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(Arts) This Week: Dancing into the Heart of Darkness (SICKENING SPINNING HEAD BARF ALERT)
The New York Times, New York, New York ^ | 13 June 2004 | Christopher Reardon

Posted on 06/13/2004 6:48:00 PM PDT by dufekin

As photographs of the atrocities began to circulate, there was no denying the horror they revealed. Members of an occupying force, which had come waving the banner of progress and commerce, were shown brutalizing helpless captives.

All this happened a century ago, when an international human rights movement exposed the enslavement, maiming and killing of Africans in the Congo, then ruled by King Leopold II of Belgium. These events, newly resonant following the snapshots from Abu Ghraib, inspired the latest work by Ping Chong, a director and choreographer known for probing cultural tensions.

"The timing is uncanny," said Mr. Chong, 57, who began working on the piece, called "Blind Ness: The Irresistible Light of Encounter," three years ago. "This is the first exposé of atrocities by the portable Kodak camera, which had just come into use. It's also a tale of media manipulation by Leopold and his adversaries."

The production, with a cast of 17 actors and dancers, had its premiere in April at Kent State University in Ohio. On Friday it will open a two-week Manhattan run at La MaMa Annex in the East Village.

Mr. Chong, whose parents worked in Chinese opera, grew up in New York, where he studied film and graphic design. He then spent eight years working with Meredith Monk, the experimental composer and choreographer. "My work is always about movement," he said. "I'm driven by a kinesthetic impulse."

"Blind Ness" defies easy categorization. The script draws from texts like "King Leopold's Ghost," by the journalist Adam Hochschild, and Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The staging includes puppetry, shadow play and grisly archival photographs found in Brussels.

There are just two dance sequences: one based on military maneuvers, the other on diplomatic give-and-take. But Mr. Chong also uses movement, gesture and lighting to evoke cinematic effects like long shots and close-ups. "The physical language Ping brings to this piece adds clarity and sharpness," said Michael Rohd, 36, a co-writer of the script, who plays both Edmund Dene Morel, a daring whistleblower, and Marlow, Conrad's narrator.

For Mr. Chong, choreography is the key to bringing this forgotten epic back to life. "I never sit on an image for very long," he said. "I like to keep things moving."


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: abughraib; congo; dance; lunacy; nihilism
This article is beyond ugly. I am unsure if it is possible to do justice to the topic of King Leopold's brutality--the massacre of 15 million Congolese, halving the population in 20 years of genocide. And with dance? Something's wrong with this picture.

But even more disturbing is the Times's attempt to draw a moral equivalency between the prisoner abuse in Iraq and the genocide that prevailed in what today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (which, incidentally, is about as much of a democracy than North Korea, Algeria, East Germany, Communist Ethiopia, and any of the varioua other self-styled democratic republics of the world).

Precious few survived the carnage brought by Leopold to the Congo, and many of these surrered forced starvation, brutal enslavement, dismemberment and cannibalism of various body parts, and other cruelties. This stands in stark contrast to Iraq under American occupation, where almost all except the terrorists will live in freedom.

I seem to have missed in Iraq the forced-labor camps, the cannibalism, the genocide, the incitement of the most brutal forms of tribal warfare, the ordinary Iraqi people fleeing the Americans and abandoning their communities, the Iraqi people without hands, legs, arms, or genitals, the penning of women with starving, ravenous dogs, and the other incidents of cruelty that were commmonplace in the Belgian Congo.

1 posted on 06/13/2004 6:48:01 PM PDT by dufekin
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To: dufekin

c'mon man...

..."I seem to have missed in Iraq the forced-labor camps, the cannibalism, the genocide, the incitement of the most brutal forms of tribal warfare, the ordinary Iraqi people fleeing the Americans and abandoning their communities, the Iraqi people without hands, legs, arms, or genitals, the penning of women with starving, ravenous dogs, and the other incidents of cruelty"...

Isn't the daily morning-noon-night references enough for you?


2 posted on 06/13/2004 6:54:29 PM PDT by jolie560 (hE)
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To: dufekin

"Blind Ness" that nonsense says it all.


3 posted on 06/13/2004 6:57:08 PM PDT by jocon307 (The dems don't get it, the American people do.)
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To: dufekin
"Blind Ness" defies easy categorization
Translation: It made no sense.

In other news, following the critical success of Blind Ness, Sen. John F. Kerry donned a black unitard and performed a dance and image interpretation of what he called NAILED: THE PASSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AT THE HANDS OF JOHN ASHCROFT.
4 posted on 06/13/2004 7:17:51 PM PDT by Asclepius (protectionists would outsource our dignity and prosperity in return for illusory job security)
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To: dufekin
Winona Ryder who was arrested for shoplifting. Completely unjustly, if you ask me. That sort of police malfeasance makes the Jewish Holocaust during the Third Reich look like a day at the beach!

