dance, bad mothers, remash

Just wanted to post a quick link to the Martha Graham Dance Company Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge, which was a contest held earlier this year to encourage people to submit video dance reinterpretations of the classic 1950s Graham ballet, Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra, of course, is one of the worst mothers of ancient Greek tragedy: scheming against her husband, sleeping with his enemy, and eventually murdering him. She also got her due when her outraged son, Orestes, decided to avenge his father's death and commit matricide. With Clytemnestra, motherhood and the logic of generational reproduction is disrupted; rather than being the catalyst for enlarging the family, Clytemnestra is responsible for making it smaller.

It seems that this notion of remaking or remashing* the dance, taking it out of the hands of professional dancers and into the general public by encouraging new interpretations (making the Martha Graham company act as viewers rather than performers), in some ways relates to the inverted motherhood of Clytemnestra, and it's interesting that the Internet would be solicited as the medium by which this process occurs.

On an unrelated note, motherhood figured prominently on last week's episode of Dollhouse (which is such a great, great show!). I won't go too deep into the show's premise here, but it's enough to know that the show features a group of people who are regularly "imprinted" with other personalities, for varying ends. The imprint of a "mother" persona this week caused one of the most deepest and lasting impressions, because this particular imprint affected not only the mind, but caused the recipient to begin lactating. So motherhood here, or the bond between mother and baby, is figured in this show, at least, as the most profound "identity" that can be acquired, one that is specifically enacted through the body against or autonomously of the mind (the episode is entitled "Instinct").

*William Safire was baffled by the use of the word remash. From the Times, Feb 15, 2009: "In re re-mash: This could be a remix of a remix, or a remix of a mashup or a mash-up of a remix; it seems to be a coinage in process. The word was disseminated worldwide in January 2009 in an AP article by Verena Dobnik: "The Martha Graham Dance Company is launching a global competition challenging anyone who's cybersavvy" to enter "the Clytemnestra ReMash Challenge." To interest a new generation in a cultural classic, contestants are invited to create four-minute online videos comparing the vengeful Greek mythical heroine to a present-day celebrity. The contest submissions are to creatively transform short video dance excerpts into a ReMash online spot. The intent is to call the attention of today's cutting edge to an art form they might otherwise overlook by capitalizing on, and perhaps satirizing, the current dash to mash."

NYFF dispatch: self-performance on YouTube

I'm still piecing my thoughts together from the Views program at the New York Film Festival, but I thought I'd share a bit about one film that showed there, Amie Siegel's My Way 1, which is a compilation of YouTube performances of "Gotta Go My Own Way," from High School Musical 2.

While I found the film interesting for the mixture of performance and earnest expression it reveals on the part of the webcam operators, or the gendered, racial, and national dynamics at play in each video, I was actually most struck by the film's placement within a program of fairly highbrow avant-garde film. The still (which is actually not a still, but a composite) that was chosen to represent the film actually misleads the viewer, imitating the rhetoric of the filmstrip while this piece would be more accurately described as a video. Beyond that generic qualifier of video as the non-celluloid, it's something that is also distinctly identifiable as an autobiographical and I would even say a YouTube-specific genre, the domestic karaoke performance.

As a friend pointed out to me, the piece is also not new -- Oliver Laric, for example, previously created a piece called 50 50, which includes 50 performances of various songs by 50 Cent. The cuts are shorter than Siegel's and, with the soundtrack playing over all the clips, Laric's piece is arguably more about continuity across a range of performances, most of which all demonstrate the same imitative style. In this way 50 50 (which seems a play on 20/20 vision) seems to explicitly engage the ways in which music videos contribute to a culture of sameness, and thereby critiques the supposed openness and difference promoted in a space like YouTube.

Siegel's film, on the other hand, takes this question of individuality more seriously, and includes performances that do not include the original soundtrack, versions sung in different languages and in transposed keys. She chooses a wider range of performers in race, class, and to a lesser extent, age and gender.

It's a little strange, then, that My Way 1 (which is part of the My Way series; another film includes, as you would expect, Sinatra's classic) goes the way of the film, at least by the standards of the New York Film Festival. Unlike Laric's piece, it's not even available to view as a YouTube video. Ontologically --and perhaps this is a matter of the critical position it takes up-- it is identified with a cinematic practice, while its subject matter is about Internet self-performance. I wonder to what extent different media are invested with certain critical functions, and what difference is registered when speaking outside, as in Siegel's case, or from within (at least partially so; the piece was exhibited in museums and written up by Artforum as well), as with Laric.