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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

FKA Twigs Bringing Disjunctive Dance and Music Mainstream

Two Weeks FKA twigs

So why is this on my Twilight blog?Cause I want it here, so FKA twigs can see it here. Her roots go very deep into cutting edge disjunctive music and dance during the 20th century. Let's start with Merce Cunningham and a collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg. Dance, music and theater.

He took dance apart and put it back together again, leaving out all but the most essential. He stripped dance of conventional narrative; he ordered it by change procedures he conceived it without music and without decor. He took it out of the proscenium (but later put it back) and exploded the stage picture into fragments. He made the viewer the auteur. The great irony inherent in all this is that only a great storyteller possessed of extraordinary musicality could have stripped away so much and be left with more. Cunningham was able to separate dance from its traditional trappings not because dance does not need them, but because dance--at least in his hands--already had them.


From Mondays With Merce # 12
Feel free to skip around, listen to Merce, and watch the movement. He changed the way we look at dance. It is disjunctive, non-linear. Art is anticipating Continental Philosophy
Collaboration: Robert Rauschenberg Backdrop for Merce Cunningham Dancers
Now to Meredith Monk celebrating her 50th year in performance.Here she is now at 71
Meredith Monk in Concert With Katie Geissinger.If you click on the link you will get the 1 1/2 hour concert with short pieces as well as longr ones showing her virtuosity with voice only. This is her 50th anniversary performance. I saw her as a young woman in the mid 1970's. Same time frame with my seeing Cunningham, Rainer, and many others.
http://youtu.be/i-PVlBnt-x0

These were the Jimmy Carter years when grant money flowed to the arts instead of war. Reagan put a stop to all that. But those years were an incredible time to be alive and awake to what was going on.

Then we have the towering figure of John Cage
The Audience often laughed so feel free to do so!

Let's see. Annie Gosfield of course.
When Annie was in Kindergarten she used to come in my classroom at Miquon, stand there and just listen with big eyes. My favorite of hers  
is an excerpt from her album Lost Signals and Drifting Stellites but I couldn't get it to load.So link to it.
http://youtu.be/pIZpUiRaRLU

Yvonne Rainer Trio A 
(The Mind Is A Muscle,Part 1),1966
I heard her on a panel in the mid 1970's. She has made statements that ballet is about "Look at me how beautiful I am." She choreographed dances for children, old people, fat people, disabled people,et al. She was a force for innovative dance. Everyone began to dance at that time.There were workshops free or very cheap all the time.

It was an amazing time to be young and alive.

I want readers to know how deep FKA twigs's roots are in what she is doing.

First Miley Cyrus came along with Wrecking Ball
She wrecked soft porn pop princess videos and made them obsolete
and upped the game with TWERKING
Here she takes on hard core porn and demolishes it
Now all that soft porn looks waaaay dated and hard core porn doesn't have the bite it used to.

Miley Cyrus has made a FOUCAULDIAN CUT into the Discourse of pop princess performing. How can anyone follow her as she has taken it to the edge in excess,and jumped over the abyss. She imploded all that pseudo seduction so what is next?Who will step into this GAP, this space she has opened up in mainstream pop?

FKA twigs has stepped up to the plate.

And finally after over 50 years we have disjunctive dance and music in the
MAINSTREAM!

Just think no more songs about lousy boyfriends, lost lovers, R&B, and all the rest of pop music manipulating your feelings, trying to make you feel a certain way.


Just sound now
Will you pay more attention to the sounds around you. Isn't this William Burroughs cut and paste in sound  not words?

Finally music I want to listen to. Something that puts me in the space of the auteur.