foi response from Jesse Zaritt (MA)

Hello-



I want to join my voice to the chorus of appreciation: thank you for sharing your freedom of information with me.  Thank you for this dialogue.

 

I am about to share a lot of information… I have been writing and writing and tried to condense my thoughts as much as possible.  Some of the writing is still rough, and some of it I've probably over-thought and over-edited in an effort to understand what has been going on in my mind since the beginning of the year.  I am grateful to be able to put some of these thoughts into words, to have this community to address...

 

An introduction:

 

Through en email that I sent out on Dec 30th, I invited about 400 contacts of mine to think of me and of the questions that I would be dancing with during the transition to the new year.

This is some of what I wrote:

 

I think that artists today are searching for ways to make work that is relevant, vital, and responsible.  I feel the urgency of this search, but feel far from confident that my work as a dance artist meets these challenges.  I'm driven to experiment with different ways of using and creating dance in order to try to align my artistic practice with a way of being in this world that feels ethical, meaningful and somehow useful.  Seeing Miguel perform freedom of information in 2001 helped to open up an awareness in me that dance could be more, and do more than what I had previously imagined.  Ultimately, for me, freedom of information is an experiment: an attempt to understand how dance performance might become a provocation, an act of solidarity, a protest, and/or a simple meditation on sustained physical awareness.  I feel privileged to have been able to choose to be part of this experiment: this opportunity to isolate my body in space and time, to investigate my relationship to a violent reality that is both unknowable/distant and painfully close in image after image that I consume daily from the news media. 



And now some post-performance writing-

Part one written in early January:

 

My freedom of information was performed at the live/work space of Tirtzah Bassel, an Israeli artist and close friend living in Boston.  Before beginning FOI, Tirtzah and I had a long discussion about the current war in Gaza.

 

Some background: I moved to Israel several weeks before the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006 (I just moved back to NYC this fall), and Tirtzah grew up in Israel- with memories of days and nights spent in sealed safe rooms during the First Iraq War, the years of the Intifadas, siblings and friends as soldiers.

Despite my proximity to war while living in Israel, I maintained my non-Israeli privilege and distance from conflict.  In terms of my sense of security, living as a Jewish American in Tel Aviv was not so different from living in NYC.  

At the start of my two years in Tel Aviv, I made some pathetic attempts to participate in the actions of Israeli center-left and far-left groups, but was so taken by the raw, passionate energy of the dance community I encountered that I abandoned my activist posturing in favor of moving alongside those inspiring bodies.  I tried to align Israeli choreography with political activism- dedicating my MFA thesis to an effort to uncover/create instances of resistance in contemporary Israeli dance.  I want so much for my practice and love of dance to be integrated with my politics, my sense of what it means to live ethically in this world.  I keep coming up short, dance keeps disappointing me:  but I keep trying, dance keeps trying. (Not at all sure about referring to dance as if it is this thing beyond what we construct it to be...)

 

Back to the last day of 2008:  Our conversation about Gaza was circular, frustrating- echoing conversations I've been having about Israel/Palestine ever since I first visited in 1995.  How to position myself?  My mind spins between attachment and disgust, connection and alienation - my concern for Israeli family and friends, my horror at the unjust treatment of Palestinians.  I end up ideologically, emotionally, and intellectually paralyzed: I have never attended an anti-Israel demonstration, nor have I ever attended a pro-Israel demonstration.   This paralysis disgusts me, until I consider the potential power of being in-between, occupying not the one-or-the-other, but the both-and-more position.  What kind of living is possible from this uncharted, complex, non-fixed position?

 

I feel that America, and certainly the Bush regime, encourages citizens to believe in clear but false oppositions.  Our media thrives on it.  Reading the posts from some of the press about our action reminds me that people are not comfortable with an art event that does not situate itself neatly inside a fixed category of being.  Movement is not a thing that can easily be judged as good or evil, effective or ineffective, liberal or conservative.

 

My answer to the paralyzing, oppositional emphasis on either-or has been movement, which for me has become an always-in-between practice of dancing through an idea.  I believe that if I can keep my body moving with these conflicts/questions, that I'll find my way to a place of arrival, a position from which more questions will inevitably emerge.  I remember that during the escalation of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, while some went off to fight, and others to protest- I spent a lot of time improvising alone in empty studios, on my roof-top porch in Tel Aviv.  (Soon after I started teaching movement to young adults with disabilities, to orthodox Jewish actors who had never been given permission to express themselves through movement.  I know:  It is indirect, it doesn't all line up, but it was a way toward action that kept me from feeling bound up in my own selfishness and helplessness.)

