September 29, 2008

Kinetic Cinema with Elizabeth Zimmer

Next Monday, Oct 6th you won't want to miss veteran dance critic Elizabeth Zimmer at Kinetic Cinema. As the editor of the seminal book "Envisioning Dance On Film and Video" (Routledge, 2002), Elizabeth Zimmer has researched and grappled with issues of mediatized dance extensively. For her Oct 6th program she will show two documentaries that offer very different approaches to movement for screen.
The evening will include "The Way Things Go", an award-winning film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, that documents the chain-reactive performance of a 100 foot long kinetic sculpture made entirely of common household objects (click here for a teaser on YouTube). The second half of the program will  feature two rarely-seen volumes of a documentary project Elizabeth Zimmer appeared in and assisted on entitled "Downtown Dance-New York 2007". The footage includes interviews with downtown dance favs Ivy Baldwin, Trajal Harrell, Keely Garfield, Larry Keigwin, RoseAnne Spradlin, and David Parker, shows samples of their work, and has brief introductions by Elizabeth.

Pentacle Movement Media & Collective:Unconscious co-present:
Kinetic Cinema
Monday October 6th, 7:00pm (and the first Monday of every month)
$5 Admission (buy tix at the door)

IRT Theater
154 Christopher Street, Suite 3B (btw Washington & Greenwich Streets)
New York, NY 10014
Phone: 212.206.6875
Trains: 1 to Christopher Street, PATH to Christopher Street
Admission: $5

Kinetic Cinema explores the intersection of dance and the moving image both on screen and stage. Each month I invite a special guest from the dance community to share the films and videos that have inspired or moved them. These could be films that feature dance, are kinetic-based, or have been influential on their work in some way. The guest curators come from a range of backgrounds as performers, choreographers, critics, and filmmakers. Next month on Nov 3rd, the collaborative duo, Kerrie Welsh & Sasha Welsh will show films and videos that have influenced their new multimedia performance "Trace Decay."

Kinetic Cinema is part of Movement Media, my new project at Pentacle that provides screenings, consulting services, and online interactive programs for dancers about dance and media. More information will be available soon online at pentacle.org.

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September 26, 2008

Move the Frame Turns 1 year old!

It's Move the Frame's birthday! I can't believe it's been a year already. Looking back on my first post, I tackled the unanswerable question of what this genre/medium/interdisciplinary hybrid thing should be called, and 78 posts later, I'm still not sure. If anything I've gotten a little less sure, and am not using the term videodance as much. Screendance still sounds boring and dry to me, but I've got more respect for the inclusiveness of the term. I like the idea now of a multiplicity of terms, and saying: hey, we all have different interests in dance and media, just call it whatever you want.

To celebrate a year's worth of late nights putting off much-needed sleep to pursue a very bizarre obsession about a very bizarre subject, here are few of my "Greatest Hits", one for each month of this year.

Phillipine Prisoners Resurrect Busby Berkeley. This was my second post ever, and probably my best to date! I wish I could pull an article like this out everytime I sit down to write!

Viva la dance dance revolution! This was my wild idealist phase :)

Papelbon Dance I'm actually a Yankee's fan, but the fact that Jonathan Papelbon has increased dance appreciation around Red Sox Nation is blog-worthy in my book.

Project Bandaloop Straddles Different Definitions of Performance. I liked this strange merging of the commercial world with avant gard performance.

Introducing Kinetic Cinema (and reflecting on 2007) My screening series, Kinetic Cinema became a recurring topic of critique and reflection in 2008.

Second Life: A Puppet Play for the 21st Century. I'm still wrapping my brain around real-time performance in Second Life.

Thoughts on Curating: How to Bring About a Shift In Perception. This article was the genesis of my paper at the Screendance Conference at ADF this year.

Miss Behavior: Video Art and the Female Body at Kinetic Cinema. Thoughts after viewing very cool feminist video art presented by Jonah Bokaer at Kinetic Cinema.

Godard and Waters do the Madison I wrote this for Ferdy On Films' Dance Movie Blogathon. Later my investigation into these two directors' use of dance showed up in my new videodance, Fünf 'n' Twist when I shot the prom scenes this summer.

Bad Dance, Good Cinema, and Why It's All Better Than Boring Kriota Willberg's Kinetic Cinema program, The Worst of the Best was very stimulating!

Artist Driven Curating and How it Could Help Galvanize a Screendance Movement. Thoughts and ruminations provoked by my participation in the Screendance: State of the Art2 Conference at ADF this summer.

The Making of Fünf 'n' Twist A new videodance I'm making about a teenage couple and their rite of passage at the Prom. Weird and wonderful! Check out the photos and clips.

