Blue Buttocks

This weekend we are presenting a pair of artists, San Francisco-based writer and performance artist Nina Wise and Malaysian-born Annie Kunjappy, who have made an art of making art of their lives. Nina travels the world giving improvisational performances that draw heavily on her own life materials, and she also teaches others how to make a daily practice of integrating their own creative and spiritual impulses. She practices what she teaches. Annie has performed at CRS and all over the New York area as a member of Big Apple Playback Theater. She also makes and directs work of her own and teaches the art of cooking healthy meals at the Natural Gourmet Institute.

The two are wonderful role models for how to live the life you want with joy and satisfaction. If you come to see their show Leap Year at CRS this weekend, you'll have a chance to meet them both and, if you like, get a signed copy of Nina's wonderful book A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life: Self Expression and Spiritual Practice for Those Who Have Time for Neither.
— Christopher Pelham

Dance critic Apollinaire Scherr contributes an often thought-provoking blog, Foot in Mouth, on artsjournal.com. She often puts into words impressions that have circled in my head but never coalesced into clearly articulated thoughts. On Monday, she wrote, "Choreographers are still making this mistake--supposing that if they keep things open, they're giving us more freedom to imagine. Imagination doesn't need freedom, it needs something to dig its claws into."

Specificity brings art alive. Specificity need not eliminate ambiguity. Often, in fact, ambiguity is achieved by providing a richness of conflicting or surprising details. Lack of sufficient detail leads to vagueness (and blandness), which is not the same thing as ambiguity (and is usually much less interesting or desirable). Shakespeare is full of detail and still inspires a rich multiplicity of interpretations that people still argue over 400 years later. If only our dance were so rich! Lest you dismiss Shakespeare for being narrative and therefore irrelevant to an observation that was directed, in this case, toward lyrical modern dance, consider Shakespeare's sonnets. They, too, are rich in detail, vocabulary, sound, poetic devices, etc., and yet readers come up with wildly different interpretations.

In December I had the opportunity to visit the wonderful Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, FL. Yes, there is really a Dali museum there. Among numerous interesting works in their collection is his large painting The Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire. Dali was at the forefront of exploring ambiguity in visual art, in the mind really. The world confronts our senses with an infinite amount of information, and our mind's sift and structure it. We become conscious of ambiguity when our mind's cannot settle on a definitive interpretation of what we are experiencing. But Dali's work helps to remind us that our perceptions do indeed give rise to subjective interpretations all the time, even if we are only conscious of it periodically. What we "see" because we see selectively is only one of many possible versions of what is there to be seen.