manifestation of our inner tumultuous climate. War embodied through song & dance: what's the difference between an enactment & the real thing? What animals can teach us about politics= the limits & liminality of play. The art of war, war through conversation, the materiality of war. A ritual oriented towards a higher purpose, harbinger of death & destruction under the auspices of peace keeping, peace making.

Drums: an instrument of war due to the regular rhythmic rotation, like a rotary machine, clocks & calculators. Also a portal to other dimensions, of love & feasting & mystical ritualistic incantation. Percussion always lays out a structure, implies an architecture, coalesces into cells of disparate time-space. Coordinated with the body, these unit pile & compile into sections, compartments of sense, rigidity grinding against each other, or the material of the drum, or time-space itself.

Thinking through these collaborations... generally, what do I need to provide to get started? How do I participate directly through concepts? Ideas about dancing & movement without moving myself: I am not the dancer, the musician, the performer, the actor, but a choreographer, composer, writer, director: always behind the scenes, never seen/scene. I can provide structure, but why/how should/could it be followed? Scenarios for awareness: setting limitations to observe how events unfold within certain time-spaces, each with unique expressive characteristics. I'm not interested in making the music, only hearing it: staying aloof from the world, but I feel slightly guilty about this...(?) I need to act just enough to be "felt" to be an active participant, to communicate & exchange, to provide content & redirect attention as an equal peer, but not so much as to incite war/competition, blurring of information/content. This is key, & the most interesting aspect of this project: to act without acting, know without knowing, play through playing: radicality of play.

How to write with another? Dance through another? Play without instruments? How much of the expressive content comes from the manipulation of the instrument/body, or stems from concept, motivation, awareness? A delicate balance between the two. I am a 10,000 year old floating head, skill-less, de-skilled. Through what medium to I make my propositions?

Scales & timings on guitar. Contemplate prepared strings, audio spatiality, artificial (cerebral) modes of playing - artificial? Poses of the body, symbolism of its forms, movement-language dictating concepts not expressing pure affect: avoid the "interpretation" of typical interpretive dance.

What is the innate strength/weakness of Arabic, of poetry, of the calligraphic tradition of the Middle East? More than representing that regional mysticism, how to leverage the unknown & unknowable attributes of a totally foreign way of speaking/thinking-through/writing-in to reach previously inconceivable plateaus of awareness.

Same considerations in terms of space, instrument, affect, content, each form put in relation to each other but not literally, not simultaneously, one at a time each in their own way. Other aspects must also be considered singularly: the video recording of movement, audio capture of the sonic event, writing technology of the text (hand, machine, screen).