#meat joy

Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy (1964). Kinetic theater: 60-80 minutes

Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent; a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is toward the ecstatic, shifting and turning between tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon-qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic and imagistic stream in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. (They were seated on the floor as close to the performance area as possible, encircling, resonating.) Our proximity heightened the sense of commonality, transgressing the polarity between performer and audience.

7/15/24.

I've been enjoying this release from Australia's Efficient Space label for over a month now. It's been sitting there as a tab on the left side of my browser for over a month.

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

Yvonne Rainer (1965)

I'm currently doing a course on dance history and it's absolutely fascinating. I have heard a lot of the 'important' names in dance sporadically throughout my life but have never had it all laid out in a coherent and chronological order. It's been fascinating to discover when specific forms of movement had appeared and how. Of course, XX century is the most interesting for me personally - partly to do with the amount of resources (films especially) available.

I wanted to highlight a few groups and people who have left an impression on me (in all honesty, there's too many to name):

1. Valeska Gert - people call her the punk movement originator. She refused to be whatever society wanted her to be and instead was completely original and outrageous in her performance work. She even simulated orgasm on stage - in like 1930s?!

2. Judson Dance Theater - a short lived but very influential collective of dancers, filmmakers, composers and others from 1962-1966 in the USA. Similar motives as Fluxus groups, they rejected glamour and spectacle and this way helped invent Post Modern dance. Yvonne Rainer's 'No Manifesto' I quoted at the top was part of it. Even though I don't neccessaily agree with all the points of it now, but the lack of authority, democratization of performance and creation is very close to my idea of how we should be creating - collectively and actively. One of my favourite filmmakers Carolee Schneemann was also part of the group and her seminal work 'Meat Joy' (1964) was certainly quite groundbreaking, considering it was also perormed in a church. Steve Paxon who helped create contact improvisation was also part of the collective.