seems most difficult concept to grasp.
A poem by John Clare that these thoughts bring to mind:
I Am
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.
-The poem demonstrates a liminal space within which we all experience life, separate from all others.
-The sentence at the end of the first verse crosses the volta into the next verse – where is it in that void in between?
-Clare longs for death, and compares it to the sleep of childhood, innocent.

Post 2
Louise Mothersole (Queen Mary University of London) wroteat 06:30 on 03 November 2009
-Liminality in words in poem – memory, shades, oblivion, rise and vanis, shadows, waking dreams, strange (alienation), scenes where man has never trod (does it exist if none has been there to experience it?)…etc.

Post 3
Leah P Lewis (London) wroteat 06:49 on 03 November 2009
What a great text for us to explore Louise! It really encapsulates the liminal, and it seems that we’ve got quite a fascination for it ( the liminal) as a group.
I have found something in response to an idea that came from Verity when the blog was first set up. If I remember rightly she was interested in the autobiographical/identity/ memory? See what you make of this by Lillah McCarthy:
The experience which I got from this adventure into autobiography was invaluable. it showed me that if I were to succeed in reliving my life in print I must not only dig into the records of my career and into my memory, but I must try also to find out what sort of person I was and am, and how I had gone on year by year performing the automatic miracle of growing up – changing constantly and yet retaining my identity… I must select and re-select from that wealth of material fact which had been assembled those things which I believe to have both some value in themselves and also as links which bind together past and present. Once I had grasped this idea I realized that no one could bring it to fruition for me.
( from ‘Auto/biography and identity: Women, Theatre and Performance’ by Maggie B.Gale and Viv Gardner.)
This reminds me of the ‘individual journey’ we were told to go on when we working with Simon Vincenzi.

Post 4
Louise Mothersole (Queen Mary University of London) wroteat 07:07 on 03 November 2009
Ooh very interesting. Memory, life journey, the moments that contribute to who we are, the Being in constant flux – what it is to be human.

Post 5
You wroteat 15:21 on 03 November 2009
Louise you noted that birth is – ‘complete innocence – clean slate upon which to write a life’ but is this actually death? I couldn’t help thinking about the graves when I read this and how a life was only lived once it had ceased and been concluded. Perhaps this links into Leah’s idea that to write an autobiography is almost to stop a life at that time, and draw conclusions: to summise. Perhaps the most interesting part of Moving Bodies is the collapse of that very notion, that void where they cross and cease to move, to breathe, to exist. I think that the play between our sites is of interest because theoretically we are being drawn by movement and motion – bodies and theory in flux. THE liminal space is surely that very point between life and death… (See dumb type – visuals, noises which vibrate your soul, crosses of life and death and moving bodies)
Love both texts too. Is this time to re-read The Trial? K’s lawsuit for not having moved in his life of mediocrity?

Post 6
Leah P Lewis (London) wroteat 17:41 on 03 November 2009
Trial – I like that word. 5bodiesmoving on trial…

Post 7
Vee Combé (London) wroteat 04:38 on 04 November 2009
This makes me think of the story of the american boxer, The Hurricane, which Bob Dylan sang about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Przbnf_bfU0
Here is a verse;
“Rubin Carter was falsely tried
The crime was murder ‘one’ guess who testified
Bello and Bradley the both baldley lied
And the newspapers they all went along for the ride
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fools hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.”
This also makes me think of prison as a kind of liminal space.
And the images of the Buddhist Monks that self immolated themselves in protest to the Vietnam war.
maybe you could listen to the song and watch the video.
http://www.desivideonetwork.com/view/190d4s09z/self-immolation-of-a-buddhist-monk/
The fact that a man, who has lived his life as a philosopher would choose to end his own life like that, in protest to other people’s deaths.
He did it out of love?
It throws me.

Post 8
Vee Combé (London) wroteat 05:02 on 04 November 2009
Clare – your comment about noises that vibrate you soul: it’s about reverbaration and resonance, that is why chanting is so special, because you put frequencies into your body, which give you a type of internal massage of sorts..we can do a 10 minute chanting workshop as a group if you guys are interested i can show you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUuCbeKAus&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY6z2hLgYuY

Post 9
You wroteat 15:38 on 04 November 2009
ive seen this before. and its shocking. i just dont think i could stand there and watch that happen. i think id run in to help, somehow. how can he be left to do that..













