When we left off, Mr. Yon and Ms. Keithley were newly in reciept of a basket of pitch and rushes, fished out of the Gowanus Canal and containing the secret edicts of Gilgamesh regarding the dance palace of Ur. (c.f. The Legend of Ur According to R. Nidd) They read these inscriptions and founded a dance palace.

Then they read the inscriptions again. You see, when you read things you tend to read first from an alphabet you already know. But an old kind of writing contains murky things; old letters are closer to drawings than the new boring letters of our modern day. And when our co-founders looked again at the inscriptions of Gilgamesh in the buzzing light of Ur, they discovered that the letters, far from being simple vehicles of abstractions and rules for dances, were quivering inside with little pictures, with cartoons.

I, R. Nidd, have been absolutely riveted by Ur these last two years, wish to declare to you, gentle reader, a manifesto, an UrNIFESTO or manurfesto as it might have been tossed around by Yon, Keithley and cohorts: a declaration about dancing.

Although many enthusiasts believe that The Dance is a thing sprung straight into the world unattached and unto itself, it is our experience at Ur that the impulse to make dances is inseparable from the impulse to sing, draw, talk, write, and read aloud, these things themselves comprising a storytelling of sorts. The dances that arise are intertwined with situation and becoming -- not in an acting kind of way but in a plastic becoming and Ms. Keithley herself has insisted that I use as a subtitle for my manifesto, "a treatise on plasticity." Plasticity we may think of as animism, unlimited possibility and becoming. So it can be said that the dances may be scored "death to the left, death to the right, straight on, about turn and halt." Ms. Keithley calls this "windmill dancing". Don't be fooled by the simplicity. This is not the imitation of a windmill, but the being of a windmill, or rather the being of like a windmill. Do you know that technical plasticity in fact involves the mobility of molecules into empty spaces? A creeping flow into the nearby lacuane. And what is the making of meaning but the molecular movement into the empty spaces between things? So they do the becoming-windmill which is also the being-windmill. (Which in turn reveals the sadness of the windmill by attending to the windmill-in-itself.)

But this all smacks of elemtary animism, you say! And you frown on the anthropologic implications of the word, and you shudder at the assosciation of primitivism. But proudly do we retort, yes. For you see we have rejected in full the concept that artworks progress, that abstraction, conceptualism, or any kind of ism that implies a kind of heirarchical advance over what came before. A very clever Italian named Giambattista Vico said that this movement toward abstraction was in fact a decline. A decline in vitality you could say, the inevitable end in the ethers. Oh but don't worry. It's not all a movement toward the conceptual along an unfaltering march of time. Giambattista was optimistic enough to propose that a culture moves in cycles. (Not circles, mind you; only the wicked walk in circles.) So if the heroic and sublime eventually becomes thin lipped and rarified, not to worry because it will all go icarus-like back into the potting soil, and something else circles up. Circling up is folk art because it is not yet sufficiently codified to have become an exclusionary concept. For this reason we can speak smilingly of the alien life forms and corresponding folk art made by the people of Ur.

But go back a minute, Nidd, you say. Does animism mean then that you simply dances like birds, windmills and trees? Well yes, we do dance like birds windmills and trees, but the impulse to animate, or to cartoon, doesn't require us to abandon our current life and times in favor of a misty idea of nature or a pre-technological state. So we also animate Lil Jon, rabbit militias, broken saints, typewriters, quacking town halls, utopian architectures, alien space ships, deposited anxeity comlexes, underwater rescues, and loving sheep. To cartoon is to be, but also to draw. It is a becoming with the possibilities of instantaneous other becomings. It is the instantiation in limited duration of possible worlds.

If I sound didactic, let me qualify: many of the people of Ur get positivly googly eyed and thrilled-soppy over abstract things and dance-as-dance and other approaches of our peers and elders. The little Ur community was drawn together not for a lack of love for these things, but a sense that their own work lay somewhere else. And in this banding together they all enabled each other to abandon the context of their various trainings. For the things which form the very modernist ground of the assumptions in the post-modern dance world needed abandoning in this case. Innovation at the end of a very long tradition involves too much judgment, too many examples of what came before. And so Ur lived up in this way to its name and forged an ur-dance.

