Crawley, Ashon T. ~ Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Ch 2 “Shout” Crawley’s book theorizes Blackpentecostalism (BP) as an extra-subjective mode of being together—grounded in, and as a celebration of, the flesh. As a “way of life” (138) based on itinerancy and choreosonicity, BP is ultimately a (non)being, or, as he puts it, a “being beside oneself in the service of the other” (5). Methodologically, it is… Read More
Zadie Smith ~ Swing Time I keep coming back to Barthes’ assertion that what power imposes in the first place is a rhythm (of life, thought, discourse, time). In this book, Zadie Smith explores this idea but gives it a spin: Black people had a place and a rhythm—the TA slave trade robbed black people of them. And of course… Read More
José Esteban Muñoz ~ Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts In the introductory notes to “Queer Acts,” Jose Esteban Munoz gives a glance of how ephemera can act as a form of archive, while pointing at the question of under what value-making system would such a notion—the ephemeral—become a form of evidence. The spirit is very much one of anti-rigor. I would guess that in… Read More
Scattered Notes: Lepecki’s Various Texts A movement forward and backward: (from history to/through the body) the body’s will to archive: the body’s capacity to activate a still un-exhausted creative fields of possibility in a past work, historical event, or ritualized performance, (what else would fall under this category?). this creative act tapping into a very concrete and very real virtuality… Read More
André Lepecki ~ Choreographic Angelology A critique of flow–the belief that dancers’ task is to deliver an unmediated fluidity of movement, coming from the “master’s” imaginary, passing through the body of the dancer, kinesthetically, out into the world. An idea of flow that goes back to Friedrich Schiller’s 1793 project of an aesthetic state. Schiller’s vision includes an analogical parallel… Read More
Diana Taylor ~ The Archive and the Repertoire: Notes on Intro and Chapter 3 A colonial regime of truth works by establishing a system of equivalences (meaning = text; history = document) and antagonisms (self not = other; body not = mind), erasing and deeming invaluable those forms of knowledge and meaning making processes coming from embodied practices and performance. In this text, Taylor takes us through the spaces… Read More
Body, Archive, Performance How does the body do the work of the archive? How does it transmit knowledge? Can it? Can it express an ontoepistemological order or sociopolitical reality? Firstly, I want to engage with texts that center the body as a repository of a given ontoepistemology, cultural memory, or as a mnemonic device, in the Performance Studies… Read More
On the Archive: M. Foucault, D. Taylor, TBC Foucault’s Archive For F, all utterances happen within a system of what can and cannot be said: the archive is what differentially organizes these utterances within a constituting system, which, at the same time, is constituted by the utterances as they get categorized—archived—as unique events or statements (rather than… rather than not?). The archive doesn’t… Read More