Fountain Direction and Performance: Jeremy Wade Sound: Tian Rotteveel Costume: Jean Paul Lespagnard Lighting Design: Natalie Robin Dramaturgy: Eike Wittrock Press & Production: Björn Pätz & Björn Frers – björn & björn Fountain, a new solo from Jeremy Wade, proposes a generative sphere of uncertainty. Wade circumvents traditional audience-performer dynamics and facilitates a generous group experience that evolves into a sensual engine. Wade assumes the role of preacher, shaman, and fool, by offering himself as a medium to receive and transform the energy of the theater space taking the audience on an emotional and alchemical journey.
Wade's choreographic technique is a unique encounter of aesthetic, sociological, and neurological dimensions. He derives movement from intense attention to the multiplicity of impulses in the body that are drawn from neurological processes, social constructions of norm, and aesthetic decisions. The stage becomes an engine where the intersubjective actions/reactions are propelled into space enveloping the audience for maximal sensation and association.
 "By turns frightening and pitiful, the process was fascinating to behold, and strangely affecting. The space was charged." — Brian Seibert, The New York Times A production by Jeremy Wade in co-production with HAU Berlin and Gaîté Lyrique Paris. Sponsored with funds from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and by the Mayor of Berlin Senate Chancellery Cultural Affairs. With support by Tanzfabrik Berlin and Uferstudios.

• published: 12 Mar 2012
• views: 1833

Address by Henry Flynt. Bluestockings Books, New York February 2012 Autopsy of the Left, II delivered 9 February 1012 © Henry A. Flynt, Jr. last changes 12 March 2012 A. 1. The overhanging word ‘communism’ a. The word ‘communism’ has more than one legitimate meaning. a.i. The communist idea. For our purposes, the idea began in the French Revolution as a brilliant critique of the Rights of Man. The Rights of Man can be summed up in one word: citizenship. Citizenship without a wealth endowment: the only right you have is the right to die immediately. The communist idea was crystallized (reactively, while lambasting capitalism) by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts and in the German Ideology, Vol. I, I (1846). Unless somebody can tell me differently, these were the first presentable formulations of the idea. (One of the many, many problems is that Marx’s descriptions of communism look very much like anarchism.) a.ii. The world Communist system of the twentieth century. As we all know, it perpetrated a series of “human rights violations” and “inter-Communist” wars which are only now being exposed in full. After some seven decades, the system collapsed or evaporated. Arguably, this system was the greatest occurrence in world history—but what it delivered was a debacle. a.iii. A long-distance “conversation” among a miniscule number of people who want to give substance to the promises of the 1844 Manuscripts and the German Ideology. The Florida futurist Jacque Fresco calls for the creation of a new planet. He has numerous publications. He presents himself as a technocrat who does not dirty his hands with politics. Beyond Fresco, there was Freeman Dyson, with his Dyson sphere as the image of a higher civilization. My question to Dyson: what economic system do they have in the sphere? I reluctantly mention Joseph Seymour, the only one in the sectarian Left who “recently” (2011) published an article on how socialism will work. (According to him, it will repeat Soviet economic history like a tape recording.) These are the only public contributors to the conversation. I am the only one who, on Vimeo and on my web site, furnishes substantial statements directly on topic. Moreover, I am the only one who has searched out the others and collated what they say. I notice them—but they do not notice me. Obviously, their motives are profoundly different from mine. The question is whether what we have now, so- called market democracy, is “the last social system.” Either the other contributors don’t care, or else (Seymour) they repeat the anachronistic line of a failed regime. (A disgraced regime, to anyone who knows what every professional historian knows.) b. Why do I want the word ‘communism’ for the latter-day conversation about a neo-Marxist society of the future, when it will remind most people of the failed murderous system? In the first place, more than half of the few contributors I recognize do not use the word ‘communism’ and even reject it for precisely the reason given. We know why Seymour doesn’t reject the word ‘communism’: his tiny organization is a relic of the failed regime. So why haven’t I rejected the word? b.i. We have to say something about morality, anticipating what I will say about moral discourse in (F) below. Public discourse pressures people to put a plus or a minus in front of every historical chapter, to think of every historical chapter as good or evil. But on the contrary, there are very few historical chapters on which there is a consensus on their valence. In most historical chapters, what people call good and what people call evil are interwoven. My first example: ancient Egypt. In fact, you can tell exactly who a person is by whether he or she only says good or only says bad about ancient Egypt. Typically, history does not deliver us “clean (unblemished) initiatives.” We have to record the “human rights violations” of the world Communist system, along with much other evidence, in order to carry out the mission Marx assigned of judging what social formation this system was. I have to know in order to judge who I was shoulder-to-shoulder with in the 1960s. This is not the sort of exercise in “gotcha indignation” which we now get from the Left against the U.S., for example. b.ii. I still use the word ‘communism’ because without Marx and his successors and their rocky historical experience the idea would not be available for study at all. We would have no historical experience regarding “the transition”— no historical experience on what the consequences of nationalizing the means of production are. Even Fresco, who presents himself as a pure futurist and technocrat, probably looks back over his shoulder at Marx. I still use the word ‘communism’ because the world Communist system was way out in front on many causes which are now sacrosanct, such as the Greek Resistance and the Civil Rights movement and majority r

