Michael J. Kramer's Blog, page 78
June 10, 2014
Bound Legally
dancing where bodies meet legal & economic contracts: joel valentin-martinez, brazos y abrazos @ marjorie ward marshall dance center, northwestern university, 14 march 2014; philip elson, terms and conditions @ links hall, 16 march 2014.
Joel Valentin-Martinez’s Brazos y Abrazos (Arms and Embraces) and Philip Elson’s Terms and Conditions, which both appeared on stage in Chicago during the same March 2014 weekend, were worth seeing side by side because even as they explored very different topics, they also shared an unlikely and surprising common interest: how dance allows us to glimpse where bodies meet legal and economic contracts. What does it mean to be bound to something, legally as well as corporeally? Where does movement, labor, muscle, and mind meet up with words, laws, agreements, stipulations, and disputes? What happens at the intersections of the human body and the body of contract law? What kinds of possibilities does this interplay unleash—and what are the many constraints it creates?
Valentin-Martinez’s dance piece was inspired by Bittersweet Harvest, a traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibition about the Bracero Program, a controversial guest worker agreement that sent agricultural laborers from Mexico to the United States beginning in World War II. The exhibition appeared in Evanston this spring and Valentin-Martinez’s piece at Northwestern* probed the conditions of exploitation, possibility, community, displacement, the earth, and the self that agricultural labor across the Mexico-US border created. Dancers leapt and twisted and turned, but most powerfully moved in rows horizontally across the stage, back and forth, grounded, bent, rooting themselves even in their displacement from home to distant places of employment. Their bodies enacted the backbreaking labor they had agreed, legally, to complete (though not always with a full understanding of the English language contracts they had signed). The dance acknowledged the pain and difficulties, the injustices and unfairness, of the Bracero Program, but it also registered how participants in the program transformed their contracted displacement into something else: a patience, a fortitude, a strength, indeed a bittersweet harvest not only of plants and food, but also of social life and individual being.
In his first piece as a choreographer, Elson, who is an ensemble member of The Seldoms Dance Company*, took his audience to a very different setting: while Valentin-Martinez took us back into the historical memory of contract labor in the agricultural past (though this kind of labor is still very much with us in the modern world, let us not forget), Elson intensified our awareness of the contemporary, even futuristic, world of what we might call digital contract leisure. His work created a heavily mediated space in which bodies interacted with the immaterial yet powerful forces of digital technology. Projected behind the dancers was an immersive environment of digital video—mock advertisements for ridiculous digital products and the assaults of sped-up, exaggerated announcements of the terms and conditions for digital applications (those pages of endless “fine type” text we all never read carefully but to which we must agree in order to participate in the digital world). These set the tone, funny but also ominous, as the video was interspersed with solos and ensemble movement that, in striking, original, well-crafted dance movement, took on a kind of prothetic quality, gesturing as much to the spaces around and among the dancers as to their bodies themselves. It was as if the forces of the digital were continually pulling away from the bodies of the dancers and toward circuits of dematerialized power and flow.
If Brazos y Abrazos (Arms and Embraces) sought out moment of groundedness within the historical displacements of immigrant labor, Terms and Conditions pursued the dissipation of the self and community in an increasingly untethered, wireless, modern world of screens, apps, social media, and GPS maps. The dance paid close attention to the ways in which data born of—and borne by—the body is either augmenting, extending, or perhaps even replacing muscle and bone and bodily form. Arms vogued away from eyes, fingers pointed off into the corners of the room as if zapping out the inner soul to the air, bodies seemed shocked, turned, jolted, by sudden inputs and pulsations, dancers fell and collapsed onto one another, limp, tossed about, if they had lost their centers of gravity.