 

How perfect that freedom of information asked me to improvise continuously while attempting to wrestle with all these questions, inviting me to consider how this might be an act of protest.  Freedom of Information allowed me to try to line it all up: dance, protest, awareness, change, hope.  I am moved by how differently we all encountered and embodied this proposal: for some of us- it did line up, and for others it did not.

 

Tirtzah and another Boston-based painter where my only live audience members during the 24 hour action.  I had no live internet feed.  While Tirtzah slept from 12:30- 10AM, I was totally alone.  

 

During the first few hours, it was exciting and pleasurable to be able to isolate and indulge my body's love of movement.  I felt free, and I accepted this freedom as a gift of the action.  I was struck by how much choice I have in how I conduct my life- when and how to move in any way that I want, whenever I want.  

 

(Side note:  In a rare moment of Zionist identification during the winter of 1999, I told an Israeli friend of mine that I was going to stay in Israel and join the army.  She told me that the world needed more dancers and less soldiers.) 

 

The middle of the night and the early morning were difficult for me- I spent hours shaking and tapping different body parts, leaning against a wall and absently swinging my legs.  Once Tirtzah woke up in the morning, and gave me some oatmeal to eat, I regained energy and began moving more fully.  With my small audience, I returned to my movement investigations.  Tirtzah danced with me for an hour, I ate another snack, I moved with reckless abandon for the last hour of 2008 (Tirtzah told me when I had one hour left).  



I remember thinking as I finished freedom of information that I should teach more and perform less-  that more people should be able to discover how to access the kind of pleasure and awareness that I feel when I move.  



Shifting gears: some thoughts from January 16th 2009



I am generally an optimistic person.  I think this optimism fuels my belief in dance’s ability to be part of a vital and necessary creative dialogue around issues such as war, justice, and suffering. 



For me, as impractical and impossible as it may seem, Israel has been both the site of an imagined, yearned-for utopia and a failing, corrupted state.  Lately, America - in the transition between Bush and Obama – also embodies this both-and quality:  overwhelming failure makes possible a kind of desperate hope and optimism. 

 

The past few weeks have been difficult for me as an optimist.  I find it difficult to discuss this with others, but somehow trust this grouping of people.  This war in Gaza has induced a drastic decline in my ability to believe in human progress.  I feel choked, remote- as if the logic of both sides of this conflict has become completely unhinged from a reality where actual human beings live and breathe in the world.  There are very few people in my immediate circles who seem willing or even able to position themselves in the in-between- and all around us exists a vast sphere of growing hatred and condemnation, hope becomes more distant.  With eyes toward the inauguration, and a desperate, failing optimism pinned on a new America, I already feel as if it is too late. 

 

I have to reposition myself, this is the beginning of an eyes-more-widely-opened transition.

 

Again, my deep gratitude to all of you, to Miguel for taking on this project, this experiment.  I know that we have to keep pushing ourselves, keep asking the impossible from ourselves, from our chosen art form.

 

-Jesse Z

foi response from Jesse Hewit (CA)

this is...easily one of the most readable and fucking FASCINATING discourses i have ever experienced. seriously...this shit is phenomenal.

I am OBSESSED with hearing each of your voices on these threads. It's is so incredibly dynamic to feel each of you processing your experiences with foi, making sweeping assessments and teeny suggestions of your abilities as art-makers, as change-seekers, and and as doers, finishers, strong people.

first of all, i am unworldy in my pride for each of your accomplishments. and it feels ABSOLUTELY wierd, becasue the only folks of you i've even et are miguel and jesse z. but the strange and gorgeous psycho-social phenomenon of this thing is that it created a hard and fast experiential bond that...may seem replicable in workshops, work situations, etc...but i dont think it actually is. i think that having many folks do this action in places that are just far enough away from eachother to where they cant quite hear or see one another, induces a kind of trans-geographical empathy and love that is beyond RADICAL and extraordinarily timely and approrpiate for the dire issues that we are thinking about in undertaking this in the first place. not that this was a total happy accident, but really...if there is one thing that i hoped to resolutely sharpen in doing this, it was my sensoral care and awareness of people in far away places, and i must say: MY HEART IS FULL of you all. quite full. i think thats so terribly exciting. and in that state, i feel a radical collision of personal art and personal-but-macro-politics, acting together to create a palpable and strong anti-war sentiment. it was SO SAD for me at times to do this action. and it was SO SO hard, and people looked at that and it fucking KILLED them. and bam..there it is. and now me and a handful of others are walking around with sharper periphery vision, with unclogged hearts and bodies, ready for action, and with new ideas about our limits as americans. FUCK YES.

