So I’m an armchair tech geek and, when I can, listen to the This is my next podcast at the end of each week. Most of the interim site’s team—they’re soon launching its replacement, The Verge, in partnership with SB Nation—defected in April from tech blog Engadget. (Read David Carr’s rundown for The New York Times here.)

Last week, toward the end of episode 22, Paul Miller, Vlad Savov, Joanna Stern and Joshua Topolsky found themselves here after talking about wireless carriers (I don’t have any comments or responses, it just struck me as a super-Zeitgeisty exchange worth sharing):

VS: We want the benefits of a monopoly, one network spread across the entire country, but we don’t want one company to be in charge of it. If it’s not going to be one company, one carrier, it basically has to be the government. There’s no other option, [no other] choice.

JT: What about a supercompany? Like a really, really big company.

VS: You [American] guys are all really afraid of your government and at the same time, you’ve all benefited from government initiatives to a great degree, which you don’t really appreciate. One quick example being the lunar landing, right?

JS: Oh, God.

PM: You can’t…we cannot go down this…

JT: No, I like it. Vlad, I’d like to hear your perspective as a sophisticated and advanced European. I love it.

VS: Seriously: The lunar landing was the result of vast amounts of government investment, and it was to compete with the Russians.

JT: You know what we need? We need Russians.

PM: The Russians were doing that with their government, too. The Russians weren’t, like, “Let’s let private enterprise figure out this going-to-space thing.”

VS: Yeah—the Russians made it into space, you guys made it into space, onto the moon, on the back of government initiative.

JT: Here’s what we need. Look, we’ve been fighting this war on terrorism. It’s very scattered, it’s messy—

PM: The pioneers didn’t need a government initiative to load up their wagons and go West. They just needed cheap, unspoiled land to buy.

VS: Oh, they bought the land? They bought the land, Paul? [Laughs]

JT: Yeah, they didn’t exactly buy it. I wouldn’t go that far. I think that there was “a lot of land to get.” But let’s be honest—

JS: But they bought it on contract.

JT: What we really need is a really sophisticated enemy [that] is beating us. Listen, this is something that Americans would really respond to. If you found out that we were under threat because of our wireless network[s, because they weren’t] advanced enough, you would see, like, massive defense spending to get the most awesome wireless network in the world.

VS: Absolutely. That’s it.

JT: People in the Ustream [live chat] are saying, “Aliens?” and that’s right. If we found out that aliens were gonna—

PM: That’s such a good sci-fi plot: We find another advanced civilization and we just start ramping up our technology to respond. Instead of scrappily flying fighter jets into the heart of the spaceship, we build our own [competing] technology.

JT: What would be amazing is if they just had a force field that could withstand anything, could withstand all wireless signals, could withstand all missiles, and then maybe they weren’t doing anything yet but they were threatening to do something, and we’d have to really scramble to develop all of our technology [to be] better than theirs, then, I am telling you, then we would have a great wireless network in America.

PM: Here’s what it’s called: Cold War 2.0. Cold War with the aliens.

VS: You guys are talking about it facetiously but there is an economic competition. South Korea is covered from head to toe in wireless spectrum and wireless connectivity and their internet and broadband internet is just ridiculously fast.

PM: You need to stop talking about this topic seriously so that we can discuss Cold War 2.0.

JT: Yeah, I want to talk about Cold War 2.0 as well. I think we can tighten up the title a little bit.

VS: We seriously need to make megabit broadband a human right, and [yet] all of these initiatives are happening and if all that you guys are going to do is just squabble [over] these stupid takeovers, AT&T and T-Mobile, which will never happen, I mean, hopefully it doesn’t—

JT: Oh, it’s gonna happen.

VS: —then you’re falling behind, man. You’re falling behind. You’re turning into Nokia, your whole country, your massive country—I’m generalizing horribly, but you’re turning into Nokia.

PM: Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

JT: No, no—he’s right. Let the man preach.

VS: All you’re doing is being cocky. All you’re saying is, “We’ve got market share! We’ve got market share!” And then, all of a sudden, HP disappears from the consumer market—

JT: Yeah but, hey, hey, you know what, dude? Who invented the iPad, my man? Huh? Was that somebody from Europe?

JS: That’s right. We’ve got Apple.

JT: Did a Russian guy create the iPad?

