Sunday, May 22, 2005

Self-esteem-booster

Problems with self-esteem, like the majority of humans?

I found this helpful Site. Things to help ourselves when we have that negative little voice talking inside our head. Things we know we should do, but seldom set into practice.

http://www.self-esteem-nase.org/Self-esteem-booster.shtml

Curiousity Again

The previous article made me thing about depression. Why is that?
Because, we lose our curiosity when depressed.
We get into the state I call: “looking at the wall”
But we stare at the wall not looking for its wonderful design or for the random organization of dust, that can look like a Pollock painting or because we want to measure the tiles or touch the quality of the paint……we stare at it, because we are numb. As simply as that, we lose any kind of curiosity in life. This inaction, bring us to more inaction.

We are doing a lot by doing nothing. Even our shadow is depressed.
We lose curiosity, what makes our soul be an adventurous child.

Curiouser and curiouser by Robin Archer

The arts must ask its audience to throw out a lifeline to curiosity in all things in order to survive and prosper. ByRobyn Archer.In my essay "The Myth of the Mainstream" (Currency Press, April 2005), I talk about curiosity being amongst the finest virtues of humankind and how this was revealed to me when I looked back trying to recall the first symptoms of my father's frontallobe dementia: I eventually felt that it was this ever-curious man's loss of the vital stream of curiosity.

The curiosity factor has become a potent metaphor for me. I can't help thinking that once the blinkers are on, there's only oneroad ahead-and that leads to death.

Anyone who approaches art, or virtually anything, only wishing to defend their own tastes, anyone who won't lookat something because they fear it won't be to their liking, anyone who bags something before they've seen it, mightas well be dead already. They've lost their sense of curiosity. They're winding down.

One of the most powerful, and perhaps accidental, foes of the preservation and stimulation of curiosity is thatall-pervasive factor of contemporary life - marketing. I say "accidental" because at the start of the 20th century, and atvarious peaks throughout that time, when waves of social reform produced increasing numbers of citizens (first in thedeveloped and then the developing nations) who experienced a phenomenon at that point only known by wealthy, that is,leisure time and spare cash, marketing itself was a new and exciting tool that existed precisely to stimulate curiosity.

But as early as the mid-19th-century snake-oil merchants were derided so thoroughly that their profession entered thevernacular, and in the 1950s the same happened to used car salesmen.These days, when marketing is a career, one still sees the altruistic basis of the trade in the very best of the advertising branchof marketing, when the skill of art directors, graphic and video artists and especially concept developers, grab our attention andstimulate our curiosity enough to take the next step and try to satisfy that curiosity about an available product, be that newtechnology, food, insurance, entertainment or art.

The difficulty for art, unlike entertainment, is that it is hard to commodify and therefore hard to market. And the very art mostlikely to stimulate the sense of curiosity is always the most fragile. Marketing when applied to the arts is at best crude andat worst destructive. Hype may get your audience to the shimmering waters of art, but the audience will notnecessarily drink .

In precisely the same way as one needs to address the people at this time, not the politicians, the arts must go outside thesegmented and ultimately blinkered nature of targeted marketing, and ask its potential audience (which I believe knows nobounds) to throw out a lifeline to curiosity in all things.If ordinary people are scared of the arts, a highly disputed piece of parochial, reductive and selective marketing research, thenour job as artists and commissioners of new work is not to try to persuade them to enjoy a particular piece of art, or even artitself, but to ask them to live again fully in all things, and put an end to lives which are driven madly by the false ideals, objects,and icons which marketing itself has created.This achieved, audiences would come thirsty to art and ready to drink deeply. There would scarcely be a need for marketing inthe arts.Finding the means to achieve that is the challenge.

Until that renewal is complete, the parallel universe of the small symbolic following for art must be maintained, and new worksfrom artists vigorously commissioned and nurtured in the knowledge that the ripple effect of the creative lightning bolt willalways remain an important part of what artists, their commissioner-presenters, and the informed critique that broadcasts theseactions, always do when that tripartite cultural activity is in a state of grace and good health.

This is an extract of Robyn Archer's Alfred Deakin Innovation Lecture "Imagination and the Audience: Commissioning for Creativity" deliveredon Saturday at the Melbourne Town Hall.******************

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

About Teaching

I love to teach, I love to motivate my students not just into dancing, but also into enjoying their trips of discovery, about their own creativity and possibilities, not just in art, but also in life.

I love to teach, but I can’t stand the endless meetings, where I have to listen to the endless talks of the “I know best about the system” guy…….or the “we need to organize another meeting to talk” woman (generally to talk about the same issues that have no resolution). I love to teach but I hate to give grades, that to my eyes in art, are absolutely relative and which many times take away motivation with no fundamental real cause.

I love to teach, but I feel like a fish out of the water with the system.

Yesterday I found this article. Is just marvellous and I agree 100% with it. I felt I was not alone.

The article is called “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher” by John Gatto

I highly recommend it

Here is the link:

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Monday, May 16, 2005

Um Día Difícil

Um solo, uma bailarina, uma noite de insomnia e uma entrevista importante ao dia seguinte. Uma peça ironica e divertida.

La Marmita apresenta: "Um Día Difícil". Coreografia e interpretação de Andrea Gabilondo, o día 4 de Junho as 21H 30, no Café Concert em Viana do Castelo.

