October 21, 2008

Dispatches from EMPAC's Grand Opening Weekend

I've written quite a few posts on this blog about the United State's one and only major supporter of videodance, EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY.

After two years of construction, on October 3rd EMPAC officially opened the doors of their new magnificent state-of-the-art media and performing arts center, and celebrated with two weekends of non-stop performances, screenings, installations and special events. I was lucky enough to be able spend the day on Saturday Oct 4th, seeing this amazing facility for myself. I traveled with a fellow dance filmmaker, Sabine Klaus (aka CreationEditor on dance-tech.net) who was visiting from Scotland. We took in the sights and Sabine recorded much of what she saw on video to create the 25 min vlog post below. Many thanks to Sabine for letting me share it with you here.



The building is a work of art in itself. Designed by the London-based architecture firm, Grimshaw, it is built into the side of a hill overlooking downtown Troy with views of Albany beyond. With its modern glass and steel exterior, and curvey wood interior it looks like both a starship landing dock, and a giant pickle barrel. It was a bit confusing to find one's way around the multitude of theaters, studios and galleries, but by the end of the day I'd gotten my bearings.

In 2007, with the support of a $1 million gift from the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts, EMPAC launched the DANCE MOViES Commission which supports the creation of several new experimental dance films by artists from the Americas each year. The premiere screening of the first DANCE MOViES Commission films took place in the huge Concert Hall space on a gigantic screen. I don't know enough to speak about the great acoustical and technical attributes of this space, but it was awesome to see dance films blown up so big with so much visual and sonic impact!

I thought the pieces that showed off the capabilities of the building the best, however were the interactive installations. The Wooster group made a 360 degree video installation that was supposed to be about life in wartime, but it made a more powerful statement about control and editing, as one viewer in the space, sitting in the "chosen" chair, was able to direct the gaze of the group by swiveling around. Wherever this one person looked, that was the part of the video that was in focus and audible. The piece was masterfully designed to look slipshod and casual, but underneath it was very manipulative, making you feel both in and out of control over the action. I'd love to see more pieces like this, but besides major art museums and institutions like EMPAC, it would be hard to find a place with the technical capabilities to mount it. Another great installation was Billie Cowie's 3-D "In the Flesh" in which viewers don the red and blue glasses to watch a dancer lift herself off of a zebra print rug. Like a ghost being conjured at a séance, it felt creepy to see her delicate hand reaching up to me, almost touching, and then fading away.

All in all, EMPAC is an amazing place for experimental artists, but after visiting I had a few questions about what its real world impact will be. Here in New York City, spaces to make and show experimental dance and media are more scarce than ever. Perhaps Troy and Albany will become a new destination for artists seeking cheap and plentiful real estate with adequate cultural and community benefits to support them, but even in up-state New York, the great disparity between rich and poor is quite striking. EMPAC is really designed for world class artists who already have the capabilities, funding, and expertise to take advantage of the unsurpassed technological resources this facility can provide. This makes sense given their situation at one of the world's most prestigious technical/engineering institutions.

Even in the arts, it seems the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I would just like an empty room with lights and heat to rehearse in, and perhaps a new video camera that can record high quality footage. I'd like to be able to pay my dancers and crew adequate compensation for their time and talents, and I'd like to not have to work three jobs in order to practice my art. There is a big gulf between the gutter most of us live in and the glimmering edifice of EMPAC. We need to create a bridge to be able to reach these glorious technological dreamlands of the future. This means radically rethinking how we build support, create community, and raise the value of our work. EMPAC makes experimental art look valuable and appealing to the wider world, but its up to us artists to raise the quality of our work to match those expectations. This takes many carefully measured steps to cultivate  donor networks, major funders, and presenters whose support will be necessary to reach that glittering gem on the top of the hill.

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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?

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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? 

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July 23, 2008

Artist-driven Curating and How it Could Help Galvanize a Screendance Movement

At the Screendance conference at ADF two weeks ago, I presented a paper that put forth an argument for the value of "artist-driven" curating in developing and galvanizing an art form.  I wanted to propose a way of raising awareness about screendance among dance communities that would help dancers feel like they can enter this art form that is new to them with a set of useable skills and knowledge already in place. In forming a strategy, I drew upon Paulo Friere's concept of praxis from his pivotal book on liberation education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. For Freire, the way to raise consciousness among any group of people is by posing problems. This process of asking questions and raising problems, activates both students and teachers in a dialogue that brings about reflection and leads to future action.  Freire calls this pattern of action-reflection-action praxis, and it is through praxis that people engage in cognitive discovery of their lives that is transformative and empowering. From third world peasants to American dance artists, this process enables people to transform their daily realities and create lives full of meaning.

In my Kinetic Cinema screening series I posed a question to my guest curators from the  NYC dance community, "What films and videos have influenced and inspired your work in dance?" Each curator came up with a completely different way of answering that question, and the works they chose revealed their own unique thinking patterns and artistic processes. Some curators, such as Malinda Allen, chose to curate autobiographical evenings, chronicling their artistic development through pivotal works that have inspired them. Other curators, like Levi Gonzalez, chose to show work that was new to them, and investigate the commonalities and differences between screendance and dance performance. Still others such as Jonah Bokaer and Kriota Willberg, have studied the history of film and video art extensively, and for their programs they decided to delve into very specific areas of research such as feminist video art and the female body, or "bad dance" films.

Judson Dance Theater, photo Elaine Summers
Kinetic Cinema is an example of what I have dubbed "artist-driven" curating, in which artists get together and share works that have meaning to them, often in informal intimate settings. The value of this type of curating is that it sparks artistic dialogue and exchange between the "makers" in a field, which can then lead to new art movements with distinct identities and progressive agendas. There have been numerous artist-driven curating collectives in the past that have had a huge impact upon the development of dance and film. A classic example of artist-driven curating is the Judson Dance Theater that formed in the early sixties as a collective of experimental dance artists interested in pushing the boundaries of post-modern dance. They were given the meeting room of the historical Judson Church to conduct their investigations and present public performances. The work that resulted from these programs went on to fuel the modern dance community for decades to come, with generations of dancers and choreographers spring-boarding off of the ideas and breakthroughs of the original collective.

