14 February 2008
Frances would like to invite you to a showing of the development of monadologie.
“In so far as the concatenation of their perceptions is due to the principle of memory alone, men act like the lower animals, resembling the empirical physicians, whose methods are those of mere practice without theory… For instance, when we expect that there will be daylight to-morrow, we do so empirically, because it has always so happened until now. It is only the astronomer who thinks it on rational grounds.”
— G.W. Leibniz - La Monadologie 1714
monadologie has been:
choreographed and danced by Bonnie Paskas, Frances d’Ath, Lina Limosani
an ANAT/Arts Victoria Arts Innovation Residency (AIR)
at Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
and Maximised by Chunky Move
important things:
when: Friday 22nd February, Saturday 23rd February
what time: 7:30pm
where: Napier St Theatre, cnr Napier and Church Sts, South Melbourne
what else: blogging at www.supernaut.info and www.anat.org.au/blog/dAth and dance stuff at www.francesdath.info
contact me: frances at francesdath.info or 0419 586 227
Please RSVP by email or SMS
13 February 2008
Feeling rather stunned after today. Bonnie and I worked out a couple of reiterative sequences that unfold from from the beginning and end of the group of phrases and respectively refer back towards earlier phrases and forward towards later phrases. They also occur with greater frequency at the beginning and end so cause a pile-up of repetitions that causes a rather grueling mental exertion just to remember what comes next, not even what we do with what comes next. And by strange chance, they cross over in the middle, so we can do either the ascending or descending sequences.
Much confusion and anxiety.
Which is to say, we tried to run it all today. 41 phrases unfold to nearly double that and in an instant we have almost half an hour of something that more-or-less is what it will be in another week. I realised that these unfolded phrases could serve as a basis for another set of series that operate on them which we never got to, and then thought about equations, and how through a process of eliminating, swapping around, balancing, it’s possible to make it more simple, which gave me the ghost of a sense of something further away, where pockets of emptiness would appear just from these eliminations.
I suggested this to Bonnie and immediately declared it’s something I’ll work on on my own in the final weeks of the residency.
We still have about a week of useful play time left. Lina returns tomorrow and I hope is not too horrified by what we have done. It’s all lurching into production time now, thinking about more than just making dance, and having to divide my attention elsewhere.
It’s become an extremely intense piece, something I’d imagined, after all my visual aesthetic for this was inspired by black metal and doom … ok … photographs of Sunn0))) playing live. I think also my turbulent personal life has seeped into it too. I wonder if when astrophysicists are having a bad time, they write angry and emotional equations?
monadologie
