About the videos "Briefcase Sweetheart" and "Wild America"

Check out the latest 2 video installments!

(Click on the images in the right-hand column)

"Briefcase Sweetheart" and "Wild America"

"Briefcase Sweetheart" is a much different approach to dancing in space. Whereas the other explorations have been improvised (Butoh is, for the most part, an improvised art)-- this one I worked over a few times to polish it up. I got some very strange looks from people hiking past, along the north shore of Lake Superior's Temperance River State Park. Why a business suit? I wanted the surreal juxtaposition, like Rene Magritte's suited figures raining down from the sky.

Sometimes I feel like an alien when I go out to a wild place. I can't seem to leave my city life truly behind me, and so I take it along. It tags along like an uninvited sweetheart... I'm so wrapped up in my relationship to this metaphorical briefcase that I never seem to fully arrive in "nature" before it's time to go back to the city again.

Inside the briefcase is a sheet of white paper. For summer work right now, I am teaching landscape painting to kids. Something interesting happens when I draw or paint things: I enter more deeply into it, looking close-- admiring subtle details that might have escaped my notice. Shadows and light, color and form. And yet, as I paint, I begin to feel more and more distant from what I'm painting. I am so focused on capturing this image for later, that I become totally unaware of my body, of my physical comfort, and block out awareness of anything else happening around me. So I simultaneously become hyper-sensitive and deadened to perception. Strange.

And afterwards, the place I was in, the multi-dimensional place and moment becomes, suddenly, an object.... The painting still exists to record this meeting, of artist and place... but it is framed. It is reduced. It has been made so much less real than it was. And what makes this place so special, that I should spend so much effort in remembering it? Is my living room at home any less special?

(music for "Briefcase Sweetheart" is from Pieces of Africa by Kronos Quartet)
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"Wild America" video ... Science & Spirit

Ever since I was a kid, I would battle with my sister over the remote control for the TV-- She'd want to watch the Monkees. Me, Marty Stouffer's "Wild America." I used to dream about becoming a naturalist, getting to interact with all kinds of creatures and witnessing all that cool stuff I'd see on TV. Well, now I get the chance to be my own Nature Show host.

I'm interested in exploring and making apparent some of the general ways I interact with nature-- as an introduction to this performance as a whole. In my "Wild America Show" I approach nature as a know-it-all guide... and as a deeply Spiritual Nature Guru.

How do science and spirit intersect?

In the scientific view, nature is broken down into understandable parts. Patterns we don't understand are labeled as "random." Wendell Berry in his book of essays Home Economics writes about the discoveries of fractals, and how science is continuing to discover patterns where the category "random" was once applied. Berry states that the dismissal of patterns we don't yet understand as "random" denies the existence of mystery. The possibility that we are a part of a pattern much more vast than we'll ever be able to break down or comprehend.

Berry's essay pretty well summarizes my concept of God, or Mystery. In my view, "Intelligent Design" as a concept doesn't necessarily have to be at odds with the concept of evolution. Why have such a limited view of what "God" is?
What if God is a verb, and not a noun? If God exists in the patterns through which all things cycle? In any case, it's clear that our tampering with natural systems is having severe repercussions on a scale more grand and more minute than we could ever know. Havoc is being wreaked on entire watershed systems, and inside the flow of blood within our own bodies. Is it time, yet, for humans to acknowledge that there are aeons of accumulated wisdom stored in the DNA of every being-- when allowed the freedom to express itself and live its life as it was meant?

What are the negative effects on ourselves, our own psyches, to the extent that we've "tamed" our own instincts? Ever observe how creatures in a zoo, while perhaps in fine physical health, exhibit some form of mental neurosis? What is the essential difference between creatures that are inherently wild and untameable, versus those which are considered "domesticable"? Why would any creature submit itself to another being, against the better judgment of its own instinct?

In nature, most systems are self-righting -- that is, they heal themselves over time. If I cut my skin, the sore scabs over, new skin grows beneath it, and a few weeks later the spot is totally healed. Likewise, cities are only kept nature-free through intensive maintenance. If we stopped repairing the cracks in the roads, how long would it take the grass to reclaim the pavement? It seems like the natural inclination of the universe is to heal itself. To reclaim the wisdom of its systems.

Why not assume that we humans, too, are capable of regaining balance by simply re-orienting ourselves to our "God-Given" directions? How different a human would I be, were I to stop reinforcing this facade of "separateness", and allow for the natural wisdom of my body? For example, my natural inclination is not to kill anyone in Iraq. Even if I had the means, I simply wouldn't do it. Is it possible that the systems we're currently enmeshed in are only capable of such extreme imbalance through unnatural enforcement? And if the people decided to stop feeding energy into the maintenance of this?

How many soldiers return from war with psychological damage?

Is it because, deep inside, they violated their own nature?

In any case, my version of "Wild America" is a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of myself approaching nature (as I often do) in an idealized, romantic way. And yet, the ending sequence, of dancing on the rocks, takes place at a location I've felt a connection to "the Divine" in the past. I realize that I am in constant search of those moments-- felt so rarely. The fading in and out of the video-- my dancing body billowing in and out of time with the music, "Hide and Seek" (by imogen heap), captures what it feels like to return there, to those rocks. I've had a long history of returning again and again to this place. Ghosts of past me's brush shoulders with the present. Like the clouds, I drift in and out of being.

The first time I came to this place was 8 years ago.
If the cells in my body completely recycle themselves every 7 years,
then all the bits that were once me, who came here, have now moved on into being something else.

So then why do I remember it?

(additional music in this video by sigur ros -- the "meditation & bugs" sequence)
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