On the film side, Jean Luc Godard would never have developed his unique and influential style without his competitive and close relationship with fellow French New Wave director, François Truffaut. Although they were very different in many ways, their artistic visions were honed and shaped by the intense dialogue and exchange of ideas they had with each other over many years. The French New Wave was born out of the critical discourse started by writers and cinephiles in the film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma. These writers were seeking a new type of cinema that didn't exist in France at the time, one that married their love of low-brow Hollywood genre flicks, with more experimental, intentional, and referential nuances found in high art, all brought together by their strong vision of the director as auteur. When these writers began acting upon their critiques, and creating work of their own, the French New Wave was born, and gave rise to a new era of filmmaking that completely changed the art form in much the same way the Judson Dance Theater group did for dance.

There have never been more ways for individuals to share and distribute their media content than there are today. With the rise of the internet, and the social media of Web 2.0, today's artist-driven initiatives are less inhibited by distance or financial limitations. Some recent examples of artist-driven projects for screendance on the internet are the social network dance-tech.net founded by NY-based dance media artist, Marlon Barrios-Solano, blogs such as this one, and email lists such as the media-arts-and-dance listserv moderated by Simon Fildes. These online forums are bringing together an international community of dance filmmakers who can interact and share work and ideas with each other easily and instantaneously. The result will be a more unified and cosmopolitan screendance community, where new entrants can feel part of an existing movement.

New art movements and genres don't get made overnight, but in the case of screendance, it is crucial to raise awareness and interest in the dance community. Through curating initiatives that pose questions and engage artists and audiences in dialogue, we can facilitate praxis. This process involves leading artists to examine, critique and analyze dance in media, and also to make work of their own, thereby transforming and shaping the genre and, by extension, the world. Artist-driven curating is one proven way to galvanize an arts community and further the identity of an art movement. These artist-driven initiatives, while often underground and informal, serve as springs that feed into larger institutions, such as dance film festivals, museums/galleries, performance venues, and universities. It is in these small, seemingly insignificant ways, that we can move screendance into cultural prominence, and make dance relevant in today's mediatized world.

Addendum:
I should clarify a few assumptions and opinions I have about dance and "screendance" which came up in discussion after my presentation at the Screendance conference. First, I am coming from a dance background, and ultimately, I want my work in screendance to have a positive effect on the art form of dance in general. I learned while at the conference that this isn't a common position among everyone in the screendance field. Karen Pearlman, a dance filmmaker and co-artistic director of PhysicalTV helped us all tremendously by making a Venn diagram to illustrate the hybridity of screendance at the last Screendance conference in 2006. (see below)


What I learned at the conference is that practitioners of screendance can come from one of three different art areas: dance, film, or visual arts. Everyone's location on the diagram is different and can move around, sometimes overlapping more with dance and visual arts, other times more with film, etc etc...

I shade towards the dance circle, and am biased about wanting screendance to do something for dance in general. Not that it should always serve to directly promote live performance, but rather that I think a vibrant screendance movement can have beneficial impact on live dance performance as well.  I also feel that dance as an art form has suffered and is suffering from a lack of resources and cultural capital (meaning attention and value from the culture at large). I believe that one reason for this poverty of cultural capital for dance is due to the art form's lack of visibility in media (meaning mass reproduced and distributed moving images). After the birth of film in the late 19th century, cultural capital has shifted away from the live performing arts and towards mediated arts, such as film, television, and now broadband video. Unlike music and drama, dance has not developed a recorded media industry around it, and this has left dance artists (for better or for worse) with very few opportunities to reach a mass audience, have an competitive economic engine, or come out from behind the banners of other genres such as music videos, movie musicals, or even commercials.

I'm not interested in being part of a huge dance media industry, however I do see some benefits that other art forms have gained as a result of spawning commercial media juggernauts. Take music for instance. Over the course of 50 years of pop hits and mega record sales in the "Rock & Roll" (and then just "Rock") music genres, there was a huge influx of kids learning to play guitar, forming garage bands, and talking about music. Today, even with the music industry floundering in the digital file-sharing age, the indie music scene is flourishing better than ever with 35 million users on MySpace (many of them musicians or music lovers), magazines, books, radio shows, tv channels, films, documentaries, and blogs that feed a vibrant discussion that most Americans can engage in. Imagine if dance had this kind of relevancy to peoples' lives...Maybe there wouldn't be so many dance critics being laid off, maybe more people would be interested in the difference between modern and post-modern contemporary dance, or maybe dance classes would be as popular as sports in public schools. Being a choreographer would be as cool as being a rock star.... Actually, this is already starting to happen with popular dance competition shows like "So You Think You Can Dance"... But I digress...

So, now you know my agenda, but I'm never going to be a media mogul. I will leave it to other shrewd bean counters to figure out how to squeeze out the dollars and cents from an art form ripe for the picking.  I'm an artist who sees limitless artistic potential for dance in screen-based mediums. Alongside the commercialization of dance screen, I want to see a vibrant exploration by dancers in the dance/film/visual art hybridity called screendance. This is where artist-driven curating comes in. I believe screendance can empower dancers who decide to enter into it. The movement for screendance has been slow to happen in the dance community, and dancers in the United States at least, have not seen media as a tool for artistic empowerment and growth. Despite the rise of dance film festivals around the world, I haven't seen a comparable rise in awareness and understanding about screendance in my own dance community here in New York. The Dance On Camera Festival happens in January when the APAP conference is consuming the attention of most dancers. Even dancers who do get exposed to screendance, and then decide they want to try making a video or film of their own, usually hit a wall when they realize the massiveness of such a task. It's an incredibly steep learning curve to jump from stage to screen, requiring a completely new set of skills and collaborators who understand dance, and there is little support or resources out there for dancers who want to make this leap. What is lacking is funding for production and creative development, distributors, classes, mentorship, critical writing, and even a central repository of knowledge or easily accessible catalogue of films to look at.

