We attended a dance called Rock My Body. Odd title. A half hour piece performed by a single dancer as part of the brief and underpublicised Vancouver International Dance Festival. The accompaniment was performed live by Aunts and Uncles. Neither Sharon nor I expected such contemporary music. I for the most part liked it, though it didn’t work for her so much. The contrast between nearly upbeat indie rock and a half naked man painted like a ghost and wracking his body through movements by turns hyperactive and painfully gradual. All grim. We did however agree that the lyrics detracted from the piece. The dance itself is so primal and direct and the lyrics such borderline high school poetry that it was like hanging Coles Notes next to a Pollack. Still a few of the simpler lines resonated with me. Maybe because the dance itself did, maybe not.

In the first five minutes I wrestled with certain prejudices I hold against dance. I love dance, don’t get me wrong. It is a beautiful and stirring art and needs no translation. A few of the early movements had the ring of hippie-dippie Vancouver, though. I worried that the whole performance might just be spineless interperetive dance in ghostface. But my, how I was mistaken. The cliché forms gave way soon to forms so basic I’d hesitate to classify them as dance except for their repetition. Which was, I cannot stress it enough, intense. The dancer spun in one spot with his arms upraised for what must have been three or four minutes straight. He migrated only by a matter of inches. He did not change the expression on his face. He did not seem particularly winded afterward. He transitioned into a gradual movement which required a high degree of finesse and muscle control and faltered only in the smallest and most forgivable ways.

There were perhaps four such other intense repetitions throughout the piece. Sharon and I both read them as the themes of the dance, and yet they played more like transitions than climaxes. More as rests than choruses. Another example was a sort of organ grinder’s monkey move. Again the dancer stood in place, this time executing a mechanical sort of march which later incorporated a likewise mechanical clap and later still incorporated an Edvard Munch scream face in place of the clap. I almost didn’t buy the scream face but then while his hands retracted for another clap his expression went entirely blank as if to say the scream was purely satirical or superficial. It was a mask designed to conceal, not the naive trope I’d almost mistaken it for. Also, for the three or four minutes he carried out this move he shifted his eyes continuously. Absolutely continuously. Left, right, left, right. Very quickly. Until they were bloodshot. Which stood out terribly against the white make-up.

And the make-up. At first it looked cartoony. It is after all a Japanese rendering much in the Asian operatic tradition of a ghost. Just a hop skip and a jump from George Romero’s blue zombies. But it changed. As the lighting intensified and took on colour and the dancer began to sweat from his exertions the make-up went from a caricature to a full costume slick and revelatory and demonic.

The whole performance deepened as it progressed. Not in any real narrative arc, because the dance seemed more to present a series of vignettes or reflections than any coherent story. Rather it deepened in the sphere of emotion, and it did so exponentially. The audience became complicit in the dance. The choreography and the dancer’s agonized expressions gave off certain signals, and the audience received certain signals, but these signals did not always or necessarily at all share the same content. At two distinct points in the performance I was convinced the dance represented my own personal struggles. This is what any proper art should do. Not only communicate the artist’s state, not only comment on the audience’s state, but tangle them both up until in the tranquility or frenzy of the work it hardly matters who is who because your experience is my experience and mine is yours and everyone’s is everyone else’s because everyone is everyone else and our hearts in joy or torment are one.

I couldn’t decide which of us was which.

This or something very like this was one of the lyrics that struck me. Simple enough premise, plain enough rhetoric. In the moment though it just about knocked me on my ass.

If you get a chance to take in a Butoh show in your lifetime, do so. It might be wildly different from what I’ve seen and described, which was quite different from what I expected. That, it seems, is one of its foundational strengths. It is built to destroy expectation and lure the audience into an experience they would not previously believe. I’m off to see another show on the weekend to test that theory. I’ll keep you posted.

~J

To recap, this is a collection of writing advices I’ve encountered and found useful over the years. Mostly for writing fiction, but there are a few sections that might help anyone with any sort of writing. I’ll expand it in further editions as I learn. I might include a chapter of peer-submitted advice too if any of you have tips to offer and would like a feature. On deck: sections on characterization and plotting, which I am admittedly unsure how to write since my approach to these elements is inconsistent and instinctual. We’ll see.

In any case, enjoy.

~J

I will one day die. It will be as the author says as if everybody else died too. But you will be with me. I will be with you.

I will one day die. If there is a paradise it has begun here. In sunlight. In a cup of tea. In laughter that draws attention and cannot be muted. In those moments upon which our greatest invention, language, need not intrude. In our teacher, pain. In our subject, contentment. In our privilege unique in the known universe to look ourselves in the eye and say I am.

Look yourself in the eye and say I am. I will one day die.

The longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man’s possession, but what has once gone by is not ours.

Whatever you take in hand, pause at every step to ask yourself, ‘Is it the thought of forfeiting this that makes me dread death?’

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

~J

A friend of mine interns for COSMOS in Australia. After hearing what he had to say on the matter, I skimmed to the report’s conclusion. And when I say skim, I mean like a bullet skims the ground to reach its target. The position of the researchers involved is very clearly awed and excited, but also reserved and skeptical. They have not abandoned the scientific method:

Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly. We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of the results.

I repost this in the hopes that we will not jump to independent conclusions, as the media has done. They turn questions and conjectures into statements. It gets attention, that’s their job. Let’s not confuse product for fact. They aren’t physicists and neither are you or I. A few of us have read A Brief History Of Time, that’s about it. Hell, the janitors at CERN probably have doctorates. Einstein’s expansions on the theory of relativity weren’t confirmed by experiment for years after he proposed them. (I use the term confirm loosely, forgive me scientists. By which I mean Phill.) If his theories are incorrect, they still won’t be overturned in a matter of a days. The revolutions of earthlings aren’t so predictable as the revolutions of their earth.

If it is true, of course, we could be hitting the crest of some serious revolutionary action. Einstein and his special theory are engrained in our culture. Of course, just because one of his proposals might not be entirely accurate doesn’t invalidate everything the man did. Still it’d be a shock to our collective system to amend his stature by even a hair. Even if physics seems marginal in our daily lives we’d still feel it.

Whether the anomalous results are factual or mistaken, this will no doubt advance our understanding of light. That has to mean something. I wonder what it would look like if we graphed man’s understanding of light from the first artificial fire to the present day. I wonder. The wonder is all around us, as they say. Here’s hoping our attention span is enough to hear this one out.

~J