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Fly/Prelude & Gospel (images one & two)
Fly/Prelude:
(:00-4:00) The beginning image is blues man meets plantation work song/chain gang meets conjure/myth-maker woman. We open with a lone singer - he is 'blues' as tradition, as passed on in text and practice where minor chords and rawness are integral elements of story-telling. His song is bittersweet - longing, sadness, but it is also acceptance and the realization of yearning, unfulfilled desire and pain as part of living process, as part of the process of "love."
The introduction of the chain gang adds a layer of a connected, but also different sense of trauma. They suggest our history of slavery/racial discrimination. So, while blues reiterates this history through the poetics of its lyrics, its minor discordant sound and its connection to Jim Crow history, the dancers embody this idea of trauma again via their own linked bodies, as the literal “chain” in the chain gang – they are low humming a chain gang melody as they move in a call & response fashion.
The powerful thing about house is that somehow it manages to contain all these fragments - to connect history and the present - to connect the longing of bodies who want to be whole and loved whether from a historical past that continues to wound or from present-day personal experiences that speak to contemporary concerns and struggles of living. So, these wounds could be racial/ethnically-derived and/or they could be gendered, classed or anything else that's within the realm of social categorization and has the power to make certain kinds of bodies feel excluded, unrepresented, unloved. House has been a home for all of these concerns. House becomes a safe space to call these issues up in an embodied manner. To name them and dance/sing them out. But not in a facile way that assumes when you leave the mix or the dancefloor your problems are solved. Just that maybe you have shared them with a community or called them into the light of day (so, house here as testimonial/witnessing) to throw a little clarity on them, to make those problems or issues a little bit easier to engage or deal with outside, in the "real" world.
Right, so I have digressed. Going back to the beginning of the piece and the figure of the blues man and the chain gang I was also experimenting with choreographic structure by layering the blues tune and the chain gang hum. I was trying to translate something I recognize as a DJ compositional mixing device that is characteristic of much of Chicago-derived house music (and from what I’m learning might be best associated with Ron Hardy’s style). It is the putting together of two or more discordant sounds, but being able to layer these non-matching tracks in such a way as to find their glue or the cohesive point that link the discordant harmony into some kind of musical sensibility that works.
The addition of the female griot character adds another layer, telling an old myth and folk tale, “The People Who Could Fly” that integrates house with other black traditions that use expressive forms (story, music, visual art, dance, etc.) to both remember our legacy of disempowerment and to voice with urgency how art/cultural practices have been strategies to survive disempowerment. As I keep working through this house project it's a theme I keep coming back to, that I think lies at the foundation of why house is so powerful as a form of cultural expression. The fact that it has not been articulated as such is something that I both want to undo and to understand why it has not achieved its potential as a more direct tool/example of art/culture as social justice mechanism. So, in a sense I want to connect house with this complex of practices – blues, griot stories featuring epic memories of loss, slavery, disenfranchisement and ultimately, stories of survival and the building of alternative frameworks and alternative communities.
The long group phrase contains images, gestures and qualities of release, holding on, strong core – limbs might be soft, but core is strong, tactile earth, waiting and striking, heavy weight, manual labor, sweat, pushing, pulling and digging – so in some ways it’s a figuration of plantation labor/economy. But, it’s also about a collective sensing as the group has to hum together, count together, stay together with no musical accompaniment just the group’s sense of timing and breath. It’s about the strength, the core of strength as the community.
(4:00-5:45) This section came out of an improvisational exercise. Performers paired up and had to create two loose lists of movement - one determined by action words (e.g. press, hover, yoke) and the other a game of twister (e.g. hand to hand, cheek to cheek)
When the pairs come to each other, it is an intimate partnering. They begin to focus in. It's quiet. It is just about that other person in your space. Eye contact, bodies pressing surface areas together, leaning on each other, picking each other up, counter-resisting weight, and so on. The group is a community transforming from carrying a burden to lightening their collective load by sharing it. Joy and pleasure begin to emerge as some couples slow groove together, others lean and caress, and others lay head on shoulders, hug, embrace. Its intention is to display love/care/connection via touch for an other human being.
