Great Dance

November 26, 2007

Videodance Gift Ideas

Now that we're over being thankful (in the States at least), and have shifted into consumer overdrive for Christma-channu-kwaan'stice, I thought I'd list some good gifts ideas for videodance fanatics (like me!). It's hard to find gifts related to dance for the camera, so before you fruitlessly Google search, here's a list to get you started:

Video compilations and DVD's:

Dance for Camera Vol. 1 & 2:



Danceforcamera1.jpg danceforcamera2_dvd.jpg First Run Features has taken the lead in producing high quality video compilations of recent dance for camera shorts. I loved Volume 1, and refer to it constantly. Some favorites from this collection are Pascal Magnin's Contrecoup and Annick Vroom's RIP. Vol. 2 looks promising too with Motion Control by the Brit team Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie, and Mitchell Rose's hilarious Case Studies from the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders.

Mystic Fire Videos puts out great collections of past dance film innovators. This is the place to brush up on your history. I recommend:

Thumbnail image for maya_deren_DVD.jpg Maya Deren Experimental Films
The complete collection of all of Maya Deren's shorts. A must-have for dance film aficiondos.

Thumbnail image for Hilary-Harris-DVD-Cover2.jpg The Films of Hilary Harris
Four short films by Hilary Harris including his Academy Award-winning "Organism." His film techniques are still remarkable today, and of special interest is his "9 Variations on a dance theme" featuring a beautiful young Bettie DeJong (of Paul Taylor).

Unseen Cinema: VIVA LA DANCE, The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance
Part of Anthology Film Archives' incredible Unseen Cinema 7 disc box set.
The entire box set is a treasure for cinephiles, but VIVA LA DANCE
features dance in early cinema (1894-1946) with 33 films including some
of the earliest films ever made! This DVD will blow your mind!

Books:

Anarchic dance.jpg Anarchic Dance
by Liz Aggiss, Billy Cowie
This book compiles the history of performance & media dance makers Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie. In addition to the full color book, there is an accompanying DVD featuring excerpts of their work both on stage and in film. Very entertaining and inspiring for videodance enthusiasts!

Making Video Dance.jpg Making Video Dance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dance for the Screen
by Katrina McPherson
A simple and comprehensive manual on how to make videodance. Great for dancers new to processes of film and video production.

MayaDerenbook.jpg Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde
edited by Bill Nichols
As you can tell, I'm obsessed with Maya Deren. That said, this is a really intriguing compilation of essays by other film and dance artists about
the importance of her work in history. It also includes a reprint of one of her treatises "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film" that is priceless.

Gadgets:

I'm not much of a gearhead, but I do lust after new toys to make videodances with. Here are a couple that have caught my attention lately:

HV20_camcorder.jpg Canon HV20 HD Camcorder $899 (after rebate)

I got hooked on HD video after borrowing a HD camera from my friend to shoot "Fünf 'n' Twist" last spring. Even the little consumer HD camcorders deliver an incredible image, and they are getting cheaper and cheaper! I've usually gone with Sony, but this Canon has been getting good reviews, and I like that it takes hd minidv tapes, which is easier to handle than a hard drive.

Glidecam4000pro.jpg Glidecam 4000 Pro Stabilizer System
I found this while looking for a steadycam to rent online. This is a low budget alternative to a steadycam, and lets you do choreographic handheld shots. I also found some fun demo videos on the AllMobile video site. I would call this a videodance!

I realize I'm missing editing software suggestions. Any editors out there? Help us out and give us your wish list for videodance thingamajigs.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:30 AM - Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)

November 19, 2007

Up-coming Dance Film Submission Deadlines

I just added a new page called Dance Film Submission Deadlines on the upper-right side bar listing up-coming festival and funding deadlines for submissions. I'll try to keep this list up-dated frequently, but let me know about other opportunities I may have missed by sending me an email or commenting here.

Below are up-coming deadlines:

DECEMBER 2007

Fifth Annual Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema
Boulder, CO USA
call for entries
Deadlines December 21, 2007 and January 18, 2008
Festival dates: April 4 and 5, 2008

Sans Souci, an international festival of dance cinema, screens short works that integrate dance with cinematic elements. We have an expansive definition of dance and an appreciation for highly experimental and interdisciplinary forms, including mixed-media works that incorporate live performance.

