Dance critic Apollinaire Scherr contributes an often thought-provoking blog, Foot in Mouth, on artsjournal.com. She often puts into words impressions that have circled in my head but never coalesced into clearly articulated thoughts. On Monday, she wrote, "Choreographers are still making this mistake--supposing that if they keep things open, they're giving us more freedom to imagine. Imagination doesn't need freedom, it needs something to dig its claws into."

Specificity brings art alive. Specificity need not eliminate ambiguity. Often, in fact, ambiguity is achieved by providing a richness of conflicting or surprising details. Lack of sufficient detail leads to vagueness (and blandness), which is not the same thing as ambiguity (and is usually much less interesting or desirable). Shakespeare is full of detail and still inspires a rich multiplicity of interpretations that people still argue over 400 years later. If only our dance were so rich! Lest you dismiss Shakespeare for being narrative and therefore irrelevant to an observation that was directed, in this case, toward lyrical modern dance, consider Shakespeare's sonnets. They, too, are rich in detail, vocabulary, sound, poetic devices, etc., and yet readers come up with wildly different interpretations.

In December I had the opportunity to visit the wonderful Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, FL. Yes, there is really a Dali museum there. Among numerous interesting works in their collection is his large painting The Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire. Dali was at the forefront of exploring ambiguity in visual art, in the mind really. The world confronts our senses with an infinite amount of information, and our mind's sift and structure it. We become conscious of ambiguity when our mind's cannot settle on a definitive interpretation of what we are experiencing. But Dali's work helps to remind us that our perceptions do indeed give rise to subjective interpretations all the time, even if we are only conscious of it periodically. What we "see" because we see selectively is only one of many possible versions of what is there to be seen.

Why call our blog "Blue Buttocks," you may ask. The name refers to the Mongolian blue spots that appear, bruise-like, on the bodies of Asian babies, frequently on their buttocks and thighs. What seems like a very serious condition to those unfamiliar with the spots is actually completely superficial and fades harmlessly away in a couple of years as the pools of pigment, which cause the spots, slowly disperse throughout the body. If you can learn to make light (and art) of all of life's apparent traumas, then you can be that much more focused on sharing your happiness and abundant creativity with the world.

From The Sound & the Fury. Photo of by Joan Marcus.

My job as curator of performances at CRS demands that I try to see the outside work of artists in the CRS community as well identify new (to me, to us) artists and companies that we would like to work with and present in the future. My job as Director of CRS, with only part-time staff help 2-3 days a week, demand that I be here running the Center almost all the time. It's a difficult juggling act, and I probably don't see nearly enough performances as a result. On the other hand, it forces me to be ever so selective. Gone are the days when I must see a show simply because someone I know is in it. Now, I try to target work that will hopefully be extraordinary, inspiring, and, at least sometimes, relevant to what we are doing here.

Last Saturday I managed to get to two very good shows, each of which dealt very explicitly with the perception of time. Each even involved an old friend of mine, so I hit a home run. The first work, which I urge you to drop whatever you are doing to go see, is section one of The Sound & the Fury by William Faulkner as staged by Elevator Repair Service at New York Theatre Workshop. The second concert, part of the First Weekends dance series at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), I'll try to review soon.

If you haven't read The Sound & the Fury, section one records through stream of consciousness, the perceptions of memories of a mentally handicapped boy/man, Benjamin Compson, from the age of 3 through 33 as he grows up in a very troubled family in the American South in the beginning of the 20th Century. Benjamin remains an innocent. He cannot talk, cannot understand much. It makes for difficult reading. It was assigned to me as summer reading prior to Advance Placement English my senior year of high school for what I am sure was intended to be shock therapy. I was wary. But my super-talented friend Tory Vazquez, with whom I had the pleasure of performing with many years ago in the American premiere of Fassbinder's Blood on the Cat's Neck, is not only an actor in the company but is also the Producing Director. All of Tory's own plays have been brilliant, heartfelt and honest, so I hoped for the best..and was rewarded.