{word}{movement}{sound}{video}::performance::

::publication::

                                A DECLARATION OF INVITATION!

Whereas...
...to facilitate better communication to audiences believes that the act of live performance and its artifacts can serve as publication,

Inso thought of whatsoever...
...that publication is Public Action, further legitimated by proscription of capitalizing letters,

Further henceforth notwithstanding...
...the general public will please find old program information, director's notes, dramaturgy, journals, scripts in progress, scores, performance critiques, at the tothinkthethought

blog

(it's not a fancy button, but it's a button. Click it and you will travel to a foreign land.)

A PREEMPTIVE SELF-EFFACEMENT ABOUT THE DECLARATIVE!

Please don't let me alienate you. This really does make sense.  There is a logic to your sensations.
I often sound like I'm on an apocalyptic mission, but that swell of false self-aggrandizement usually happens when you're alone for too long.
    "Too many theories, too few stories," I recently eaves-read, implicated.
    "As a teenager I experienced Methodism instead of sex!," I promptly defend.
    "Nostalgia is decadent," declares David Hockney circa 1972, in retroactive poo-poo;
    "So is the declaration," I spit back, as if he didn't notice.
The declarative -- "it's a post-colonial thing".

A CONTINUED INSISTENCE ON INSISTING CONTINUALLY!

"I want participatory privacy, in public," is what I declare to my friend Mike about dance-making. "I suppose that's like ten people taking ten shits in ten individual port-a-potties made of one-way glass."  Oh, the human condition.  It always comes down to...it always comes down.  Radio show host Professor Tom confesses to once bruising his tail bone after falling in the shower, at which point discovering that, "your ass is connected to every part of your body."

My Mother, Reimagined, would like to make an interjection ...but not yet.

A FURTHER DECLARATION AGAINST THE MACHINERY
OF DANCE-GOD DEMAGOGUERY!

There is a certain culture within the dance community that shapes the choreographer as demi-god, whether by cult of technical excellence or by cult of personality.
Hazaa!         
A certain culture of impunity attaches itself to the art made because of this, a systemic lack of transparency that is as much a vestige of the patronage systems of classical ballet as the "tradition of the new" of early 20th century avant-gardism.
Wank wank!  
My issue with this is also that which I seek to address in my work, namely, that "we are not talking about it," and that the silence continues to legitimate Old World hierarchies sedimented in patriarchy, blind Hellenism, Orientalism/Eurocentrism, post-colonial parentalism, and fetishism.

Bonk triple slice!

AGAINST THE HEGEMONY OF HOMOGENEITY!
YES! IT'S A DECLARNATION!

I take representation seriously--yes, and personally.  How does one make satisfying art in these times, how does one proceed "authentically"? I believe my question is no different to that addressed in studios worldwide in all that has occurred post-60s utopianism (can we be color-blind? can we be body-blind? can we be real to everybody? can we all still name the elephant if we are playing pin-the-donkey with its tail?). The question is inherently geopolitical with geopolitical & ideological consequences.  Sasa Ascentic's recent lecture performance, My Private Biopolitics (2006 and ongoing), states with such clarity: "Who is it that owns contemporaneity? Who owns the competency of naming?". I could add: "Who, by naming, makes a spectacle of foreign identity? Who, by naming, thieves?"

Do we know our histories? In observation of collector's culture
in the museum franchise or arts market, we see little acknowledgment of pillage and
responsibility, that the long history of Othering geographically and culturally alien peoples is a profit-making enterprise (erm, excuse me, Miss, I believe we call that scapegoating). 
 What is my position in this system, as an object wanting to be curated?
What audiences have I for the spectacle of my outsidership?

At the root of such questions, for me, is the desire to help develop body literacy in ways specific to and engaged with context, in order to shatter stereotype (or, like Guy Fawkes, to make an effigy of it and celebrate its annual incineration).  Stereotypes are by nature dehumanizing, a useful tool in satire and slapstick (which I find in some forms to be necessary and highly evolved), but what usefulness do they have in the barter/trade/grant commerce of the arts market? We need more genres besides nationality and brand name to house us, and a large part of the onus to evolve this industry towards greater diversity of equal standings, as I see it, is for the artist itself to speak up. Where are you, dancer?

Oh! It's all so exotic!