I picked up this small book while browsing Spoonbill Bookstore in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This is a collection of some sixty Polaroids with intermittent text.

“The Artist,” Andrei Tarkovsky says, “must be capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic, and conveying the deep complexity of truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of life.”

Dance is not beholden to narrative and can exist without translation via language. It is something else, entirely ephemeral, and containing its own logic. Dance is direct, tangential, running amok, fast, slow…like snow and irreverent in its ability to articulate its own poetry.

Translation made me think of transfiguration, something about figure/change. Right? So I checked the definition: A marked change in form or appearance; a metamorphosis. Yes, certainly dance can do that. Then, I wondered if trans-culturation was indeed a word. I thought it was a word I used to know. So I looked it up… it is. It is a bit more complicated since it points to the addition of new or foreign cultural elements into an existing culture (political and historical implications there). Yes, dance can move in that way too.

Dance needn’t resolve; as in wrap up a contradiction or finish, as in a story. Rather I see making dance as posing questions and laying bare a kind of thinking in the physical, the choreographers or improvisers thought process literally “fleshed” out.

Finally I tried trans-nonlinearation just for fun… nope, not a word. So I stopped, my luck ran out.

Still I couldn’t help myself…..

Trans-hopefulalienation = Holden Caufield

Trans-cunnilingusimagination = hermaphrodite

Trans-defactoromancipantsoffanation = Obama Election

I notice that I subvert my initial proposal. I was speaking of dance.

Ahhhh… dance can do that.

Exactly.

Hello! This blog is for current research, teaching updates, documentation of ideas and pieces in progress, writings on art and culture (non fictional and fictional) and anything else related to my work. Please stay tuned for new postings in the weeks ahead.