Performance

This performance of Alferi’s 2002 cinépoème “Ne l’oublié pas” arranges three lines of poetry that change at different rates (the last one doesn’t change) to create different phrase combinations that lead to the same conclusion. The result appears to be combinatorial, but because the medium is video, there is actually an unvarying sequence, so it evokes how a multiplicity of experiences and rapid sensory information enters the frail storage medium that is memory.

The dancers move in ways that evoke the process of creating memories and attempting to keep them. Their dance leads to poses and pauses, some of which contain reminders of where thoughts are stored. The use of a lead dancer is an important strategy in the performance underscores an intuition to be found in Alferi’s video poem: that variation is memorable. Note how with her distinct costume and dance, framed by the other dancers moving in recurring poses, the lead dancer captures and commands attention, pulling together the fragmented performances into a coherent experience.

Choreography: Sarah Burns
Poetry: Pierre Alferi (“Ne l’oublie pas”)
Dancers: Jennifer Apter, Andrea Fitzpatrick, Jessica Nagler,
Julie Spendal, Farrah Thompson, Jessica Walts

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This performance is about circularity: counterclockwise rotation of letters and words around a central axis on screen, dancers enacting different kinds of spins and gyrating movements focused around a globe. Each concentric line rotates at different speeds, aligning the letters from different lines to generate intriguing combinations. As the performance progresses, the word rotation gradually speeds up until the words become a rapid stream, suggesting an acceleration of time. The dancer’s movements speed up as well, as their playful interactions with the globe become increasingly frantic yet gentle, much like the music by The Kronos Quartet.

Choreography: Kerry Ring
Poetry: Loss Pequeño Glazier
Music: “White Man Sleeps” composed by Kevin Volans,
Performed by The Kronos Quartet
Dancers: Julia Tedesco, Ellie Sanna, Meghan Starnes

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The opening performance in “Language to Cover a Wall” is about the word made flesh: Glazier reads his poem “Etymon / Encarnación” while a young woman dances to the rhythms of his voice. The words juxtaposed in the title both gesture towards primeval origins of language: etymon refers to the origins of words, while encarnación is about the immaterial gaining a body. And we can’t help but notice the bodies on stage: Glazier sitting in a chair, reading his poem engrossed in the words on the page, gently swaying like José Feliciano. The contrast of a young female dancer in a white dress, interpreting lines of sounded breath with her body, bending her articulations with an agility matched only by the poet’s vocal articulation of the poem.

Poetry: Loss Pequeño Glazier (“Etymon / Encarnación”)
Dancer: Sarah Burns

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The interpretive dance performance seeks to evoke the experience of a concussion and does so by clustering six dancers on a side of the stage using red lighting to suggest a sense of the inside of the speaker’s head. When the dancers are clustered, swaying semi-coherently, they evoke the sense of a brain function normally, but as the piece progresses it begins to unravel, as the dancers spiral out of control. Their disjointed movements as they each dance on their own, spread around the stage mimics the cognitive impact of a concussion, echoed by the language hovering over them. The dance performance concludes by returning to normal function, urgently, as one of the dancers runs around the reorganized collective, as if trying to hold them together by sheer force of will as the screen and stage fade to black, leading us to wonder. Has the brain been healed? Has normal language function returned?

“Expansive Mayhem”
Choreography: Julia Tedesco and Ellie Sanna
Poetry: Loss Pequeño Glazier (“Io Sono At Swoons “)
Music: Jai Uttal and Ben Leinbach
Dancers: Melissa Hunt, Marika Matsuzak, Stephanie Ohman, Sammi Pfieffer, Samantha Will, Jessica Viglianco

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This performance is based on Memmott’s video poem “NONCE.EXECUTOR” a poem that juxtaposes words with phrases and images that somehow define or describe them. The dancers are positioned between the screen and a disheveled blonde doll sitting on the front of the stage with a spotlight shining on it. The dancers’ movements are very doll-like, making stiff movements that emphasize their joints and how they bend and rotate on dolls. Are the dancers an explanation or description of the doll?