Entry fees: $25 and $40 for the early and final deadlines respectively
Visit http://www.sanssoucifest.org/ for more details and a downloadable entry form.
Submissions are encouraged from all artists regardless of credentials and affiliations. JANUARY 2008

Cinedans
call for submissions
Festival date: July 2008.
Submission deadline: 14 January 2008
See also : http://www.cinedans.nl/2007/en/entries.php

We are looking for dance films and videos in various styles, completed after June 2005,  that combine choreography and cinematography. We welcome shorts, features, documentaries, stage adaption, animation and video clips.

Please click this link to access the entry form.
Please click this link for regulations

What do we offer?
- Cinedans Award, best film 2008 prize 1000 EUR
- Cinedans Audience Award.
- Jury Special Mentions
- Cinedans on tour through Netherlands
- Cinedans on tour international including Cape Town, Shanghai, and Beijing.
- The festival will have seminars, introductions by dance filmmakers, Q&A, a video library and sales of new dance DVD's!
- The touring possibilities will be negotiated with the filmmakers.

HOW TO SUBMIT:
1. Go to www.cinedans.nl and hit ENTRIES
2. Fill out the online ENTRY FORM and press SUBMIT.
3. Please e-mail 1 digital still to entry@cinedans.nl
4. Send your preview DVD, 15 EUR submission fee and entry form to:
Cinedans
Kamer 201
Keizersgracht 174
1016 DW Amsterdam


FEBRUARY 2008

EMPAC DANCE MOVIES COMMSSION 2008: OPEN CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The deadline for the proposals is February 15, 2008.

For more information on EMPAC and the DANCE MOViES Commission, or to download the guidelines and application form, please visit the EMPAC website:
http://www.empac.rpi.edu

DANCE MOViES Commission application process:
The EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission is a competitive open proposal process, in which eligible artists submit a project proposal.  The initial proposals are reviewed and a small number of artists are invited to submit a detailed proposal to an international panel. The panel assesses the quality and feasibility of the proposed project and submits its recommendations to EMPAC. The commissions are awarded by EMPAC after review.

Upon awarding of the commission, the artist or collaborative team has one year to complete the project, at which point the work is premiered at EMPAC, shown at dance film festivals around the world, and credited as an EMPAC DANCE MOViES Commission.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:21 AM - Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 13, 2007

Project Bandaloop Straddles Different Definitions of Performance

I'm taking a class in Media Economics at the New School, and while doing research on online advertising, I came across an ad campaign by ValueClick Media called "The Performance Interviews." As a videodancemaker I immediately noticed their banner ad, which contained a small video depicting a Bay Area aerial dance group called Project Bandaloop. The video was eye-catching and compelling, but what struck me as strange was that interspersed with the dance footage were marketing consultants talking about what "performance" means to them.

Project Bandaloop

I watched several of the interviews on the ValueClick site, and in light of my recent posts about my frustrations with experimental dance, I started interpreting what these marketers were saying about performance as advice to dance artists. For them, performance means conveying information to the client and exceeding the client's expectations. In their cases the clients are businesses trying to reach a target market of consumers. As a dancer I interpreted "clients" as my funders and presenters, and the "target market of consumers" as my viewing audience.  Here are some notable quotes from the interviews on the ValueClick Media website:
"The definition of advertising is inform, persuade, and remind...Perform means I under-promise and over-deliver."
- John Durham, CEO of Catalyst

"Performance in both business and life requires focusing on an objective, establishing a benchmark, creating an ideal, and then working toward that objective."
- Craig Petz, VP of Marketing, taxbrain.com

"Performance is execution, it's delivery...People need to learn to start performing together better. I think in the U.S. particularly we've lost our way in performing together...I think the Sixties was a decade of high performance. People got off their butts and made things happen together."
-Lori Schwartz, SVP Director of Emerging Media, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab

To an experimental contemporary dance artist's ears these words sound so arcane and old fashioned. After all in post-modernism and everything since then, the objective has been to obliterate the expectations of the audience. It's not about delivering anything, instead the work is supposed to break down and foil the audience's preconceived notions of what might happen. In Jerome Bel's show at DTW this past week (which I didn't attend, but I heard many recountings of) he said just this in a reply to a question from his co-interviewer, the traditional Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun:

"Bel explains, he is a 'contemporary' artist -- this means not ballet, not Swan Lake, not the Nutcracker. 'Contemporary' means there can be no expectations, no preconceived notions. It's in the present."
- From Tonya Plank's review "Mesmerizing Traditional Thai Dance Versus Dumb White People Tricks" on Swan Lake Samba Girl.


