Schechner – Betw. Theater and Anthro   “It’s as hard to write about performance, theory or practice, as it is to put ideas, as such, onstage, for the writing is always indirect, representative, the map not the territory. And the stage always is there, physical first, a gaping territory only …

[I worry that in the future college students will take 1,000 courses, each one lasting ten minutes; all degrees are in Wikipedia. Big “ifs” but – if Wisdom is prior to all things, one of the first causes, then wisdom exists before possessions – wisdom doesn’t “have” (a state as …

John Paul Lederach draws up a map of the ways art contributes to peace-building in the following ways: [Summarizing] (1) Art teaches that relationships are central to presence, and asks us to acknowledge interdependence; (2) art promotes paradoxical curiosity: diverse truths can hold at the same time; (3) art makes …

Silence as Creative Space. Silence is embedded in mask work and deep listening. We can never be silent enough for sound outside ourselves. John Cage, Slim Silence, says this in Indeterminacy (see e.g. minute 5 version 1).   We are pianos full of hammers; these hammers are built to wait; …

Putting a face to genocide. Making a person. In the sense of making a persona or mask – making a seeming. Not an individual, but a point of address, a site to wonder into, with eye holes and a mouth hole, so it can see us too, and speak. Not …

Sum Twelve Twelfth weekly sum of daily notes, in the run-up to Silence: 2014, a cross-border artistic witness. See the Soulographie site (soulographie dot org) for the day-to-day.   Silence: December 2014.   Artists worldwide to practice silence through the month as they will, in different ways, to deepen global …

Some lyrics from a song written with Newton Pittman   Showed money and grew old What I stole and what I sold Death’s a hole dug low and cold Dust the judgment, cheap the gold   Rhetoric’s the art of turning souls Dying the art of building holes I live …

The design of genocide invites the incapacity of speech. Some responses: a) the madness of forgiveness – moving forward with incapacity, and damage (the way Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Jimmy Scott, or Johnny Cash allowed their voices to change), b) a devotion to metaphor as the fruitful ruin of speech …

From the Acts of Peter in the apocrypha, thought to be the source of the legend that Peter was martyred upside-down; he says this from his cross: What is Christ, but the word, the sound of God? So that the word is the upright beam whereon I am crucified. And …

O sing him a song that is new, play loudly, with all your skill.   Our newness, our loudness can only be silence against this him/hymn/music of the spheres, the absolute and faithful song?   Also:   Play creates a zone of proximal development of the child [the gap between …