"MOVING BODIES" sent you a message on Facebook... Sunday, 1 November, 2009 19:51
Leah P Lewis sent a message to the members of MOVING BODIES.
--------------------
Subject: Moving Bodies meeting for Week 6
Hello pretties,
Regarding meeting for this week, I would suggest that an hour or so before Thursday's lab workshop with Anja Kirschner & David Panos, would be fine. This way we can discuss our individual findings etc but still have plenty of time to plough through the lab readings (there are many this week!).
So how about:
>Wednesday Nov 4th, between the library induction at 3 pm and Quorum (with Paul Heritage) at 5.15 pm
OR/AND
>Thursday Nov 5th at 10 am, before we watch the screening at 11 am
Your thoughts??



RE: Monday Monday, 26 October, 2009 12:10
From: "Claire Read" View contact details
To: "andrea biama" bellandreab@yahoo.co.uk

excellent!



RE: Monday Monday, 26 October, 2009 2:06
From: "Andrea Baima" bellandreab@yahoo.co.uk

hi guys, it seems the internet server’ engineers were compassionate enough to re-connect me to internet much earlier than the estimated 24 hours…

apparently… there are over 3 million sites starting with ‘moving bodies’… so, i’ve played around and finally got this address for our blog:
http://5bodiesmoving.wordpress.com/
have a look at it, please.

i’ve only managed to include something on the home and about pages and two links (to chris’ blog and bock/vincenzi’s page)

we’d need to set some time aside tomorrow to speak about it in depth: deadline to send jen the address is thrusday.

by then we should have put as much as possible from our notes into it + pics + videos or video-links.

here are two sites you could look at as a way of getting familiar with the blog:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/introduction/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/

give you all the details tmrw as i’m typing while sleeping,see that octopus flying?xxxxv aojrg'q g;


my third try to contact you all - computers are no longer my friends! Monday, 26 October, 2009 0:11
From: "Claire Read" clairelread@hotmail.co.uk

OK so I've read the feedback for the task to date i think.. I am still content to go the the two sites and the manmade hill in particular to look and explore. i think this is a neat touch because the hill is essentially a field of possibilities both physically and metaphorically. i have also read andrea's diar entries and found them useful especially as they drew my attention to the liminal once again. i think we willl have to go over the task set by chris once more to make sure we have a firm grasp on what we are being set this week. i had one other thought regarding the live bodies or their insertion during the presentation; last week whilst doing the watching through the window exercise with chris i was reminded of a piece by handke, the hour we knew nothing of each other which involves, would you believe, moving bodies and relations/aesthetics. perhaps because handke was mentioned my memory was jolted but when reading andrea's notes on the liminal phases of childhood and speech patterns i was reminded of another handke play where an infant learns to speak and know in the world. i think this is kasper. perhaps this falls in with the playground and childs play, the graveyard as the breakdown of speech in death - i cant remember the ending of kasper he may well die! - as well as the psychiatric hospital regarding the formation of knowledge.
finally, and sorry that this is a stream of conscience without much structure, handke's landmark play, offending the audience where the audience are told repeatedly that the play is not a play, the actors and not actors and to cut to the chase, the lines of matrix and non-matrix and a certain questioning of the sacred liminal space of the stage is ripped apart somewhat.


RE: Monday Sunday, 25 October, 2009 21:34
From: "louise mothersole" louise_mothersole@hotmail.com
good ideas everyone.

Good luck tomorrow! I'll get working on the music, based on the suggestions so far. And see you on Wednesday, Verity, to possibly do some vocal work.


RE: Monday Sunday, 25 October, 2009 16:55
From: "verity combe"
yes I would LOVE to do some live, distorted vocal work. It would have to be scored/scripted somehow, i don't much like random improvisation when it comes to the voice. I could possibly work on this with Louise independently once we've got some visual? I think it's important that they are connected somehow.
Thinking of this, in response to your thoughts on liminality, what springs to mind is a sentence that doesn't finish or is continuously repeated, with no beginning and no end, almost like a chant of somekind.
or maybe an in-between.. trance-like state...