"PRIME MOVER" Screening Raises Questions of Merit & Worth of Dance Films Reflections on the most recent Kinetic Cinema program, and the difference between visual arts-based dance media works vs. cinema-based dance media.

That brings us pretty much to the present! I think I've matured and gotten a little more serious over the course of the year. Maybe I need to bring back some more Papelbon and Phillippine Prisoners. What do you think?

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:15 PM - Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

September 21, 2008

Queens Council on the Arts Offers Online Marketing Workshop for Performing Artists

I'm continually impressed by the forward-thinking and progressive workshops being offered by the Queens Council on the Arts (QCA). Last year they had a "Dance Doc Slam" where dance artists could show their promotional/documentation videos and receive advice and critiques from a panel of presenters, funders, booking agents, and videographers. This was a really useful way of learning the perspectives of different key figures about what they look for in dance documentation videos and how our work can be conveyed more effectively on screen.

This week, on Sept. 25th, QCA is offering another great workshop for today's dance-maker:
STAGE PRESENCE ONLINE, a dynamic workshop for performing artists on how to best use the internet to capture and promote your work. Once again there will be a fabulous panel of esteemed experts including Jaki Levy of Misnomer Dance, Meghan Sprenger of Dance Theater Workshop and Tom Pearson and Zach Morris of Third Rail Projects. (Yours truly was invited, but I have my Media Sales class that night...) This is an opportunity to have your website reviewed by your peers and gain insight from professionals into the myriad options of developing a presence on the web.

Here are the details:
STAGE PRESENCE ONLINE
Thursday, September 25, 2008, 6:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Topaz Arts, 55-03 39th Ave., Woodside, topazarts.org

Admission is free. Registration is required. Space is limited.

To register, please email your name, address, telephone number, and artistic discipline to mblouin@queenscouncilarts.org A select number of performer's websites will be reviewed and evaluated at this workshop. To have your website reviewed include a url in your registration.

Also, be sure to check out the other workshops QCA is offering this fall, including a presentation by Dance Theater Workshop on Tuesday Sept 23rd at the Chocolate Factory, and one that sounds great to me:  "schmooze or loose" learn how to work a room, get new contacts and maintain professional relationships on Tues. Oct. 16th! 

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 9:07 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 10, 2008

"PRIME MOVER" Screening Raises Questions of Merit & Worth of Dance Films

On Monday night, Kinetic Cinema kicked off it's fall season with a program of films at Chez Bushwick called "Prime Mover: Dance on Camera From Chez Bushwick." The program was originally curated for the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow last May, and was shown in a slightly shortened form for us here. The selections were incredibly varied, from 3-D animation studies to installation art to dance for the camera to performance documentation, and the overarching premise was that it was all movement-based media created by artists associated with Chez Bushwick.

After the screening, a lively discussion ensued among the audience about what we had just seen. Because the program was so varied in its scope and content, the discussion immediately headed into, what is dance film, and can all of these works fit under this one heading? It's a discussion that comes up at every screendance/dance film event I go to, and like all the others, this one also headed into the dangerous area of what is "good" and "bad" dance film. Rather than slipping down this slope, I hoped to lead the debate more into the direction of "mapping" the genre, as Claudia Kappenberg describes in her paper Does Screendance Need to Look Like Dance?  presented at Screendance:State of the Art2 at the American Dance Festival last July. In this way we could get a sense of where individual works are located in the intersection of media arts and dance, rather than make subjective value statements.

The work that spurred the most controversy was a video of a performance by choreographer Ann Liv Young called "Snow White Paris." The video was basically a straight ahead documentation of the live performance, with one camera set up at the back of the theater in a fixed wide shot the entire time. The curator for CCA-Glasgow made edits and pulled out 10 minutes of excerpts from the full performance. The reason why the work was chosen for this program was that Ms. Young - who rejects the title of video artist for herself - makes DVDs of almost every performance she does and sells them at the hefty price tag of $55 a pop. In this sense she seems to have adopted an art world business model in which she documents her performance art and then uses the documentation to create value and revenue for the work. Still, despite this unique relationship Ms. Young has to media, many of the audience members at the screening objected to the inclusion of "Snow White Paris" in this program. To some, it had no value because it said nothing about the cinematic potential of dance on camera, and one audience member felt like performance videos sully the reputation of screendance and turn people off to the genre.

