Just got out of a performance of "CYP17" at Danspace at St. Mark's. Wow. It was incredible dancing. André Gingras, choreographer; Kenneth Flak, dancer. That, on top of interesting conversations with Sueyoung earlier today and finding the Dave Hickey essay. Somehow, Sueyoung and I were discussing Benjamin and my thesis that he prefigured social computing in The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The distance between the author and the reader lessened. Now, with blogging, we are all authors. We are all readers. Sueyoung said I was post-poststructuralist. She said that she'd been mulling over the distance of author and reader, the return and ubiquity of the author, the post-Benjamin rebirth of the author, going in circles. And then I happened upon the Dave Hickey essay in Harvard design magazine, number 25, fall 2006/winter 2007.
One of my most memorable theatrical experiences was "In circles" by Al Carmines, set to words of Gertrude Stein. I thought he'd largely constructed the script/score from her essays but then found much of it in a collection of her plays. I saw "In circles" when I was in college. Dorothy and I saw it with Richard Barons. We bought the recording and, gradually, the recorded version overtook the memory. The words still reverberate. When anyone says "Messages are received," I hear the singing. It's a little like the reverberations of the words in the work of Nina Katchadourian: "that's amazing" or "in Beirut."
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