RE: Monday Sunday, 25 October, 2009 14:31
From: "Andrea Baima" bellandreab@yahoo.co.uk
hi guys,
i’m sharing in attachment the thoughts i’ve got so far (ignore bits in spanish, not relevant).

also, here are couple of examples that helps me to understand liminality:

-a child learning to speak: trying to articulate, to pronounce, to verbalize but not quite doing it properly

-the pre-teenager period: we are aware that we are changing but don’t know exactly how our voice would be afterwards, how big our breast is going to grow, how much body hair are we actually going to have, etc. etc.

so, in my view, during the liminal period one does not know precisely what the final outcome is going to be; there is suspense, ambiguity, doubt, confusion, uncertainty… louise… do you think music / sound might go along those lines?

in relation to have something ready vs. live music… live may be great as a way of doing something different from last week. but i wouldn’t mind if its pre-recorded.

any suggestion / preference guys? personally: considering you’re busy louise… just see what works better for you
(and… break a leg on performance! see you there)

verity: would you be willing to do some voice work, whether recorded / live? i love your voice, it worked really well when you worked with the other group… how does it sound?

thanks clair for checking about technological issues.

THOUGHTS
SUNDAY 25.10.09
-distorted sound / music
-distorted voice
---
Saturday 24.10.09
-Photoshop: cemetery / hill / archipelago / tunnel / field / island
-Try getting into any building’s roof surrounding the cemetery to get a shot from above to have better angle to zoom
-To blurred images in the video as to give an impression of not knowing, a sense of lack of clarity but at the same time revealing movement or figures / shapes… no one would know exactly what is happening as when one is within the liminal there are might be confusion, uncertainty, suspense, ambiguity, doubt, nebulous obscurity…
---
Friday 23.10.09
image:
(no video image on @ this point)
cluster of entangled bodies on the floor, heads are not visible to audience. wearing a neutral mask (reference to liminal stage: I’m not what I was, neither know yet what I’ll be)
at a certain point bodies start moving –very slow movements- as to start disentangling (transforming oneself from the liminal space / time to something different)
attention moves suddenly towards the images on video but then… what are the bodies doing now? are they frozen / disappeared from audience view?
---
Thursday 22nd October 2009
Spanish cementry.
Roots that are not mine.
Forced inheritance.
Tango. Mate. Bandoneon. DieGOTAN tanos piano piano nacio el tango…
To find a different path, to open wide love’s notebokes. Que bueno, che… reirnos como hermanos…de murga y de compas…
Liminality, Chris: space bring him anxiety: tunnel vs. two doors away from the street, does it make a difference the space from where we perceive?
Me estoy encurdando con el tinto y el GOTAN… ah ja! Ah ja! ja ja!
21.15: totally drank now.


RE: Monday Saturday, 24 October, 2009 21:35
From: "louise mothersole"
Hallo all,
I am in complete agreement about us being present in an actual performance on Thursday.

What kind of music would we like? I could compose something like before, or we could even have some sort of live music during the performance if we'd like? The world is our lobster.


RE: Monday Saturday, 24 October, 2009 17:31
From: "Claire Read" clairelread@hotmail.co.uk
Hey, yes I agree that to insert our bodies on the Wednesday session would be a good idea - we are, after all, Moving Bodies!


Monday Saturday, 24 October, 2009 14:35
From: "Andrea Baima" bellandreab@yahoo.co.uk

i’d like to propose trying to add our physical presence during the showing to go with the video projection, anything, however little.  perhaps we won’t manage perhaps it won’t work well but if there is agreement we could try something on wednesday?

then, louise… how about joining us on wednesday afternoon for that and also if there is agreement… would you be willing to prepare some music again?  it did really worked last thursday…

what everybody else think...?

***
posted by Andrea


21.10.09 WEDSNDAY
pass by the cementry and took advantage to take pictures of it.

the first thing that called my attention when I’ve read the file with our sites was a sign in the cemetery: ‘we’are all equal in death’, what about in life…?

While walking around the cementry I’ve noticed that some of the tombs are actually surrounded by a metal frame, a kind of on purpose built frame and made me questioned how equal we are in death when actually a barrier /frontier / difference is created by those bars…?