Things are definitely improving however, and as I listed above, there are numerous new artist-driven initiatives that are springing up on web-based media platforms. I hope that local movements also continue to grow and multiply. I would love to see artist-driven curating collectives spring up in other cities around the US and the world. It doesn't take much to do, you just need a space, a projector and some friends to get started. Pick a question and try to answer it visually. Share what inspires you and talk about why. Have a dinner party and cater the films. In whatever fashion, we all have the ability to participate in the discussion, and help shape this unique art form of screendance into a vibrant cultural phenomenon.

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July 18, 2008

Report on Screendance:State of the Art 2 at ADF

I'm finally home after several weeks on the road, crossing the country and then heading south for the second Screendance: State of the Art conference at the American Dance Festival. The topic for this year's conference was CURATING THE PRACTICE/CURATING AS PRACTICE. There were about 20 registered participants, coming from all over the US and Europe, and we were a good mix of artist/makers, teacher/scholars, and curators. While some of the old topics came up (like what is the definition of screendance?) the presence of the over-arching theme of curating helped guide many of the discussions into new territory, and keep us on topic.

Douglas Rosenberg, a filmmaker, scholar, and organizer of the conference started off the proceedings with a lecture about the history of curating as it arose out of the visual arts field and how this practice has gradually slipped by the wayside with the rise of the festival model in screendance. He spoke about the original premise of curating in the art world as a means of creating meaning by grouping different works of art together. This combination of art works creates a meta-narrative between the pieces and can serve to support a thesis about the art put forth by the curator. In this way curating can help shape new ideas in art.

I appreciated learning about  how curating differs from "programming", which is generally how dance film festivals work. For a long time I've felt dissatisfied by the programs at festivals, particularly the shorts programs, because they can be such a grab bag of films that seem to have nothing to do with each other. Usually these programs are billed as the "best" new dance films of the year, with the dubious value judgment of "best" being the only unifying theme. With no other underlying meaning to connect the films together, I as a viewer often find myself feeling disappointed when the films fall short of my expectations of what "the best" dance film should be. I leave most screenings feeling like the vast majority of screendance is boring and uninspired, when in reality, I just didn't have enough context to view them under.

Helping to illustrate this difference between curating and programming, there were several curated screenings during the conference as well as screenings that were part of the "Dancing for the Camera" festival. One of these curated programs was put together by Claudia Kappenberg, an artist and scholar from the University of Brighton and was entitled "Paradoxical Bodies." In her program notes Kappenberg described "Paradoxical Bodies" as seeking "to address the peculiar premise of real bodies on screen, in itself a paradoxical proposition, which mixes and purposefully confounds mental states and actual physical existence." With this introduction we watched seven experimental films that were often oblique and seemed to float in the timeless space of ritual. The program included ELEMENT (1973) by Amy Greenfield, HWRGAN (BY THE LATE HOUR) (2006) by Simon Whitehead, K (1989) by Jayne Parker, THE NIGHTINGALE (2003) by Grace Ndiritu, SAND LITTLE SAND (2006) by Becky Edmunds, IT IS ACHING LIKE BIRDS by Lucy Baldwin, and SPRUE (2004) by The 5 Andrews. Most of these films have never been shown in dance film festivals before, either because they are not generally considered "dance", or they are not the typical show pieces that would past muster with a festival's judging panel. Despite their challenging and experimental nature, I was captivated by this program. After Kappenberg's introductory statements I was prepared to grapple with the paradoxes, ambivalence, and alternative notions of the body put forth in these films, and I was freed from having to compare them to my usual standards of what's "good" and "bad". Instead, I appreciated them for what they each said to me within the framework of the program's topic.

In contrast to Kappenberg's curated program, Sini Haapalinna, a freelance artist from Finland, presented a program of shorts from her first curation for the Finnish dance film festival "Beyond the Lens" which sought to show a snapshot of "the state of the art" of Finnish screendance. This was a good example of the usual festival model of programming, which culls work from an open call for entries, and then seeks to show the best ones of the group. While it was probably meaningful for Finnish audiences to see what work is being made in their own country, for an international group of screendance experts gathered in North Carolina, the program seemed jumbled and out of context. The works were all over the map in terms of style, production value, content, and intention. The result was a muddy program that had some nice isolated moments, but was somehow lesser than the sum of its parts. While Haapalinna probably didn't get the reaction she was hoping for from the conference attendants, it was actually really useful and informative for us to see this kind of program in light of the curation model Rosenberg had just presented. Finally we were able to critically respond to the festival model of programming, and articulate about why it isn't as effective as it could be at promoting and advancing screendance to the public.

In my next couple of posts, I'll talk about my presentation on "artist-driven" curating, and summarize some of the other discussions that went on at the conference including a theory for mapping screendance by Kappenberg, how a curator's role is always political by Gita Wigro, and a modified Venn diagram for curators of screendance proposed by Martha Curtis.

To be continued!

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June 27, 2008

Summer Travels and Videodance

I'm about to start a twelve day cross-country road trip, driving from West to East with one of my best friends who's moving back to Vermont. We'll be stopping at a bunch of national parks along the way including Crater Lake (OR), Glacier (MT), Yellowstone & the Grand Tetons (WY), and the Blackhills & the Badlands (SD). It's gonna be great, but I won't be able to post to Move the Frame for a while. There are lots of videodance activities happening around the world this summer, so I thought I'd leave you with a few things to keep you busy while I'm MIA.

As soon as I get back to New York, I will be leaving again, this time to go to the Screendance conference at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC from July 10-13th, where I will be delivering a paper on curating. Below is the abstract for my presentation, which is titled after a post I wrote here a few months ago.

