Dana Venerable - Everyone Dances Alone

green_space

Nella Larsen, Harmony Holiday, curating sound, grief, Milford Graves, dance and combat, attention to vibration, Ntozake Shange, the choreopoem, writing after dance, art as access to a different experience of time, time as a modality that dismantles, moving through my house, actively giving attention--Dana Venerable talks to green_space Dec 2, 2021.

Venerable's notes:

+ Harmony Holiday is working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln, not Alice Coltrane--although she did write a piece about Alice in November on her substack.

+ Ntozake Shange describes and theorizes choreopoetry so beautifully, and I'm currently working on writing down my own understandings of it, yet a general sense of what the form is for the sake of this note includes artistic works that blend dance, poetry, sound, and song, but also work to erase their divisions as categories / genres.

+ The quote I was referring to regarding restoration and behavior in thinking about performance beyond and with understandings of repetition is as follows: "...performance not only as restored behavior but also as behaved restoration." This quote, a close-reading of Simone Leigh's Free People's Medical Clinic (FPMC) and what Alice Rayner ("Keeping Time") wrote about time within performance are included within Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel's introduction in their edited text Race and Performance After Repetition. A huge shout out to artist and scholar Dr. Ariel Nereson for introducing me to this text!

+ A link to Frank Ocean's "Endless:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHLFNoT64HQ&feature=youtu.be

+ The only other note I wanted to add but didn't in reference to Omarion memes is that people are and were using Omarion's name instead of Omnicron, and he had to make a video statement that he was a musician not a variant, which is hilarious to me (and he thought it was hilarious too!). His recent dance moves were only the beginning of his virtual presence, yet the ability for Omarion to dance and moonwalk in Timbs will forever blow my mind. (note within note--see his music video for the song "Touch")

+ My bad for overusing the word "fascinating" (!) I suppose I love that word and being fascinated.

Find Venerable's work here & here.