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”
“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.”