JS: I love that this is—

VS: Well, actually, a UK guy created it, probably. Jony Ive.

JT: Come on. He designed the exterior.

VS: Oh but wait, wait—what does Apple do, exactly? It designs. It does nothing else.

JS: That’s not true. Software.

JT: Software’s made in the USA, baby. Love it or leave it.

JS: Innovation.

JT: Drill baby drill!

PM: Can we please, please…

JT: Okay, let’s stop. We’re done. We’re finished, okay?

JS: Can we please eat dinner? Can we please eat dinner after the Cold War talk?

PM: It’s 2:40 in the morning over here [in Berlin, at IFA 2011].

JS: I fell asleep.

Easily the most contentious performance I’ve witnessed since Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment—which played the same house last March—EMPIRE (Art & Politics), at the MCA Stage October 2 and 3, has stewed restlessly in the minds of everyone I know who’s seen it. Reductively assessed, it’s a snowballing extrapolation of two early lines: In voiceover while we take in four opening tableaux—two of which are a bare-breasted woman hoisting a French flag and a couple playing cards*—actor Davis Freeman thunders, “What’s the secret behind this card game? What lies are being told that will never make it into our history books?” Moments later, that couple, dressed in gorgeous Napoleonic era costumes by Sabine Debonnets and Odile Hautemulle, ends their game, the woman victorious.

“I won,” she says contentedly, putting down her hand. “Now: What shall it be?”

The remaining hour and a half of European performance collective Superamas’s latest show suggests that this woman, like the winner of any battle, epic or tiny, can choose anything she wants.

Photo by Giannina Urmeneta Ottiker, courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Through cinematic use of lighting and sound effects, a deranged and slapstick, Cliffs Notes reenactment of the Battle of Aspern-Essling follows. In one short scene, a black soldier is humiliated with racist jokes (his captors dance around like monkeys), then executed by firing squad. Another begins with a torrid but consensual three-way tryst which, when interrupted, becomes a hideously cartoonish pair of rapes. Later, all the soldiers die, one by one, until the stage is littered with bodies. (Some of this is soundtracked with Wagner and Offenbach, some of it by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Michael Jackson). Enter a movie camera on a motorized dolly, recording the carnage with a floodlight to Patti Smith’s cover of “Pastime Paradise.”

It’s a film set, you see, and the actors soon reappear, freshened up in elegant contemporary clothes (also gorgeous, by Alix Eynaudi) to mingle, and celebrate the production with some sabered Champagne at a party for unappealing people. One is a naïve, privileged college student and daughter of the host, a smug and self-satisfied, flirtatious French ambassador named Philippe Dupraz. Innocuous tropical lounge music plays, what you hear in the lobby of a W Hotel, but the fête’s mood is threatened when a token guest, a political refugee, recounts terrible tales of the Somali turmoil that keeps him from his homeland and what remains of his family. The gravity of his story is hastily ignored, or whitewashed by the others’ transparent lack of ability (and willingness) to relate.

Giant light fixtures, white globes suggesting planets given monochromatic paint jobs, hover motionless over the action. The camera remains always, flanked by a sound technician wielding a boom microphone. (Three or four conversations might happen simultaneously, but only one at a time is chosen for the record. What lies are being told that will never make it into our history books? Also, this skeleton camera crew can interact with Freeman’s American character while the rest of the cast is caught in a freeze frame. In more than one respect, a quote by David Lynch does not come from nowhere, and there’s a healthy splash of Cronenberg in there, too.)

EMPIRE is vertiginously layered, drunk on a cocktail of theatrical conventions and blurred intersections of approaches to performance. And it’ll tell you as much, straight up: One actor plays Superamas’s director—though in reality it’s a collective—as a coke-nosed, horny, gay Belgian (with a Hitleresque haircut thrown into boldface during a shrieking defense of the universality of EMPIRE’s message). He lectures Dupraz on modes of representation and the jeux de friction between stage and audience that’s as much his priority as is putting the moves on Ibrahim, one of his actors who, though conspicuous proof of pan-cultural desire, is not, in fact, named Abraham. Dupraz responds by mocking Belgians—and Quebecers, too, while he’s tipsy and on a roll. “‘What is universal?’ is more a political question than an artistic one,” we’re told. No interaction isn’t loaded with assumptions of superiority and assertions of power, and each ends with the same implied coupon gifted one victor. “I won. Now: What shall it be?”

