so i’ve allowed myself to get a little jumbled and flustered regarding all of this posting stuff, but i’m trying to press on. hopefully, i will be breaking down a number of ideas over the next couple of days (i thought that one of my main reasons for coming out here was to work toward some level of organization!)…
it is my sincere belief that i will be better served by thinking of my independent work as a social business. i’ve seen my efforts grind down in the past because i have resisted casting the work in a business framework. but, y’know, that’s how things work in this country – it is hard to have your work culturally validated if you do not agree to bring your goods to market, so to speak. there is academic work, which happens in a rarified vacuum. there is the ‘downtown’ model that seeks to appeal to the sensibilities of mostly only other artists. and there are the regional scenarios which have become increasingly more grotesquely corporate (where is the space for an artist to function when s/he’s being plugged-in as a kind of focus group chit?).
so i’ve tried to think about my work in the grossest terms, as being a quid pro quo barter. i want it to be something wholly integrated, with readily apparent values, while not being oversimplified. i came out here thinking that i was going to concentrate on dealing with the work in mostly pragmatic ways: improve the training system associated with the work; generate materials to help future collaborators learn the sign language text; work on marketing materials. but in getting there, i’ve been working in a really sprawled out manner. i train, i compose etudes, i memorize text, i research.
i love the training stuff. my most immediate masters (Ellen, Moni, and Felix) all hail from integrated, fully developed systems that bring into coherence ways of knowing and seeing thru practical organization of the body. one way of creating is by manipulating the laws that govern the coordination of the body – being able to submit to them, reduplicate them, and arrange them in such a way that the ineffable then has a way to enter the world thru you.
i think about Mr. Suzuki, Decroux, and Vakhtangov and how they must have arrived at their systems. i know they weren’t working alone like me and i know they expressed ethos in a much different way than i do. but then their work, the plays and performances that they created, had a much different cultural avenue. performance meant something different and the effort to create performance was not something akin to bartering time for money, as it unfortunately is in this country. i do not doubt that we still live in a time when the self-possessed artist can spring forth and forge a relationship with the larger world based on the artist’s attention to his vertical understanding of his imagination and work. it certainly helps if that atist can generate a magnetism and compelling spectacle while unpacking their ethos. (i think of Bill Irwin, i think of Richard Maxwell.) but i do think that the avenue to the public’s awareness and attention is more than ever based on who an artist is rather than how an artist works.
so it’s been important for me to confront my attitude toward the breath, stamina, stability, flexibility, and fluidity. i’ve been generating exercises that test and build strength in these areas. these exercises are based on everything i’ve learned from my masters, and other sources. they are arrived at via a sort of creative sprawl – very akin to that feeling in rehearsal of groping forward blindly.
overall, as a seeker (or apprentice) – it falls to me to usurp the master. we cannot remain disciples our whole lives. on the road to self-mastery, it behooves the seeker to preserve his isolation and mobility. that is the best way to come by multiple new knowledges - to travel to new places unburdened by particular obligations to people or beliefs.
INDIAN BASIC SKETCH from Danyon Davis on Vimeo.
