bodycity at Late Night Snack — Tuesday, 9/30, 7:30pm

Late Night Snack
at BPD at the REDCAT lounge

Tues­day, Sep­tem­ber 30 at 7:30pm

We will be debut­ing bodyc­ity XII: more tales from Future Mountain

Here are some keywords/phrases/ideas:

labor of love: giv­ing birth, car­ing for chil­dren just born and elders or invalids soon to die, gar­den­ing, clean­ing house, home repair, rebuild­ing cities/communities after war or dis­as­ter — rugged and mon­e­tar­ily unre­ward­ing work that is wholly nec­es­sary for sur­vival. Move­ments that are fluid but heavy and mus­cu­lar, seem­ingly invol­un­tary like a heartbeat.

women (work­ing) in war times: My Nana worked in a fac­tory dur­ing WWII fab­ri­cat­ing nylon para­chutes. Since all of the nylon was going to the war effort, ladies stock­ings were very hard to find so the women in her fac­tory drew lines up the backs of their legs to stand in place of the dark seams of actual stock­ings. The main­te­nance of Amer­i­can fem­i­nin­ity in recent his­tory is faci­nat­ing behav­ior. In war times,this fem­i­nine iden­tity seems to be split into a few arche­types: (1) the iconic notion of woman as the sweet sex sal­va­tion for sol­diers who’ve sac­ri­ficed their minds and bod­ies for coun­try, (2) the proud mother, devoid of sex­u­al­ity who blind­ingly sup­ports of her men in uni­form by ful­fill­ing her own duties of sus­tain­ing the labors of her home, (3) the griev­ing mother, wife, daugh­ter who has lost and is made beau­ti­ful by her sense of honor. For­tu­nately, we can add a few more iden­ti­ties to this list: (4) the pro­tester, hys­ter­i­cal and pas­sion­atly close to self-destruction, (5) the female sol­dier, a still feared anom­aly who marches as unflinch­ingly as the next man, (6) The vic­tims — moth­ers, wives, daugh­ters who are killed or sur­vive acts of war inflicted upon them and their fam­i­lies, they are char­ac­ter­ized by shock.

Arche­types are fod­der: sum­mon up and emu­late their move­ments but don’t go over­board with mim­icry. Oblique ref­er­ences are always more effec­tive than attempt­ing lit­eral trans­la­tions — they allow your view­ers to fol­low you along to the next idea with­out get­ting stuck in their own train of thought. For exam­ple: move­ment can reflect fac­tory work by being repet­i­tive and ref­er­enc­ing the mechan­i­cal nature of an assem­bly line with­out lit­er­ally act­ing it out. Also bor­row from/bastardize rag time, swing, pin-up styles to F with the iconic notion of women as sweet sex salvation.

For me, this is also related to women in times of dis­as­ter. I think it is impor­tant to imag­ine our­selves in the actual areas of war or weather, the prac­tice of domes­tic mys­ti­cism — there is some­thing other-worldly about the raw, post-apocalyptic iden­tity of survivors.

domes­tic mys­ti­cism: find­ing tran­scen­dence in the domes­tic atmos­phere, locat­ing one­ness with the uni­verse at home — I’m think­ing about an embrace and glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of domes­tic­ity — it is humor­ous and tongue-in-cheek: the end­less and mys­te­ri­ous nature of refrig­er­a­tor mold, see­ing the future in cof­fee grounds, mourn­ing the past on a reflec­tive linoleum floor, etc. It is the belief in one’s own cor­po­real real­ity.
I think that this idea can trans­late into call­ing out our rela­tion­ship with the phys­i­cal struc­ture we’re in by ‘washing/watching’ the win­dows — arc­ing arm move­ments, jump­ing with arms up, ‘sweep­ing’ the floor — any sweep­ing of limbs , ‘paint­ing the walls’ — slow motion flail­ing and heavy contact…handstands that melt onto the floor and then do it again. Fol­low through and see how far you can develop it — can you push it so far that you hardly rec­og­nize it?

hearts are invol­un­tary,
M