interpersonally, i want to say that you/we are all dynamically and colorfully nuts. at least i think so. or at least, let me say that our individual pathologies and circumstances and LIVES have, in my opinion, EVERYTHING to do with how we completed this action. For some it was euphoric all the way through -- they loved the time to be solo and roll in their frames. for others, the test of limits came quickly, and they learned MASSIVE and staggaring lessons in 6 hours, OR in simply sitting with their thoughts and never putting the blidfold on. either way: unprecedented contemplation on bodily limits: complete. success. check.

bottom line: people do what they can. this idea brings me to my knees. the fact that this was easy for one person and that another hallucinated gunshots and took off the blidfold and had to work through psychoses of weakness and bad artistry...this is what we can do. and im so deeply in love with each person who stayed present with those limits, however torturously or joyously they presented themselves.

like lily, i ended the action much sooner than i thought i would. i made the mistake of not checking to see if my space had heat, and on a northern california winter night, that was unworkable. it wasnt just that i was very cold and could never get warm, it was that i didnt know what to do to get okay with it. i tried everything. i over-moved, trying to get my body heat up, but had panic attacks about how this was taxing me too early on in the morning. i under-moved and bundled up, but had panic attacks about this NOT BEING THE ACTION and feeling like this was not what i had set out to do. i thought about all of you, i thought about my own shame and not being able to come up with a solution, i thought about my own mental health struggles in my seeing hearing life, i thought about what this says about me. it was easlily one the most prolonged and painful interrogations of myself i had ever induced. and yet, there was finally a moment when i accounted for the practical hurdles in my situation, i cried a little more, and i said out loud, " i am stopping now." i was heart-broken and self-hating for some time afterward. i couldnt face miguel, i couldnt face you all. i couldnt face the folks who i had lined up to volunteer to take care of me and my space that night. but slowly, i realized that THIS WAS THE WORK. duh. i had interacted with limits and pain and mental disaster for as long as i could and i stopped when i couldnt anymore. and nothing could be richer. i will always wonder what could have been different given a warmer space for me. would i have finished? am i built for this? does my scattered and piecemeal identity as a sort-of-dancer mean that i dont have the chops for this? dont know. iwent out that night, with so much love and curiosity and calm and SPACE. for me, i had gone form point A to point Z, with foi. this was enough. i was full.

and then there's what i gave, which as many of you surely experienced, was a plethora of experiences to those looking/watching/etc. even in my brief (well...not so brief really) 8 hours, the people who watched wrote things to me that told of unprecendented (a word i will overuse in this email) feelings and thoughts. the buzz of my 8 hours is still floating around SF in my little communities, and ive received countless emails from people both reporting on what they saw, and also discussing my process of ending early and what that meant to them. it is SO ALIVE. and it gently retroact lily's statement, i feel that i made one of the most meaningful pieces of art to date. it sure didnt go how i thought it would. but it's not really MINE. i gave it to others, in whatever form i could muster, and accordingly, the most common comment i got was, "thank you."

so...dare i end with, "thank YOU." to all of you. this was and continues to be a tsunami of strength and provocation for me and what i do. i feel rooted in my purpose to keep giving this type of work, giving this type of experience to those who care to look and think.

how centering and yet far-reaching, eh? what a gift. and so so much still to be done.

in peace,
jesse

California -- Jesse Hewit

California – Jesse Hewit
Jesse Hewit - Jesse's mom is a nurse and an activist and his dad is a teacher. He is a Brooklyn-based scholar/artist (NYU Tisch - ETW), who came to San Francisco in 2005 to study race and sex. He finished an M.A. in 2007, looking at the biopolitics of posturing our masculinites in public space. His culminating experience and thesis work came in the form of a dance septet that explored his study topics, as they were experienced by his cast of dancers. Since the academy, Jesse has danced in his own and others' work around the bay, been an editor on Sexual Research and Social Policy, the journal of the National Sexuality Resource Center, worked in various curatorial and administrative capacities for CounterPULSE (counterpulse.org <http://counterpulse.org>), and now works with Dancers Group and CounterPULSE, as a facilitator of the 2nd Sundays series. He is, right now, interested in a red-winged monster/prophet who makes people uncomfortable and reifies certain damaging power structures. Jesse also can't refuse snacks or warmth.

Massachusetts -- Jesse Zaritt

Massachusetts – Jesse Zaritt
Jesse Zaritt is a dance artist living in Brooklyn, NY. He is a 2008 graduate of the Hollins University/ADF MFA program and a former dancer for the Shen Wei Dance Arts company