Let me talk at an angle to this: about what it means for something --
an imagining -- to "take on a life of its own". For example, I may
have an idea for a new "genre" of performance, an idea which appears to me
with complete clarity. Yet, when trying to implement an example of
this genre, I hit an insurmountable obstacle: I can find no way to map
this clarity into external material relationships. The clarity of the
imagining acquires an inaccessibility very akin to the clarity of a dream.
Eventually, I may find a mapping and proceed to make a piece and then
perform it. Right from the start of these processes, the piece -- and
the genre, of which I have never before seen an example -- acquire a life
of their own. I no longer examine _myself_ to understand what I am doing,
I must examine the piece itself, its physical being -- I have to
understand _it_ to understand myself. As soon as it begins to be
made, it demands to be made differently: I feel this demand through
displeasures of various kinds: aesthetic displeasure, displeasure of
the body as it labors to execute the piece, the perceived "wrongness" of
the piece's interactions with the environment. I have to understand my
displeasures, and permit the understanding to transform both my imagining
and my material circumstances: it may turn out, for example, that a new,
hitherto unheard-of skill needs to be learned. And it invariably turns out
that what the piece needs to be, and what I, as its executor, need to
be, is very different from what I started out with. What goes on here?
What kind of "truth", what kind of dreaming, what kind of understanding?
- malgosia
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an imagining -- to "take on a life of its own". For example, I may
have an idea for a new "genre" of performance, an idea which appears to me
with complete clarity. Yet, when trying to implement an example of
this genre, I hit an insurmountable obstacle: I can find no way to map
this clarity into external material relationships. The clarity of the
imagining acquires an inaccessibility very akin to the clarity of a dream.
Eventually, I may find a mapping and proceed to make a piece and then
perform it. Right from the start of these processes, the piece -- and
the genre, of which I have never before seen an example -- acquire a life
of their own. I no longer examine _myself_ to understand what I am doing,
I must examine the piece itself, its physical being -- I have to
understand _it_ to understand myself. As soon as it begins to be
made, it demands to be made differently: I feel this demand through
displeasures of various kinds: aesthetic displeasure, displeasure of
the body as it labors to execute the piece, the perceived "wrongness" of
the piece's interactions with the environment. I have to understand my
displeasures, and permit the understanding to transform both my imagining
and my material circumstances: it may turn out, for example, that a new,
hitherto unheard-of skill needs to be learned. And it invariably turns out
that what the piece needs to be, and what I, as its executor, need to
be, is very different from what I started out with. What goes on here?
What kind of "truth", what kind of dreaming, what kind of understanding?
- malgosia
------------------