Starting the ball rolling.

I had a wonderful day with Conal struggling with initial concepts and looking at great fabrics. We knocked about a few design ideas and have decided to crack on with an initial copy and reinterpretation of the Yamamoto dress.

I have written a few sentences. I think we should plant and finally harvest bits of text here, if you have any.

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The dancer appears to disappear, objectifying him/herself before the viewer, disappearing in the role, transcendent, the opposite of acting.

We present an exorcism and a bodying-forth, an invocation and re-imagining of the battered corpse that is the body after its deconstruction.

In this work performance and performativity (so easily confused and conflated by the ignorant) are not so much integrated as finally discarded as concepts. They have served their purpose. The common-sense conclusions reached by those hysterically obsessed by these terms are laughably obvious. Any Nietzschean aphorism on the subject revealed in a sentence that which hordes of careerist academics could not express in libraries full of sexed-up doctoral thesis, un-read readers, fodder-anthologies and mini-paper journals.

In order to express her/himself, each subject must make a leap of madness (Nietzsche) as a leap of faith (Derrida). One must speak as a subject and the subject in order to give the illusion of a particular sovereign subjectivity. This is an impossibility and demonstrates the contingency of our claims to universality (to speak as 'one'). BUT THEY MUST BE MADE. All words and therefore actions are generated out of the constitutive lack within langauge; its failure, Beckett's 'I can't go on, I'll go on...'

The work could examine the reality of a body scared and weighed down by academic discourse, a de-centred, fragmented and split subjectivity in relation to ethics and aesthetics (united as style), using japonisme as the theatre to expose this relationship. What is sought is a stylistics of existence, an awareness and examination of the overlap between ethics and aesthetics, subject and object, which simultaneously generates art objects and artistic agency as unstable but beautiful precipitates.

(AK)