In the horizontal movement across the stage in Brazos y Abrazos (Arms and Embraces), the dancers seemed to be crouched down deep—knees and backs bent, suffering but also solid and striving as they tilled, weeded, watered, and harvested crops not their own, yet somehow made theirs by their contracted labor transformed into bittersweet beauty. At one point, Terms and Conditions also featured the dancers moving across the stage in rows. But this time instead of crouched and planting, they were standing yet slumped as they stared down at imaginary mobile devices in their hands. Sometimes they moved forcefully, marching across the stage; sometimes they moved like zombies, entranced by the virtual worlds held within their hands, which had sucked their bodies in and almost seemed to replace the actual physical space before their eyes. They were no longer walking only into an embodied, actual future, but also into a simulated one too.
As they looked down, not forward, gazing into their palms, the dance seemed to emphasize a different kind of contract that we now enter into when we use digital technologies of the present day. These were not the older legal and economic agreements (and their buried injustices and disagreements) of the Bracero Program, but rather new kinds of contracted activities in which many engage today when we give up our privacy, our interiority, our identities, for participation in the pixelated dreamlands of digital experience. We do so as consumers, in our leisure. Only these entrances into the digital realm also contain a kind of lurking labor, what some cultural theorists call “playbor,” a new mode of economic transaction in which, neither exactly by free will nor entirely through involuntary coercion, we hand over parts of our bodies and our minds when we log on and join in to the digital emporium. There, where information supposedly wants to be free, dance reveals other terms and conditions hidden in the rectangular glowing screens and thrilling algorithmic calculations. These are the costs we may not quite always be computing as we are pulled, body and soul, into the new circuitries of pleasure and labor in the digital world. We tilt forward into this future, yet, in postures contracted yet ungrounded, are we really looking anymore where we are going?
*Full disclosure, I teach in the History Department at Northwestern, where Joel Valentin-Martinez is a faculty member, and I work with Philip Elson in The Seldoms Dance Company, where I serve as dramaturg and he is a key ensemble member.
June 4, 2014
Baggage
dances with suitcases: reggie wilson and lucky plush pack their luggage.
Reggie Wilson packs his suitcase in Moses(es). Photo: Kevin Monko.
“My bags are packed, I’m ready to go.” – John Denver, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”
“Should I stay or should I go.” – The Clash, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go”
Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Company’s Moses(es) and Julia Rhoads and Lucky Plush Productions’ The Queue both use dance theater to probe the experience of travel: using the meanings of movement on stage in service of examining the meaning of movement across space. These were pieces in very different registers—Reggie Wilson draws on Afro-diasporic and postmodern forms and features forceful, virtuosic dancing while Lucky Plush is far more cerebral, sometimes corny, very playful, and often focused as much on talk as on dance showmanship. But both pieces shared an interest in the question of physical voyages that were more crucially psychic transits uncertain of their destinations. What they shared too was, paradoxically, a kind of interest in the stationary, in the stillness that one can achieve, or find oneself lost in, when trying to move.
Both performances started with suitcases. At the beginning of Reggie Wilson’s multicultural investigation into the many meanings of the biblical figure of Moses, he played his typical role of interlocutor, part of the performance but serving as a kind of director or narrator in between audience and dancers. As Louis Armstrong’s deeply textured version of “Go Down Moses” played, Wilson slowly stuffed a large red wheelie bag with silver tinsel that was spread across the stage. Part of the thrill of this was spatial: would it all fit in the suitcase? And part of it was temporal: would he finish the job before the music ended? But most of all, the suitcase lingered across the rest of the performance as an image, a motif. As Wilson and ensemble, well, unpacked the many layers and levels of Moses as a symbolic personage across different traditions, the suitcase stood on the side of the stage, as if to ask, from its silent stuffedness: what is it that we compress to take with us when we move? What do we carry? What do we repress? And what do we stash away in an effort never to see it again? What do we leave behind when we wish to or must move on?
Lucky Plush, The Queue.
The red wheelie bag never appeared again in Moses(es). In Lucky Plush’s The Queue, suitcases, wheelies, purses became a running gag, tossed around by the dancers, set upon faux-conveyor belts, containing body spray and other props, one bag perhaps containing explosives or something mysterious and illegal. The performance was set at an airport, and left us there, on the queue, uncertain of what social cues to follow between strangers and even between familiars in the timeless, placeless—yet harried and intensely circumscribed—realm of the terminal.