Then, what called my attention was the way trees are planted: they follow the same pattern as tombs: they look like an army as Galeano wrote when making a comparison between human planted trees and Nature growing tress. Horrible feeling. Diversity encapsulated into uniformity without the chance to interact with little communities around. Does it correspond to our ‘contemporary’ times…? all uniformed, encapsulated under a disguise called diversity and freedom of choice?


19.10.09 MONDAY
IMAGE
(for a group performance)
all wearing masks that covers the whole head or neutral masks and a kind of brown (for some reason I saw it brown!) overall (although NOT a proper bib overalls as they might be linked to a particular  gender).

In my mind the image doesn’t read ‘uniformity’ as I can see different heights / body shapes.  It read more as a non-recognisable (in terms of gender) human

No idea yet though what the image is trying to say in relation to the theme… which actually… it hasn’t being defined yet!


IDEAS
-to speak with a local rabbi and find out about that sentence written at the cemetery: ‘we are all equal in death’
-to interview a school teacher (school whose playground is in our cluster): do children from illegal immigrants attend school?


***
18.10.09
for tuesday 20th october 2009

A shot of an underground train arriving followed by (camera on hands):
1-painting nails
2-one hand gets the red colour nail varnish
3-when applied is colourless

Length: 1’13”

This was my metaphor of a typical day of mine… travelling on the underground and setting things to do and ending doing something totally different…

Also, there was my statement about gender: when I was growing up varnishing nails was a distinctive female feature. 

However, at the same time, my performance speaks of something that not always goes as expected: gender is been constructed with time not something acquired at birth. 

Finally, it also became my response to the film we saw last week as part of the workshop with Chris: Hail the New Puritan.  Because of the gender reference, the mundane activities of everyday life, artists do similar things to the rest of the people, and finally the pushing of boundaries as having an unexpected varnish colour.

***
As part of the documentation of my responses, I also recorded two other shorter pieces (to be postes asap):
-repeatedly: a hand coming out from a curtain pointing at you (as in the WWI advert) and disappearing…

-a hand appears unexpectedly and very close in front of the camera, it turns and point to it directly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCf5dMyarBs


***

thrusday 15.10.09
thoughts after the meeting first group meeting
-to dance tango my style
-photo: hands pressing the wall

RECORD
-Come down from that tree, che: you look like a boy!

***
-Could I go with you and your friends hunting, daddy?
-I’m so sorry sweet heart; I can’t take you with me…

***
-could I go fishing with you this weekend, daddy?
-I’m afraid I can’t take you sweet heart
-why not? Why you never want to take me?
-you are a girl, you can’t come with me and my friends… I’m so sorry sweet heart…

***
-I want to go be an astronaut!
-I’m afraid only men are astronauts, darling…

(distort voices)
***
-come in, come in… well, men… let me introduce Andrea… the first woman to work as a journalist in this section of the newspaper
***
Enrique: who is going to cover the conference today?
Boss: we’ll send the girl (pause. To Andrea) Girl, you’ll have to be at the Cultural Central in two hours…

IMAGES
-Two hands behind a turning table, trying to push it
-curved body, head hidden inside a basket, hands trying to push the back wall
-Person inside a huge cylinder.  Hand managed to reach the border, then the head only to realise that on the other side is the inside of another cylinder bigger, and then there is another and another and another…
-camera on hands:
1-painting nails
2-one hand gets the pink/green/whatever colour nail varnish
3-when applied is colourless

***
-repeatedly: a hand coming out from a curtain pointing at you (as in the WWI advert) and disappearing…

*** 

-(speedily and energetically, one after the other, images)


1st CLUSTER:
.Michael Clark’s scene of Hail the New Puritan (buttocks?)
Sara Lukas instead
.english zeppelin
.margaret / miners on the street


2nd CLUSTER:
.reagan
.liberty statue (mocked? with a coke instead of the torch or something like it?)
.Guerrilla Girls’ billboard 1989: ‘Do Women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?’


3rd CLUSTER:
.menem
.maradona / tango / obelisco
.graffiti

*** 

where did those ideas came from…? 

Well I’ve supposed they were part my response to the film and part my response to my group decided to work on.  However, re-reading Barthes The Death of the Author ‘(…) a text is (…) a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ p146

and reading an analysis of the Death of the Author by John Lye, he said: ‘We do know that the creative process seems often to 'take over' the original intentions and meanings of the author’ http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.php (Accessed 20.10.09)




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