Hello
Welcome
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The last time I met my grandmother she shared with me some stories
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27 October 2023
Gaza is cut off from electricity and telecommunications
The Palestinian telecommunication company Jawwal said in a social media post late on
Friday that mobile phone and internet services have been shut off.
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29 October 2023
Palestinians break into Gaza UN aid warehouses in a sign of desperation
Thousands of people storm food warehouses in Gaza as civil order starts to collapse, the
United Nations says.
The United Nations relief agency says thousands of Palestinians, desperate due to three
weeks of total siege and bombing broke into several of its warehouses in the Gaza Strip,
taking wheat, flour and other basic goods.
The hospitals in Gaza will have no electricity to sustain operations or injury treatment.
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11 November
Israel’s military has brought the war to the front gates of al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s biggest
hospital complex, where thousands of injured and displaced people are trapped amid
ferocious bombardment.
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Dear,
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about dance
The more I think about the less I dance
—--
But maybe that is ok
— Today I
am dancing here, in front of you
With you?
—--
You see me dancing
What I do is quite simple
I am trying to move without stopping
—--
I am dancing
I am moving
Some say this means being free
—--
I am afraid I disagree with that lately
or I disagree with what has become of it
–
Many years ago I read a book by the choreographer Jonathan Burrows.
He is a choreographer from the UK who was quite famous around 2000
—I
remember in his book he wrote:
What can dance do?
Or something like this
—-
Since then this question has stayed with me like a sticky thing….
—----
So after many years I invite this question back and add to it.
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What can dance do and what can dance not do?
Maybe he was already asking both questions and I am not really adding rather than
repeating
—--
And maybe this is ok
—---
It has been quite some time that dance and choreography have been quite an important
metaphor for the times we are living. They have become quite established forms of art, still
very underfunded and precarious jobs for someone to be doing.
—-
Sometimes when I share that I am a dancer and choreographer I can feel the imagination of
this other person as they imagine I have such an interesting life. There is this idealism about
“the artist is the master of their own time and space.”
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Which has become a kind of dream in our neoliberal societies
Don’t you think so?
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In Ritsema’s ambivalent picture, the artist is the prototype of the
future workforce, someone who accepts a low income because of
their preference for a lifestyle: “permanently on holiday but managing
the work 24/7 all by themselves, but not without capital
holding power over the profit lines.”What might appear as
opportunism can be seen, conversely, as a desperate sign of precarity.
The self-performance of freelance work is assessed by generosity.
A worker performs well if they give a lot of themself, their
“all,” praised as effortful generosity and felt sometimes as self-realization
and at other times as self-exploitation.
(Ana Vujanovic and Bojana Cvejic, Toward a Transindividual Self: A study in social dramaturgy, Oslo – Brussels – Zagreb: Oslo National Academy of the Arts – SARMA – Multimedijalni institut, 2022)
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And despite of the precarity
there are many around the world who insist on doing it, like me here in front of you, with you
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There have been a lot of words, and discourse around the body….which means our
bodies…and their autonomy
The autonomy of the body
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“The development of the Western contemporary dance has turned the autonomy of the body
into a specific privilege while its external appearance is defined by technical perfection and
multiplicity of techniques. Due to the ruthless dictation from the present, the position of which
is almost monumental in contemporary dance, we feel uncomfortable whenever we are
faced with something different, with the past, and we are incapable of finding a language to
describe that which is different. Western gaze is therefore still hesitant when it comes to
attributing autonomy of the body to the Eastern practices. In other words, the autonomy of
the body is always bound to the image the West has about it.”
(Bojana Kunst)
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It feels more and more like all we need is a moving body, a flexible body, a body that is full of
itself,
A healthy body
A fit body
….which means our body the more it moves the more free it is supposed to be.
—-----
Free from each other
And we loved that.
Our independency
Because in one way dance being a metaphor for autonomy was partially what helped dance
to become important, dance was being recognized
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And mobility became something like a new religion
And more people wanted to become part of this cult
—-
At that time movement was equal to freedom.
Maybe it still is
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And we immerse ourselves in dance.
Dancing on our own.
Dancing for ourselves
Dancing with ourselves
Dancing feeling our bodies
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And we were saying to each other
I feel
In my body
There is everything
I am moving
I feel the bones, the muscles, the fascia, the inner organs.