The musical accompaniment is E. Badu's version of the Eddie Kendricks song "My People." I chose this track because it conveyed some of that utopian "we shall overcome"/future-yet-to-come aura that surrounds house, a cosmic Sun-Ra Pharoah Sanders Alice Coltrane kind of future human sonic discourse that never loses its attachment to Earth - that is somehow future vision, present condition and past history rolled into one experience. But, I also chose it because I know the Kendricks' tune - have experienced it in party settings as very much part of a Chicago house aesthetic. Badu's update is nostalgia, takes me back to memories, but I also love that it's a woman's voice leading this version.
(5:45-end) The last section is set to Marshall Jefferson's Ride the Rhythm, an example of classic Chi house. As I continue to work with house aesthetics and experiment with ways to stage what is really a club-improvisational form of expression, I keep asking myself how I can push the 4-4 beat of a typical house track and pull out what I would experience in a house set - that interplay between dancer and DJ and the track. For the dancer, the performance/the dancefloor activity becomes a conversation. You respond with your body - following the 4-4 or adding polyrhythm or a syncopation to it, adding the voice or clapping. What a layperson to house hears and what I hear are definitely different because while I am guided by that bottom 4-4, I am not a slave to it. I'm hearing the other things going on in the track's arrangement of sounds and I'm definitely kinetically adding another layer - I am processing the music in a different way. I was intrigued by this Marshall Jefferson track because when I listen to it, I can literally hear three faces of house music converging - there is this hoe-down/folk layer, a gospel/sacred/church layer and this profane/sexy/sensuous layer. Solo dancer calls the congregation in. Her sequence with outstretched arms, mobile pathway, syncopated phrasing is a translation of images from my grandma's Westside Chicago church. The gospel sound is definitely at the base of the track; it's the backbone. The rest of the sequence moves fluidly back and forth between this folksy/squaredance image (swinging a partner, the low driving skip) and the church pew (syncopated claps, heads thrown back). The sensual reemerges in minute body waves, undulating pivot turns - that sequential slinkiness that connotes (to me) a sense of sexy play.
(:00-4:00) The beginning image is blues man meets plantation work song/chain gang meets conjure/myth-maker woman. We open with a lone singer - he is 'blues' as tradition, as passed on in text and practice where minor chords and rawness are integral elements of story-telling. His song is bittersweet - longing, sadness, but it is also acceptance and the realization of yearning, unfulfilled desire and pain as part of living process, as part of the process of "love."
The introduction of the chain gang adds a layer of a connected, but also different sense of trauma. They suggest our history of slavery/racial discrimination. So, while blues reiterates this history through the poetics of its lyrics, its minor discordant sound and its connection to Jim Crow history, the dancers embody this idea of trauma again via their own linked bodies, as the literal “chain” in the chain gang – they are low humming a chain gang melody as they move in a call & response fashion.
The powerful thing about house is that somehow it manages to contain all these fragments - to connect history and the present - to connect the longing of bodies who want to be whole and loved whether from a historical past that continues to wound or from present-day personal experiences that speak to contemporary concerns and struggles of living. So, these wounds could be racial/ethnically-derived and/or they could be gendered, classed or anything else that's within the realm of social categorization and has the power to make certain kinds of bodies feel excluded, unrepresented, unloved. House has been a home for all of these concerns. House becomes a safe space to call these issues up in an embodied manner. To name them and dance/sing them out. But not in a facile way that assumes when you leave the mix or the dancefloor your problems are solved. Just that maybe you have shared them with a community or called them into the light of day (so, house here as testimonial/witnessing) to throw a little clarity on them, to make those problems or issues a little bit easier to engage or deal with outside, in the "real" world.
Right, so I have digressed. Going back to the beginning of the piece and the figure of the blues man and the chain gang I was also experimenting with choreographic structure by layering the blues tune and the chain gang hum. I was trying to translate something I recognize as a DJ compositional mixing device that is characteristic of much of Chicago-derived house music (and from what I’m learning might be best associated with Ron Hardy’s style). It is the putting together of two or more discordant sounds, but being able to layer these non-matching tracks in such a way as to find their glue or the cohesive point that link the discordant harmony into some kind of musical sensibility that works.