Thoughts on Curating - How to Bring About a Shift in Perception

Screendance, while growing as a genre worldwide, is still basically unknown in American culture at large. Even within the field of dance, most choreographers and dancers in the United States believe they are unable to name a single work of screendance. The problem is that so much dance for screen is perceived to be part of another genre, be it music videos, advertisements, or experimental films. Screendance as a genre is a foreign concept to the typical viewer, but only a slight shift of perception is necessary to render it familiar and identifiable. To help bring about this shift in perception in my own dance community, I have started a monthly screening series in which I invite guest artists to curate evenings of films and videos that have inspired their work with dance. In compiling their programs, my guest curators discover the knowledge they already have about media and dance and are able to share their insights in ways that other dancers can easily relate to. This simple curated series has raised awareness for the genre in my community and is laying a seed bed for future creativity and experimentation in the form. Like the Judson Dance Theater, Jonas Mekas' New American Cinema Group, and more recently Richard Linklater's Austin Film Society, forming an artist-driven curating collective for screendance has the ability to galvanize a community, inspire new work, and further the boundaries of the art form.

Those of you who have followed my blog for a while will recognize my thought processes on curating as I've written extensively about them in my posts about the Kinetic Cinema screening series for the past six months. I'm excited to listen and talk to the other presenters at the conference this year about this very important topic for videodance.

The other presentations at the conference will be:
"Screendance: Curating the Practice" (Opening Talk by Douglas Rosenberg)
 "Does Screendance Need to Look Like Dance?" by Claudia Kappenberg, Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK.
 "Tutus and Bonfires" by Gitta Wigro, a freelance programmer from the UK.
 "Beyond the Lens III" Sini Haapalinna, a freelance artist from Finland.

Also Meredith Monk will be honored for her work in film and give an intimate discussion with the Screendance participants. There will also be two curated programs during the conference in addition to the Dancing for the Camera Festival taking place at the same time, which is open to the public.

If you can't get down to North Carolina this summer, then those of you in Europe should head to the Cinedans Festival taking place July 3-10th in Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.

From the Cinedans website:

This sixth edition of the Cinedans has an exclusive collection of national and international dance films in store for you. Films from a new generation of dance film makers will be screened from over fifteen countries. Six documentaries allow you a glance into the dance kitchen of locally operating dancers or internationally renowned choreographers and William Forsythe and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker compiled a varied selection of their favorite dance films. In addition, Forsythe presents filminstallations, exciting crossovers of performance, film, dance and installation.

Janine Dijkmeijer, the director of Cinedans and Annelyke van den elshout, the program manager, were both at the first Kinetic Cinema screening in January as part of the Dance On Camera Festival. I was happy to see that they have started their own artist curating initiative this summer with their Carte Blanche program, in which they asked choreographers William Forsythe and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to put together an evening of films and videos that have been influential on them personally and artistically. These kinds of artist-driven curating programs are so easy to do, and they give such wonderful results in terms of generating interest, dialog and connections for artists and viewers alike. I'm glad the idea is spreading, and I wish I could be there to see these programs! If anyone reading this is able to go, please send me your report and impressions!

Finally, I'm happy to report that I will be finishing production on a new videodance this summer called Fünf 'n' Twist. There will be many more postings about the creative process of making this work in the near future. In the meantime, you can watch a study of the ending of this piece that we made last spring here in HD on Vimeo!

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June 24, 2008

A Review of the 'Worse of the Best' at Kinetic Cinema

Latika Young of the Dance Films Association wrote a great article about Kriota Willberg's last program for Kinetic Cinema in DFA's member ezine:

The Worst of the Best:
Kinetic Cinema Gets Down

by Latika Young

Before taking a hiatus for the summer, Kinetic Cinema, the dance films screening series curated by Anna Brady Nuse, went out with a bang! "The Worst of the Best," a night of "bad" dance film, as selected by guest curator Kriota Willberg, featured an array of clips and excerpts that had the audience at Tribeca's Collective:Unconscious in stitches. With everything from undulating nude males to jete-ing serial killers to an over-the-top 80s spandex extravaganza, there was something in the selection to please even the most well-versed bad dance connoisseur.

The night began with a little live dance, as Nuse exploded onto the stage in a frenetic version of the classic dance from "Flashdance" complete with gold metallic hot pants and matching shoes. A perfect entrance, it warmed up the audience's belly laughing muscles and set the tone for an evening of the dance cliché as encapsulated on film.

Willberg, co-director of THE BENTFOOTES, which premiered at Dance on Camera Festival 2008, has been interested in bad dance for some time. She used to host bad dance film screening parties at her apartment for fellow dancer and choreographer friends (what better way to build a supportive dance community--we may be struggling in our own careers, but at least we are not making dance like that!).

Willberg developed somewhat tricky criteria that determined her selections for this "tour of surprisingly bad dance films from the early 1900s to the present." As she explains, there is a difference between "bad" dance and just "boring" dance. Bad dance necessarily "provokes a strong emotional reaction" in the audience, and, as Willberg points out, these are more often than not the dances people end up discussing fervently with friends. Boring dance, on the other hand, "is just dull" and is easily forgotten. Where it gets tricky is with the question of production values. For Willberg, even boring dance, with a big enough budget, becomes bad dance by virtue of the unrealized potential of its grandiosity. Any otherwise boring dance film with a large enough budget enrages Willberg to the point that it has elicited a strong emotional response and thus qualifies as a truly bad dance.

The screening began with a video montage of clips culled from the internet of dances intended to demonstrate "boring." All low production value, the clips may have come from YouTube or artists' personal websites, but they certainly were not from Hollywood blockbusters. The original videos likely go on for what must feel like many very long minutes, but edited down into a quickly paced montage, they were not really that boring after all. Instead, the curatorial process of cramming them side by side and positing them into humorously crafted sub-categories, such as "Women and Their Hands," "Semi-Clad Undulating Duets," and my personal favorite, "Nude Men Kinetically Recumbent," highlighted their humor rather than their boredom. Fortunately, though, the audience was saved from having to watch any of the clips in their entirety. Anyone who has sat on a dance film festival pre-screening committee can undoubtedly understand.

