ORIENTATIONS

We take a possible cue from the ballet. At the heart of Parade lies a set of tensions between multimedia, difference, and attention, and most pressingly, it seems, these tensions are also about disorientation, about how the ballet orients our attention to the possibilities of disorientation. Its musical effects and its costumes are all designed to disorient, to mix up received categories of perception. In this way, the ballet performs queerly along the lines of Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, which asks us to consider moments of disorientation—or how the encounter with disorientation “makes things oblique, which in turn opens up another way to inhabit those forms” ("Orientations" 571). In the process, we have perhaps the chance to experience, even cultivate, different relations to objects, not to mention others.

Jonathan: In writing this, I reach a stumbling point. So I get up to take a walk, to use my body to reorient my thinking, to experience thoughts in motion, to move in a different direction.
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