Trace--Part 2: Time is the soul of Trace

The concept of Time is fascinating to me and is the soul of Trace. The recording of time through movement is an act of tracing. How does movement record time? How does movement and time partner together in order to create an experience with implications on the future while denoting the past?

When I think of tracing the word journey comes to mind. Journey is a time-based word that discusses one's pathway in, with, or through (but not around) time. In time, gives a hierarchy of value and size in which time exists even when I or my journey do not. With time gives me the sense of partnering with time and also a choice to engage or disengage time--however, time always exists, or that I do not use it or consider it in my journey. Through time asserts that time is a force in which to be acted upon.

I feel that tracing codifies the journey and, in turn, passage of time. This passage of time can be a document of my existence. But how? 

The present always exists. But, the past may never be recorded and so it will not be remembered when the participants in the present, that created the past, do not exist in the future. It brings up the age-old question: "If a tree in the forest falls, but no one is around to hear it, did the tree really fall?"

There has to be a device in which to outline, denote, record, trace the present, so that there is a knowing or understanding in the future. So that there is a future. 

Trace--The beginning (choreo project)

the start of a new project

Trace.

–noun-
1. a surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the former existence, influence, or action of some agent or event;
vestige: traces of an advanced civilization among the ruins.

2. a barely discernible indication or evidence of some quantity, quality, characteristic,
expression, etc.: a trace of anger in his tone.

3. an extremely small amount of some chemical component: a trace of copper in its composition.

4. traces, the series of footprints left by an animal.

5. the track left by the passage of a person, animal, or object: the trace of her skates on the ice.

6. Meteorology. precipitation of less than 0.005 in. (0.127 mm).

7. a trail or path, esp. through wild or open territory, made by the passage of people, animals, or vehicles.

8. engram.

9. a tracing, drawing, or sketch of something.

10. a lightly drawn line, as the record drawn by a self-registering instrument.

11. Mathematics.
a. the intersection of two planes, or of a plane and a surface.
b. the sum of the elements along the principal diagonal of a square matrix.
c. the geometric locus of an equation.

12. the visible line or lines produced on the screen of a cathode-ray tube by the deflection of the electron beam.

13. Linguistics. (in generative grammar) a construct that is phonologically empty but serves to mark the place in the surface structure of a sentence from which a noun phrase has been moved by a transformational operation.

14. Obsolete. a footprint.
–verb (used with object)

15. to follow the footprints, track, or traces of.

16. to follow, make out, or determine the course or line of, esp. by going backward from the latest evidence, nearest existence, etc.: to trace one's ancestry to the Pilgrims.

17. to follow (footprints, evidence, the history or course of something, etc.).

18. to follow the course, development, or history of: to trace a political movement.

19. to ascertain by investigation; find out; discover: The police were unable to trace his whereabouts.

20. to draw (a line, outline, figure, etc.).

21. to make a plan, diagram, or map of.

22. to copy (a drawing, plan, etc.) by following the lines of the original on a superimposed transparent sheet.

23. to mark or ornament with lines, figures, etc.

24. to make an impression or imprinting of (a design, pattern, etc.).

25. (of a self-registering instrument) to print in a curved, broken, or wavy-lined manner.

26. to put down in writing.
–verb (used without object)

27. to go back in history, ancestry, or origin; date back in time: Her family traces back to Paul Revere.

28. to follow a course, trail, etc.; make one's way.

29. (of a self-registering instrument) to print a record in a curved, broken, or wavy-lined manner.
Origin: 1250–1300; late ME tracen, ME: to make one's way, proceed < MF tracier < VL *tractiāre, deriv. of L tractus, ptp. of trahere to draw, drag; (n.) ME: orig., way, course, line of footprints < OF, deriv. of tracier

Stop the voices

My Boston dancers and I had a real and raw conversation in Friday's rehearsal (August 17, 2007) about our current work that is to be debuted in Cambridge, MA mid-October. We are working with the subject matter of the Osmotic and Appropriation of Racism, Sexism and Heterosexism.

This work stems from my lifelong consumption and research with the fight against oppression. I have discovered over the past 12 years of my work in Student Affairs in Higher Education that I am not only fighting the majoritive expectations that fill/filled/are filling my environment, but also myself and the appropriated oppression I subject myself to everyday. Pop culture propagates mantras and coaching through any and all of life's situations. The mantras that I subject myself too everyday reflect the community I was raised and the non-majoritive membership I maintain.

I gave each of my beautiful dancers Mark Tappan's "Reframing Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination: From the Psychological to the Socio-cultural"--Education Program at Colby College.

He writes: Traditionally, both internalized oppression and internalized domination have been viewed almost exclusively as internal, deep, unchanging, psychological qualities or characteristics of the oppressed, on the one hand, and the privileged, on the other. I believe, however, that there are serious limitations to such an overemphasis on the personal, individual, psychological dimensions of both these phenomena. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) argues “whereas for most whites racism is prejudice, for most people of color, racism is systemic or institutionalized” (p. 8). The same holds true, I think, for internalized oppression and internalized domination, in general. It is easy, particularly from a dominant point of view, to see the oppressed as “victims,” and to see their reaction to oppression as reflecting a set of “psychological problems”—-thereby obscuring the role that systemic, structural, and institutionalized forces play in the production and reproduction of oppression. Similarly, it is very easy, from a dominant point of view, to see racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., as personal, psychological shortcomings that are too easily interpreted, and thus dismissed or minimized, as the result of prejudice, bias, ignorance, etc. (“I’m not a racist!” or “I didn’t mean anything by that remark”). This view, moreover, leads to a solution to prejudice and bias that stresses the need for individual attitude change, via education, training, therapy, etc. (interventions at the individual level), and nothing more.

But privilege and oppression are the result of forces and mechanisms that go far beyond the individual, psychological level (see Hardiman & Jackson, 1997). Consequently, the social, cultural, institutional, and historical forces, that lead racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. to become systematically embedded in the structure of our social lives must be acknowledged in any attempt to challenge the status quo (Bishop, 2002). In the end, any solution to the problems of privilege and oppression must focus as much on structural/systemic change as it does on personal transformation. This is where the socio-cultural concept of mediated action can be most useful.

Mediated action entails two central elements: an “agent,” the person who is doing the acting, on the one hand, and “cultural tools” or “mediational means,” the tools, means, or “instruments,” appropriated from the culture, and used by the agent to accomplish a given action, on the other (Wertsch, 1998). In this essay I will argue, therefore, that that both “internalized” oppression and “internalized” domination are better understood as forms of mediated action--are better understood, in other words, as socio-cultural phenomena, rather than simply as psychological phenomena. Such a reinterpretation, among other things, helps to hold both the individual and the structural/systemic levels together at one and the same time.

Mark's perspective, my own research through life experience and training and teaching through my work in Student Affairs over the past 12 years pervades deeply my new choreographic endeavor.