The bulk of the offerings, however, were clips from films released on the big screen and each example was selected to provide a more nuanced understanding of Willberg's definition of bad. The gem of the night, glittering in decadent ridiculousness, was Ben Hecht's 1946 film SPECTRE OF THE ROSE. Choreographed by Tamara Geva, Balanchine's first wife, the two dance scenes presented were performed by Ivan Kirov. An attempt to combine a murder mystery with classical ballet, the result, at least to modern eyes, comes across more as camp than refinement. In the first scene, the male ballet superstar (Kirov) has been confined to bed for two years after killing his first wife. Suddenly feeling better, he is inspired to dance, performing ebullient feats of jete and pirouette that are made that much more incredible (and farcical) considering his extended period of inactivity (perhaps, instead, we should feel relieved he did not join the ranks of the "kinetically recumbent nude male" as we witnessed earlier). The second scene has our star re-entering a state of insanity and struggling with his desires to kill his second wife. Fortunately, derangement does not deter our protagonist from his dancing tour de force and, with knife in hand, he catapults about the room, balletically crashing into walls, before leaping with pointed feet through a glass window, to his certain death below. This is a bad dance film made so by both its delicious anachronistic ballet moves (likely quite magnificent for the time but which seem highly dated to the modern viewer) and its equally ridiculous backstory.

Other choices from the evening included THE MOTHERING HEART, the 1913 D.W. Griffith film that features background dancers, undoubtedly quite common on the vaudeville stage of the time, who appear as gallivanting Isadora-nymphettes and a leopard skin toga-ed couple who awkwardly perform Lindy aerial moves, STAYING ALIVE, the sequel to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, as directed by Sylvester Stallone (and, yes, Travolta does wear a very Rambo-eque headband), and scenes from the film everyone loves to hate, Paul Verhoeven's 1995 SHOWGIRLS, which is just bad in so many divine ways.

Willberg wants to know, "What is the worst dance film ever?" To share your favorites, or most hated, e-mail her at info@duramater.org and be sure to tell her why. After a summer break, Kinetic Cinema returns in October. E-mail Anna Brady Nuse at mtf@straighttothehelicopter.com to get on the mailing list.

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June 5, 2008

Bad Dance, Good Cinema, and Why It's All Better Than Boring

Kriota Willberg's program, "The Worst of the Best" for Kinetic Cinema Monday night was extremely entertaining. She proved beyond a doubt that examining truly bad dance film is fun, inspiring, and highly effective at eliciting an emotional response from the crowd.

For all of you who thought about or responded to Kriota's earlier online poll "What's the Worse Dance Film Ever" you may be interested to see what made the cut in the end. Here is the list of the films she discussed Monday night and a short summary of why they were chosen:

The Mothering Heart (1913), Dir: DW Griffith
Reason: MADE BAD AND STRANGE BY HISTORY

Spectre of the Rose (1946), Dir: Ben Hecht, Dancer: Ivan Kirov, Chor: Tamara Geva
Reason: MADE WORSE BY THE BACKSTORY
 
Torch Song (1953), Dir: Charles Walters, Dancer: Joan Crawford and ensemble, Chor: Charles Walters
Reason: OFFENSIVE = BAD (Cast was in black face in 1953!!)

Staying Alive (1983), Dir: Sylvester Stallone, Dancers: John Travolta, Finola Hughes, Cynthia Rhodes, Chors:  Dennan and Sayhber Rawles
Reason: DRAMA!!!!

Center Stage (2000), Dir: Nicholas Hytner, Dancers: Amanda Schull, Sascha Radetsky, Ethan Stiefel, and ensemble, Chor: Susan Strohman
Reason: THE SAFE CHOICES AREN'T ALWAYS THE BEST CHOICES

Showgirls (1995), Dir: Paul Verhoeven, Dancers: Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon and ensemble, Chor: Marguerite Pomerhn-Derricks
Reason: DRAMATIC! OFFENSIVE!  MADE WORSE BY BACKSTORY!

Preceding the bad dance films, Kriota also discussed the difference between BAD and BORING and illustrated it with a montage of boring dance film and video clips she culled from the web (actually her poor assistant, Gretchen culled them from the web!). The interesting thing about the difference between bad and boring is that it often comes down to money. Apparently the "have nots" aren't really capable of making truly bad art, only dull art. As Kriota explained, when a filmmaker has over a million dollars to make a dance movie, and it turns out to be boring, then we are outraged, "Is that all that you could do?" and that automatically bumps it into the bad category. Whereas when a low budget video of, say, a naked man flapping around on the floor in a puddle goes on and on, it's just dull and we feel like we are wasting our time.

I'd never thought of this difference before, but in terms of my emotional response it's true, I'm more outraged by a squandering of resources and opportunities than watching a boring video on YouTube. I guess jealousy has a big role to play in what makes something bad or just boring, which is also proof positive of the irrationality behind all demarcations of good and bad. Who can really judge these things beyond a reasonable doubt? No one, but at least Kriota has taken a stab at defining her standards for judgment, something all of us curators, presenters, and critics should do!

Amy Greenfield, a cine- and videodance pioneer, was also in attendance Monday night and had some interesting insights to share...

"Thoughts on Monday. Great premise btw  - most thought-provoking program so far. That's GREAT.  BAD ISN'T BORING!

It was also so enjoyable because except for the boring tapes, cinematically this "bad" filmdance was the best cinema of the season - Hollywood films! I love the contradiction and feel it needs to be recognized. Also realized Monday that "dance people" and "laypeople" looking at them will have very different reactions cause most people look at the film as film first, and in context with the rest of the film as they were features. Yeats asked 'How do you tell the dancer from the dance?' Monday night's delightful, insightful show made me ask 'How do you tell the cinema from the dance?'

Some of my own thoughts on Monday PM: 
I've seen The Mothering Heart and it's an important silent film by the great film pioneer, DW Griffith. I love the film and never noticed the dance moment screened. The actress in the foreground is Lilian Gish, one of the great silent film actresses. Notice her restraint vs the dance. Lilian and her sister Dorothy were sent by Griffith to study dance at Denishawn. The ACTING in these films was good filmdance. (What's good filmdance and whats good dance put on film is there a difference?) Griffith used Denishawn dancers including Martha Graham in his masterpiece, Intolerance.