—------
We called our bodies instruments.
And we treated them as such.
—------
I am an ever-turning wheel
—--
Through movement
I connect
With the world
Movement is freedom
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I connect with my body and this is so important
Because my body is all there is
I am dancing
—---
I am always moving
Like the world
A world in constant motion
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Movement is life
When I move
I am free
—------
Movement is freedom
In my body, I can find all the answers
Everything I need is already inside me
—-----
My body has all the answers
Everything can be found in movement
Because movement is all we have
Me
You
All
—----
When I move
I am connected to the world
We are in constant movement
A world in motion
—----
Dance is life
Dance is disappearing
Dance is ephemeral
Dance does not need continuity, does not need history, does not need consistency
Dance is enough
—--
And more things like that became mantras not only for dancers but for quite some part of the
western societies
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I am dancing
But this is not what I do most of the time as some people might think that dancers do
—--
I am mostly shutting in front of my computer and writing applications
By the way most of the time they do not work
Because guess what the whole system works through relations and curators
Anyway that is another story
Not the one that I wanna share with you today here
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I am dancing
I am moving
Some say this means being free
—----
Shifting weight
Attentive to details of the contact with the floor
Relax but do not collapse….release
—--
Jump
—--
Use your pelvis (I always forget about this one)
Enjoy articulation
—------
Keep on moving
Keep on finding an interest that springs from pure movement
Because movement
Is all there is
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It is the thing you can rely on
It is the one that brings change
Keep on moving
————-
Gaza’s border with Egypt opened for limited evacuation today, allowing for just under 500
people to flee war-torn Gaza.
People wait at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt in the southern Gaza Strip on
November 1, 2023. [Mohammed Abed/AFP]
1 Nov 2023
The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt opened on Wednesday, allowing
limited evacuations from the besieged enclave to Egypt after nearly four weeks of Israel’s
war.
The opening could see up to 491 people entering Egypt. By 9:48am local time (07:48 GMT),
people were already streaming through the Palestinian side of the crossing.
Two hours later, Al Jazeera correspondents on the ground reported scenes of chaos as
people pushed to be allowed through the crossing, angry that their calls to embassies and
government officials had gone unheard.
Before 15:00 GMT, the General Authority for Crossings in Gaza told Al Jazeera that 76
wounded Palestinians and their companions had so far crossed into Egypt through the
Rafah border crossing, in addition to 335 holders of foreign passports.
People sit in the waiting area at the Rafah border crossing in the southern Gaza Strip before
crossing into Egypt on November 1, 2023 [Mohammed Abed/AFP]
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What can dance do and what can dance not do?
——-
We thought that all the answers could be found by just going more and more inside
Into our own bodies.
And we tried.
Going more and more inside our individual selves
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In a way, dance was perceived as being everything and nothing. Thus justifying its approval
as a non-historical entity, with no empirical agency. Some philosophers like Nietze, Valery,
Badiou, Agamben relate to dance as a metaphor, as an abduction, as a vehicle for
philosophical thought or as sheltered by philosophy, as a philosophical exercise. What they
share in common is the appropriation of dance in the sense that they use it for their own
work without acknowledging dance agency, history and empirical reality.
—-
Alain Badiou said
"The true dancer must never appear to know the dance she is dancing"
Introducing dancing as an action of (its) disclosure I would say…
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But where are we now?
From Paul Valery
Dance is the art of Life itself.
Dance is a serious matter.
The creation of a distinct species of time. Dance is a force of time, breaking free from the
usual state of balance
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To conclude, performing oneself from the viewpoint of aesthetic individualism is like dancing
solo. Looking at solo dance, we have identified the operations in which the person
aesthetically manipulates the experience of the self in time, space, movement,
affect, and relation. What keeps one preoccupied with oneself is through and through
aesthetic: an effort to persistently vary how one lives, works, and appears. In the last section,
we will observe how techniques of performing oneself centre on the body in particular – or
how the body and embodiment provide the playground for developing technologies of the
self today.
(Ana Vujanovic and Bojana Cvejic, Toward a Transindividual Self: A study in social dramaturgy, Oslo – Brussels – Zagreb: Oslo National Academy of the Arts – SARMA – Multimedijalni institut, 2022)
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In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and
pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
(Adrienne Rich
In Those Years)