Mission Statement
This post is in response to a thought-provoking question asked by a fellow dancer... a very conscious, spiritual, impassioned performer/visual artist to whom I would like to express gratitude for the impulse to express all of this in words. Thanks, Luna :)
Question: (with regards to the tribal dance community) What are we doing?
Answer: Well, what I believe we are doing is gathering the tools for those around us (who watch us perform, learn from us, etc) to empower themselves and then handing out the tools with an instruction book. One never knows how the tools will be used, but I am convinced that we are doing our part to help all the creatures here to break free from aeons of piled-on emotional sludge.
Question: (my own to myself, extrapolated from the above) What am I doing?
Answer: All of the above, certainly... in the last few years quite consciously. Personally, I also have the goal of breaking the concept of "beauty" wide open and introducing what Austin Osman Spare called an "aesthetic of the ugly" whereby cockroaches, gators and slimy things with multiple limbs can be viewed as glorious instead of with disgust or fear. Some people are bisexual... I think of myself as (erm, no word for it)... um... omnisexual, perhaps (though currently that term as defined in Wikipedia refers to all the variations we have on human... someday it might need to be expanded)? If we suddenly were introduced to a slew of alien races I would like to think I could have a love relationship with any of them based purely in love and an appreciation for their intrinsic beauty, quite apart from the consensus-reality aesthetics of my own race.
The way I tend to present this in my own art of choreography and performance is via humor and exuberance... it is the natural way for me and people seem to connect with it because laughing ameliorates fear. So I bring them the idea of Apape, unconditional Love, via the uber-cheesy, over-the-top romance of Bollywood and the balls-to-the-wall, intoxicated, freedom-loving pirate.
So for me, Art is really all about Love... and expanding the small definition of Love present in mass consciousness to a pure, unadulterated, consuming, spiritual, feral existence without fear. This is why works of art such as Unmata's Ponyplay piece (which I had the privilege of witnessing for the second time this past weekend - on Google vids effects me so... that others are doing the same Work and with such pride, skill and majesty... it makes me cry with Joy. Just thinking about it right now brings tears to my eyes.
What a wonderful life this is, where the radiantly inhuman beings of the darkly shining underbelly of society can produce such inspiring works of Art and support each other in it.
And now, for the quote from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which sums it all up...
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but now I see that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, see the serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by known impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.
Agape,
Samantha
Question: (with regards to the tribal dance community) What are we doing?
Answer: Well, what I believe we are doing is gathering the tools for those around us (who watch us perform, learn from us, etc) to empower themselves and then handing out the tools with an instruction book. One never knows how the tools will be used, but I am convinced that we are doing our part to help all the creatures here to break free from aeons of piled-on emotional sludge.
Question: (my own to myself, extrapolated from the above) What am I doing?
Answer: All of the above, certainly... in the last few years quite consciously. Personally, I also have the goal of breaking the concept of "beauty" wide open and introducing what Austin Osman Spare called an "aesthetic of the ugly" whereby cockroaches, gators and slimy things with multiple limbs can be viewed as glorious instead of with disgust or fear. Some people are bisexual... I think of myself as (erm, no word for it)... um... omnisexual, perhaps (though currently that term as defined in Wikipedia refers to all the variations we have on human... someday it might need to be expanded)? If we suddenly were introduced to a slew of alien races I would like to think I could have a love relationship with any of them based purely in love and an appreciation for their intrinsic beauty, quite apart from the consensus-reality aesthetics of my own race.
The way I tend to present this in my own art of choreography and performance is via humor and exuberance... it is the natural way for me and people seem to connect with it because laughing ameliorates fear. So I bring them the idea of Apape, unconditional Love, via the uber-cheesy, over-the-top romance of Bollywood and the balls-to-the-wall, intoxicated, freedom-loving pirate.
So for me, Art is really all about Love... and expanding the small definition of Love present in mass consciousness to a pure, unadulterated, consuming, spiritual, feral existence without fear. This is why works of art such as Unmata's Ponyplay piece (which I had the privilege of witnessing for the second time this past weekend - on Google vids effects me so... that others are doing the same Work and with such pride, skill and majesty... it makes me cry with Joy. Just thinking about it right now brings tears to my eyes.
What a wonderful life this is, where the radiantly inhuman beings of the darkly shining underbelly of society can produce such inspiring works of Art and support each other in it.
And now, for the quote from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which sums it all up...
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but now I see that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, see the serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by known impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.
Agape,
Samantha