Recent Pieces Published Elsewhere

January 9, 2022

Editor and publisher of Gathering Space a chapbook which was distributed in bookstores and galleries throughout NYC for free, Spring 2021

Imagining- “Meditations on Computers and Presence in the Age of Distance” (Inaugural Issue, Fall 2020)

Currents 2020 Equilibrium and Balance– “A Note on Process” (Summer 2020)

InfiniteBody “Artists Reach Out: Aynsley Vandenbroucke” (Spring 2020)

Pidgin –  26 Short Assignments for Pidgin 26” (Fall 2019)

PAJ- A Journal of Performance and Art – “Bodies of Silence, Parts of an Essay” (Fall 2019)

Seneca Review“Statement of Divorce” (Spring 2018)

Movement Research Performance Journal- On Practice

BOMBlog- Interview with Brian Rogers

Performance Club- Reflections on an All Day Event

The Brooklyn Rail- Imaginary Education in the History of Written Dances

Critical Correspondence- Karinne Keithley in conversation with Aynsley Vandenbroucke

An Imaginary Education in the History of Written Dances

July 15, 2011

Published in The Brooklyn Rail (July- August 2011)

George Balanchine would type in black and white. The words would be classical with modern, jazzy moments, all laid out in a symmetrical fashion. The letters would be very thin.

Martha Graham’s written dance would be filled with, ahem, contractions.

Let’s look up, sob.
Don’t!
Won’t!
Can’t!
She’ll fall.
She’ll roll.
She’ll strike a leg o’er the air.

Merce Cunningham’s written dance would be a wide open field of words, nothing more important than others. The words would be picked by chance and new words would be made by combining independent letters. It would be virtuosic, which I have yet to figure out, and it might look a bit like John Cage’s writing.

Yvonne Rainer, during the time of Trio A, might have made a written dance with no involvement of the writer and reader, no capitalization, no punctuation.

step off the curb move jump um turn stand on one leg spin stand on one leg sit move use a yeah word don’t look do look um breathe stand right arm um forward flow stop begin stand turn one leg to side one arm to side or use the

 

Steve Paxton:

 

And Pina Bausch might have included writing in this new spectacle made in a foreign country. I give you the press release.

For Immediate Release:
March 21, noon.
Pina Bausch presents the premiere of Rite of Spring in the South Pole.
One stage covered in ice two miles deep, 15 female dancers in thin slip dresses, 25 penguins, 150 falls—including the sun which will be setting for the last time until it rises again in September.

And Online #1

October 3, 2016

Welcome to the first installment of an online project related to And, the performance I’m making to premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017 (Thursday-Saturday at 8, Sunday at 3).   And uses experimental literary devices to create a series of live, three-dimensional essays.   I’m playing with the lines between fact and fiction, narrative and abstraction, legibility and complexity, working with–and against–the roles of formal structures in writing, moving, and making a life.

In this website part of the project, my rehearsal, video, image, and writing experiments in progress alternate with excerpts from other people’s writing.  I’m interested in the ways all of this language (quoted, projected, animated, written and/or physical) can converse, offer ideas – sometimes contradictory, and create associations rather than pin down any one meaning.  I’ll post a new page like this about once a month.

Some words:  Wildness, marriage, structure, body, language, power, sex, art, dance, teaching, performance, contradiction, form, divorce, friendship, love, hate, actually knowing someone, work, play, imagination, honesty, creating, experience, meaning, application, energy, submission, meditation, feminism, Hillary Clinton, poetry, solitude, university, uncertainty, community, hierarchy, denial, scholar, artist, lists, numbers, ecstasy, not-knowing, text, imagination, children, student, class, religion, falling apart, practice, erotic, connection, personal essay, Spalding Gray, female, male, aging, ambiguity, lecture, conversation, contract, syllabus, stability, mobility, coherence, lyric essay, known, dominance, questions, answers, association, House, home, non-monogamy, family, autobiography, fear, theory, reality, beginning, ending, property, dailiness, life, generosity, categories, organization, real life, and, or, commitment, depth.


“This work is all very disobedient, in a way it picks up where Disobedience left off; but it doesn’t lecture as much or shake its fist so, is less interested in the so called real than in denying its existence in favor of the real real.” Alice Notley from “The Poetics of Disobedience” 

“Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.” Rebecca Solnit from “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”

“The text is a performance on a page. Text is more than a description. Text also summons a sensory experience. You know what I mean?  Words have a sound and shape. Words against other words create texture.  Words ring in your head. They command images and emotions. So in reading and writing, we experience the text in ways that are physical as well as abstract…. And writing is a continuous improvisation.” Shawn Wen interview in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay

“Somewhat typically for [Barbara] Guest (as for [John] Ashbery), the lines begin with a first-person speaker addressing the reader, but with each line that follows, that speaker leads us further and further away from the self that began, so that by the time the sentence draws to a close, we are out in the jungle with no hand to hold.  For Guest this dissolution is desirable, if sometimes melancholic; at times it is the deliverer of ecstasy.” Maggie Nelson from Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions.

screen-shot-2016-10-03-at-1-46-13-pm

“Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.” Lyn Hejinian from “The Rejection of Closure”

And Online #2

November 3, 2016

Welcome to the 2nd installment (see 1st here) of a website experiment related to And, the performance I’m making to premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017.  In these web pages, rehearsal, image, and writing experiments in progress alternate with excerpts from other people’s writing.  I’m interested in the ways all of this language (quoted, projected, animated, written and/or physical) can converse, offer ideas – sometimes contradictory, and create associations rather than pin down any one meaning.  I’ll post a new page like this about once a month.

