Today this word – ‘relation’ – came up in my mind at the end of the class and I was lucky enough to find it in A Choreographer’s Handbook. Now I think it is an essential part of dance, experiencing the final exercises in Ondrej’s class. The moving of only one specific area in my body makes me think about other dimensions of it that I did not know where so hard to control until I tried moving them – at some point, Stalina touched my nose and I started laughing because there was no way I could have control over it. The same goes for certain parts of the legs; it is like fragmenting your knowledge of your body and working with that, creating a sort of ‘map of yourself’. I also feel that the group-following exercise was performed more instinctively today, as I predicted in my previous post.

I really like the interdisciplinarity of the class and how in Trajal’s class we focused our attention on readings and research – after today’s discussion yes, venturing in the costume shop is research – it was truly inspiring to hear about his research process in the ball world, especially because both of his close observation and distanciation of and from the subject. I say close observation because he was constant in his research, coming there for 12 years, and distanciation in the fact that he didn’t perform or immersed himself in the voguing scene.

Today’s lecture escalated into a discussion on appropriation. I love this, and at the same time I recognize it was not the only main topic that should have been discussed in that lecture, but the weight this term is carrying nowadays needed that amount of time for analyzing it. And I still feel we could keep discussing this and it would never be enough. I love the examples the people are giving – like Daniel and Sharon’s views on K-Pop and its ‘white’ counterpart or Ondrej’s Fortnite reference – they feel refreshing because they are actual, deeply situated in the recent generations’ mainstream knowledge, making it easier to identify with them. What is that I concluded is that each part – the one that appropriates and the one that has the source of inspiration – tries to put the blame into other in some way. But I think it gets more complex than that. Each thing resulted from a chain of appropriation and it is part of the chain. Looking back in history, we could easily see all these chains. One example is the Mycenaean – Ancient Greek – Roman influence. And this chain can be easily stretched to the present, adding Romanesque, Gothic and probably 5 more architectural influences, all the way to the Neoclassical. Talking about appropriation truly becomes a grey area at some point, and I’m sure nobody can assert facts about it now. Maybe in 10 years?

I will leave here one of the first things that I’ve seen 3 years ago that made me think about this topic. It is when Tory Burch had almost an entire fashion collection comprised of almost replicated pieces of Romanian traditional clothing from the twentieth century displayed at the MET.