“Dance and/as philosophy” plus 2 more |
| Posted: 13 Jul 2010 12:31 AM PDT Of all the forms of art (especially contemporary art) I have written about in the last few years, dance is one of those for which I have been unable to say anything coherent. Movement is indescribably difficult to work out unless one has the vocabulary for it. I therefore decided to watch Pinoy-French Contemporary Dance at the PETA Theater Center, knowing full well that I would be venturing into a totally new experience. But what astonished me that night was that, not long after the open forum ended (where the four questioners at Donna Miranda's lecture-performance couldn't get a word in edgewise), I found myself ruminating about a very different yet obvious vocabulary to speak about dance. It was one I was familiar with, sort of. It was that this performance spoke to me as much as philosophy as it was about dance. Why not? I have to admit that the first contemporary dance concert I watched was one at a small studio along West Avenue many years ago. The most recent one I watched before last night was Ballet Philippines' Neo-Filipino, a concert from which I gained a new appreciation for the music of The Postal Service and Wim Wenders but very little else. It reminded me of why I have been reticent of late to talk about contemporary art: sometimes, it tends to be all the same. So it was that Miranda opened the evening with her new lecture-performance "Anything Less is a Reckless Act." Now I read the advance word: people would be asked to choose between watching the video of a dance and Miranda talking about it. There are no other alternatives, unless one wishes, in this case, to stroll up the street to the fast food restaurants, grab a quick bite, and walk back down in time for the interval. When I spoke to some people I knew, they would rather choose the dance. "I came to enjoy the dance," said one of my interlocutors. And so, when Miranda began her spiel and pronounced the rules, about 90 percent of the audience headed over to the theater. It dawned on me that something was not what it seemed, and so I decided to stay. It was a brilliant choice. The lecture was a very intriguing insight into how a dance comes together, or seems to come together, but it turned out to be more than that. By choosing to outline what was going on and deliberately placing it apart from all of us, the lecture-performance was a very good example of, not to mention a play upon, the kind of contemporary hermeneutics I have been writing about. There was the deliberate attempt to describe and foreground one's own prejudices. There was the decision to distance one's self from one's own work. The author became another interpreter. Or so I thought. Miranda's own language was inherently subversive: admitting to imposing meaning, for instance, was really an invitation for us to question what she was meaning to do. And in essence, what she was doing explicitly was what was implicitly going on in the other place: depriving us of the chance to fulfill our expectations so that we could make the only real choice left that night: the choice to regret our other choices. In other words, she invited us to reflect upon what we did--if we had ears to listen.
And yes, the open forum was very interesting. The Way is not a way The main performances, which were by the choreographer Lin Yuan Shang and a member of his dance troupe in France, were another hopeful sign that something different was taking place. We did expect this to be a display of what the French cultural attaché called "kung fu dancing," but it was more than that. As the act progressed, something was being made explicit to us. Some quotes from the Tao Te Ching were being projected onto the screen in both Chinese and English. In the process, we saw how kung fu, a martial art made beloved by hundreds of films of varying quality and not a few film stars, was rooted in a thought system whose echoes have only emerged in the West in the 20th century (for example, with Martin Heidegger's discussion of being).
As the choreographer and I discussed briefly after the open forum, Taoism is a very good example of an Eastern philosophy. In fact, one should not even bother calling it a "philosophy," which is a Western construct, or even a "religion" though it is often classified as such. He explained that in Taoism, "the body and the philosophy are not separate." Hence, performing the body is an act of doing philosophy, if one could call it that way. In the East, the dichotomy between body and mind made more prominent by Rene Descartes is almost non-existent.
In fact, the performances reminded me of another Taoist form of body performance, tai chi, and many of the moves were similar. One of the emphases in Lin's performance was on how kung fu, like tai chi, was both meant to evoke movements in nature. For instance, he repeated some of the quotes while performing, emphasizing each movement as he noted its allusion to, say, water.
But it was an interesting commentary on how people really saw kung fu that at one point, four scenes were being simultaneously projected on screen. These were four martial arts movies; the longest clip was from the recent Kung Fu Hustle, and that clip depicted sheer violence, the (necessary) counterpoint to the serenity and calm which was earlier depicted. For Taoism teaches, indeed, that balance is important. This was highlighted in the last segment, which showed the contrasts between nature and the busy working world where, as the Dave Matthews Band song puts it, "ants are marching."
Lin's work is where dance as philosophy is most clearly laid out, but the connections were slightly less clear in the more contemporary number that followed, performed by a dancer from his troupe. "In-Between" highlighted, however the question of confronting the "other," and how paying attention to the language of movement allows us to see the struggles of emerging and trying to live. I could sense this as a teaching moment for those who are fond of the kind of thought made popular by Emmanuel Levinas and (later) Jacques Derrida, where the emphasis is on ethics as first philosophy.
So what?
The risk I take in outlining how dance and philosophy interact is a risk Miranda identified explicitly in her piece: it is an imposition of meaning. Yet this is a suspicion post-modernity makes when meaning provides the account that justifies the way its world operates. What prevents the critic who happens to think philosophically from saying that it is an imposition is precisely the openness of texts like dance, texts which are non-textual in the strict sense, to the possibility of interpretation. What it means does not justify its existence; movement happens whether we mean it or not.
Miranda's work, founded as it is on the obsession with theory and "making meaning" (something the author shares to some extent), lets us examine the question of choice, which is in many ways one of liberal modernity's fondest shibboleths. But it is open, of course, to the question of how intimate relationships begin and end, among other things. And while Lin's first set of works in this show highlight how Taoism puts modern dualism into question, it is always open as well to questions surrounding, for example, the commodification of the martial arts.