Photo by Giannina Urmeneta Ottiker, courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Projected video whisks us to a not-dissimilar party at the Festival d’Avignon, where a plan is hatched to interview Samira Makhmalbaf in Afghanistan. The ensuing conversation with the Iranian filmmaker, in an empty railway tunnel, contains the show’s only earnest dialogue, despite Superamas’s journey there the cheekiest portrayal of them as, to quote Jeroen Peeters’s dense but informative essay The Empire of Spectators, used as a program note, “cowboys driven by an exotic and pornographic desire for the ‘real.’ ”

It even appears, at first, to be an actual documentary. It isn’t.

More violence.

EMPIRE begs serious questions using methods that preclude your answering them from outside the particulars of your own (likely fortunate) circumstances. Does the intentional flatness of many of its scenes sufficiently forgive the treatment of women within those scenes? (I recently ran across Alison Willmore’s essay on The Social Network—which I think is apt—and find myself mulling over whether EMPIRE belongs in a similar category for similar reasons, the hetero male hegemony of geopolitics standing in for Harvard’s tech geek circles and jock-run final clubs.) Is the implied self-indictment in EMPIRE’s script—the name Superamas is used onstage as well as on our tickets—a preemptive strike against accusations of blithe play with representations of reality and perception in a show ostensibly condemning those who can afford the luxury of not knowing from experience what a rocket-propelled grenade can do to a dozen bodies at once? It’s undeniably topical, sure, but is it topical in a way that buttresses the part of it that carries the tone of a manifesto, or in a way that cuts the two centuries of its scope down to a perishable window of relevance?

It’s been three days and, still, I don’t know. I will say that the performance’s closing aria of light and sound design (props to Peter Connelly, Christophe Demarte and stage manager Martin Schwab) could, presented alone, comprise its own performance, warranting its own review. Opinions of their content and tone aside, Superamas have built an extraordinarily polished and nuanced stage environment. While EMPIRE may not entirely earn its aggression in retrospect, it deserves credit for being brave and deliberate about each moment. I wish I could see it again; if I did, what would it be?

*Superamas, for reasons known only to it, doesn’t wish to make clear which members of its cast play which characters (though I did ask).

A pair of little movies has emerged from the pile of DV tapes I’ll be working through for the next year or so: Calcetines, and Three’s Company (read about my process for the piece here and here) after the jump. More to come on my channel at Vimeo as they wrap. Enjoy.

I met Perron in February at a talk at Northwestern University, “What is Dance Journalism?” Many of the points she made then about the changing media landscape were forward-looking and in touch. As a Dance Magazine reader since the age of five, it was very interesting to hear where the publication was headed, straight from the top.

Which is why I’ve been scratching my head.

In the post, she describes self-publishing online about the creative process as “an annoying new trend,” followed by the caveat that she is “not talking about Tere O’Connor, who writes very considered contemplations about dance making, based on his decades of experience.”

I am talking about young choreographers, anxious to be in the public eye, who think that writing about what happened that day in the studio will somehow 1) bring them a wider audience and/or 2) make them a better choreographer.

To her first point: When we’re talking about young choreographers, “a wider audience” often means “people besides friends and family.” Emerging choreographers often don’t pay their dancers, don’t pay themselves, have no internal or external marketing support and, on top of these limitations, may create in a community where there are no working dance writers and/or no publications covering local, small scale dance projects. If there are working dance writers in the area, and venues in which their articles are published, coverage is almost assuredly confined — I can explain if needed — to established companies producing known work.

I’ll get to her second point.

…explaining how you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience. To dig into your imagination enough to make a dance, you need to be embroiled in a place where there is no explanation. As Igor Stravinsky once said, you have to dig underground, in the dark, like a mole, groping for what comes next.

I’ll use myself as an example. The act of putting my creative process into words is immensely helpful to me as I seek to solve the problems I encounter therein. I agree wholeheartedly with both Perron and Stravinsky that the depths of some aspects of creation are dark, murky, inexplicable and, like dance itself, outside language. But there are many stages to dance making. Again, in my own work, I spend about a third of my time generating material, and the other two thirds editing, manipulating and organizing it. It’s during this longer phase of my process that I often find translating it into words — whether for my blog, someone else’s blog, a conversation or feedback session — insightful.