A group liberated starts over by playing, and it turned out that child's play was to form the working basis of the ur-dance. The arena of play isn't only for children and geniuses. Or rather: all children are geniuses to the extent that their imaginations are unconditioned by the lineage of experiments and judgments that make up a culture. As for adult behaviour, I could refer you to a pamphlet of mine: "On the myth of Adulthood: How the creative faculty was relegated to childhood and magic stories relegated to children's literature by the forces of capital" (R. Nidd, 1984). If you remove control and good behavior from the equation, you will find that there is no reason why child's play can't intersect with philosophy, prophecy or atrocity.

Let me, R. Nidd, be the first to admit that our foray into child's play has also been a foray into child psychosis. Oh the child has seen some bad bad things and been treated a bit like a dog, and has to wonder about why people lie a lot, and sometimes the child gets mugged, so yes, there is child psychosis. The child has been sucked up into a black hole. The child was eaten by a bear. The child kicked the bucket (lit) and then kicked the bucket (fig).

One of the great events of Ur IV dynasty was the diabolical creation of Mr. Yon, along with Taryn Griggs, (the star dancer of Ur and the one who literally made the molecular movement happen). This thing called "Teardrop Terror" (the teardrop terror of ticonderoga is a fearsome fat elephant, one of the many elephants populating Mr. Yon's brain). Being the teardrop terror consumed Ms. Griggs at this time. Diorama car crashes and bad bad fans. All sucked up into a black hole. The little one built a wall out of boxes covered with a drawing of a house on fire. For those of us watching, it was a flash of insight, and the first and maybe most perfect instantiation of the ur-dance. Silly, Nidd. It was the ur-dance. The very one.

Vico says that the sublime can only emerge from the popular imagination, and I, R. Nidd, am in agreement. There has been a true and heroic casting off of the abstraction and conceptualism and rarification. Followed by an unjedgmental fishing out of the imaginative folk life of a small population. An Ur can only exist on the scale of the local. It is also right that it duration should be finite. The thrill of the Ur 4 dynasty has been one of discovery, not codification This even though, like folk artists do, these odd goslings may spend many many years to come creating work in the vien they have discovered here. The point is, creation doesn't need a rarified room. Interpretive apparatus in fact will only hinder your experience of the dances of Ur, send you off after the scent of a red herring. For these works do not refer to dance ideas. They are the thing-in-itself in dance. (This may seem like a small distinction but it's not.) One could make the case that the dances are not so much a world of movement described in space, but of things in special quivering performative life. In a room with each other. And punching the walls. And pursued by aliens. And standing like a tree. And making cities out of books.

So they built the city and there it was. Then a mighty elephant, Ganesha the destroyer, squashed everything. The walls crumbled. Dust everywhere. No one could see anything. A lot of people got away, but some of them were sucked up into the black hole. Then there are those, like me, R. Nidd. Observers who will forever remember the alien life forms they made, and their corresponding folk art.

What will become of Ur? Will there be an Ur 5 dynasty? That lies in the world of wondering. In all likelihood, something new will emerge, something different. Perhaps the heroes of Ur will trudge onto their conceptual and rarified stage. Perhaps everyone will just get drunk and screw. Or perhaps the people of Ur will form new affiliations in new rooms, where they can make more noise and draw on the walls.

POSTSCRIPT ON FINITUDE

Do not weep, gentle reader. Objects must be finite. They need edges and a surface so that their interior might take up a beautiful ringing frequency when struck by just the right kind of lightning at the moment of their greatest possibility. Even the best book must have an ending. You couldn't very well love it if it didn't.

There was, from the beginning, a self-destruct clause, to protect against ossification, institution or heirarchy. Practical reality brough the self-destruct on before the clause was invoked. Residential spaces are incompatible with performances that brush up against anti-matter. The finitude allows the retrospective glance, and it is only now, at that end, that we can all see what has been made manifest at Ur.