But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334

Harris Schiff

Merida June 4, 2009

Yesterday’s meeting laid out the formal structure of the project with different strategies we discussed the day previous. The performance will focus a good deal on language and it’s function as sound, as communication, as abstraction. This theme seems augmented by the challenges of working across two languages – though our meetings are in English, I wonder how difficult it is for Nadia to have to “translate” her poetics into English on the fly as it were. 

For me the challenges (but also an interesting aspect) of the project lie in this “translation” of poetics. To understand how different audiences will respond to different language and sound element. A point made was that the overlap of English and Spanish in mexico is very common and mostly associated to television and overdubbing in movies. Using this technique then requires some additional abstraction or self-awareness to divorce the initial feeling of overdub for the audience.

Another interesting development from the discussions yesterday was the idea of our doing a very text-centric project within an improvised music festival. What I had said almost offhandedly to explain our project in this context was that the mouth is the first instrument, the primary instrument. But thinking about it – it’s actually quite true. The project will focus on the mouth, speaking, communicating, sounds, and silence – and the mouth is one of the first things most people use to emit sound. The cry of a baby. I also was thinking about our use of improvisation in the performance. And what occurs to me – which may be less obvious in the project itself – but this idea of process/improvisation – is very much tied to collaboration in my mind. So the collaboration of the three of us is essentially a form of improvisation – particularly due to the fact that we’ve never worked before like this and our timeframe is short.

Merida – June 3, 2009.

Jackie and I met Nadia Escalante for the first last night to start discussing what I’m calling our triad project. We had a couple hours of chatting about our personal work, our aesthetics and ideas about what we’re working on. Nadia spoke of some of her ideas about language and the nature of language as an obstruction to reality. How language can hide a lot about what is happening. She has some interesting perspectives on silence being at the root of language and her words “everything we could express is in silence” is a compelling idea. 

Jackie’s work looks at human interactions, miscommunications, (humorous, sly, sexual, andotherwise). The catalogs of gestures that make up who we we are and how we relate to each other. Also we discussed how the removal of context, or distorting of context was of interest. 

I feel as though my own sound work is moving towards an interest in improvisation as a way of understanding these routes of communication, dialogue, miscommunication, exchange. I think aesthetically I’m interested in the contrast, the tension, the push and pull of opposing or juxtaposed ideas, concepts, sounds, visuals, mediums etc. I like to think of the process of creating art as an activation – of the artist and the audience, a performative gesture that is more than just that of the performer. A complicit act = performance. 

I think all three of us work with these ideas. Something we developed in the meeting was the idea of focus on the everyday – the quotidian – the aphorism. Also the disruption of the everyday and the linear narrative. 

Before the trip we had considered focusing on the mouth as a theme of the performance and project. The mouth as the entrance and the exit, the form of communication, the way that the outside is brought inside. 

This morning we began to work out strategies for the project – different actions that we could use to express some of our ideas. The afternoon meeting will also be focused on developing strategies and planning out the shape of the performance. We’ve decided to use video projections and documentation as well as focus on some language related to the mouth and aphorisms involving the mouth.

But now it’s raining like crazy!

Merida!

“I am trying to connect the ideas of emotion in music and improvisation itself—and making the claim that both the idea and the practice of improvisation are essentially feminine—a female art derived from female so-called vices: emotion, volatility, variability, fickleness. Being called fickle, for instance, is never a compliment, but I think it can actually form a kind of structure for a work of orchestral music.”

http://www.textura.org/archives/articles/rosenfeldarticle.htm