SILVER VENUS (2018)
THE ESSAY THE FILM THE PAMPHLET THE SCREENPLAY THE QUESTION THE ARCHIVE THE PERSONA AS CHOREOGRAPHIC SCORE.
“…we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world… decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences.” Donna Haraway
Stay with the trouble. Stay with the mess.
Stay with the present muck of sea sponges and gut bacteria and the psychological manoeuvers of this group as femme who behave like percolating silver.
For 60 minutes let go of fantasies of annihilation, idyllic futures, and nostalgic nausea.
A personal vow: I, Venus, will stop reaffirming my own invisibility by way of demure self-sabotage, late night partying, unprotected snax, chaos, accustomed naiveté, chin-innocence, playing a role, refusing a pole, blame, resentment, leaving gobs of anger in a lavender bath, not letting go, not holding harder, assuming telepathy and psychic abilities are widespread, control and avoidance, body odour, being overly clean, perfectionism, assigning personal responsibility to the planets or intergenerational gene buffets, fear, fear of being located, fear of being dislocated, ambivalence about procreation, hope, despair, ambition, diligence, or not respecting the separateness of all beings, objects, things, thoughts, or circumstances.
Welcome to an imagined shift in real time. A devolution back into the water where we Venus’ have chosen to place our imaginations and our bodies and deal with both the excess and lack. Nothing is as it smears. We begin our dance at that particular location of bend where beams of light meet water and torque the protruding shell of a clam named Ale.
Untrammeled nature teems (Mark Roth)
HEY, I’M A PERSON!
Rigid Venus, come out from behind the cloak of resemblances. Recline into a position that resembles Venus, and you, however she is imagined this time, perhaps under the warm hues of a Renaissance plop. Maintaining poise and position, observe the coming and going of personal comfort and discomfort and why. Maintaining poise and position, tip and rotate forwards along the floor and towards the shore. Shift backwards like scuttling sand when the tide tugs from deep. Notice how your poise and position emulate the look of sensuous calm but make for awkward rolling. Notice encounters. Observe tactics during these encounters. Squirt when an emotion is present. Squirt when there is calm. Together, become an emotion-fountain. Together, become a calm tide.
PERSONAL CLAM ICONOGRAPHY
Do clam, as a clam does. Tense, burrow, squirt, hinge, locomote, make clammy ramps up and down and across, and explore the perimeter of your home while you balance its ph levels.
Embody the communication style, wrist flicks, and clappy correspondences of the clam – but not all clams, only that one in particular with the contagious laugh. Give the room your clammy vibe. Deliver a message. Take pause on a position that feels like it’s communicating something never before expressed on this planet. Land on whatever feels off but curious. Tell a joke with clammic comedic timing. Together, and with great sensitivity, construct a monumental tableau that commemorates when the duality of bivalves were harmoniously repaired into an organic, complicated, totality. Or, make a diagonal.
In an introductory interview, have a discussion with another clam about the future.
Engage in an ambiguous display of interspecies selection. Lead with your crotch. Become enveloped by entering negative space. Parade your quirks. May the sprouts rejoice when a selection is made.
SOMEBODY GET ME A BATHTUB
Drop your head in. Recall/invent the memory of that time you made standing waves with your legs while sitting in a bathtub. Stretch the space around you into a tub and share the same bathwater with other curious floaters. Plop and splash. Notice the bulbous responses pooling around you like white blood cells rushing to a healing zone. Go inside, become a white blood cell. Pool together inside of a sound, or collude together in an urgent victory march. Flush out an area of the room in group edema. Express effort and relief through a soundwave.
Enjoy the benefits of self-love by becoming the conductor for an orchestra of your sonic needs. Challenge the bankrupt internet search of ‘women yarl-ers’ by blasting semi recognizable choral fragments of 4 Non Blondes and Toni Braxton and celebrate their grammatical usage of the words NON and UN(break My Heart). Demand a bathtub amphitheater because voices bounce better off the porcelain. Balance and regulate sonic fluid as a way of receiving love. How is it possible to receive love? Let go of trying to analyze emotion and absorb a polyrhythm instead.
FART CONFIDENCE AND FINESSE
Let go of antiquated notions of politeness for something else: deep self-respect. Produce the wind for your own sail. Do not deny the existence of the body. Embrace its techniques. Step into the light and sound of brave vulnerability. Consider the subtle finesse of timing, location, and available air circulation. Diffuse with elegant self- acceptance. Diffuse from all of your physical and psychological sphincters. Cascade the room like Yukio Nakagawa cascaded one million tulip petals over an open field onto Kazuo Ohno in ‘An Offering to Heaven’. Deploy the group navigation techniques of teeming silver herring, banking and turning at each flatulent fork with expert precision.
PETALS IN THE EXPANDED FIELD
Take a moment to organize chaos.
From dancing, expression, and instinct
into choreography in 5’s and along the planetary pathway of Venus.