Everyone, of course, has his or her own process. I have worked with choreographers whose creative methodology is exceedingly clear and open, and mad scientist types with processes as incomprehensible as a cuneiform tablet in a dark room. Some have written during the rehearsal process and some haven’t. There’s no pattern or correlation. There are good and bad choreographers, good blogs and bad blogs.

Dance, as Perron knows, is changing rapidly. Many choreographers, especially here in Chicago, are incorporating text into their work, some in very advanced and excitingly new ways. “What if you’re in the studio working on a piece,” she asks, “and you’re thinking about what you’re going to say about it in your blog? Wouldn’t that compromise your process?”

Maybe. It depends on the artist’s process, and it depends on the work. The artist’s decision to make public his or her journal is beside the point.

I think this rush to explain is part of a larger trend of people thinking a simple how-to set of instructions can make them into an artist. In The Atlantic’s Fiction 2010 annual issue, the novelist Richard Bausch says, with dismay, that there are 4,470 titles under the rubric “How to Write a Book.” He thinks they are pretty much useless.

The problem with this statement is, of course, that Perron equates artists who write with people who want to become artists by reading about how to do it. Besides,

During that beginning period, putting it into words denies the groping phase. You should be utterly at a loss for words, just feeling your way. After a while, you can start to justify your decisions to yourself, to your dancers, or to your audience if your presenter so wishes. But first, you have to be willing to be lost in that pre-verbal place.

sounds awfully “how-to” to me.

Choreographers aren’t always great writers, and what they say about their work can sometimes be bewildering, inaccurate and/or misrepresentational. But if they want to blog about their creative process—

—especially if there would otherwise be no public record of their work, before or after the fact—

—they can (and should) knock themselves out. Only they can say whether or not it helps them. As a dance writer, I can say for a fact that artists who blog about their work help me do my work. They help me write my listings, research their performances, and prepare for interviews.

Everyone decides for his or her self what to write. And everyone decides for his or her self what to read.

Sarah A. O. Rosner, left, and Rowan Magee in rehearsal at BARN in Queens.

Sarah A. O. Rosner’s press contact dropped me a line shortly before I headed to New York last week, wondering if I’d be interested in stopping by a rehearsal. The A. O. Movement Collective’s latest, 90 Ways to Wake from Drowning, premieres at Joyce SoHo this weekend, Friday 30 and Saturday 31. Tickets are moving fast — a Saturday matinée was added to absorb some demand.

I encourage you folks out there to catch this work.

Granted, I didn’t see much at BARN — just an hour or so of tweaks to two duets between Rowan Magee and Ilona Bito — but I enjoyed watching Rosner observe and offer notes on the material. Even when tuning highly physical vocabulary (Bito spent a lot of time upside down), Rosner uses language more like a theater director’s to coax out the environment she’s looking for. It showed in the way the pair’s slow wrestle seemed more like an impassioned discussion in movement than a pas de deux. Rosner’s work isn’t about using dance to represent life; you instead feel like you’re observing interactions within a community that speaks through bodily contact. This strikes a chord of authenticity in solid dialogue with how dance as an art form works, and anchors the more angst-ridden moments, which could become indulgent, to real emotional bedrock.

More on 90 Ways by Brian McCormick at Gay City News.

More on the AOMC at its affiliate blog The Urgent Artist.

Their preview video is after the break.

(Apologies in advance for my sprawling, disorganized assessment of this piece. On the other hand, if you haven’t or can’t see it, reading this review might give a sense of the experience.)

Time Out New York Dance editor Gia Kourlas, writing in the New York Times, wondered whether Tony award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones is or should be considering a move from dance to theater. Her query was prompted by Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray, which received its world premiere last fall at Ravinia and has been reborn, “tightened significantly,” for New York’s Lincoln Center Festival. (In 2007, Ravinia commissioned the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company to create an original work for the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, and were returned a trilogy over three years. Fondly Do We Hope is the final installment.)

I’ll second Kourlas’s query, and without a memory-jogging sift through my drawer of ticket stubs, add that I’ve never before seen a dance so thoroughly drenched with language. The spoken and sung lyrics of its score are pulled from the Bible, 19th century and contemporary sources; singers and some dancers speak text from same and a script by Jones and Janet Wong. Moments without some sort of voiceover are rare. Buttressing the verbiage is a three-page program note by Suzanne Carbonneau, relevant source material reprinted in full, words projected on the set, and a statement by Jones himself.