In Kappenberg's paper she proposes a map for screendance based on the Laban Effort Graphic that distinguishes between works that are oriented towards the visual arts and those that are oriented towards cinema. While it seems like a small thing, this distinction has surprisingly important ramifications on audience members' expectations when watching screendance. The audience on Monday was primarily made up of dancers and dance filmmakers whose expectations were to see works that displayed cinematic values, ie. a distinct camera viewpoint, a narrative arc, and sophisticated editing. If "Snow White Paris" or some of the installation-based videos had been shown in an art museum as they were in Glasgow, the audience response would have been very different. In the visual arts a work's value tends to be based on overall visual composition, documentation (of time-based works) without camera manipulation, and an open point-of-view that leaves more space for the viewer to make decisions and create their own interpretations of the work.

If anything, Monday's screening emphasized for me the importance of curators to help audiences understand where the screendance works they are showing are located on the greater map. Context is everything. We have to assume that audiences will come with expectations and pre-conceived notions about what they will see. It is the curator's job to make sure that their own expectations are made extremely clear, otherwise audiences will not know how to interpret the material presented, and subjective value judgments will continue to fly. I don't believe performance videos like Ann Liv Young's should be excluded from screendance programming, but I do believe that they need to be shown in the right setting and with the right contextual information surrounding them. I'm glad this piece was included in the Chez Bushwick program, and for the discussion and illumination it provided us. Many thanks to the great audience members on Monday, and to Jonah Bokaer, founding director of Chez Bushwick, for bringing us such a provocative and stimulating program!

Let me know what you think! Have you been frustrated by works you've seen at dance film screenings and festivals? Would your feelings about these works have been different in a different setting, ie a gallery or art museum, or installation? 

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 2:24 PM - Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

September 5, 2008

Kinetic Cinema is Back! Monday Sept 8th

I'm very pleased to announce the start of a new season of Kinetic Cinema, with the first screening happening at 8pm on Monday Sept 8th at Chez Bushwick. As you might of heard, our original presenting partner, Collective:Unconscious unexpected lost their space in Tribeca this July when their basement was flooded and they were forced out by their landlord. It is a sad and all too familiar story of endangered affordable art spaces in Manhattan. Luckily Chez Bushwick has stepped in and saved the day for this program, and their director, Jonah Bokaer has curated a fabulous selection of films drawing from Chez Bushwick's constituency of dancers and choreographers.



"PRIME MOVER: Dance on Camera From Chez Bushwick" is a program of works created to represent the diversity of artists working in movement-based media. Filmmakers and choreographers featured on the program will be Charles Atlas, DD Dorvillier, Jillian Peña, Dean Moss, Samuael Topiary, and Ann Liv Young.

Pentacle Movement Media presents:
Kinetic Cinema
in collaboration with Chez Bushwick
Monday September 8th, 8:00pm (and the first Monday of every month)
$5 Admission (buy tix at the door)

Chez Bushwick
304 Boerum St., Buzzer #11
Brooklyn, NY 11206.
Phone: 718.418.4405
URL: http://chezbushwick.net/
Trains: L to Morgan Ave
Admission: $5

In addition, we also wish to recognize and support Jillian Peña, a choreographer and filmmaker on this program who was hit by a car three weeks ago and sustained very serious injuries and hospitalization. The driver was unlicensed, and Jillian, like many artists in our community does not have health insurance. Her dear friend and colleague, Miguel Gutierrez has set up a paypal account to receive financial donations to alleviate the financial hardship that Jillian and her family are experiencing at this time. In addition, there will be opportunities to make donations for her at the screening. Please consider making a donation on her behalf. ANY amount, any number of times that you can give it, will be invaluable for her and for her family.

To donate online, go to paypal.com and sign up for an account (takes literally about 2-3 minutes) and then go to the "Send Money" tab and make the donation to:
donations4jillian@gmail.com

Kinetic Cinema explores the intersection of dance and the moving image both on screen and stage. Each month curator Anna Brady Nuse invites a special guest from the dance community to share the films and videos that have inspired or moved them. These could be films that feature dance, are kinetic-based, or have been influential on their work in some way. The guest curators come from a range of backgrounds as performers, choreographers, critics, and filmmakers. Past programs have included fresh new shorts from the Dance On Camera Festival, a survey of the history of mediatized movement curated by Brian McCormick, dance films from the popular to the avant-garde curated by Malinda Allen, feminist video art curated by Jonah Bokaer, explorations in experimentalism with Levi Gonzalez, and a tour of inspiringly bad dance films curated by Kriota Willberg. Next month on October 6th, dance writer and critic Elizabeth Zimmer will curate.

This screening of Kinetic Cinema also marks the first event of Movement Media, a new project I am directing at Pentacle that provides screenings, consulting services, and online interactive programs for dancers about dance and media. More information will be available soon online at pentacle.org. In addition to producing Kinetic Cinema, Movement Media will soon become the home of Move the Frame. Stay tuned for more announcements!

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