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January 2009
Exponential Times
Happy New Year!
I am a latecomer to the internet/information age and am not sure what is common knowledge anymore. Ellie Friedman, one of our company's most staunch champion and a tireless seeker, sent me a link to We are living in exponential times. Please give it a look if you haven't already done so.
This site with its brutal report of the exponential growth, depth and reach of our technology left me weak kneed and lightheaded, so much so that I lurched trembling for the familiar assurance of a book. The book that helped me regain some equilibrium is Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958). Her introduction states:
"While such possibility still may lie in a distant future, the first boomerang effects of science's great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that "the truths" of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will not longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thoughts...
We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is."
I am sure this is a peculiar way to begin an assessment of what happened in 2008 and what might happen in 2009 for me, my work and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Still, with the prospect of Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray as the primary company work to be created in 2009, there is some connections here. The Ravinia Festival and the Bicentennial Commission of Illinois paid me the compliment of asking for a work in response to the 200th Anniversary of the birth of a man much talked about at this time of transformation, Abraham Lincoln. A year ago, I told the instigator of this project, Welz Kaufman - the Director of Ravinia Festival - that I hoped to lead with my heart in this endeavor. In a brief time I realized that in some instances the heart only feeds on what the mind gives it. Abraham Lincoln hides (for me at least) in plain sight. He is a shadow moving among the architectural landmarks and ruins of my psyche, my identity, my memory and, yes, my dreams.
At first I thought the problem was history, or the elusive nature of "getting the story right." Now I have decided that the only story I need to get right is my relationship to the idea that is the man and his times. His legacy?
The first ancillary work I created in relation to this project which premiered at the American Dance Festival in 2008 was Serenade/The Proposition. It is a lively, colorful work that was surprisingly easy to make. Its text keeps reiterating, "It could be said that history is..."
In December when we left for work on Fondly Do We Hope...Fervently Do We Pray - the Ravinia commission - the new question was how can this work avoid the pitfalls of a Lincoln/Civil War narrative and be instead a free and potent reflection on what that man and that era have to say to me/us now, in 2009.
While I shed tears at his election and wish him and us only the best during his tenure as president, still I must resist the template that is overlaid now on Barak Obama and a too facile identification with the Lincoln years. Before the Obama election, when the nasty fight of the political campaign reminded us daily of the deep divisions, rancor and confusion in our collective experience, I was inclined to say Lincoln had the Civil War with its too clearly delineated sides whereas we are traumatized daily by an undeclared war with no clear battlefields or fronts. This formulation invited a work of art that would be discontinuous, cacophonous, troubling in its vehemence and not requiring any resolutions. After the election and now, on this last day of 2008, as 2009 hangs like weather in our collective sky, I am not so sure...
What is there in the We are living in exponential times website and what is its relationship to Lincoln? One could say that Hannah Arendt's quote is brought to fruition in this website. If that is the case, this becomes one important aspect of the battlefield that I maintain our "undeclared war" is happening on.
Continuing on as I look thru a glass darkly at Lincoln's era, his was a war that morphed from being about the permanence of The Union to become a war about what once seemed to be civilization's ultimate standard: The Rights of Man. In this battlefield of exponential growth, is there room for such a fragile concept?
The work, just like 2009 itself, is indistinct and yet pressing. Fondly Do We Hope/Fervently Do We Pray is gleaned from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. These words, as much a prescription as a plea, gain meaning and potency with every passing day...
-- Bill T. Jones (Monday, January 5, 2009)
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