What? You say there's no comparison? You say I'm insulting the memory of 6 million dead by daring to compare a minor arrest to their tragedy?

Oh. Nevermind. (But I were European, I bet I could get away with it.)

5 posted on 06/13/2004 7:18:23 PM PDT by ClearCase_guy (You can see it coming like a train on a track.)
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To: dufekin
"As photographs of the atrocities began to circulate, there was no denying the horror they revealed. Members of an occupying force, which had come waving the banner of progress and commerce, were shown brutalizing helpless captives."

Words mean things; just not to Liberals, however.

6 posted on 06/13/2004 7:27:45 PM PDT by cricket
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To: dufekin

The thing that's most beyond ugly is that New York liberals will go watch this crap and come to the same conclusion as the Slimes: George W. Bush is King Leopold's ghost.

Moral relativism from those who thought communism was morally superior to capitalism.


7 posted on 06/13/2004 7:55:03 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
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To: conservative in nyc

That couldn't be further from the truth. Bush has tried, with unknown degrees of involvement, to bring peace and stability to the Congo. Indeed, it is in our national security interest.

Reports abound that al-Qaida "bought uranium" there. (Apparently, it's not a part of Africa--only the American embassy in Niger is.) The country is infected with epidemics of malaria, trypanosomiasis, onchocerciasis, leishmaniasis, dengue fever, typhus, bubonic plague, tungiasis, helminthic infections, dysenteries, typhoid fever, hepatitis, giardiasis, cholera, dracunculiasis, echinococcosis (but not paragonimiasis or poliovirus), schistosomiasis, trachoma, arenavirus hemorrhagic fevers, lassa fever, ebola, marburg hemorrhagic fevers, meningococcal disease, and other wretched diseases, be used to harvest germs for biological warfare? Or perhaps (I hope I'm not giving terrorists any ideas), weaponizing snakes?

The lawless and genocidal region could provide a haven to terrorists where they could operate, given superior firepower, with impunity beyond the effective control of any national power.


8 posted on 06/13/2004 8:56:06 PM PDT by dufekin (John F. Kerry. Irrational, improvident, backward, seditious.)
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To: dufekin


Maybe these "Metaphysical" crystals will help this guy with his artistic pain and suffering............
9 posted on 06/13/2004 9:39:15 PM PDT by Dallas59
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To: propertius
Ping.

New York Times compares King Leopold in the Congo to Abu Ghriab and pontificates on the virtues of a dance performance regarding Leopold's carnage.

Not sure one can do justice.

Care to comment?
10 posted on 06/13/2004 11:11:14 PM PDT by dufekin (John F. Kerry. Irrational, improvident, backward, seditious.)
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To: dufekin
It is, quite frankly, also an insult to the people of Congo. To bring down that ugly period in their history to the humiliation of a few people in an Iraqi prison cell shows moral relativism at its most absurd.

On the plus side if we point out the racism inherent in this to the NYT and the organisers of this dance they will be so filled with embarrassment they could actually pull the thing.

Despite the horrors of Leopold, most Congolese I know would much rather attention was brought to their current plight (War has claimed 3 to 4 million lives since 1998) than dredging up past history again.

But many liberals would rather focus on the nasty things white people did to black people 100 years ago than to the terrible things black people to do black people today. So we get to the ridiculous stage where people like Winston Churchill were war criminals but Idi Amin was a great pan-Africanist leader (I have heard this argument made seriously).

Liberal thinking about present day Africa is so confused, so wracked with imagined guilt, so patronising, so full of contradictions and so inherently racist that it can barely be called an ideology. More like the noise of a madman howling into the wind. And, as we all know, empty vessels make the most noise.
11 posted on 06/14/2004 2:53:49 AM PDT by propertius
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To: dufekin

sounds about right.

Killing 15 million black people is equal to placing Hanes her way on the head of a general from a regieme who killled about 10 million Iraqis...

It's called moral equivalence.


12 posted on 06/14/2004 4:44:28 AM PDT by LadyDoc (liberals only love politically correct poor people)
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To: propertius

Would you mind submitting your reply directly to The New York Times letters section? Really, they should print it.


13 posted on 06/14/2004 8:04:53 AM PDT by dufekin (John F. Kerry. Irrational, improvident, backward, seditious.)
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To: dufekin

Hmm. theoretically my job precludes me from writing to newspapers. But am tempted. Unless you want to do it instead? Should also point out how self-indulgent liberal attitudes to Africa are. They are all about making the liberal feel better, and so actually help keep Africa down by making Africans feel they never have to be responsible for their own actions. The West is, apparently, always under an obligation to bale them out because of perceived injustices committed anywhere between four decades and four centuries ago...


14 posted on 06/14/2004 2:31:26 PM PDT by propertius
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