Hi all
just seen Micheal Clark dancing at The Roundhouse - with three other
dancers and at different times a bass guitar, two rock drummers, and
five bass guitars - very very heavy, intense, taut - resistant - with
movement being channelled through extension of massively capable
balletic technique torqued and skewered against incongruity of music,
environment, to create focused resources of energy under release
justification for posting (happy links for me):
- reading Aaron Williamson and Tertia Longmire's excellent Energies of
Writing recently from Sound and Language. Here countless narratives are
frayed up against each other: refusing closure, prioritising materiality
yet balanced by constraint within the sentence as dominant grammatical,
if not semantic, unit - energy under release:
'Enamelled cables phrasing ripped hymnals. I'm
frayed by falling through black whilst turning,
still splitting the gashes, lashing backwards.
Splints stir into action....
- and further, the 'programme' for Clark's event came in the form of a
an A3 newspaper, shades of agit-prop 'concreteness', with enlarged
versions of pages from ballet manuels, The Financial Times, stuff like:-
a SENTENCE = an ORDER
the grammar = the rules of language
the rules of grammar = marks of power
LANGUAGE = orders, laws, commando
order = arbitrary
and a quote from Chesterton:-
"In everything that yields gracefully there must be resistance. Bows are
beautiful when they bend only because they seek to remain rigid.
Rigidity that slightly yields, like Justice swayed by Pity, is all the
beauty of the earth. Everything seeks to grow straight, and happily
nothing succeeds in so growing. Try to grow straight and life will bend
you"
- not revolutionary/revelatory for many here maybe, but it was for many
in a dance audience used to reading potted biogs of dancers etc
nice one Mr Clark, nice one.
lovin' it
rob
--
Rob Holloway
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