But the pedagogical moment is precisely where teachers of philosophy must open people's imaginations to the possibility of meaning. This is perhaps where people can learn how to see things differently and be changed as a result. So what is left after unpacking what is possible, or what can be coherently said, in movement, is a different view of the world. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 13 Jul 2010 01:57 AM PDT Mary Gauthier From a runaway, to a brief stint as a philosophy major, to Cajun/Soul food restaurant owner, folk singer/song writer Mary Gauthier has a life rich with experience. From those experiences, she has molded six albums of original songs, more than a dozen years of recording and touring around the world, a harvest of music industry awards and had covers of her songs by a roster of artists. When: 7:30 p.m. Where: Don Quixote's, 6275 Highway 9, Felton Cost: $18 advance, $20 door Details: 603-2294, donquixotesmusic.info Moon Taxi Moon Taxi, a rock band from Nashville, Tenn., has toured with Gov't Mule, DJ Logic, The New Mastersounds, Matisyahu and most recently Umphrey's McGee. Their rock, jam, hip-hop and progressive rock influences have taken them to festivals such as 10,000 Lakes Festival, Moe's Summer Camp, Birmingham's City Stages, the Terrapin Hill Harvest Festival, and Huntsville's Big Spring Jam. When: 8:30 p.m. Where: Moe's Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz Cost: $5 advance, $8 door Details: 479-1854, http://moesalley.com For more local activities, visit the Things to Do section of the Sentinel home page to search and view comprehensive listings for events, movies, restaurants and performers in the area or sign up and promote your own event. Visit http://events.santacruzsentinel.com. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| What's the philosophy of investing? Posted: 12 Jul 2010 04:38 AM PDT  Very few investors give a serious thought to the underlying issues involved in an investing style and if it fits their personal risk-profile, says Devangshu Datta. Trend following, or going with the herd as it's less politely described, is safe from an emotional viewpoint. If you're wrong, so is the crowd and misery loves company. Also, since money does move prices, the probability of a "win" is higher. Successful trend followers are just a little late latching onto a new trade and just a little early in closing out. By being slightly late into the trade, you allow it to build up momentum. By getting out a little early, you miss the theoretical maximum return but also introduce a higher degree of safety. The other trading philosophy is to beat the rush: Identify trades early and get in before the crowd does. Obviously this aims at profit maximisation and carries larger risks. The lack of crowd validation also makes this style more emotionally demanding. The tools of technical analysis fall into two categories that fit these philosophies. There is one set of trend-following tools, such as moving averages. The other set consists of lead-indicating tools such as the Relative Strength Index (RSI) and its close relative, the Williams %R. Trend-following tools assume that, once a trend is in force, it will stay alive long enough to be exploited. Lead-indicators identify oversold-overbought levels where trends are likely to reverse. It's unclear which style works better in practice. Trend followers generate profits more consistently. But they take massive losses when the market is collectively wrong. "Leaders" are less consistent. But they make larger profits when correct. Also, because leaders are inured to being wrong, they are usually more disciplined about stop-losses. Fundamental analysts rarely discuss this issue explicitly. The tools of balance-sheet analysis are all trend-following by definition. They deal with information that may be quite dated. However, it could be argued that technical analysis is about price history and all forms of stock-analysis are about forward projections made from historical patterns. "Fundamentalists" do have definite stylistic differences. A fan of Warren Buffett [ Images ] would tend to avoid IPOs, for example, due to the lack of reliable financial history. Some, including Buffett himself, will also avoid all new technology-driven sectors. The (perfectly sound) logic is that they feel uncomfortable investing in sunrise industries they don't personally understand. More aggressive "leader-oriented" investors will enter IPOs. The really high risk-takers take pre-listing investments, via private equity or venture capital. Not coincidentally, PE and VC both actively target sunrise industries. The risks are more because information is scanty and projections can be wrong by magnitudes. The returns can also be huge. Somewhere in-between, there are empiricists like Peter Lynch or Philip Fisher. While they pay heed to balance-sheet analysis and history, the empiricist-investor is willing to back growth at a relatively early stage of the business cycle, on relatively little information. Lynch for example, often bought companies on a quarter's worth of results. Fisher had a penchant for sifting gossip and backing stocks very early in the cycle when he had a hunch that growth was about to zoom. As with technicals, it's difficult to state that any style of investment is definitely the best. A large part of it depends on personal risk-appetite. However, when one is investing across sectors, markets and economies at different stages of development, there could be objective differences. A conservative investor for instance, may be left behind in a very tech-driven economy. In emerging markets, where information dissemination isn't good and crony capitalism is rife, a gossip-driven approach that anticipates balance-sheets may also be forced upon the investor. This is true in India [ Images ], where information-quality is often dubious and government policy decisions can cause huge swings in sector-viability. But it is also true that somebody can generate a good return in Indian equity by tracking predictable businesses. The risk profile for somebody who owns a stable predictable business is very different from that of an early bird, who subscribes to IPOs and enters sunrise industries. The contrast in styles imposes contrasting modes of money management. A risk-taker needs to monitor his portfolio more often, set more rigid loss-limits and generally be prepared to be more active. Very few investors actually think about the underlying issues of style and whether it fits their personal risk-profile. This is one reason why investors often mishandle even potentially great investments. They enter a stock without realising that they are personally uncomfortable with the method of management required. Next time somebody offers you a tip, think very hard about this. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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