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Last Wednesday I attended a Headlong Dance Theater rehearsal, and the group was working on finding a balance in their improvisational exercises between the abstract and the literal. 

I found that this really identified with our discussion, particularly in Tuesday's class, about the Rothko painting and trying to achieve just a feeling instead of a story. Headlong, I guess, in oppostion to Zadie Smith, wants their audience to feel somewhere inbetween a feeling and a story. They define it as being between a place where you can make perfect sense of what's going on (making a story) and a place where you have no idea what's going on (a feeling). I wonder if this is the true ideal of modern art (and by art I mean the broad spectrum from painting to theater to literature). 

We've talked a lot in class about how Smith's theory that all art should be viewed as a feeling is ironic considering it's the theme of a 450 page novel, but perhaps, because it's a novel stating that we should view art as something static, it really does fall into that middle section that Headlong is trying to achieve in their work. 

I don't really know what to make of that, but that's what I've been thinking about.