My question is, if we have moved so far from the marketing model of performance that our main objective is to obliterate all the expections of our audiences, does that mean we have killed performance? Are we at the end of a frayed rope in terms of new frontiers for this art form? Perhaps this is an ontological question that I don't have the know-how to answer, but I certainly feel like I've come to the end of the sidewalk on this path.

I found the ValueClick interviews on performance to be quite intriguing. The irony is that an online ad company used a contemporary experimental dance company as the visual face of their campaign to tout the high performance potential of web marketing. Given the proliferation of advertisements that use dance (see Maria's post "Dance in Advertising" from A Time to Dance for a nice selection of these), it seems that marketers know that dance is a valuable vehicle to deliver the goods to their clients. So, why don't we see that for ourselves?

Project Bandaloop, Anaheim Ballet, Misnomer Dance, Great Dance and all the dance bloggers out there see that dance is extremely valuable in the digital age. Now it's my goal to help the rest of the dance world to see it too.

Here's another video by Project Bandaloop for more aerial artistry:


Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:43 AM - Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

November 9, 2007

Isaac Julien's "Cast No Shadow" at BAM

Last night I saw Isaac Julien's Cast No Shadow, created in collaboration with choreographer Russell Maliphant, at BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival and PERFORMA07. Like Claudia La Rocco's review in the New York Times from Nov 8th, I was ecstactically overwhelmed by Julien's films, and frustratingly underwhelmed by Maliphant's choreography.

Presented as a trilogy that Julien has been working on for several years, the evening started out with "True North" a three channel film depicting gorgeous images of the Artic, many shot in Iceland and Greenland.

Julien_True_North.jpg
"True North" by Isaac Julien

Actress Vanessa Myrie, is a striking presence in all three works as a mysterious voyager passing through different worlds. In "True North" she abstractly represents Matthew Henson, the African American explorer who quite possibly was the first person to reach the North Pole. Julien depicts the icy other-worldly landscape as a land of huge contrasts: still and vacant vistas with giant crashing waterfalls, liquid water with brittle ice. The only problem with the work was Russell Maliphant's live choreographed dance on stage and sometimes shadow-cast upon the screens. While Julien's films were gorgeous studies in contrasting states of being (specifically through the metaphor of water), Maliphant was only liquid, in a way that spread mediocrity across the work and melted away the striking edges of the film.
The second piece, "Fantome Afrique" was a journey through Burkina Faso's colorful capital city Ouagadougou known as a filmmaking center for Africa. This section was presented just as a film installation, and as a videodance-maker, obviously this was my favorite part of the evening. Again presented on three panels with three different channels of film, the work blew me away from an editing perspective. Not only were each of the three screens engaging to watch just on their own, but they were masterfully choreographed together to create juxtapositions of images that gave many more layers of meanings. To me it seemed to raise the concept of montage to the 3rd degree (montage cubed). Vanessa Myrie passes through the film again, as an omnipresent observer of all faces of humanity. Also, a much better dance/film collaboration is apparent with choreographer Stephen Galloway, who appears in the film as a dynamic force who seems to ride and stir the winds of change. I loved the way Julien shot Galloway's movement. Sometimes in extreme close-ups of just his hands framing an object in the distance, other times as a flickering, stuttering life made of dust, or a haunting face illuminated in the dark.

The third piece, "Small Boats" is the most recent film in the trilogy and was made in collaboration with Russell Maliphant and dancers from the start. This time we are taken to Sicily where the story of countless African immigrants sailing across the Mediterranean to a "better life" is depicted. This was the only single channel film of the evening, and it was projected onto a scrim at the front of the stage while the live dancing was intermittently revealed behind it. I thought the use of the scrim was really effective. At times black holes would materialize in the film to reveal the dancers behind the scrim, the most striking of these was a shot of a marble staircase from above with a dancer rolling down the stairs. Slowly the stairs between the banisters dissolved away, and the camera zoomed into the darkness with a body of a dancer illuminated behind the scrim. All this was cool, except when the live dancers actually danced.