Lucky Plush strives for a tonal quality in its work: a kind of warm intimacy that dance movement frames but does not itself embody. It is a performance space of talk, of silent film comedy gestures referenced, of the occasional leap and athletic display but mostly of a kind of hesitancy and self-examination. “What is a second?” one dancer asked, later arriving at an observation of herself: “I’m feeling timeless.” If Moses(es) was all about movement across vast expanses of history and place and tradition, The Queue was about feeling stranded nowhere, in the vexed present, stuck, at the gate, on the security line, in the waiting room, always about to move but never quite getting there. At the same time, The Queue also became about discovering, in that lost space of uncertainty, a kind of humor and solidarity, a sense of kinship and connectedness, even a sort of deep love, among the wheelie bags all packed up and constrained from showing their true contents.
Finally, both these performances were not only about suitcases; they were also interested in lines. The Queue often featured its dancers in a horizontal formation, and played with the shape and form of the line as it splayed across the stage. A kind of wall of dancers stood at the center of the work, their bags pushed and pulled among them, each performer telling a story as they slowly began to relate to each other from one side to the other. The luggage was essential to these lines of bodies: they were the symbolic outer casings of an interiority that began—slowly, over the strange, delirious, rambling story line of The Queue—to reveal itself.
By contrast to this horizontality, the central section of Moses(es) featured a kind of Soul Train vertical lineup of the ensemble, assembled at the back of the stage; the dancers then stepped forward, one at a time, coming at the audience directly from the rear curtain to the proscenium, each with all the individual virtuosity he or she could muster, dancing their selves expressively, celebrating their singularity as solo performers while also gesturing (quite literally) to a wide and dizzying array of vernacular, balletic, modern, and contemporary styles. They were each themselves yet their bodies were filled with traditions, histories, memories, others. They took us to this moment, inside the present, on stage, where many pasts, like tangled tinsel, were compressed and, ultimately, exploded forth. All this to the ecstatic, pumping sounds of the classic Chicago house track “Follow Me” by Aly Us. It was cathartic and beautiful—a journey that, in this case, did not require one. No baggage needed here, packed as the meaning and energy and power was into the bodies of the performers themselves.
June 3, 2014
Approaching Digital History
conclusions from a methods course.
Click for larger picture of the whiteboard.
For the last meeting of my Approaching Digital History methods seminar at Northwestern University (syllabus also available here), my wonderful students and I tried to list out our findings from a term of engaging with the state of this developing field. Below are tentative conclusions about digital history in 2014. Overall, we were struck by the promise of the field, but also by how much work is left to do to figure out how to use the digital successfully in service of historical understanding and meaning-making.
One major discovery we made was that the challenges of developing digital history converge at the intersection of method and medium, of approaches to historical practice in the digital age and how we conceptualize and use the digital as a new medium for thinking historically. These challenges appear on both the research side of historical practice and the presentation side.
On the research side, the digital offers enormous opportunities for thinking about history at new scales, from the extremely large to the microscopic. It also, as a medium of remediation and extended mutability and flexibility, provides the chance to pursue an enhanced range of perspectives and strategies for perceiving patterns in our sources. We can get “into” our materials in new ways in the malleable design structures of the digital even as they demand new kinds of conforming rigidities as binary code and machine-readable data. Projects have only begun, slowly, to make use of these possibilities. And we struggle to adjust our assumptions about correlation and causality, about authority of interpretation and openness of meaning in the new medium of the digital as we pursue new modes of analysis.
