A TEXTING MOMENT

The texting below was an exchange that took place just before midnight... Earlier I had been texting to another person and it started to go bad because the ideas were very complicated and misunderstandings started to erupt. So we decided to stop. Such negative Texting can be a source of tension and miscommunication. This can also happen in email exchanges. Having suffered through the extreme misunderstandings that can occur through cybertext, I know that such discrepancies are not trivial. Some have changed my life in ways that I wish I could take back. Once text has become an object occupying space and no longer an expression in time like conversation that vanishes into fleeting moments passing by, it can become a destructive force that gathers momentum.

But the text offered here was a spontaneous exchange. The imagery that was created in the moment will serve as a road map to the planned experience in the Greenwich Village restaurant known as Choga. LN is a noted and accomplished choreographer, multimedia artist, and educator.


Wizard: I was advised to take it slow in making changes...
This struck me as spectacularly wise.
Did I ever give you the book Science and Technology in the Arts 

LN: No.

Wizard: That big book in guest room...

LN: I looked through the book when I was there and wondered if I could get a copy.
Our legacy is in that book!

Wizard: But "taking it slow" seemed good because I thought I would be surrendering a property I have been working on for more than 50 years.
My Credo was multimedia...

LN: Yes, give yourself some time.

Wizard: Stewart Kranz was impressed and that was why I was in the book...
If you look, the images are like pictures from IMPACT...

LN: Yes! I want to teach a course and use that book!

Wizard: When I got to NYU, I had chance to implement ideas as curriculums and productions
That's why I'm Having so
Much fun with the new EXPANDED MUSIC

LN: Great! Wish we had planned for your course and mine to connect!

Wizard: NOW EXPANDING MUSIC INCLUDES THE SENSE OF TASTE AND IMPROV AT CHOGA
Let's see about next semester. I'm
Offering it again...  Will have so many students for Spring
I have a great cellist in my class.
He is from Turkey.
His mother makes cellos.

LN: Wow!!!

Wizard: He is playing her instrument...
He is so sensitive and musical

LN: Does be compose?

Wizard: We have terrific violinist ...
Cellist seems afraid to improvise and we are
Taking all of us there tomorrow on video.
We are officially having class in Choga.

LN: This is unbelievable. I just came from a meeting
with a very important person and I suggested we use a
music composition with violin, cello and flute!

Wizard: They now have multimedia.
Choga has three screens and good sound system

LN: You never cease to amaze me !

Wizard: We are linking movement to notation
Our dancer will be our notation...
We will play her as she moves...
We will use both physical and emotional space as the score.
LN: Are you actually going to notate (symbols on a page)?

Wizard: I wish I had that Korean Artist... But yes... we will ask some students to map it.
Thanks for reminding me to take materials!
The strategy of getting musicians aware of embodiment  has really worked...
Last week everyone choreographed each other...
Conceptually this has been growing with me
and that IMPACT student Connie who was interested in embodiment

LN: One of the basic techniques is learning how to open to using space

Wizard: Not sure what you mean
How to open using space

LN: If you take you arm out to the side, it has a certain extension.
But if you take your arm out with the intention of expanding to the length of the room
You fill more space
You take in an idea

Wizard: Interesting... We use similar analogy with the voice

LN: Let the body open to dimension

Awareness is everything

You can do all kinds of movement awareness exercises.  I make them up. Try this one :

Bring your chin to your chest
Now left your chin with no particular intention
Now bring your chin to chest again

This time think about throat opening
Revealing throat
Do you feel your throat more?

Wizard: Yes

LN: I'm not sure that came across

Wizard: And I could see or hear filling the open throat with sound

LN: If you bend your elbow,
Now think of opening at the joint
To straighten your arm,

Wizard: I forgot to mention that Choga has this big open
Space in front of bar... So it is like a stage... a place for embodiment...

LN: Embodiment is about intention

Wizard: Yes, I agree
But it is also about Beingness

LN: And Nothingness ..

Wizard: And Heidegger

LN: Sartre

Wizard:  I'm going to take this text and turn it into my blog

Languaging and the Worlding of the World

Yes, writing takes time... And we have to take the time or time disappears, evaporates without any words to mark its passing.

Now that I feel the end of my time passing faster and faster, I regret all the poems unwritten, all the songs still inside, all the music left in the silence... The books unwritten...

Wait! Just one more moment!  Ah... Now the saying "time waits for no one" tolls like an ostinato across the emptiness of mind...

Howl is such a great movie. It has just been released for the home market. As good as the poem is, the movie may be better... Howl is about language... The essence of words and the eloquence of their sounds that transcend meaning...

I seem to have lost power like a car running out of gas or a blackout that suddenly descends upon a city... Not without warning... But with an impersonal  indifference ...

This text is empty... Just clicks across the screen... Taps of the true digital wasteland of fingers and thumbs eking out letters and words...

I am a romantic. I do believe in forever, even though I know I will soon disappear as everyone has before me and as will those who follow.  Yet for me,  forever persists as a premonition of a deeper truth. It flies in the face of the reality of the universe. Newtonian Physics describes a universe that  disperses energy so that eventually existence as we know it comes to a close, the law of Entropy.

Believing in forever is like believing in fairy tales. But it is the stuff that drives us to great achievements. The stuff that dreams are made of.

My friend says compose something, create something to pull you through nights of despair. But nothing comes... except I find myself echoing the Cole Porter song In the Still of the Night  because I recently had an epiphany that Cole Porter was summing up the existential question:

Do you love me, as I love you
Are you my life to be, my dream come true
Or will this dream of mine fade out of sight
Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill
In the chill, still, of the night

This is sung to the night, to the universe... wondering if the love we feel in being alive will be returned by the world, the life we love. Or is our place in existence just a dream that fades out of sight like the moon growing dim....

In the chill,

Still,

of the night.

The hoped-for return of the world loving us is an illusion fading out of sight, like the moon that will be lost to the earth as it escapes its orbit... we see our hope growing dim on the rim of the hill until it is gone.  And all that we thought was as enduring as the universe is just illusion...

There is this shimmering moment in time that I think is forever...It is in the fire of imagination and the inspiration of those that inhabit my experience and my world...

Creating new work is more than refuting despair, it is making the world and creating ourselves in the emerging moments... evidence that we here and we are enduring... it is the worlding of the world.