• published: 05 Mar 2012
• views: 634

Fountain Direction and Performance: Jeremy Wade Sound: Tian Rotteveel Costume: Jean Paul Lespagnard Lighting Design: Natalie Robin Dramaturgy: Eike Wittrock Press & Production: Björn Pätz & Björn Frers – björn & björn Fountain, a new solo from Jeremy Wade, proposes a generative sphere of uncertainty. Wade circumvents traditional audience-performer dynamics and facilitates a generous group experience that evolves into a sensual engine. Wade assumes the role of preacher, shaman, and fool, by offering himself as a medium to receive and transform the energy of the theater space taking the audience on an emotional and alchemical journey.
Wade's choreographic technique is a unique encounter of aesthetic, sociological, and neurological dimensions. He derives movement from intense attention to the multiplicity of impulses in the body that are drawn from neurological processes, social constructions of norm, and aesthetic decisions. The stage becomes an engine where the intersubjective actions/reactions are propelled into space enveloping the audience for maximal sensation and association.
 "By turns frightening and pitiful, the process was fascinating to behold, and strangely affecting. The space was charged." — Brian Seibert, The New York Times A production by Jeremy Wade in co-production with HAU Berlin and Gaîté Lyrique Paris. Sponsored with funds from the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and by the Mayor of Berlin Senate Chancellery Cultural Affairs. With support by Tanzfabrik Berlin and Uferstudios.

• published: 12 Mar 2012
• views: 1833

Address by Henry Flynt. Bluestockings Books, New York February 2012 Autopsy of the Left, II delivered 9 February 1012 © Henry A. Flynt, Jr. last changes 12 March 2012 A. 1. The overhanging word ‘communism’ a. The word ‘communism’ has more than one legitimate meaning. a.i. The communist idea. For our purposes, the idea began in the French Revolution as a brilliant critique of the Rights of Man. The Rights of Man can be summed up in one word: citizenship. Citizenship without a wealth endowment: the only right you have is the right to die immediately. The communist idea was crystallized (reactively, while lambasting capitalism) by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts and in the German Ideology, Vol. I, I (1846). Unless somebody can tell me differently, these were the first presentable formulations of the idea. (One of the many, many problems is that Marx’s descriptions of communism look very much like anarchism.) a.ii. The world Communist system of the twentieth century. As we all know, it perpetrated a series of “human rights violations” and “inter-Communist” wars which are only now being exposed in full. After some seven decades, the system collapsed or evaporated. Arguably, this system was the greatest occurrence in world history—but what it delivered was a debacle. a.iii. A long-distance “conversation” among a miniscule number of people who want to give substance to the promises of the 1844 Manuscripts and the German Ideology. The Florida futurist Jacque Fresco calls for the creation of a new planet. He has numerous publications. He presents himself as a technocrat who does not dirty his hands with politics. Beyond Fresco, there was Freeman Dyson, with his Dyson sphere as the image of a higher civilization. My question to Dyson: what economic system do they have in the sphere? I reluctantly mention Joseph Seymour, the only one in the sectarian Left who “recently” (2011) published an article on how socialism will work. (According to him, it will repeat Soviet economic history like a tape recording.) These are the only public contributors to the conversation. I am the only one who, on Vimeo and on my web site, furnishes substantial statements directly on topic. Moreover, I am the only one who has searched out the others and collated what they say. I notice them—but they do not notice me. Obviously, their motives are profoundly different from mine. The question is whether what we have now, so- called market democracy, is “the last social system.” Either the other contributors don’t care, or else (Seymour) they repeat the anachronistic line of a failed regime. (A disgraced regime, to anyone who knows what every professional historian knows.) b. Why do I want the word ‘communism’ for the latter-day conversation about a neo-Marxist society of the future, when it will remind most people of the failed murderous system? In the first place, more than half of the few contributors I recognize do not use the word ‘communism’ and even reject it for precisely the reason given. We know why Seymour doesn’t reject the word ‘communism’: his tiny organization is a relic of the failed regime. So why haven’t I rejected the word? b.i. We have to say something about morality, anticipating what I will say about moral discourse in (F) below. Public discourse pressures people to put a plus or a minus in front of every historical chapter, to think of every historical chapter as good or evil. But on the contrary, there are very few historical chapters on which there is a consensus on their valence. In most historical chapters, what people call good and what people call evil are interwoven. My first example: ancient Egypt. In fact, you can tell exactly who a person is by whether he or she only says good or only says bad about ancient Egypt. Typically, history does not deliver us “clean (unblemished) initiatives.” We have to record the “human rights violations” of the world Communist system, along with much other evidence, in order to carry out the mission Marx assigned of judging what social formation this system was. I have to know in order to judge who I was shoulder-to-shoulder with in the 1960s. This is not the sort of exercise in “gotcha indignation” which we now get from the Left against the U.S., for example. b.ii. I still use the word ‘communism’ because without Marx and his successors and their rocky historical experience the idea would not be available for study at all. We would have no historical experience regarding “the transition”— no historical experience on what the consequences of nationalizing the means of production are. Even Fresco, who presents himself as a pure futurist and technocrat, probably looks back over his shoulder at Marx. I still use the word ‘communism’ because the world Communist system was way out in front on many causes which are now sacrosanct, such as the Greek Resistance and the Civil Rights movement and majority r

• published: 05 Mar 2012
• views: 634