[img]http://www.lamarmita.com/images/hipera1.gif[/img]

Indecision

Sooo…….here I am undecided…..should I write in Spanish? In Portuguese? In French? Or I stick to my English that is far than perfect?
I already found the first problem to my Blog: Indecision 1

Then appears Ms. Indecision 2…should I stick to a single theme? Should I be playful and informal? Or should I just talk about choreography and art?....Mhh……

The other day that I decided to make this page, I didn’t know anything about the Blog community. In the instructions, they said: “There are no rules”…Yuppee!! I felt like a free child…..NO RULES!!!!!! But after navigating into this new world, I realized that many, many talented people are writing not just intelligent and witty posts….but besides that, they are GOOD writers. Mhh…I am definitely not a writer. Should I be myself? Or Should I pretend to have a talent I don’t have? Ok I will be myself….this was difficult to decide lol
Ok. Ms Indecision 3, it was nice to meet you anyway.

And this takes me to think about our days. Since we wake up, we are constantly deciding, it never stops. Should I wake up and go to work or should I enjoy the sun and do nothing? Should I have coffee or green tea? - That they say makes you look 10 years younger- Should I take the train or a cab?
I prefer to let myself go with the flow of life, if I think too much I get undecided again.

Perhaps if I take the word “should” out of my vocabulary, I wouldn’t have to struggle with the options I face everyday. Why not instead of saying: “I should work” or “I should write”, I change the word to “I would love to go to work “, “I would love to write” and especially “I would love to be myself”

Then it doesn’t matter in which language I write and it also doesn’t matter if I am not a writer. Just like creating choreography, the idea “talks” to me and I follow it, enjoying the process of discovery with no fear. Then there will be no more indecision, because the fear to be mistaken or “wrong” disappears.

I think this is the right track

Friday, May 13, 2005

Dada Poetry

According to Hugo Ball, inventor of dadaist phonetic poetry, we must withdraw into the deepest alchemy of words, reserving to poetry its most sacred ground": a program whichwould have -appealed to Velemir Chlebnikov, "eternal prisoner of assonance", for whom the alphabet was a "table of sounds". Chlebnikov wanted to immerse himself in the depths of the Russian etymons, of the etymological night, in search of a mythical panslavonic language "whose shoots must grow through the thicknesses of modem Russian". The ultra modem tends to link up with the archaic, eternal contradiction of avant-gardes. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring' (composed in the years 1912-13) is a musical flight from time, a return to the common archaic background, to magic, spells, a primitive religious paganism.Illogical phonic sound, abstract poetry, was taken up by dadaism from Italian and Russian futurism. In Zurich, at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded in 1916 by five friends, Hugo Ball Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck, first simultaneous poems by Henri-Martin Barzun and Jarry's "Ubu Roi" were recited. Later Tzara declaimed some of his simultaneous such as "La Fièvre Poems, puerpérale" a "Froid Lumiére", for the purpose of representing the dualism between the soul (the voice) and the world (mechanistic process, fate) represented by noises. "Les chants nègres" was a collective performance with masks, soutanes, drums, dances: a sort of funeral service.Here, one evening, Hugo Ball read his "Verses without words", based on the equilibrium of vowels, regulated and distributed exclusively in relation to the phonic value of the initial line. Clothed in azure, scarlet and golden cardboard, with a cylindrical shaman's hat on his head - it is Ball's own description - "I began with:*The accents became heavier, _expression increased with the intensification of the consonants. I soon noted that my means of _expression, when I wanted to be serious (and I wanted to be at all costs) no longer corresponded to the pomp of the staging... to the right on the lectern I had "Labadas Gesang die Wolken" (Labada's song to the clouds) and on the left "Elefantenkarawane" (The caravan of the Elephants)... the dragging rhythm of the elements had permitted me a last crescendo, but how to continue to the end? I then noticed that my voice, which apparently had no other choice, was assumed an ancient cadence of sacerdotal lament in the style of the masses sung in the Catholic churches of the east and west. I do not know what this music inspired in me, but I began to sing my sequences of vowels in recitative liturgical manner. The electric light was turned off as arranged and I was carried away covered in perspiration like a a magical bishop who disappears into the abyss" (Dei Flucht aus der Zeit" "The flight from time", Munich, 1927). Thus was dada phonetic poetry born.

Moments in Life

There are moments in life when you miss someone so much that you just want to pick them from your dreams and hug them for real! When the door of happiness closes, another opens; but often times we look so long at the closed door that we don't see the one, which has been opened for us. Don't go for looks; they can deceive. Don't go for wealth; even that fades away. Go for someone who makes you smile, because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright. Find the one that makes your heart smile. Dream what you want to dreamgo where you want to go; be what you want to be, because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do. May you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human and enough hope to make you happy. The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way. The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past; you can't go forward in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches. When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so at the end, you're the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying.

Author unknown

Thursday, May 12, 2005

La Palabra "Trabajo"

LA PALABRA DEL DÍA trabajo

En este Día de los Trabajadores, tal vez sea oportuno recordar que la idea de trabajo estuvo desde muy antiguo asociada al concepto de tortura. En efecto, la palabra trabajo proviene de tripalium, que era el nombre de un temible instrumento de tortura.Tripalium (tres palos) es un vocablo del bajo latín del siglo VI de nuestra era, época en la cual los reos eran atados al tripalium, una especie de cepo formado por tres maderos cruzados donde quedaban inmovilizados mientras se les azotaba.De tripaliumderivó inicialmente tripaliare(torturar) y posteriormente trebajo (esfuerzo, sufrimiento, sacrificio).Trebajo evolucionó posteriormente hacia trabajo, vinculándose poco a poco con la idea de 'labor'. Lo mismo ocurrió en francés, lengua en la cual tripalium derivó en travail (trabajo), vocablo al cual los ingleses dieron la forma travel y un nuevo significado, asociándola inicialmente a la idea de 'viaje cansador' y, más tarde, simplemente viaje.

From:

LA PÁGINA DEL IDIOMA ESPAÑOL http://www.elcastellano.org