On the presentation side, our forms for communicating historical findings have been fairly stable for decades—the book, the journal article, the op-ed piece, the lecture, the seminar, perhaps occasionally the exhibition or documentary film. These have been the standardized vessels for communicating historical findings. The shift to the digital medium demands greater attention to form as well as content. Design becomes key here as a new mechanism for communicating historical meaning. Design is not neutral, and their is a vastly expanded repertoire of design options and choices in the digital domain that far exceed what historians have published in the past through primarily paper and text based modes of analysis and narrative.
Here is a reframing of the notes we took for the whiteboard during our last seminar. Comments, responses, ideas, and questions are welcome as I continue to develop this methods seminar in digital history.
WHITEBOARD NOTES REDESIGNED:
Digital History is at once new methods and a new medium.
DH methods connected to goals and objectives:
-Analysis, new findings
-Preservation
-Organizing “access” to data
-Presentation and (Re)presentation and conscious, careful playing with representation
-Interaction, “networked” knowledge, participatory historical meaning-making
-Questions, as a means to frame and ask new questions
DH as new medium:
-What happens when we shift from paper, books, journals, classrooms to the digital domain? How do we think historically in this new medium?
—
So much DH method and medium hinge on the relationship between
1. machine-readable and 2. human-readable data,
between narrative forms and database forms.
How we pivot between the two forms of data is the crucial question.
—
Design becomes far more important in the digital medium, and hence in digital historical methods.
What kinds of design:
-argument based (trying to make a point through digital design as well as content)
-exploratory based (creating spaces for historical engagement without definitive findings)
-tool based (creating tools for others to use in service of historical learning and meaning making)
-informationally based (archive, attempting to be more “neutral”)
-aesthetically driven (making history beautiful within the digital medium)
-experiential (encouraging new modes of historical meaning making that are ironically more absorbing by being remediated through digital re-representation)
—
Some things that seem at stake in DH methods and medium:
-what kind of historical “reality” are we pursuing her?
Virtual (gaming, simulation, cyberspace, away from reality to see it from new angles)
Augmented (intersecting digital and “real,” mobile apps, extensions of archival objects)
-questions of scale become crucial in DH methods
macroscopic “big data” approaches vs. microscopic zooms
an enhanced flexibility of movement among scales
-the perceptual, sensorial, perspectival via digital remediation, these become possible arenas of extending historical scholarship: phenomenological moves in service of epistemological elaborations, the digital as a mediating force between what we sense/perceive (see, hear, touch, make) and what we know about the past.
May 27, 2014
Fishin’ Blues
exploring musical patterns of community on harry smith’s anthology of american folk music.
Comments prepared for the second gathering of the NEH Advanced Research Workshop HIPSTAS, High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship, which focuses on using the digital sound analysis tool ARLO, Slides below too.
—
I have been using ARLO iteratively to search for unperceived connections and contrasts within a small dataset: the famous Anthology of American Folk Music put together by Harry Smith in 1952. Consisting of 84 tracks, divided into three categories—Ballads, Social Music, and Songs—this collage of US “roots” music recordings was a kind of mystical remix of old commercial recordings of hillbilly sounds, race records, and other ethnic musics that existed on the periphery of the emerging twentieth-century American commercial recording industry.
Anthology of American Folk Music liner notes. Smithsonian Folkways.
Smith was an avant-garde filmmaker, autodidact, ethnographer, collector of esoteric items, quirky bohemian—also a drug addict and hustler—who claimed to be a modern-day cultural alchemist. Here he is in a photograph from the 1980s taken by poet Allen Ginsberg, who playfully describes him “transforming milk into milk.”
Harry Smith “transforming milk into milk.” Photograph: Allen Ginsberg.
On the Anthology, Smith reorganized the sounds he had collected from commercial 78 rpm recordings of the 1920s and 30s and illegally bootlegged into a long-playing proto-box set release for the famous Folkways label, once owned by radical lefty impresario Moe Asch and now a part of the Smithsonian Institution.
What Smith released into the world was, in essence, a remix before the term existed. He erased existing categories of race, class, and region in the US, the kinds of classifications that were typically used to organize folk music. In their place, he offered what many in the burgeoning folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s came to imagine as a dreamt-up integrated community of American vernacular life in sound.
