HUB

the archive and movement laboratory of conceptual dance theatre company A House Unbuilt... spending at least an hour a day, making space, marking time,—making enough room to feel, tremendously, again.

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5 posts tagged stage

HUB 481:
Front Porch 

HUB 305.2:
Field Trip, part 1—The School Manufactured Artifact

HUB 241.1:
discovering a new site… the soft crest toothpaste green and warm red oak, the light glancing off tattered wallpaper and buckled flooring, the columns streaming upward in formation and at the ready—visions take me to the planning phase already.  a prospect, indeed.  more research to be done. Manufactured ArtifactFound Artifact

“So, too, a person need only step onto a stage to become purely frontal, to lose his backside and have it replaced with a backstage. It is a back room that he can never enter, but must circle endlessly.”

HUB 205.2

from Behind This Curtain… I too have been thinking about the stage, the way it frames things in two dimensions, the way it restricts not only our view as audience but as performers too. I’ve been thinking about that portable stage we carry with us, always on demand—the smile. There is always something behind the smile. A backstage as such, where things other than that stretch of saccharin are left to wait, perhaps to be used as props or scenery at some later date… We—our selves—are left outside/offstage, neither back nor on nor front of house. Indeed, we are left circling the yard as the smile plays on without us.

HUB 159.2:

(there’s a bit of a pause before it starts, …just wait, please)

I’d like to speak to you today about whales and their singing…

The song of a lone whale in the depths, the far reaches of the ocean—the vast distance her song can breach to be heard and responded to by another. (( the humpback’s song reaching from one pole to another in an individual, identifiable voice. ))

Do they have a short hand, like a telegram would use, so to grab the attention of the prospective listener, to hold them there, waiting for more? (( perhaps the clicking of the dolphins.))

How long do these transmissions take to reach their end, like the speed of light—the stars we see today long since faded in their own locale.  What does this lull in communication do to the way we communicate? —do we resend, learn another’s way of speaking, swim deeper for a better signal?

Considering, again, the telegram, what did its relative speed offer?  What has replaced it today?  And whereas in the past, such means were a supplement, now perhaps the are a substitute for any and all longer forms. 

It is here that I begin to think of evolution, of natural selection, of how a whale’s anatomy is built in such a way to facilitate these distant yet personal transmissions—the monkey lips, the acoustic fat, the melon, and extended lung capacity.  

I consider the human anatomy here too, as we are a distant evolutionary relative to these whales, these mammals of the sea who started their lives on land.  Is there some similar fatty membrane or capacity of being that gives way to the history of our messaging each other?

What has brought about our own epistolary evolution, from the long form letter to the telegram to post card, fax, fax to email, email to sms?  

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