Some words (in alphabetical order): actually knowing someone, aging, ambiguity, and, answers, application, art, artist, association, autobiography, beginning, body, categories, children, class, coherence, commitment, community, connection, contract, contradiction, conversation, creating, dailiness, dance, denial, depth, divorce, dominance, ecstasy, ending, energy, erotic, experience, falling apart, family, fear, female, feminism, form, friendship, generosity, hate, hierarchy, Hillary Clinton, home, honesty, House, imagination, imagination, known, language, lecture, life, lists, love, lyric essay, male, marriage, meaning, meditation, mobility, non-monogamy, not-knowing, numbers, or, organization, performance, personal essay, play, poetry, power, practice, property, questions, reality, real life, religion,  scholar, sex, solitude, Spalding Gray, stability, structure, student, submission, syllabus, teaching, text, theory, uncertainty, university, wildness, work.

“It was kind of like staying in character for a year and a half, which was incredible. But the only way that was possible was to determine that everything that I was feeling and thinking and doing [was part of that candidate character]. If I am PMS-ing today, I’m going to talk about PMS as part of my campaign. And I realized how, again, how openly female a presidential campaign had never been, because these were not the dilemmas of the bodily realities of the candidates ever.”  Eileen Myles about her Openly Female Write-In Presidential Campaign

“I am still amazed that poets insist on writing about their divorces, when robots are taking pictures of orange, ethane lakes on Titan….”  Christian Bok tweet, September 8, 2012

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” James Baldwin in “The Creative Process”

screen-shot-2016-11-03-at-11-36-29-am

“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t stop.” Helene Cixous

“To think like a woman in a man’s world means… remembering that every mind resides in a body; remaining accountable to the female bodies in which we live; constantly retesting given hypotheses against lived experience. It means a constant critique of language, for as Wittgenstein (no feminist) observed, ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world.’   And it means that most difficult thing of all: listening and watching in art and literature, in the social sciences, in all the descriptions we are given of the world, for the silences, the absences, the nameless, the unspoken, the encoded- for there we will find the true knowledge of women. ” Adrienne Rich from “Taking Women Students Seriously.”

Protected: Has This Happened Before? (Writing in Progress)

December 18, 2023

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

New Project in Progress

June 9, 2022

Welcome to the first installment online portion of “And,” the performance I’m making to premiere at Abrons Arts Center March 30-April 2, 2017.  rehearsal video and an excerpt from something I’ve been reading that relates to the piece. As in the performance, I want the language (quoted, projected, animated, written and/or physical) here to offer ideas, sometimes contradictory, and create associations rather than pin down any one meaning. I post new entries to the top of this page; the page will grow as the performance does.

Lyn Hejinian from “The Rejection of Closure”
“Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.”

Paul Valéry, from Analects:
“Two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Alice Notley in Disobedience:
“my rule for this poem/ is honesty, my other rule is Fuck You”

Louis Bury from Exercises in Criticism:
“Within such a context, constraint, rather than being an unpleasant form of coercion, becomes a helpful mechanism for navigating quantitative overload- becomes, paradoxically, liberating.”

Eileen Myles from The Importance of Being Iceland:
“It simply strikes me that form has a real honest engagement with content and therefore might even need to get a little sleazy with it suggesting it stop early or go too far.”

Maggie Nelson from The Argonauts:
“Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained-inexpressibly!- in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, a deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.”

Robert Smithson from The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustration:
In the illusory babels of language, an artist might advance specifically to get lost, and to intoxicate himself in dizzying sytaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corridors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humors, or voids of knowledge… but this quest is risky, full of bottomless fictions and endless architectures and counter-architectures… at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.”

Rebecca Solnit from “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable” :
“Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don’t entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.”

Kenny Goldsmith from BOMB Magazine conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum:
“It’s an interesting point. Having come through an art education and now teaching English, here’s what I’ve learned: English students function from the neck up; they don’t have bodies, they just have heads.”

Lyn Hejinian from The Rejection of Closure:
“Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage itself.”

 

 

Helene Cixous:
“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t stop.”

George Eliot from Daniel Deronda:
“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.”

Alice Notley from The Poetics of Disobedience:
“This work is all very disobedient, in a way it picks up where Disobedience left off; but it doesn’t lecture as much or shake its fist so, is less interested in the so called real than in denying its existence in favor of the real real. ”

Shawn Wen:
“Even words are asked to be more than descriptive. They cannot just represent. They cannot sit pretty and let the reader do the work. Even the words try to inhabit. To set a scene. Then the writer is just a wannabe actor. The actor can twist and bend. Now he is a bird. Now he is a flower. Writers must spell it out. F-L-O-W-E-R. And still, it’s just a word. It can’t dance. It can’t run. It can’t fall. You can read it. You can do so much as to pro-nounce it. Try to taste the sibilants as you tap your tongue against your teeth. But you still lack the shape and presence of a body.”