1.
I am a well-fed white person living in a first world country. I do not
experience poverty, marginalization, or war in my daily life. I have
absorbed or stolen all of my grief except that quantity accounted for
by alienation. I use the word alienation when I wish to refer to
the process of isolation and estrangement from others moving towards
the unresponsiveness of society to an individual.
Alienation functions as a component in the present social system. The
fragmentation of individuals from a social body prevents cooperative
structures from developing alternatives to the current modes of
economic production. Alienation produces the interior/exterior binary,
facilitating the inward care of the family, nation, ethnicity, etc.
Space acts as an agent in the process of alienation. I use the word
space when I wish to refer to the interactions between persons and
objects that create patterns and borders.
2.
I drafted the following series of statements about space in a society
that does not exist yet. These currently false sentences point to the
dynamics of spaces I would find desirable.
Existence is a social act.
Individuals compensate the social body for exclusive use of its spaces.
Individuals make public space an intended end.
Public space is an activity not a location; interactions between
subjects create space.
I public space when I create conditions for interactions that welcome
balances of participation and power.
Strangers do with each other instead of be with each other.
Loiterers facilitate energy transfer and engagement in public space.
3.
In an attempt to make some of these statements true during a discrete
frame of time, I began work on a dance/video project to be a means for
the creation of liminal space, crevices existing between the ordered
predictability of relationships in both private and public space.
Ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy characterize these spaces, and
individuals change their behavior towards one another in response to
the space. Interactions in liminal space maintain qualitatively
difference from interactions outside the space.
I created a two minute unit of movement material that included
handstands, pirouettes, somersaults, and high leg extensions and
performed the dance in a variety of spaces: a bathtub, a field of
cabbage, my bedroom, the main aisle in Wal-Mart, a crowded public
bathroom, a computer lab, behind a hardware store’s dumpsters, on top
of a rock sculpture, the magazine racks in a chain bookstore, an
elevator, lying in a pile of autumn foliage, in the trunk of a Volvo
Station Wagon, a hedge, Starbucks, a small pond, the busiest corner in
downtown, a corn field, and a forest. In each space, I set up a tripod
and filmed how my dance affected the space and how the space affected
my dance.
Field notes: Employees of Starbucks asked me to leave the
establishment. After watching me dance a top of a rock sculpture, a
young child began climbing and exploring the crevices between the rocks
rarely touched by the public. A shopper in a retail store gave me
tips on how to be more vertical in my handstands. The density and
muddiness of the corn field prevented me from moving a few feet in any
direction without falling. A person in the public bathroom waited for
me to finish my dance to tell me how pleased she was to see someone
dancing; it “made her day.” Most pedestrians and shoppers avoided
looking at me with the exception of almost every child I encountered.
The outdoor spaces affected my appearance more than indoor spaces
adding mud, leaves, and scrapes to my costume.
4.
Research departure: How could society organize space in a manner the
avoids the public / private binary?
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