The problem with Maliphant's choreography is that he has a movement vocabularly of about 10 words, and one of these words (the drop and roll on the floor move), is used more than a Valley girl says "like". I swore if I saw another drop and roll I was going to scream! I tried to distract myself by watching the film, but they were too good at making space in the film for the dance (which is often what I want to see more of in these kinds of interdisciplinary performances).

Sadly, we can't always get what we want, but from a filmmaking perspective my cuppeth overfloweth with inspiration from Isaac Julien's work. Luckily, just the film version of "Small Boats" is playing for free through Nov. 20th at Metro Pictures Gallery, and now I want to see all his older works, like the film he made with Bebe Miller and Ralph Lemon "Three." Anybody know where or how one can see this?

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 1:05 PM - Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 7, 2007

November Videodance Happenings

There are a bunch of intriguing dance film & video events happening this month both here in New York City and around the world. Below is a list of some I've come across. I've grouped them by location with New York City and U.S. events first, then branching out internationally. If you know of some others to include feel free to comment here and share with the videodance community.

isaac_julien.jpg
True North, Isaac Julien
Showing at BAM Next Wave Nov. 6-10th


NEW YORK EVENTS:

PERFORMA07
The second Visual Art Performance Biennial
Oct 27 - Nov 20, 2007
http://07.performa-arts.org

Somehow I completely missed the first PERFORMA Biennial in 2005, but this year's festival is chock full of must-sees. Below are the one's I've earmarked involving dance and screen: Isaac Julien & Russell Maliphant
Cast No Shadow
BAM Harvey Theatre - 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn
7:30pm Tues. Nov 6th through Sat. Nov 10th, 2007
Tickets and info: http://bam.org/events/08CAST/08CAST.aspx

Isaac Julien, a visual artist and filmmaker collaborates with UK-based choreographer Russell Maliphant to create a multimedia performance of three epic journeys through different landscapes. Julien has collaborated with notable choreographers in the past, including Bebe Miller and Stephen Galloway. This is his first evening-length performance work.

Press interviews: TimeOut, Bomb Magazine


Free screenings of Isaac Julien's Small Boats
Oct. 30 - Nov. 20, 2007
Metro Pictures
519 West 53rd Street
212.206.7100
www.metropicturesgallery.com
FREE


Performance On Demand
Opens Friday, November 2 through 17.
12 pm - 6pm FREE
EAI Viewing Room at EFA Gallery
The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
323 West 39th Street 11th Floor
www.eai.org

The EFA Gallery transforms in to a video lounge to host Electronic Arts Intermix's viewing room, a program which provides free public access to one of the foremost collections of video art in the world.


REMAINS TO BE SEEN: New and Restored Films and Videos of Carolee Schneeman
Remains to Be Seen: Artist Talk & Screening
November 7th, 2007
6 pm, FREE
Electronic Arts Intermix
535 West, 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
T: 212 337 0680
www.eai.org

In conjunction with Anthology's program of screenings, EAI will commemorate their preservation of Carolee Schneemann's works with this special evening. Schneemann will be on-hand to speak about her work, answer questions from the audience and introduce a program of new videos and recently restored performance documentation pieces.

Other programs in REMAINS TO BE SEEN:
Nov 15, 7pm: Restorations & New Works
Nov 16-17, 7pm: Kitch's Last Meal
$8 , $6 , $5
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10003
T: (212) 505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org


Michael Williams & Melissa Brown, Time Booth
Nov 11, 2007 7 pm - 11 pm
FREE
Canada
55 Chrystie Street
www.canadanewyork.com

Time Booth is a screen-play that is written to be performed using a photo booth. The artists will push the visual capabilities of a vernacular photo booth to the limit using unexpected visual effects, original props, and lighting tricks. The final performance will be documented by the eye of the camera.


