SPANGBERGIANISM Blogposts Autumn 2010 Bring up the volume, forget Cage Among current trends in dance one can identify a compulsive attraction to electric guitars. Lately the guitar has made its way back in dance with a vengeance, but of course not understood as a musical instrument or something to which definition is already given. Music is the new cool in dance, and the absolutely most uncool is naked men and DJ’ing. Singing is semi-cool but stay away from exoticism and capitalization on the behalf of somebody that could be called other. Just forget about that department, it will always bring trouble. A better proposal is to throw dollar bills on the audience – coupé décalée style. To form a band is a very bad idea in 2010. Stop it! You don’t want to be in a band. Get real, it’s just some silly idea of realizing your youth dreams. Look, you are doing business – it might sound pathetic but dance is a business and you have no where else to go. To form a band is as stupid as thinking that Bill Gates created Guitar Hero because he always wanted to be in a band. If you, when you visited you parents this summer, went downstairs to catch up with your old Stratocaster copy, make sure this was the last time. Do not do that again! Concert… embarrassing in the first place but then where… In the foyer, or festival center of a dance festival. Seriously. Songs sang with the voice placed between your collarbones. Vulnerability 2010 is not recommended. Sound is definitely the new cool, but with music come figures and entourage and the first to show up is always John Cage. This summer I have already seen two shows based on the lecture on nothing, and I hear rumors about a handful other pieces. John Cage is not cool and his lectures are modernist mumbo jumbo – R.I.P. don’t resurrect those old monsters, they will at best become zombies, living-dead rejecting contemporary technologies and social networks as inauthentic. As if we want autonomy. Now, what is the lecture on nothing about? Nobody seems to know, however I didn’t have the opportunity to ask Quentin Tarantino. You know it’s not about nothing or music; it’s not about structures or repetition. It can’t be, if so it’s simply too stupid. The lecture on nothing is obviously a critique of male heterosexual production, delicately resonating with its environment: never up in the face and yet a sort of undercover nail in the eye of male representational frames. The critique is moving around the central note; it refuses to adhere to established tonalities and fiddles with harmonies, but most of all it avoids any kind of production as an ungrounding of the entire system of male heterosexual production. The lecture of nothing undermines an entire system and what amazes me is that the follower of Cage is such a genuine hetero. I like the image of a bunch of young male lets say bassoon players, needless to say very hetero, expressing their admiration for Cage in the local music academy. The bassoon player in conversation with the clarinetist: “-So radical, so subversive…” not realizing that what they support is a gay manifesto. Sweet. However a new problem arrived, what does it mean when a female choreographer gives the lecture supported by, so to say, a master in her IPod headphones supporting the text with a fleshy rather eroticized improvisation. Eszter Salamon subordinates 1 herself to the equalized, indifference of John Cage’s voice, liberating herself from representation without nobody realizing. Salamon’s dance is not very exiting, it’s long and the text is so dated, so tiring to have to listen to all those quasi esoteric tropes that ooze of vanity, but this is precisely where Salamon’s piece goes undercover, where it goes tactical and has nothing to do with Cage, but only this lecture can give her permission to unground, decode herself. Salamon gives Cage the possibility to undo herself. Burrows and Fargion are in their n’th duo using the same lecture. Obsessed with structures the two men fiddle and fiddle and fiddle with the lectures making it even more important, giving it even more significance. Where Salamon dissolves the two boys appropriates and so to say surf the wave of Cage. And by the way, if the interpretation of the lecture proposed is correct, aren’t Burrows and Fargion announcing themselves as a gay couple. Sweet, they are giggling and dancing a bit clumsy. Contained and perfect. Jonathan and Mateo. Sound is back in business, and perhaps Cage is more than a dead composer. It’s definitely the new cool, but forget Cage and let’s engage in making thing. Nothing is not an option, this year it’s all about “Too Much Too Soon” – make up and stop being modest. Show No Mercy! Who’s your target group? You are a choreographer and you run a business. Correct, your job is to develop and manufacture products that you push on individuals with titles such as programmer or festival director, organizations such as the art council or e.g. the Goethe Institute. Your target group and your client are not identical, on the contrary they are significantly different and don’t know each other. So what do you do? You continue to push products called dance performances without analyzing who your clients and target groups are – no let’s not talk about “your audience” that is irrelevant. The business strategy utilized by dance and performance is simple: hope for the best. Your client is not cool; she doesn’t stay up late, has no idea about what a beat mix is, and if he has a FB account she has less than 250 friends, still more than 60. Are you d’accord with this, are you fine knowing that your clients idea about life is approximately as contemporary as your vintage sneakers were last year. Your client has heard about bittorrent but never used it. He still considers that music is something stored on stable media, that mp3 is not authentic, and has all the Patti Smith’s albums on CD (he had all of them LP, but you know… times change). Check it out, that’s the guy that buys your show. Are you happy about the fact that he likes your work? Are you okay with the fact that your work adheres to her taste, or that she thinks that your stuff has potentiality. Too many of your clients spend time with their grand children. Think about that! Dance, especially produced by choreographers without health insurance, without exception addresses the same target group. This kind of choreography, created with too small budgets but always state funded, is directed to itself. The target individual is identical to the maker: young, good looking, middle class, fresh and conservative. The target individual dresses badly and considers it uncool to be cool. The target individual considers herself contemporary but doesn’t know the address of Colette. The target person considers himself contemporary but listens to soul. 2 Dance and choreography, shape up! It’s not a defeat to know your client or detect your target group. But a person who doesn’t is either ignorant or somebody with an unconditional belief in authenticity. Who thinks that art is special. Stop that! You are not your work, and your work is not supposed to consolidate your identity. Dance and performance does not become less superficial because you think it’s deep: it is after all more or less an hour of classical representation accompanied by creative electronic music (help). Dance and choreography will not lose its specificity because it’s glossy, effective, fast, aggressive or fuckin’ nuts. But it will lose its specificity as long as you, and me, continue desperately to try to please programmers, managers, our friends and worst of all the audience, especially when we do it through being alternative, healthy, medium rare, positive, disillusioned, a little bit crazy and always available. Summarizing the first half of this years shows, season and festival programs brings me to a simple conclusion: dance experiences a deep crisis and this is signified by a continuous mass emigration towards the general. The watchword of dance today is: one size fits all. And worst of all it lacks any kind of attitude. The reason is obvious: production value, belonging, identity and staying alive are more important than specificity, excess, cocaine and revolt. Of course I’m pathetic, but what’s the alternative? Modesty, Buddhism, demure, enthusiasm, faith? Are those notions that you’d like to signify your practice by? Did you make life difficult for yourself deciding to be a choreographer in order to confirm such an attitude? If you did, I don’t want to be your friend! Dancers, choreographers and all you others, we have a job to do: - Stop working for your client, they don’t care – they just want more money. - Evacuate your audience, and don’t let them in again until they are ready to kill for it. - Fuck modesty and all other well-meaning aspirations. If you don’t consider your mission an armed struggle, ready to declare war, you are not needed. - Accept no interviews, agree to no essays published in dance magazines or written by dance scholars. To be published in a dance magazine is a disaster, it means your work is good. - Spend more time on producing press images, rumors and attitude than rehearsing and processing your next piece.