Jones, of course, can do whatever he wants. In contemporary performance—hell, in contemporary culture—genre distinctions are vague at best. But upon exiting the Rose Theater, feeling like I’d just read a novella, I wondered what dance had to do with any of it. The physical language created by Jones and his collaborators is beautifully executed and compelling, but comes nowhere near the way it defined character in, say, his 2006 work Chapel/Chapter—knowing Jones is capable of great dance theater makes Fondly Do We Hope that much more frustrating.

(Arranging movement to match the starts, stops and cadences of the spoken word is, as choreographic manipulations go, fairly simple. An accomplished dancer can do it on the spot. What’s more important, and difficult to pull off, is dialogue between the heard and visual vocabularies that avoids the extremes of literalness and opacity. In Fondly Do We Hope, long stretches of dance are repeated “verbatim” to unrelated paragraphs. Now, Carbonneau states, “The movement is not intended to depict psychological situations nor to illustrate [the text]…Jones harvests this thematic inventory for boundless variations,” but instead of alchemizing into something greater than the sum of its parts, Fondly Do We Hope becomes two realms in parallel. There are ways this could be meta-commentary on the race divisions and two Americas the piece seeks to dissect, but that’s not the case here.)

In other words, without its text and lyrics, Fondly Do We Hope would be a 90-minute contemporary dance that gives an abstracted sense of the sociological survey Jones has spun out of the story behind and impact of the Lincoln Administration. Without its dance action…the work would be an ambitious and inventive one-act musical about the story behind and impact of the Lincoln Administration.

For the record, Fondly Do We Hope is a noble effort, and at least optimistic about the capacity of its audience to comprehend it. But its planes don’t cooperate. It simply doesn’t function as dance theater.

Bjorn G. Amelan, a longtime BTJ/AZDC collaborator, has designed yet another sleek and versatile set for the company, but this one hides more than frames. The majority of the stage space is given to a sheer white curtain in four sections hung from an oval ceiling track. You could call it a giant lampshade or shower curtain, sure, but as the work progresses it becomes a symbol of literal and figurative skins—all that is surface and superficial, what we see when we don’t look too hard. There’s true poetry when the dancers press against it from the inside. It also reflects the video projections, mostly snatches in cursive of what we hear, wipes of erasure and montage. It’s also a zoetrope.

Six white Doric columns on casters recall, as Carbonneau confirms, “the White House, grand antebellum plantations, and the birthplace of democracy in ancient Greece.” There’s true poetry when one topples over like a tree felled for a log cabin. Downstage left, a small oval platform juts out into the first few rows, an ambassador from the dance to its witness. The three composer/musicians (Jerome Begin, Christopher Antonio William Lancaster, George Lewis, Jr.) and Clarissa Sinceno occupy a small orchestra pit. Liz Prince’s costumes, like the projections, are in greyscale, their linings occasionally flashing acid greens and crimson. Again, a concise contrast of superficial simplicity with inner complexity, though a common trick, à la the “Rum and Coca-Cola” girl in Taylor’s Company B.

Excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Poem of the Body,” its anatomical inventory pointing one way toward investigation and the other toward auction, serve as the introduction and conclusion to Fondly Do We Hope. During Wong’s projections, Kara Walker’s charged silhouette art is both close at hand and at arm’s length. There are terse biographies of Lincoln, Jones, unnamed characters of past, present and future, and Mary Todd (whose legacy, it’s suggested, is something about which we should argue, without taking sides or elaborating). I-Ling Liu and Paul Matteson dance diamond-like solos. Actor Jamyl Dobson is our narrator. The Lincoln-Douglas debates are sketched woven into present concerns. There’s procession, mourning, reflection, objection, subjection, unraveling and time traveling.

Jones and company have much to say about Lincoln, race, our nation’s history, present and future. So why the obfuscation? Art can be abstract and still punch the gut.

All the elements, especially the plainchant-to-metal score, “work” if considered out of context. Fondly Do We Hope aims for greatness with strong components. One has the sense of being in an extraordinarily insightful space. It’s hard to say for sure, though—none of the lights are on.