DANCE AFTER CHOREOGRAPHY
Nov. 12, 7pm: An Evening With Grand Union, featuring Douglas Dunn, Nancy Lewis, and Yvonne Rainer, all members of this legendary improvisational group.
Nov 13, 7pm: From Judson to the Present, includes film and video by Judson pioneers, as well by artists who flourished in the generation after Judson.
Nov 18, 4pm: The French Aftershock, two films showing the Judson influence in France.
$8 , $6, $5
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10003
T: (212) 505-5181

DANCE AFTER CHOREOGRAPHY looks at how the Judson Dance Theater took apart the conceptual underpinnings of "choreography," an intellectual process that greatly affected artists creating body-centric work, and remains pervasive today.


Eva & Franco Mattes (aka 010010110101101), Synthetic Performances
Nov 13, 2007
6 pm - 8 pm, FREE
Artists Space
38 Greene Street
New York, NY 10013
T: 212 226 3970
www.artistsspace.org

Eva and Franco Mattes will reenact three historical performances through their avatars, which were constructed out of the shape and surface of their bodies, in the online world, Second Life. Synthetic Performance is part of a series of performances that have taken place in synthetic worlds and videogames. People are invited to attend the live performances at Artist Space and interact with the videogame from within the gallery or from anywhere in the world.


Yvonne Rainer, RoS Indexical
November 18th - 19th, 2007
7 pm
Tickets: Ticketweb
The Hudson Theatre at Millennium Broadway Hotel
145 West, 44th Street,
New York, NY 10036-4012
T: 212 768 4400
www.millenniumhotels.com

In what is only her third live performance since her return to choreography in 2000, Yvonne Rainer looks to the controversial premiere of The Rite of Spring, the brilliant collaboration between composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, which shocked Paris audiences in 1913 with its "primitive" movement vocabulary and dissonant musical score, as the springboard for a radical work of her own.


Daria Martin, Harpstrings & Lava
November 19th, 2007
7 pm
$8 , $4 , $6
Tickets: Ticketweb
Tribeca Grand Hotel Screening Room
Two Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10013
Phone: 212 519-6600
www.tribecagrand.com

American artist Daria Martin's film Harpstrings and Lava, created in collaboration with musician Zeena Parkins and actor Nina Fog, conjures the atmosphere of childhood anxieties in an expanded tableaux vivant that blends film, dance, painting, music and sculpture.


For those of you who can't make it to New York:
PERFORMA TV
www.performa-arts.org/tv
Although there is the potential for action at any time, performances will take place every day at 11 am and 9 pm.

Coinciding with duration of Performa07, PerformaTV is a 24/7 live and continuous Internet video stream broadcast from a stage-set designed by artist Ronnie Bass and hosted by Columbia University's School of Visual Arts. Scheduled and impromptu events from artists, curators, critics, and art historians will include interviews, discussions, performances and concerts.


LOS ANGELES:
DANCE MOViES Commission WORKSHOP
Wednesday, November 28th, 7:00 - 9:00 pm
18th Street Arts Center
1639 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90404
In the main gallery space.
www.18thstreet.org

Led by EMPAC's Dance Curator Hélène Lesterlin Free and open to artists interested in applying to the commission. No need to register, just come!


INTERNATIONAL EVENTS:

Argentina:
DANCE MOViES Commission WORKSHOP
Thursday, November 8th, 2:30 - 4:30 pm
Videodanza Festival International de Buenos Aires
For information and location: http://www.videodanzaba.com.ar/index.htm

Led by EMPAC's Dance Curator Hélène Lesterlin Free and open to artists interested in applying to the commission.


Columbia:
Imagen Movimiento
Video Danza 2007
23 al 25 de noviembre del 2007
Cinemateca Distrital de Bogotá
http://www.imagenenmovimiento.org/

Programs include a retrospective of the work of Maya Deren, art and new technology, Columbian videodance, International videodance, and a presentation of the first festival award of Video Danza.


Netherlands:
dancescreen, The Hague 2007
November 15th - 18th, 2007
Filmhuis Den Haag
http://www.dancescreen.com

dance screen is the major international dance film and video festival, featuring an extensive programme, which brings together the newest dance films and videos, inspiring panels on the state of the arts as well as hot topic talks on community focal points. The festival will culminate in the dance screen Award Gala on Saturday, November 17th.


