A little wisdom is no doubt possible; but I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer—to dance on the feet of chance.
Friedrich Nietzsche, This Spoke Zarathustra
[Contact improvisation] came out of Grand Union. We were in residence at Oberlin College, I saw that there were a number of young men and this was a winter term kind of thing where people just volunteered to be in it and, you know, sort of out of school time. So I set a men’s class and I had never taught such a thing before, and I decided to teach a kind of, a gymnastic throwing your weight around solo, but I realized I would have to figure out how to communicate what kept me safe in this or what would keep them safe in it. So then I started digging through all my physical knowledge and decided that really the major issue was how to open up the senses to the movement. The movement was going to be random, improvised and rough, and it was going to be done on a mat so there wasn’t a kind of falling problem, but in a way that freed us to be a bit more relaxed about what we were actually doing. So I wanted the senses quite acute. I wanted the sphere around the bodies to be quite lively. I wanted people working all the way to the periphery of their vision. I wanted them able to fall, I wanted them able to bump into each other without, you know, and, and know how to do it. I wanted to, them to be able to roll on the mat, so if they fell they could translate that toppling into a, a movement that agreed with the surface that they were falling onto. They took the force parallel to it, things like that. So I learned how to teach these things, found out that people were, in fact, pleased to learn them and wanted more. And that wanting more is what finally got us to contact improvisation. That’s why it’s called something like contact improvisation because there is a third entity between the two dancers. It’s really a kind of, the leader is the movement. So once it gets into momentum, the, you, you very clearly have something to follow, which is neither one of you leading. It is the momentum that has been established. It’s the reality that you’re in that is the entity, the flow, the danger, the survival of the graceful capitulation to whatever event occurs.
Steve Paxton, “The Origins and Value of Contact Improvisation in the Words of Steve Paxton”, pillowvoices.org, 22/08/2020
A finality without means (the good and the beautiful as ends unto themselves), in fact,
is just as alienating as a mediality that makes sense only with respect to an end. What is in question in political experience is not a higher end but being-into-language itself as pure mediality, being-into-a-mean as an irreducible condition of human beings. Politics is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the act of making a means visible as such. Politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought.
Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Politics” (1992), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics
Giorgio Agamben, over the course of a series of profound essays, has endeavoured to identify a space of politics that is neither subservient to the logic of a means to an end, a means to an end beyond itself (politics as poiesis, production), nor to the idea of an end in itself, lacking a means (politics as praxis, action). Politics is rather a means without ends, a “carrying on”, an action “endured and supported”, what Agamben calls gesture or res gesta. “The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.” To open up this “sphere of a pure and endless mediality” is to reveal and enter upon what is properly an ethics and a politics: the sphere where a gesture interrupts the gesture as a means to an end or as an end in itself (interrupts transcendencies), a sphere where the open remains open – is “endured and supported”, where that we are and what we are become one in a permanent possibility of non-realisation, and of multiplicity and metamorphosis; a sphere without beginning or command, an an-arche. (Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” (1992), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics)
We may, by analogy, compare the ethical-political gesture with dance. (And here we bind this reflection to the work of the recently deceased dancer, Steve Paxton). Dance produces nothing; it has no object beyond itself and nor is it an end in-itself (unless grasped exclusively in its aesthetic dimension). “If dance is gesture, it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements.” (“Notes on Gesture”)
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For March 8: Gender is a Weapon
Gender is a Weapon: Coercion, domination and self-determination
Sally Darity
(From The Anarchist Library)
I was on the bus recently, and a guy about my age got on the bus and sat across from me. He and some others were looking out of the bus windows at some men in red dresses. We didn’t know why they were wearing dresses, but the guy across from me said, “That’s scary.” Another guy said, “Whatever, as long as they don’t come on the bus.” I wanted to say “what’s so scary about men in dresses?” But worrying that I might look enough like a dyke to him to get shit for it, and worrying that the effort and fear involved with confronting someone might make me cry, I didn’t say anything. I just wondered. What makes a guy in a dress so scary? And what about homophobia, transphobia, or whatever you want to call it without knowing why that guy was wearing a dress, causes men to bond by shit talking about it? There are many ways in which we are taught what our appropriate gender is, and when someone feels threatened by a gender identity or expression, we can guess that there lies the key to our struggle.
Gender is used against us, but we can also use it to free each other and ourselves. If we start undermining the rules and constraints of gender, we can more successfully fight patriarchy and domination. By writing this, I hope to plant seeds of gender rebellion, solidarity, and gender freedom.
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