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.

Here's The Way of Merce

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.

An Open Letter To Rob Pattinson

Love and Humiliation

are words that do not belong in the same sentence.

Unless you are denying Love

Blindly, that is the only elegant way to love. What reproach could there be for someone who discreetly and totally devotes himself to another; what reproach could there be for someone who is the object of such devotion? Blind destination: that is the direction dreams go, in ideas and love. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 105)

So far as existence is concerned, as Ajar (Romain Gary's alter ego) would say, it needs to be taken in charge by someone. No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition.  Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion....It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms. Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 119)

BTW This is what Eric Packer does whenever he leaves the limo. He is letting the "world will him". Too bad Cronenberg didn't know that in his misreading of DeLillo's novel.

Since it is impossible to own someone, it is impossible for that someone to "cheat" on you. 

Someone can cheat you in a transaction which occurs in the Order of Production.

They cannot "cheat" on you sexually in the Symbolic Order of Seduction since you do not and cannot own them.

CHEAT is a word now almost universally used that is a sound-bite, a ready-made that deprives you of the ability to think, the language necessary to think in, about this situation, and as long as you have not torn it out of your mind, you are trapped, your freedom has been stolen from you by the use of this stupid word. CHEAT is creating your reality for you via an illusion.

You can enter an institutional marriage contract, that as Kant said, "is a legal contract giving each person the ownership of the other's sexual organs."

Someone can be a slave but slaves retain their own individual freedom. Only a slave can be liberated, but only an individual can give up, deny, disregard, be unaware of, ignore, exert, choose to practice their own freedom to any extent they choose. They may be dominated, but they are still free. 

Working, performing, living under an authoritarian system, the individual may be dominated, ruled, whatever, but the individual is still free. 

Take Cronenberg directing Cosmopolis. An authoritarian director he masks his authoritarianism with - in this case - a requirement that the lines spoken by the actor must be exactly as written. No changes. The actor is still free in the sense that the face, the body, the movement the eyes, the voice, are still the actor's own. The actor is free to express.

Take Rupert Sanders, the permissive parent model. His actors are encouraged to express their own opinions about the performance of the scene. To freely express their perceptions and interpretations on how to play it. The director inputs, discusses, persuades, encourages, strengthens, weakens, whatever, and in doing this exerts the aura of his dominance. 

When the camera roles the director directs the scene. 

This all seems very democratic eh. Very respectful of the actors.

What the director has done is to take the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, interpretations of the actors and usurped them under his direction of the scene. Yes the actor still retains his/her own freedom, but that has been compromised in this situation. It has been stolen in homeopathic doses so the actor is not even aware that it no longer belongs to him, but to the director who is calling the shots on the scene. 

The director controls and dominates on a meta level. An invisible level.

This is a subtle difference. Do you see it?  The Jesuits have known this subtle way of "spinning" someone's mind for centuries. They are masters at it. Eric Maddox learned to be a master at it, which is why he got Saddam against all odds.  A Jesuit education will give you this because it will have been done to you, giving you the opportunity to "identify with the aggressor" as Freud would say it.

Kristen Stewart has been carefully aided in a performance of Snow White by a subtle director. Her first physical role as an "action hero". Her fears have been alleviated, she has mastered riding (always a sexual challenge with females) and has assumed an active rather than a passive Snow White persona. Her director has helped her as a therapist might, but used his dominance to enter into a seductive relationship with her. 

Not with Charlize who would know exactly how to handle this situation. No, with the young very inexperienced Stewart, her vulnerability an erotic attraction for him, and in the past for you BTW.

Stewart has been subtly dominated by Sanders, without her awareness, on the shooting set of Snow White. This has led to her insecurity as to how to handle his advances on THAT AFTERNOON! She has handed a certain quality/amount of her freedom of action to him on the set without knowing that she has done so. She didn't know, so she couldn't take it back. This is why there are acting coaches BTW.

This is something two people in a relationship discuss, argue about, confront, threaten, weep over, endlessly because this situation is interfaced in the minds of individuals just as surely as the screens in Eric Packer's life are interfaced with his mind, his perceptions, his thinking and reasoning abilities, his emotions, and tearing it out during the OMITTED naked bodies scene in the novel is excruciatingly painful to him; to deliver himself from its total influence. 

But how can you deliver yourself from this kind of influence if you don't know it exists?

An object does not exist until and unless it is observed. - William Burroughs

Stewart has been thrown to the lions and wolves, meat for the tabloids, entertainment for empty lives, vulnerable primarily for her unknowing. 

Unprotected and Abandoned