Portugal:
FRAME, International Dance-Video Festival
13-17 November, 2007
ESAP, na Rua do Comércio do Porto, nº , a 100 mts do Largo São Domingos
http://www.fabricademovimentos.pt/


United Kingdom:
The second international Opensource: {Videodance} symposium.
Universal Hall, Findhorn Foundation Community, Morayshire, Scotland
20th - 24th November 2007.
http://www.videodance.org.uk

Screen dance is a rapidly expanding area of artistic, academic and curatorial activity worldwide. Inherent in screen dance practice is the interface and collaboration between dance artists and media arts practitioners. Opensource: {Videodance} 2007 is an open symposium for artists, academics, curators and producers coming together, to share ideas and work, network and debate, and provide a valuable platform for current issues in the area of screen dance practice to come to the surface.


London International Dancefilm Festival 2007
Friday 30 November to Sunday 2 December
http://www.londondancefilmfest.com/

The LIDFF will show a number of new, short dancefilms in each afternoon and evening session in between the main features. The final programme of Dancefilm Shorts will be published on the London Dancefilm Festival website from 25 October 2007.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:00 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 5, 2007

Responding to "Your Audience"

Audience200x255.jpgI received some great responses to my rather angry rant on Halloween: "Your Audience, Love 'em or Hate 'em?," in which I complained about feeling contempt from experimental dance artists towards their audiences.

Levi Gonzalez, a brave soul from the NYC dance scene provided a wonderful counter-comment to my post which challenged me to clarify my thoughts and be more specific about my problems. Now I can condense it to basically this: I don't feel like experimental artists think about communication enough.

I used to be active in the NYC experimental dance scene as a performer and choreographer. In the past couple of years I have changed course to become a producer and curator of dance for the camera. Now that I've gained a bit of distance from the scene, I'm seeing it from the outside and having some different thoughts about experimentalism. Before, when making work, I was more focused on what I was not doing (ie participating in an oppressive, capitalistic, populist culture) rather than what I was doing: performing for an audience and having an exchange with them. I didn't think about how my work may have been alienating my audience because it never occurred to me to investigate who they were and what they were bringing to the experience. Despite the many exceptions in the dance community, I do think that there is something about experimental art scenes that foster a kind of elitism and snobbery. My personal definition of an experimental art scene is a group of artists who live on the outer edges of society and share similar aesthetic and creative ideas that mainly revolve around critiquing and counterbalancing mainstream culture.  One aspect of mainstream culture is the "mass audience." As part of the experimental dance scene in New York I used to feel that to cater to any audience beyond our scene would be seen as a sign of selling out or dumbing down the work. In any case, the work's status as "experimental" would be put into question. This could have just been me being oversensitive, and trying to fit in. But now as an audience member I often feel like if I didn't know this scene or come from it, I would feel really out of place. I get the sense mostly from younger, less mature artists, that they want me to come to them all the way. There is very little interplay or reciprocation from the performers towards their audience. Again, this is getting very general, and I hate to name names in such a small, fragile community. Perhaps it would be better to illustrate an example of what I considered to be a good artist/audience exchange that Levi happened to be a performer in:

 In John Jasperse's recent piece at BAM, "Misuse liable to prosecution" he addressed the audience directly right at the beginning through a monologue of economic statistics that laid the groundwork for the rest of the dance. There was nothing self-indulgent about it. We learned what the piece was about up-front, and then the abstract dance vignettes that followed could be fit into a context. Even though the piece was specifically about the terrible economic state of experimental modern dance, he did not put a guilt trip on the audience. In fact his audience was mostly comprised of members of this self-same community. He may have made us feel uncomfortable, but it was not to attack us and twist the knife, rather it was to raise awareness and show a way to empowerment. As an audience member I really appreciated this work because it voiced the pain and difficulties of being an experimental dance artist in a way that all people could relate to. The work was human.

Levi raised a great point in his comment that illuminates another potential pitfall experimental artists run into:

'Also, ironically, one could argue that the way artists make a name for themselves and the way they tend to be marketed in the contemporary scene is if they are in fact, "shocking" "transgressive" and "controversial". As an artist myself I feel pressure from the marketing point of view to be provocative and polarizing. It sells.'