This was a visionary musical collage of democratic longing, what the cultural critic Greil Marcus has called “Smithville,” a fictitious American every-town. It was what folk music scholar Robert Cantwell describes as “Smith’s Memory Theater,” an effort to summon in one compressed sonic form the range of American culture and spirit at the grassroots. It became a sacred text, a sort of bible and reference manual, within the folk music revival during the 1950s and thereafter, partly because the Anthology not only preserved traditional sounds, but also rearranged them in such a way as to suggest to folkies new ways of comprehending the world.
In its strange, collaged form, surrounded by quasi-mystical imagery and humorous yet scholarly liner notes, it was not only a compendium of folk song, but also a kind of guide for self-transformation and enhanced living for many folk revivalists. What I want to know is if ARLO can help us discern the patterns that Smith himself claimed to be chasing after with the Anthology: patterns of commonality and community, individuality and difference, all expressed musically and brought into being as much through comparative collage and pattern-making as in the discrete sounds of the Anthology themselves. These patterns include not only melodic and rhythmic similarities and elaborations, but also harmonic tonalities and sonorities that ARLO might be able to discern and re-represent.
Smith himself remarked of the Anthology in a 1968 interview with John Cohen in Sing Out! magazine: “I was just fiddling with those ideas then…Everything is computerized now.” He saw potential in the use of the computer to listen better to musical expression and its cultural—even its political—implications when remixed, re-mediated, and heard anew in reoriented relationships. Now that we are developing sonic analysis tools such as ARLO, can we use them to continue the project that Smith began, which was to see if music rearranged and recontextualized could unleash new understandings of those who made—and also those who continue to listen to—these important vernacular American sounds?
I think the jury is still out on this question. What leaps out at me about ARLO is that it is clearly well-suited for questions of accessing collections, particularly large ones. This is something that computational automation is good at: seeking out patterns based on precise parameters, processing large amounts of data, turning back search queries, pinpointing the needles of material lodged in haystacks of data. But what about analysis, interpretation, the making of new meaning from sources, especially of music?
The challenges here between access and analysis are not completely different at the level of ARLO’s parameters: we are in the same territory of seeking out similarities and differences across sets of sonic materials. But the question of what one wants to do with those parameters becomes more complex when it comes to analysis. Matters not only of what, but also of why start to leap to the fore. What counts, as it were, as evidence for particular arguments becomes an issue. And what questions we wish to ask—which questions of ARLO’s parameters and functions might lead to new findings—this becomes the most pressing dilemma of all.
For instance, with the Anthology, we might ask questions about similarities of melody, of pitch. But we might also, thanks to the design of ARLO, ask questions about attack, energy, harmonic timbre. In terms of music’s temporality and rhythmic dimensions, we have to decide what units of measurement are worth… measuring as a discrete entity: a single note? A lyrical line? A whole verse? A particular “lick” on an instrument? One voice singing? Two voices? Instruments in relationship to each other? Silence between notes? They are all potentially crucial aspects of the pattern-making that is the Anthology of American Folk Music. Which permutations of what matter in musical expression, even on these scratchy old records, maybe especially on these scratchy old records. The complexity is endless. There is no “objectivity” here, really, in the shallowest sense of that term. There is only choice, selection, exploration, iteration, comparison, and the mingling of computer-heard sound and human-heard sound, different ears, if you will, intermingled in responses to sonic registers.
Given these challenges, my early experiments using ARLO have been tentative. I’ve been most interested in seeing at first if Smith’s remix of vernacular American folk sounds possesses sonic similarities of pitch, on the one hand, and energy, or intensity, on the other. So I have toyed with the pitch parameter and the energy spectra parameter the most just to see if the same tagged section of a song—say the chorus of the final song on the Anthology, Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues,” produces similar or different results.
“Voice, Whistling, and Guitar”: Henry Thomas, “Cottonfield Blues,” Vocalion Records.
