4 hours and 14 minutes into my 12-hour day at the ProHipHop office [when I started working on this post] and I’m ready for a big nap!
Doing quality posts takes a while but I have some legitimately easy ones ahead, just as I would on any normal day.
I’ve discussed the idea of 24 hour blogging as endurance art but my own experiences with time-formatted art has been in dance improvisation contexts.
When I was studying dance at UNC-Greensboro from 1977 to 1982, with a year at SUNY-Purchase from ’80 to ’81, I was especially focused on modern/postmodern dance and started doing a lot with dance improvisation.
One form of improvisation I explored quite a bit was simply improvising for an hour with a group of like-minded folks and no audience or additional agenda other than productive use of the time and space. We rarely used music in such settings but did explore sound making quite a bit. No drum circles, no huggy hippy fun, just hardcore postmodern dance.
Such a situation puts the dancer back on his or her own resources in a way rarely encountered in technique classes and choreographed performances or even in club settings. One has to decide why one is there, what one is going to do and how to relate that activity to the other folks in the room without external motivators such as music or a choreographer.
Having a set hour gave one enough time to fully explore whatever one needed yet gave a solid boundary to the event. Most often these would be weekly meetings and though such experiences affected our choreography, including the use of improvisation in performance, it wasn’t really about anything beyond the art and craft of improvisation in the wake of postmodern dance.
My year at SUNY-Purchase in ’80 and ’81 changed a lot of things for me as a dancer though I did not take the obvious path of finishing there and heading to New York. Sometimes I wish I did because there was a lot of creative energy at SUNY-P at the time as well as in Manhattan but that’s the road I didn’t take.
But I did have the experience of my first 12-hour improvisation, a class project schemed by me, Laurie Roth and a woman whose name escapes me at the moment. It came out of our work in Mel Wong’s Experimental Forms class and our shared interest in the 60s and 70s avant garde across art forms.
It was an amazing experience because the work wasn’t just about doing something every hour but about going into a space with no audience, just improvisors, and paying attention and working for 12 hours. We also included various forms of art making that resulted in a documentation show of sorts though it didn’t really document the event.
For me it was an important lesson in encountering blocks and working through or around them because stopping wasn’t an option. I came out of it with a sense of transformation, a state that I continued to seek in various forms, including additional 12 hour projects at UNC-G (1982) for my senior thesis and in Durham, NC a few years later.
I think having such low-key but meaningful experiences as one aspect of my life as a working artist is what led me to this 12-hour blogging experience as a long day at the office with the intention of achieving at least a slight transformation in my understanding of what I’m doing at ProHipHop.
And now it’s 1:46, almost an hour blown in self-reflection.
Time now for microblogging action!
Or a power nap. Whichever comes first.