Ben Hecht who made Specter of the Rose was one of the great Hollywood screenwriters who obviously didn't know anything about dance. The dance in Spectre massacred influences from Deren's Study In Choreography For Camera and more especially Cocteau's Blood Of The Poet. The two 'good film good dance' moments had to do with real action, and the film actor's dictum - don't act, re-act: when the dancer lays down the knife at the sleeping woman's neck, and when he lept out the window, shattering the glass and going into non-existence as Nijinsky did on stage. That last moment was GREAT and worth all the previous BAD dancing.

Staying Alive was REALLY good cinema and I didn't think it was bad dance either though I just couldn't separate the film from the dance until the unfortunately stupid climax which went over the top - and tellingly, was the only part not shot close-up, fast cuts, and wasn't such excellent cinema.

The Stroman [Center Stage] was bad dance and bad cinema. Interesting how bad cinema can ruin good dance by Amanda Schull."

Amy

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May 22, 2008

New NYC Videodance Artists and Events

There is a well-spring of videodance activity bubbling up in New York City recently. It seems like every day I see or hear of a new artist or event happening. In the next few posts I'll give a run down of the latest news, and will share more in the coming weeks.



NYC Dance Artists in Kinetic Cinema
First, a report of the Kinetic Cinema screening that happened on May 5th, curated by Levi Gonzalez. This screening was eye-opening for me, because I didn't realize there were so many choreographers in my midst that are working in video so extensively now. The evening included videos by Sarah White, Melanie Maar, Theo Angell, Yasuko Yokoshi, Hedia Maron, and ChameckiLerner.
Sarah White's "Interference" is an experimental study on perspective showing two people moving at the junction of a wall. Sometimes the camera is upside down, making it look like the duet is on the ceiling, other times it is right side up and superimposed with the upside down image to create a quartet. The piece has a very consistent and almost relentless quality: the only sound is the constant drip of water, the image is grainy and blown out, and the space gritty. I liked the feeling of the piece, but it was a little long and rambling for a sit down screening. It could probably work well in an installation setting.

Melanie Maar's "Lower" is a video adaptation by filmmaker Eric Breitbart of a live solo piece she performs. The solo is about a rare psychosomatic brain disorder that makes movement disjointed and uncontrollable. For the video, Breitbart decided to depict Maar as the silent film Vamp, Theda Bara (see picture). The combination of the severe black & white Theda Bara character with Maar's quirky and spastic movement was surprisingly poignant and emotional.

Theo Angell's video "Piscean Anomalite" was inspired by mutant and deformed fish he saw while on an artistic retreat in the wilderness. The resulting film is beautifully constructed with haunting Native American chanting, images of rushing water, and disturbing shots of the mutant fish superimposed over moving human bodies. It was eery but cool...

Yasuko Yokoshi showed a 20 min documentary of her latest performance project "Reframe the Framework DDD", which was made and shot over two years with nine high school students from Brattleboro, VT and was recently performed at the Kitchen at the end of April. Now I really wish I had seen the performance, because the documentary was completely riveting. Yokoshi set out to remake David Gordon's 1984 piece "Framework" and place it in the context of today from the perspective of the Vermont teens. Every moment of their process was documented on video, and the candid drama of their everyday lives, emotional upheavals, and sometimes life-threatening concerns felt heart-breakingly real. Part of the emotional thrust of the piece comes from the self-consciousness of the participants. The strange set of circumstances that brought a downtown experimental dance artist from Japan to work with rural teens is not lost on the participants, in fact it's discussed openingly and thoroughly. At one point Yokoshi says to the girls "I'm not afraid to piss you off." And one of the girls asks Yokoshi "Why did you want to make this piece with us?" Over the course of the process everyone undergoes an amazing transformation of self-awareness and discovery, routing through pain and fear and coming out stronger and more mature in the end. This is a brilliant example of the positive aspects of experimentalism.

Hedia Maron's "Untitled" and "Dance Dance Dance" both looked like artifacts found in someone's attic. "Untitled" actually was found footage of a friend's mom performing with a dance company outdoors sometime in the '70's. The grainy 8mm film is silent, and seems like a strange flickering beacon from the past. "Dance Dance Dance" was shot by Maron in 2007 on 8mm black and white film, and depicts a modern club kid dancing in his dorm room in stocking feet. Again, the footage is messed up to look old and grainy, and in silence, making the familiar YouTube-esque scene look distant, like a strange relic from bygone days.

The final piece of the evening was Roseane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner's "Flying Lesson" made in conjunction with filmmaker Phil Harder. This piece was shown in January at the Dance on Camera Festival where it won the Jury Prize, and if you have seen it you will understand why it deserves major props. The film has a simple plot, two women show you how to fly, but the way to do it is extremely difficult. All you need is a still camera, and very strong legs, because you will need to jump about 10,000 times and take a picture at the top of each jump. Then you go to an editing studio and put all the picture frames together to make them animated (film rate is 24 frames/sec, video rate is 30 frames/sec), and viola! you are flying! Chamecki & Lerner make it seem easy with their cute wings and colored boots breezing up the city sidewalks and frolicking in the park, but trust me, don't try this at home!

Stay tuned for up-coming events, new submission opportunities, workshops, social networks, and more great things for videodance artists to take advantage of here in New York City!

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May 7, 2008

Godard and Waters do the Madison

There is something about the Madison, that grand-daddy of line dances, that has continually captured the cinematic fancy of great film directors. The most notable of these are Jean-Luc Godard who created a famous dance scene based on the Madison in his 1964 film Bande à Part, and John Waters who depicted the dance in a scene in the original 1988 Hairspray. For both directors this dance, with its post-modern use of repetition, accumulation, and cultural references, was a perfect vehicle to suspend the plotlines of their films and delve into the inner workings of their characters.