What I have found, as a preliminary result, is that ARLO confirms the ways in which little snippets of similar melody, in terms of interval relationships, are scattered all across the Anthology, in unlikely places, producing a kind of subtle sense of interlinked connection across the collection of songs. This isn’t altogether surprising of course. It is a reminder that the different genres of vernacular American music that Smith chose to include in his remix—string bands from Appalachia and blues from the Mississippi Delta, Cajun fiddle tunes and Midwestern polkas, sweetly fingerpicked songster tales of redemption and justice and harsh, powerful frailing banjo plaints of sin and sorrow—share many fairly narrow musical traits: the melodies in particular are based on variations of the pentatonic scale, a shared musical style of the British isles and West Africa, which were not the only but perhaps the crucial streams that fed into American folk music represented on the Anthology. But it is nice to see ARLO catch melodic similarities where even a well-trained ear might not catch them, not just between Thomas’s “Fishin’ Blues” and his version of “Old Dog Blue” but also between “Fishin’ Blues” and fellow Texan Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” between Thomas’s song and the similar songster stylings of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Spike Driver Blues,” and even between “Fishin’ Blues” and far more distant seeming songs from the ballad tradition, such as “John Hardy” by the Carter Family, and even between “Fishin’ Blues” and the Cajun fiddle and accordion song, “Le Vieux Soulard Et Sa Femme.”
At one level this is just work of confirmation, not of revelation. Which is to say it provides more evidence that Smith had good ears, that he used more fluid sonic similarities and variations to guide his remixes rather than seemingly static categories of race, ethnicity, region. And it more deeply documents that he created a collection that was richly suggestive rather than rigidly definitive. But the findings also suggest something else, something that, with more research, might begin to bring into view—more accurately, into hearing—new findings, new understandings not only of Smith’s remix work, but of the contours and qualities of American folk music itself. ARLO as a computational ear, its pitchforks tuned and retuned to different parameters, proposes that Smith’s ears only began to perceive the deep interlinkages of American song. And if we are willing to go fishin’ a bit more even within this small sampling of songs on the Anthology, this micro dataset, using the bait and tackle, the lures and lines, of our libraries, projects, media files, tag sets, and tag discoveries, we may be able to discern far more of this suggestiveness in American folk traditions—even more, perhaps, than what Smith, that crazed remix alchemist, himself heard.
May 24, 2014
Silence is Foo!
Silence is imaginary, because the world never stops making noise. A sound is a disruption of the air, and it doesn’t so much die as recede until it subsides beneath the level of the world’s random noise and can no longer be recovered, like a face that is lost in a crowd. In past times, people sometimes thought that all sounds that ever existed were still present, hovering like ghosts. Guglielmo Marconi, who sent the first radio message, in 1902, believed that with a microphone that was sufficiently sensitive he could hear Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, and in 1925 a writer for the Washington Post speculated that a radio was capable of broadcasting the voices of the dead.
Guglielmo Marconi, 1901
May 22, 2014
The Humanities Go Digital @ Northwestern
Nice mention of the Digital Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project, my Digitizing Folk Music History seminar, and the Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory in the latest issue of Weinberg Magazine (Spring 2014)—here is a nice Flipbook version too with the full layout.. What a nice quote from one of my star students, Jessica Smasal!
May 16, 2014
Modernity and Regionalism in Chicago and Midwest Dance History
this begins in fall 2014.
Chicago Opera Ballet dancers Orrin Kayan and Jeanne Armin, 1960, Midwest Dance Collection, Newberry Library.