Lead with your crotch and follow with your best wrestling moves.
Here are some Rosalind Krauss diagrams respun.
Zoom out.
Witness The Apollonian Line in a brief encounter with The Venus of Willendorf.
Their moves are same-same but different.
Animate them differently. De-animate them less.
This is a rave. This is a score. This is a one-night stand. This is acting. This is a song. This is a Venus Flower Basket: the nearly unbreakable glass sea sponge. Nearly unbreakable because every other square in its fibrous structure has been diagonalized.
Take something familiar into a different field.
This is also diagonalizing, but brought on by a change in environment.
MOTHERDIVA MANDORLA
Who is the diva that nourishes the self, but at the expense of another?
Who is the mother that nourishes another, but at the expense of another’s self?
Reconcile the nurturer and she who commands to be nurtured.
Reconcile the care-giver and the care-taker.
Their overlap is an almond-shaped hole
A water balloon
An egg sac
A sperm bladder
A shot in the dark.
Take a chance at ruin
And simply follow what is alluring.
Resonate with a liquid centre,
And follow its sloshes through space.
Become a shot in the dark
With simultaneous care and abandon.
The caring penguin fathers who stand over their eggs in Antarctica
Huddling differently to stay warm.
Starving slowly to boast later.
THE PARROT AMYGDALA
These two almond-shaped emotion centres of the lower brain have adopted a cousin, the parrot, whose amygdalae use powerful feelings to organize.
Organize a construction entirely out of forceful emotional deliverance. Use feelings as mortar. Repeat the materials that are delivered with the salty punch of curt zeal. Amplify a tantrum, or just sit on it and feel where it goes. Get moody, recall your personal power ballad. Don’t fall apart. This could be a comedy. Wait for a feeling to come to you.
* Use this approach as a deep dark plié that sustains this score and its performance.
Plié Addendum
+++Clarity practice: to cut through ambiguity with a bow and arrow
+++Brave solos: the courage to step out, into a florescent light. To make a sound, to utter from the lowest utters.
FROTH RIDER FABRIC ICONOGRAPHY
Create form from formlessness. Encounter vastness. Use fabric. Play with representing the too-muchness of nature, including moral ambivalence and spontaneous procreation. Roll fabric like froth rolls over the sea. Let fabric drape, mobilize and bring life to the liquids it envelops. Let fabric give birth to iconographies of Venus. Cover details and at the same time reveal essences with fabric-froth. Play with endless contingency – one image metamorphosing into the next, a nightmare tableau. Build images together, work from the logic of AND, AND. Be both hidden and revealed. Look into an abyss and see its surface details using the power of negative thinking. Ask for help. Gather. Teem. Make more bubbles. Ride on top of heavy water. Work against rhythm to pull yourself out of Sinead O’Conner’s power-ballad toilet. Sublime survival only looks like an island.
WIDE-ON for HOT COMPOST PEARLS
Prepare. Pass. Ride. Assist.
Attract the oddkin of conflicting dimensions of reality and collect them in a wide inner thigh basin. Squat on momentum. Let it cook and pearl and roll along the floor. Prepare your body for a horizontal ride on a pearl. Pass a pearl to a friend. Ride and glide a pearl, free from concern. Assist a friend and uppen her pearilous pearly glide. Follow pleasure like a mudslide, slowing down only to place a bridle on a moment and extend its beauty. Become preoccupied by a detail.
I, VENUS, MAKE MYSELF LAUGH
Cleanse the space and all of its objects of seriousness, gravity, solemnity, or preciousness. Engage in absurd cleaning. Undermine labour with a thick glove. Be antagonistic, contrarian, lazy, and galvanize one thing at a time. Ignore efficiencies and become rigorously lackadaisical.
MAKE AN ALTAR AND MOVE IT
Pull materials from the shadows of this dance and construct an unfixed anti-altar. This altar is a composite organism of those who touched it and saw it and shot their sweaty pheromones throughout the room. Add to it without reason. Be fickle. Animate it, but do not worship it. It will disappear soon. It is constantly being remade. It is pure contingency. It is necessarily collective. It is no big deal. It is not art. Art makes things. It is nature, where there are no objects, but there are goopy processes going in and out of gasping breaths.
Anoint it with energy borrowed from the next performance of Silver Venus. Give it an open-heart transplant. Refuse cynicism and keep it going.
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Choreographic score by Andrea Spaziani
For the performance Silver Venus (2018) presented by Dancemakers (Toronto)
April 26-28, 2018
Choreography by Andrea Spaziani
Made in collaboration with and performed by Nicole Rose Bond, Irvin Chow, Francesca Chudnoff, Alicia Grant, Claire Turner Reid, and Julia Male
Music by Matt Smith
Costume Design by Buzz / Rebaie by Rebée
Makeup by Jooyeon Kim
Score design by Gracia Gallo of conceptcitron.com