Choreography: Ashley Peters
Poetry: Talan Memmott (“NONCE.EXECUTOR”)
Dancers: Samantha Crosby, Danielle Delong, Julie Marazzo, Kristina Merrill, Shannon Moore, Megan Rutkowski, Holli Simme, Julia Tomanovich, Emily Wilhelm

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This event investigates how one reads a literary text in the digital environment. The presentation is presented in several parts, as follows. The poem is meant to extend the idea of poetic structure from a static/print environment to the structures of digital language. It means to move it forward, not dizzied by technical effects, but along a trajectory that thoughtfully moves structures into New Media environments.

1. A general introduction. Each part of the four-part digital poem, “Four Guillemets”, is composed in sections that vary in their content on a periodic basis, indeed during the actual reading of the text. The introduction asks participants to listen to the text and to fill out response pages. Ideas about what the text means, what lines are memorable, what the “larger” meanings of the text might be.

2. Four Guillemets (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/e-poetry/guillemets/) is performed. (The performance consists of expressive language, pacing, rhythm and the adaptability of the reader to the shifts in the text.) This reading brings literary language, executed through literary structures, into the digital realm.

2a. If the Digital Poetry & Dance option is desired. A performance with of digital poetry and dance will be presented. (This would require more of a stage-like setting, thus it is presented as an option to HASTAC. There are several possible digital poetry works performed for dance that can be presented. One of these will be presented. These move the concept of electronic language into interpretative modes on contemporary/modern dance, re-imagining the body presented against digital modes.

3. A brief talk will then be given couching the performative text in traditions of literary writing. This talk presents static poetic text that is dynamic in its poetic functioning. Works looked at include Robert Frost, H.D., Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley, writers mostly identified with the avant-garde, and discusses how poetic strings as poetic variants can be seen as pioneering works for poems that use strings in code.

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013)

Recently, my work has been concerned with using quasi-algorithmic techniques to generate texts from the natural language processing affordances of so-called network services, such as internet search. For example, I search for short sequences of words and then, from the ‘results’ returned, I collect—as a human reader—some ‘preferred’ longer sequence that contains the sequence originally searched. I then select another short sequence of words from this result and continue, iteratively, to produce ‘writing to be found,’ composed and stitched together into extended pieces of text, substantial passages of words, that I have chosen and ‘composed,’ although they are, in every instance or event of inscription, written by someone or something other than myself. In related engagements, for the seed sequences that supply my searches, I may gather them from a text that was written by another human, from a well-known text, from one that has been ‘authored.’ I may try to find these same short sequences of words, independently and coincidentally ‘authored’ by other humans or other writing processes on the indexed network. I may compose a new, longer text that contains the words of the ‘authored’ supply text within ‘my’ longer sequences that are, however, written by (many) others, as found for me, as retrieved (for me) by the tireless, if electrically-powered, searching and indexing robots of all our internet service providers.

The writing that is composed in this way has, I claim, significant and affective interest, but arguably no human ‘voice.’ In the proposed performance I give literal voice to these generated texts in various ways. I turn them into writing by giving them voice, such that, after the performance, they may, at last, be dissociated from a human person who made them present.

This performance emerges from and relates closely to a long-term collaboration with Daniel C. Howe, The Readers Project (http://thereadersproject.org) and, in particular, a multi-faceted installation, Common Tongues (http://thereadersproject.org/index.php? p=installation/rts2012/commontongues.html), that will continue to generate a variety of aesthetic outcomes. Visual aspects of the performance will be developed in collaboration with Clement Valla, as a development of Hapax Phaenomena (http://clementvalla.com/ work/hapax-phaenomena/).

This performance relates to the conference themes in that it explores a future for writing, and a historically situated engagement with problems of authorship, especially the ‘moral rights’ of traditional copyright, that is: problems concerning of the association of writing with particular human authors, and problems concerning the integrity of such written compositions.

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013

Performance lecture by Marko Kosnik for Documenta Urbana 2 in Kassel, November 2006 A short resume on the topics of Laputa and The Engine from Gulliver's travels, Part 3: A voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan: taken from http://egonmarch.org/movies/laputaEngine.html