Project Title:
Modernity and Regionalism in Chicago and Midwest Dance History
Project Description:
This project documents and probes the history of dance in Chicago and the Midwest through the lens of questions of modernity and regionalism as they get embodied and networked. Beginning in the academic year 2014/2015, Dr. Michael J. Kramer (History/American Studies, Northwestern University) will serve as lead researcher and director of the Chicago Dance History Project. He will conduct video oral history interviews with participants in the Chicago dance performance world. Partnering with the Newberry Library (home of the Midwest Dance Collection, http://www.newberry.org/midwest-dance-collection) and other institutions, the Chicago Dance History Project will also coordinate the digitizing of materials about the history of dance in Chicago. We are primarily interested in two related issues: (1) histories of training and the kinds of embodied knowledges that are central to dance and (2) the story of networks both within Chicago and the Midwest and beyond the city and region to other parts of the United States and the world. Our aim is to construct a digital database of this material as a seedbed for producing digital mapping/narrative projects, a podcast series, exhibitions, books, articles, and other offerings about this history of dance in Chicago. As the database is developed, we will be designing prototypes, such as an examination of dance in Chicago in the early 1980s, so that digital archive development and its most productive uses can emerge in tandem. We view this as an archives-driven public/digital humanities project interested in examining dance history, the history of Chicago and the Midwest, and issues of modernity and regionalism from multiple vantage points across multiple cross-disciplinary perspectives and approaches. The digital database will ultimately be made available for scholarly research, for use by artists interested in constructing new works of art in multiple forms based on archival engagement, for dance programs, centers, and K-12 schools that wish to bring a deeper historical awareness to their dance pedagogy (and, just as importantly, for educators who might wish to bring dance into their teaching about Chicago and Midwest history), and for the general public.
Modernity and Regionalism, Embodied and Networked, in Chicago and Midwest Dance History
this begins in fall 2014.
Chicago Opera Ballet dancers Orrin Kayan and Jeanne Armin, 1960, Midwest Dance Collection, Newberry Library.
Project Title:
Modernity and Regionalism, Embodied and Networked, in Chicago and Midwest Dance History
Project Description:
This project documents and probes the history of dance in Chicago and the Midwest through the lens of questions of modernity and regionalism as they get embodied and networked. Beginning in the academic year 2014/2015, Dr. Michael J. Kramer (History/American Studies, Northwestern University) will serve as lead researcher and director of the Chicago Dance History Project. He will conduct video oral history interviews with participants in the Chicago dance performance world. Partnering with the Newberry Library (home of the Midwest Dance Collection, http://www.newberry.org/midwest-dance-collection) and other institutions, the Chicago Dance History Project will also coordinate the digitizing of materials about the history of dance in Chicago. We are primarily interested in two related issues: (1) histories of training and the kinds of embodied knowledges that are central to dance and (2) the story of networks both within Chicago and the Midwest and beyond the city and region to other parts of the United States and the world. Our aim is to construct a digital database of this material as a seedbed for producing digital mapping/narrative projects, a podcast series, exhibitions, books, articles, and other offerings about this history of dance in Chicago. As the database is developed, we will be designing prototypes, such as an examination of dance in Chicago in the early 1980s, so that digital archive development and its most productive uses can emerge in tandem. We view this as an archives-driven public/digital humanities project interested in examining dance history, the history of Chicago and the Midwest, and issues of modernity and regionalism from multiple vantage points across multiple cross-disciplinary perspectives and approaches. The digital database will ultimately be made available for scholarly research, for use by artists interested in constructing new works of art in multiple forms based on archival engagement, for dance programs, centers, and K-12 schools that wish to bring a deeper historical awareness to their dance pedagogy (and, just as importantly, for educators who might wish to bring dance into their teaching about Chicago and Midwest history), and for the general public.
May 13, 2014
“Revolutionary” Mix: Music for An Artists’ Congress
pop music meditations on “what is revolutionary art?”
David Lester, “The politics are not obvious” (12 x 12″ acrylic on canvas), 2003.
