Models & Cases

Here’s an exercise I love :

• plunge into a domain I don’t know,
• study it in a casual way,
• find and extract a concept or a method,
• explain what I found in an article,
• use it elsewhere.

In a French encyclopedia article about Constitutional Law, a domain I don’t know at all, I found lines telling about the Methods of Constitutional Law, with opposites :

1. Exegetical (explains/state) or Dialectical (involves opposites/changes)
2. Positive (describes and explains) or Normative (what is fair, what things should be)
3. Cases (studies the political thing in its particularities) or Models (compares the political thing to some types)

We don’t know these things at all, but we can see something here, right?

Models can be very fecund, they can teach us things, they can also be an ideal to reach, they offer a direction. But cases are funnier to study, it’s like gathering shells instead of studying them in a book. You find nuggets, strange and good ideas. To explain is great, but to find oppositions and differences is cool too.

https://afrenchtoolbox.wordpress.com/2017/05/24/gleaning-in-loop-the-gathering-seashells-type/

A model is in a brain, or on paper. Cases are in life.

This is linked to my body/soul recent obsession (see my last blog articles), and to the famous reality principle, where it (the reality) reshapes ideals and ideas and expectations.

It’s like a huge toolbox I just found! Where will I use these tools?

Have a nice day. Thanks for reading!

Anne Teresa, Bartok & Dancers, a recipe

This is a pattern exercise, a recipe for thinkers.

Take music you don’t know well (Bartok).

Take a choreographer you don’t know well (Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker).

Choose a short clip of 4 minutes.

• Listen
• Watch
• Try to imagine what the choreographer wants
• Watch and note the elements (repetition, hugs, etc)
• Are they symbols or just movements
• Is there a mood-difference, inadequacy between music and gestures
• What happens with musicians
• What do you feel when the music stops but not the dancers
• You have plenty of other Teresa movies on YouTube
• What other arts we don’t know we could explore what could we find and how
• If we extract a tool (example : dance with no music then with music, example : why their dance doesn’t follow music, example : we’re not told what’s between these people), can we transpose it? Where? Photography? Poetry? Teaching?…

Have fun!