Sometimes it is wonderful to go for a (moon)walk by yourself through the night city.

Let’s face the music, and dance!

Get your tickets here

“She was ‘dreaming.’ And dreaming is a luxury I have never permitted in my company!”

Morvern Callar, (2002) dir. Lynne Ramsay

Got it? Good. Now for a little thought exercise:

Below is an excerpt from a conversation between writer, Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), and legendary film editor and sound designer, Walter Murch, from the book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film (2002).

As you read, think about all the ways that loving cities is so close to loving films, and why films can be great archives of the experience of living in cites.

Walter Murch: In film, there’s a dance between the words and images and the sounds. As rich as films appear, they are limited to two of the five senses–hearing and sight–and they are limited in time–the film lasts only as long as it takes to project it. It’s not like a book. If you don’t understand a paragraph in a book, you can read it again at your own pace. With a film, you have to consume it at one go, at a set speed.

But if a film can provoke an audience’s participation–if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work…

Even though it’s a mass medium, it’s those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear that they saw it, but in fact it wasn’t there…

How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the

right places and draws something out of you that comes from your own experience. And then you see it on screen and think: Only I know that, so the film must be made for me.

…

It’s a kind of mass intimacy. A paradoxical state, because you’re in a group and benefitting in some way from the group experience–yet if the film is any good, you also feel that it’s speaking directly to you. Even though it’s touching all these other people people as well. The ambiguity comes from the fact that it’s flowing through, like a river. You don’t have a chance to say–

MO: Wait a minute–

WM: As you do with a book.

Young bodies navigate the city streets more gracefully than luxury vehicles.

“Dance is unlike any other social medium. It’s the core of our culture.”

–Stanley Kirk Burrell, aka. MC Hammer

Notes on Funk I (excerpt)
by Adrian Piper
1985

From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a distinctive cultural idiom within black culture since the early 1970s. Funk constitutes a language of interpersonal communication and collective self-expression that has its origins in African tribal music and dance and is the result of the increasing interest of contemporary black musicians and the populace in those sources elicited by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s (African tribal drumming by slaves was banned in the United States during the nineteenth century, so it makes sense to describe this increasing interest as a “rediscovery”).

This medium of expression has been largely inaccessible to white culture, in part because of the different roles of social dance in white as opposed to black culture. For example, whereas social dance in white culture is often viewed in terms of achievement, social grace or competence, or spectator-oriented entertainment, it is a collective and participatory means of self-transcendence and social union in black culture along many dimensions, and is so often much more fully integrated into daily life. Thus it is based on a system of symbols, cultural meanings, attitudes and patterns of movement that one must directly experience in order to understand fully. This is particularly true in funk, where the concern is not how spectacular anyone looks but rather how completely everyone participates in a collectively shared , enjoyable experience.

My immediate aim in staging the large-scale performance (preferably with sixty people or more) was to enable everyone present to

GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER

(from a paper, given with Barbara Adams, at the Royal Academy of British Architects, London, July 2009)
I remember the first Michael Jackson music video I ever saw; in my grandparents’ living room in Lagos, during the evening hour when state television showed the latest in American, British and Caribbean black pop music.

The glowing halo of curly black hair, the even skin, shy white smile. The fragile teen-aged body. Tuxedo jacket open, with a large, loosely-tied bowtie, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, one hand finger-snapping, one hand in pocket. White socks, black loafers.

Falling suddenly, into a marbled sky, and to me, an avid marble collector, and fan of blowing soap bubbles, this seemed like a dream—I want to be there! I want to be where he is. He splits into 3 loosely synchronized selves in this music video, each one imploring me, in stereo, not to stop til I get enough rocking, snapping, spinning, freezing.

Here, I should tell you what this is not about:

This is not a psychological account of an individual experience.

This is not an account of a social experience.

In theorizing sensual experience, social scientists tend to begin from a split between the individual and social. The individual’s body is constructed as a set of openings, orifices through which the separate senses might receive sensory and psychic input or stimuli, through which it is shaped, and through which it shapes. The individual’s sensory experience is understood to be psychologized, contained separately from that of other individuals, and from the mass. The job of the social scientist is then to construct a system of influence, what yesterday’s keynote speaker Elizabeth Edwards in her analysis of a corpus of photographic images, called collective systems, through which each individual’s experience or material might likened to others, and then explained. At the heart of this social scientific project is a certain kind of liberal, representative politics, in which the many is privileged over the one, the macro, over the micro.

My sensory experience of the image of Michael Jackson is difficult to understand if we begin with this split in scale of sensory experience, or between visual or sensory and material practices.

This story of encounter with Michael Jackson is about experience in a nonpsychological, transpersonal register. This is about friction generated in movement—mine and his and ours—in the proximity of bodies both organic and inorganic. In this story, my body is a living center of indeterminacy, in constant molecular motion, in constant motion through space. In this story, Michael’s movements on the screen are critical—smooth and economical, urgent and emergent. Each snap, jerk and soulful lean extend towards me, imploring me to match my movements to his, to make myself complimentary. His movements, meeting mine in the real space of my grandparents’ living room, show me that my body is malleable, open to new trajectories of motion through which other subjectivities may emerge. He extends his body into mine, through the color television set, offering me a new range of possibility for (e)motion. I just have to keep moving, and never stop til I get enough.

Michael’s moves are really in my heart, in my body. They have been with me since I was a child, providing a template for soulful, fluid, expressive motion through the world, and I now realize just how important that vision he created was.

The openness of his body—the combination of strength and fragility—is something I really admire, and hope one day to have: a special kind of freedom in your own skin, a joyful way of moving that cuts swathes through the trajectories of other lives, in a folding of bodies into one another. I don’t know how to go on and move towards this freedom. I often feel very trapped by life circumstances, and when I look at Michael, I wonder how did he do it? How did he find so many moments of freedom to move even within the constraints of forms and circumstances? The answers to these questions are a matter of truly living, or dying.