…popular music can be the social glue for creating and maintaining diverse communities; …these communities support several distinct forms of collective political action including intracommunal disagreement and debate as well as assertion in external public arenas; and…music can increase the capacity, or power, of relatively marginalized people to choose and determine their own fate. — Mark Mattern, Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action
When Block Museum curator Susy Bielak asked me to put together a mix of popular music songs that related to the themes of The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940 exhibition and the Artists’ Congress event planned in conjunction with the show, I immediately thought of the standard-issue music of the Popular Front: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Leadbelly, union songs, solidarity forever, perhaps Billie Holiday singing “Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit.” Fine by me. I love that stuff! But the more I ruminated on the question of what we should do with popular music that might be “revolutionary,” the more I thought that the question actually had to be turned around. It was not how should music be revolutionary today (my version of 1930s Artists’ Congress member Louis Lozowick’s question, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Today?,” which has inspired the contemporary version of the Congress), but rather almost the opposite: what would it mean for revolution to incorporate all that music has to offer? And I mean music in the fullest sense: feeling and thought, corporeal experience and deeply intellectual inquiry, individual perspectives and collective actions, questions of economy and commerce as well as culture and civic life, all the pain of the past as well as the rootedness musical traditions can provide, all the hopes and reaching for breakthrough, newness, for the unprecedented that music can evoke, music as a code for living, music as a flexible medium for making sense of the world, music as a modality for both experiencing and expressing what it means to be human—everything right down to what sound is at its core, vibration itself in all its mysterious physical and spiritual dimensions.
If there is to be a revolution that turns neither into a new kind of terror or a replication of all the worst qualities of the current world, if there is to be true emancipation, we will need to turn to the arts for new possibilities in democratic action. Which doesn’t mean that lots of good old-fashioned political organizing doesn’t need to happen as well, and lots of struggle and confrontation. Just that we more too. We need songs.
My mixes tilt toward the popular music I know and toward the function of these songs for the social “breaks” in the living mix of the Artist Congress itself—its presentations, roundtables, receptions, and social interactions. There could be much more classical music here, and much more classic country music too for that matter. Way more jazz of all varieties. Maybe more dance music too. There could be many more sounds from cultures around the world as well as many more contemporary pop songs. Actually, if it were up to me, the whole thing would consist solely of Curtis Mayfield and Nina Simone. But these mixes attempt to let the sounds I associate with the Popular Front ring out, then from there they especially move on to other sounds and styles that, to me, approach the legacy of the best aspects of the Popular Front ethos—democratic, radical, pluralistic, militant, inclusive, patriotic, tolerant—from a multitude of perspectives, sonorities, elaborations, redirections, and even, at times, rejections. The mixes try to probe the many corners of what revolutionary music might sound like if revolution were enacted musically, across the full soundscape of society and the full societyscape of sound.
The mixes are split into three sections: Entrance Music, Midday Reception Music, and Closing Reception Music. Here is the whole thing, in sequence, courtesy of a Spotify playlist.
Hope to see you at the Artists’ Congress, this coming Saturday, 17 May 2014 from 1 to 5pm at Northwestern’s Block Museum.
Music For An Artists’ Congress
curating “revolutionary” pop music for the 2014 artists’ congress at the block museum.
I have put together a set of pop music recordings for the Artists’ Congress being held at Northwestern’s Block Museum this coming Saturday, 17 May 2014 from 1 to 5pm.
This Saturday’s Artists’ Congress is modeled after the American Artists’ Congress of 1936 as well as subsequent efforts during the late 1930s (and afterward) among primarily visual artists to explore the nature of what revolutionary art-making might involve. Much of this history and its art are represented in the current Block exhibition The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940.
Inspired by 1930s Left Front member Louis Lozowick’s question, “What Should Revolutionary Artists Do Today?” the Congress seeks to connect the past history of probing the lines between culture-making and social change to pressing contemporary issues, dilemmas, and ideas. My role has been to think about the “background” music for such an undertaking—and in doing so, perhaps to complicate the boundary between what is sonically in the background and what comes into view when visual art-making and its political dimensions are brought to the fore.
If you are in the Chicago area, do come by for what is sure to be an important, creative, and intriguing event. More on the making of the mix in my next post.
More on the Artists’ Congress.