This is the dark side of marketing that we must also remain aware of. I believe there are many other ways of raising ourselves and our community up without selling out or diluting our message. For me, I had the realization that I must go out towards my audience and invite them in, they will not find me on their own. To do this I have embraced the camera to create and propagate dance in a mediatized form able to be distributed in many ways. I have made a cable access tv show, produced screenings and festivals, and now this blog on the internet. There are many other examples though: Jill Sigman has done it through secret message campaigns with egg shells and voicemail messages on little calling cards distributed throughout the city. Others like fellow Great Dance blogger Tom Pearson with Third Rail Projects perform in alternative sites out-side the theatre. These may seem like major undertakings, but the same results can be achieved through even subtler processes. 

All experimental artists really need to do is think of their work as a form of communication in addition to being an artistic exploration. This transmission of messages doesn't start or end at the moment of the performative act, it is an ongoing process of exchange with an audience that will take many forms along the way and ultimately shape and change both parties. With a little more consciousness about who we are performing to, we may be able to give the Mark Morris' and Twyla Tharp's of the world a run for their money and raise the profile of our community to be powerful movers in the culture at large.

For some other recent discussions about this topic see Lisa Traiger's post: What's Wrong With Modern Dance, and Daniel Burkholder's post: snickered.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:14 AM - Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

November 2, 2007

Chair Dances for the Video Age

If any of you have studied dance at an institution of higher learning than you will be very familiar with the most popular dance composition assignment ever: the chair dance. Even if you never went to school for dance, I am pretty sure you have seen a chair dance at some student concert you were dragged to. The most common type you will see is the angsty chair dance. Usually performed by a soloist, in this particularly virulent strain the dancer pours every fiber of her being into communing with the source of her greatest pain and sorrow, the empty chair. I have made and endured watching many a chair dance in my day, and it got to the point where if I saw another one, I thought I might possibly slit my throat.


backChair250x207.jpgHowever, now I'm all grown up and I don't get to spend gazillions of dollars to dance six hours a day and come up with angsty dance compositions with furniture. Instead I find myself dancing less and interacting with chairs more and more. I've got my office job where I deal with numbers and spreadsheets and many other things of importance that I never studied in school. Then I come home to sit at my computer and surf youtube, edit videodances and post to my blog. It got me kind of longing for some chair dancing...
So today for all those poor dancers trapped in cubicles, I present some excellent chair dances. I encourage you to try these at home or at work, but be sure to check your workers' comp policy first.

Chair dance # 1 comes from Lando, a Youtube vlogger who made a New Year's resolution to make a dance video a day. Her motto: Dance Your Ass Off. I guess this quickly devolved to making a videodance whenever she felt like it, but she's still made 74 so far, which is pretty impressive. (For a superstar in the daily dance video world check out Boris Willis and his "Dance-a-day" blog.) I was impressed with her cinematic approach to her videodances. Often she plays with the edges of the frame and the videos' colorings to make them look old, retro or distorted. In this one she also makes good use of off-screen/on-screen space and the curtain back-drop, which has a different effect for camera than stage.


Day 2 of Dance 365 - How to Ridin Dirty Office Chair dance by Lando


Chair dance #2 could be a spin-off of the Hipster Olympics. Brooklyn filmmaker Jill Beale makes a case for the under-represented sport of Chairing, which seems quite similar to the experimental modern dance scene in New York. Perhaps our two groups should join forces and take the world by storm, or at least wheel our way off the L line.


chairing by Jill Beale


Chair dance #3 follows the chairing phenomenon but takes it one step further to become Office Chair Skating. Instead of endurance and speed, it's about artistry and grace. You're allowed to have off-screen helpers push you in to avoid showing any clumsy foot scoots, and having smooth floor surfaces are essential.


Office Chair Skating by Rhett and Link


Chair dance #4 is a futuristic fantasy where a flying carpet is replaced by a flying arm chair soaring to the timeless anthem of Aha's "Take On Me". The guy who made this cast his dad in the lead role. As a moonlighting chair dancer, he's really great. No embedding allowed on this one, so you'll have to click the link.

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:44 AM - Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)


© 2007-2008 Great Dance. All rights reserved.
Great Dance is a registered trademark.