ARTISTIC BLIND DATES: Dancer and Choreographer Ilana Faye Silverstein Describes the Creative Process for Collapsing the Silence
To start, we each came to each other with questions that we were hoping to answer through this project.
How does performance right now in Washington, DC relate to what other artists are doing across the world? Why are we all doing what we are doing? How can we affect total presence in our audience? To forget about all immediate tasks, troubles, frustrations and enjoy some art. What is human at the core level? Why are we a throw away culture? Why does the creme of the society use their wealth only for consumption, when at one time, they had a responsibility to be as cultured as possible, curate, learn music, be well-read, and highly intelligent? Is it possible to live sustainably in a city? Why is the focus, for most in our society, on stability when our whole being is composed of unstable particles, existing in at a point, undefinable based on probability? What is the connection between the individual and the world? How does the point of view change with circumstance and experience? So what is the difference between internal and external? How does repetition / saturation effect us internally? For example: the over saturation of the news media, information overload. The difference between the original action and the memory of the action.
This becomes how does ‘reality’ keep manifesting itself? What is the act of listening? What if we could see our memories reflected in a pane of glass, as if they might have had the outcome we desperately wanted? What if war and conflict programmed us to no longer discern/read emotion? How would we communicate with one another? Can you be in love with someone you have never spoken to? What would happen when the story you’ve created about the person from a distance collides with who they really are in a chance encounter? What if the sun were to disappear, but yet the earth is sustained through technology? Would sun become mythical, mystical, romanticized and deified? What would happen to the human race?