The addition of the female griot character adds another layer, telling an old myth and folk tale, “The People Who Could Fly” that integrates house with other black traditions that use expressive forms (story, music, visual art, dance, etc.) to both remember our legacy of disempowerment and to voice with urgency how art/cultural practices have been strategies to survive disempowerment. As I keep working through this house project it's a theme I keep coming back to, that I think lies at the foundation of why house is so powerful as a form of cultural expression. The fact that it has not been articulated as such is something that I both want to undo and to understand why it has not achieved its potential as a more direct tool/example of art/culture as social justice mechanism. So, in a sense I want to connect house with this complex of practices – blues, griot stories featuring epic memories of loss, slavery, disenfranchisement and ultimately, stories of survival and the building of alternative frameworks and alternative communities.
The long group phrase contains images, gestures and qualities of release, holding on, strong core – limbs might be soft, but core is strong, tactile earth, waiting and striking, heavy weight, manual labor, sweat, pushing, pulling and digging – so in some ways it’s a figuration of plantation labor/economy. But, it’s also about a collective sensing as the group has to hum together, count together, stay together with no musical accompaniment just the group’s sense of timing and breath. It’s about the strength, the core of strength as the community.
(4:00-5:45) This section came out of an improvisational exercise. Performers paired up and had to create two loose lists of movement - one determined by action words (e.g. press, hover, yoke) and the other a game of twister (e.g. hand to hand, cheek to cheek)
When the pairs come to each other, it is an intimate partnering. They begin to focus in. It's quiet. It is just about that other person in your space. Eye contact, bodies pressing surface areas together, leaning on each other, picking each other up, counter-resisting weight, and so on. The group is a community transforming from carrying a burden to lightening their collective load by sharing it. Joy and pleasure begin to emerge as some couples slow groove together, others lean and caress, and others lay head on shoulders, hug, embrace. Its intention is to display love/care/connection via touch for an other human being. The musical accompaniment is E. Badu's version of the Eddie Kendricks song "My People." I chose this track because it conveyed some of that utopian "we shall overcome"/future-yet-to-come aura that surrounds house, a cosmic Sun-Ra Pharoah Sanders Alice Coltrane kind of future human sonic discourse that never loses its attachment to Earth - that is somehow future vision, present condition and past history rolled into one experience. But, I also chose it because I know the Kendricks' tune - have experienced it in party settings as very much part of a Chicago house aesthetic. Badu's update is nostalgia, takes me back to memories, but I also love that it's a woman's voice leading this version.
(5:45-end) The last section is set to Marshall Jefferson's Ride the Rhythm, an example of classic Chi house. As I continue to work with house aesthetics and experiment with ways to stage what is really a club-improvisational form of expression, I keep asking myself how I can push the 4-4 beat of a typical house track and pull out what I would experience in a house set - that interplay between dancer and DJ and the track. For the dancer, the performance/the dancefloor activity becomes a conversation. You respond with your body - following the 4-4 or adding polyrhythm or a syncopation to it, adding the voice or clapping. What a layperson to house hears and what I hear are definitely different because while I am guided by that bottom 4-4, I am not a slave to it. I'm hearing the other things going on in the track's arrangement of sounds and I'm definitely kinetically adding another layer - I am processing the music in a different way. I was intrigued by this Marshall Jefferson track because when I listen to it, I can literally hear three faces of house music converging - there is this hoe-down/folk layer, a gospel/sacred/church layer and this profane/sexy/sensuous layer. Solo dancer calls the congregation in. Her sequence with outstretched arms, mobile pathway, syncopated phrasing is a translation of images from my grandma's Westside Chicago church. The gospel sound is definitely at the base of the track; it's the backbone. The rest of the sequence moves fluidly back and forth between this folksy/squaredance image (swinging a partner, the low driving skip) and the church pew (syncopated claps, heads thrown back). The sensual reemerges in minute body waves, undulating pivot turns - that sequential slinkiness that connotes (to me) a sense of sexy play.
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Latest page update: made by isislady
, Dec 11 2008, 9:45 PM EST
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