Writing in Motion: Body—Language—Technology

Transmedia

One can know self and world, b e i n g and mind, simply by moving the body. Moving the body—dancing—can be synonymous with seeing, thinking, doing—with action*. There's more to dance than companies, careers , foundations and corporations. That's all temporary. There's a bigger connection. Believe it or not, it's possible to move through all of space (it's a paradox ), out of the linear into the relativistic and synchronistic. It's also possible to stop or step out of t-i-m-e, just by ... dancing! Dancing is a tremendous motion—movement connects everything across spacetime . Kant was right—space and time are (only) the conditions of our experience... I can't wait for the day when the computer is a domesticated appliance we can have in the home, when dance can have its own channel, poetry, theater, and the other arts their own channels too. Can you imagine how computer, cable and satellites will alter and transform the perception (of perception) and the operations of spacetime? Not to mention institutions, cities, governments and nationalisms as well. Probably it's because of Watergate that we don't have it already. I'd also like to be in a research center (while you're asking) where I could work with my com- pany, space, video and computer. We need new ways to see and be totally . The crisis seems to be about specialization. You ask about... labels and categories. I'm not sure w h a t kind of choreographer I am. Actually, I may be a dancemaker instead—I generate movement possibilities from processes, schemes and puzzles rather than manipulate bodies in a predetermined form. But—I might be a superrealist too, and, after all, on Fridays a futurist! Seriously, though, I prefer the word transmedia because it's movement that connects and extends whatever we see or know, in our heads, on the page or stage, across a room, or on a screen: even across disciplines. I also like the word kinetricsas the movement of bodies, ideas, images, lines, words, letters, concepts, tracks, designs, structures, systems, etc., through and across one another. The many texts I've written for my dances can stand and have been published separately. I also incorporate projections, films and video in my dances. Space City, a film collaboration with Robyn Brentano and Andrew Horn, was premiered in June 1981 at Lincoln Center's International Dance Film Video Conference. Channels, circuits and media interfacings let spaces, resources, concepts and perspectives become interpenetrating and interexchangeable. Movement —following Marshall McLuhan's startlingly insightful lead—extends the signs and signals as well as the ambient of the central nervous system, connecting all perceptual processes. There may be only five senses but a virtually unexplored and unlimited number of sense "ratios." (Kinaesthesia and extrasensory perception, for example, may be amalgams and combines of these ratios.) Ever since I began making dances in the early 1960s, I've programmed movement—I like that word—meaning constantly breaking down and repeating movement with an eye to the variations matrices of possibilities , recombining in any number of ways steps, changes, rhythms, textures , etc., as well as their density of relay and delay, so that any and all elements, components and permutable options can be retrieved, (re)assembled or juxtaposed at any moment by, or between, any dancing body. As a dancemaker I program structural and organizational options rather than just set, specifically repeatable phrases, so the generation of (im)pulses, and the tracing and tracking of "circuits" in space, activate the firing and fielding of signs and signals that synchronistically become part of the formal performance process. It's asking a lot from dancers, but there's an organization to the dancing body transversing s p a c e that is quicker than the structural logic that the brain can decide, know or predetermine. It's a kind of £%¿ía/-kinetic semiotic ... Just how there are pulses, images and imageries in the movement stream, sometimes just below the visible surface or dynamic, appearing automatically in the density of high-frequency field formations, or through the warping and deporting of line, time and contour, intrigues me enormously. Sometimes the imagery only seems to be emitted, setting up semblances and (co)correspondences; sometimes it's actual, visceral, mimetic, tacit or disembodied. Dancing brings us to, through and across— sometimes beyond—the thresholds of the...