Four months of inspiration

Some backlog of gems I collected and didn't get round to posting here.

"Contact Improvisation is the greatest life metaphor. There is no mastery, only practice.
There aren't enough hours in an eon to master a form like contact. Andrew Harwood never mastered it, Nancy Stark Smith never mastered it, Danny Lepkoff never mastered it, Ann Cooper Albright never mastered it, Isadora Duncan never even knew about it, Lisa Nelson never mastered it, Steve Paxton never mastered it, you never mastered it, you don't know anyone who has mastered it, and the story you heard about someone mastering it was a myth, so Lord knows I'll be eat'in some fine puddin' if I ever master it."
-Joey Rizzolo, 1997, quoted in Ann Cooper Albright, 'A Particular History: Contact Improvisation at Oberlin College'


Poems: "like buoys in the sea, I swim to them, from one to the next: without them, I am lost."
-Anselm Kiefer


"When the world is gone
There's always justice
When justice is gone
There's always force
When force is gone
There's always mom."
- Laurie Anderson, "O Superman"


"When you have a word or an image, you can look at it from many perspectives, seeing different things and slowly discovering a whole realm of meaning. To experience all those layers you need to spend time, and spending time in galleries with visual art I learned that another sort of time was required for an image or intention to resonate. I needed a certain amount of time to make sense of what I was viewing and I wanted to offer that time on stage too."
-Meg Stuart, Are we here yet?"


"All objects are reactive to their circumstances, albeit in different ways, and contain indexical traces of the circumstances they have been exposed to; they give testament to the world through their materiality. In a sense, they are abstractions of the world around them. Like a stain on a shirt, a footprint in the sand, the way a body wears a mark in the upholstery of a chair, and so on. Each has the potential to signify or 'document' the presence of some other object or event. Really, what interests me is the registration of touch, of contact, of the way things bear witness to the people and circumstances they have encountered. Objects are infused with meaning by their movement through the world; we give them significance by our use of them."
-Walead Beshty