The Politics of Dancing

Hugo Ball  100 years ago this month Dada was born in a cafe, The Cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich Switzerland, [1] - ‘a birdcage surrounded by roaring lions.’  Michael Ball, a German bohemian, mounted the stage dressed as a sort of human-bat and began flapping his ‘wings’ and shouting nonsense at the audience. The audience thought it truly terrible and consequently loved it. It was 1916 and Europe was destroying itself as young men slaughtered one another in a line of trenches that ran from the Swiss border to the channel coast. As a culture that looked upon itself as the pinnacle of civilisation descended into barbarism the only sane response was insanity. ‘The walls of the cabaret were decorated with primitivist masks and artworks by the likes of Picasso and Modigliani. Onstage, provocateurs mixed vaudeville acts and expressionist dance with performances that bordered on gibberish or lunacy, including a poem intoned in three languages at once, a Maori song belted out b...

A great deal has been said about stalking recently, all, understandably, from the perspective of the victim. I am interested in the perspective of the perpetrator since it seems to me that if victims are to be better protected then we need to develop a greater understanding of the thought processes and psychological outlook of the stalker. In my time working in mental health and addiction, I worked with several obsessive individuals and believe that I have some understanding of their worldview, that is how they perceive both themselves and their victims. So here are some of my reflections. There have always been anti-social obsessives who can be categorised on a scale from relatively harmless to the psychopathic. Literature is full of examples and Hitchcock understood the type well. What has changed is modern means of communication and social media, which in the hands of an obsessive can be truly devastating. The seeds of the obsessive stalker reside in all of us, we all fi...

Once upon a time, before there was time, there was Nothing. Nothing was empty and alone and thought to itself ‘sometimes I could just explode with boredom, now wouldn’t that be something?’ And that is what happened. Suddenly there was hot and cold, time and space and something.