Dance scene from Bande à Part


In Bande à Part, the famous dance scene comes after the equally famous "minute of silence" scene in which two of the main characters, Arthur and Odile, decide to be silent in a café. After the silent spell is broken by Franz, Arthur and Odile decide to get up and dance (and are soon joined by Franz). In a way, this dance continues the pause begun earlier with the minute of silence. There has been a rent in action, the world is still not normal. People do not normally just get up and dance in cafes where no one else is dancing. Also, we don't know if there is actually music playing in the room because it drops out occasionally when a narrator speaks, but we still hear the dancers' foot shuffles and claps. Could they actually be dancing in silence? At the same time, the narrator's voice brings in yet another level of reality as he tells us what each character is thinking about while they dance. This scene, while appearing to be so simple, is actually a very sophisticated example of how film can reveal many layers of reality at once. We see the "normal" world of the cafe around the characters, the familiar dance style of the The Madison being performed out of context, and then the shifting reality of the sound and narration telling us about things we can't see. No wonder this scene has been so influential on numerous other movies, Hal Hartley's dance scene in Simple Men being a prime example.


Dance scene from Simple Men


Unlike many other filmmakers that made dance scenes in the footsteps of Godard, Waters' Madison scene in Hairspray was a completely different take. First of all, Waters is a connoisseur of '60's dances. In addition to bringing the Madison back to greatness, he also reacquainted us with "The Mashed Potato," "The Fly," and "The Bump." It is clear however, that "The Madison" was one of his favorites, by virtue of the length of the scene and the many variations lovingly depicted.


Excerpt of the Madison scene in Hairspray

Like Godard's scene in Bande à Part, this one takes a long and sultry pause in the action and we learn a little more about how the characters really feel. The heroine, Tracy Turnblad cuts in between Link Larson (her love interest) and the prissy Amber von Tussle (Link's girlfriend). Link shows interest in Tracy, and Amber shoots her with disdain. All the while, the hypnotic rhythm and swing of the dance continues, turning the characters about and giving them actions which belie their feelings and motivations. I love the choreography of this Madison. It's complex but supposed to look easy. The call of the DJ instructs the dancers about what to do next, and each repetition of the dance adds a new gesture. The names of the moves are really great too, including "T time", "The Basketball (with Wilt Chamberlain)" and the "The Rifleman".

According to Wikipedia and the Columbus Music History website, the Madison developed in Columbus, Ohio in 1957. It was popularized by Count Basie in 1959, and quickly spread as he toured across the US and Europe. Apparently Waters' depiction of the dance is accurate, and Godard's is not (although he never calls it the Madison in the film, that was just what the actors called it). Nevertheless, it is clear that this dance has a certain something that is especially well suited for the silver screen. Maybe it's the mesmerizing repetition, or its ability to unify a motley cast of characters, or maybe it's just 'cause it swings, but whatever the case the Madison has been a catalyst for new innovations in film, and has undoubtedly inspired many generations of filmmakers to use dance in novel and sophisticated ways.



This article is part of Ferdy On Films' Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon happening May 4-10, 2008 all over the blogosphere...

Many thanks to Levi Gonzalez whose program at Kinetic Cinema on Monday night (5/5/08) inspired me to write about Godard's dance scene in Bande à Part.

*********************
Update 5/22/08:
Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders) is playing at Film Forum in NYC this weekend - Thurs-Sat 5/22-5/24. Click here for ticket info.

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May 5, 2008

A Great Week for Dance Film Lovers (especially in NYC)

Yes, that's right! There is a lot going on this week that you should know about...

Screening:
First, you won't want to miss Kinetic Cinema tonight (5/5) curated by downtown dance fav Levi Gonzalez. Levi has brought out a bunch of friends to share cutting edge dance videos and talk about experimentalism in dance and film. Come see new videodances by Melanie Maar, Sarah White, Theo Angell, Yasuko Yokoshi, Hedia Maron, ChameckiLerner, and much more! 

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April 29, 2008

Levi Gonzalez at Kinetic Cinema May 5th

On Monday May 5th at 7:30 pm, Kinetic Cinema will feature choreographer and dance artist, Levi Gonzalez. The theme of his evening will be experimentalism in dance and film. I'm delighted by his topic, and feel like it may be a good way to continue a debate on this blog several months ago, in which I railed against experimental dance artists dissing their audiences.

Levi's statement:

"Experimentalism in both dance and film is often seen as an affront to its audience or an insular exercise in personal indulgence. Yet the perception of experimental work is fluid - it often changes with time, and each time period re-evaluates past work in a different light. It also has the power to change or highlight perception over time as the ideas filter, and become digested into the public consciousness. I find that experimentalism often runs the gamut from difficult to pleasant, angry to accessible, deeply introspective to communicative, self-involved to incredibly vulnerable. In short, no monolithic definition applies. This evening will highlight just a few strategies of experiementalism in the overlapping areas of dance and film - some that have occurred in the past and some that are currently being undertaken by contemporary artists - in an effort to point out the divergent approaches artists take in questioning their mediums and the myriad ways they affect our perceptions."

 A highlight of the evening will be a special screening of ChameckiLerner's "Flying Lesson", winner of the 2008 Dance On Camera Festival Jury Prize.

>> Also in celebration of Cinco de Mayo - be one of the first 10 people in the door and get a free Corona! <<

Kinetic Cinema
Monday May 5th, 7:30pm (and the first Monday of every month)
$5 Admission (buy tix at the door)

@ Collective:Unconscious
279 Church Street (just south of White Street)
New York, NY 10013
Trains: 1 to Franklin; A, C, E to Canal
Phone: 212.254.5277

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. Upcoming guests include Levi Gonzalez (May 5th) and Kriota Willberg (June 2nd).

Finally, many thanks to all who completed the Move the Frame survey online. If you haven't taken it yet, it's still not too late! Click here to spend 5 minutes helping Move the Frame improve!

¡Hasta La Vista!

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April 15, 2008

Miss Behavior: Video Art and the Female Body at Kinetic Cinema

What I love the most about my guest-curated Kinetic Cinema series is that I'm constantly exposed to new art and ideas I would never have run across otherwise. Last Monday's (4/7) program was no exception. Jonah Bokaer, dancer, choreographer, media artist, and community-builder extraordinaire surprised even me, by scrapping his original program of Nam June Paik videos, to show an evening completely devoted to feminist video art from the 60's and 70's, entitled "Miss Behavior: Video Art and the Female Body."

I only wish I'd had more time and resources to market and promote this evening, because it is so fascinating, rare, and exceptional to see works by such luminaries as Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, and Hannah Wilke. It was a bold choice for Jonah, as a male dancer and media artist, to dedicate his evening to the accomplishments and advances of women in the male-dominated video art world. It was also a very interesting program show to an audience of dance people, who come from a field shaped by a very different gender dynamic from media arts. In media arts, the numbers of women participating are just generally low, however in dance, the gender diagram is shaped like a pyramid with a majority of females making up the base as dancers, students and teachers, and an increasing concentration of males populating the limited positions at the top (DanceNYC, "The Gender Project", Updated Research 2003). While women are not a rarity in the dance world, female leadership and artistic success (as measured by touring, commissions, and funding) is, given the huge ratio of women to men in the field.

Issues of the female body are also a constant undercurrent in dance performance. During the time period of the videos in this program, the dance world was undergoing its own post-modern investigations, and it seemed that choreographers and performers were trying to question and challenge all the common associations of the dancing body, particularly a female one, with sex, suggestiveness, and sensuality. Could a body be just a machine, or an object like any other prop? Could a female body be a blank slate, like a male body is? Are the bounds of femininity and gender stereotypes something to push against and destroy, or revel in and enunciate? The videos shown on Monday addressed these same questions from a number of different angles.

Dara Birnbaum's Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) was an early precursor to the common YouTube mash-up video of today. Using what was cutting edge video editing technology of the day, she spliced together hundreds of clips of Lynda Carter's TV character twirling into and out of her Wonder Woman persona. At the end of the video, a sexy disco song about Wonder Woman plays while plain typed lyrics scroll up on a blue screen, seeming to ironically underscore the song's suggestiveness. Jonah described how Birnbaum encourages her work to be pirated and played in different contexts including clubs, theatres, and installations. The work is still remarkably fresh and fun even now, and this makes sense when you think about the fact that Birnbaum has been embracing the web 2.0 spirit for over 30 years!

Here is a very short clip from Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman:





Joan Jonas' Duet from 1972, is a performance-based video documenting a vocal duet between Jonas and her screen double. The two women howl like wolves at the moon, with the live Jonas' face in profile in front of a tv screen of her luminous face in extreme close-up. If viewed on its own, I may not have read this video from a feminist perspective, but given that the entire program was about women in video art, I started to think about "bitches" as slang for women and female dogs, and the archetypal connection of the moon with the female principle. The piece did not imply anything good or bad, it was simply an interesting composition that invited many interpretations and possible meanings.

Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) shows how powerful simple task-based compositions can be. Delivered with deadpan wit, Rosler methodically goes through the alphabet showing and demonstrating common kitchen objects "Apron, Bowl, Chopper...". Despite the familiar surroundings, Rosler's kitchen is not warm and cozy. Instead she imbues each object with danger and violence through gestures that turn them into weapons rather than cooking implements. For "Chopper" she picks up a hand chopper and violently bangs it down into the bowl. For "knife" she picks up a long carving knife and jabs it sharply towards the camera. Even "spoon" isn't an implement to feed, instead she scoops up invisible liquid and hurls it out to the side. I love double meanings, and in this case Rosler juxtaposes gesture with words to break-down our assumptions and associations with women's work and the domestic realm.

When I think of Carolee Schneemann, the first thing that comes to mind is her famous Interior Scroll piece in which she pulled a scroll from her vagina and read a report of sexism. Beyond that, I know little about what else she has done. For this program Jonah selected a video that was neither erotic nor sexual. It was a 10 min 16mm film of a performance she did at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery called Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mah Wah, NJ) (1966) in which the filmmaker was one of the performers. The result is a fragmented chaotic film of a performance that involved 8 tightrope walkers suspended over the ground and lots of paper and detritus everywhere. What I liked about it was the impression it gave of what it must have felt like to be inside the piece. With its inside view, the camera was able to convey the essence of the work - instability, tenuousness, balance - rather than capture a cold, impersonal document of the performance.

The last piece of the program, Through the Large Glass (1976) by Hannah Wilke was the most sexual in content, and for that reason perhaps still the most controversial today. In this film, Wilke performs a strip tease behind Marcel Duchamp's famous Large Glass, also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. I didn't know the alternate title of Duchamp's work, and was glad Jonah mentioned it in his introduction, because by knowing this reference it made Wilke's performance a bold commentary on female objectification in Western art. Dressed in a white pants suit with a white fedora hat, Wilke struck different poses as she undressed, alternating between personas and genders. To me she was representing both the bride and the bachelors, sometimes feminine and coy, other moments defiant and haughty. Throughout the piece her gaze was fixed out on us, the audience on the other side of the glass (and the camera), making me feel like a subject as well. Generating a feeling of self-consciousness on the part of the viewer seemed to be the objective of Wilke's piece, and as a result it called attention to the male point-of-view implicit in most other Western art.

I'm very happy Jonah shared these works, and I hope there will be more chances to examine feminist motif's in Kinetic Cinema in the future. Many thanks to EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix) for access to these films, as well as Chez Bushwick and the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts for support of this screening.

Next month at Kinetic Cinema - Levi Gonzalez on May 5th with a program on "What makes a dance or film experimental?"

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March 18, 2008

Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon May 4-10

Dance bloggers and dance film lovers everywhere, mark your calendars now for the first ever Dance Movie Blogathon happening May 4-10, 2008!

I can't claim credit for this great idea, that honor goes to Marilyn Ferdinand who publishes the Ferdy on Films, etc. blog. She is organizing this fabulous event to bring awareness to the important contributions dance has made to cinema since its beginnings from Edison's Serpentine Dance to the latest Hollywood dance hits like Step Up 2: The Streets.

In her announcement post Ferdy writes:

Ferdy on Films, etc. is proud to host the Invitation to the Dance Movie Blogathon, May 4 through May 10. The last day of the blogathon just happens to be the birthday of one of the greatest dancers ever to grace the silver screen--Fred Astaire. Contributions on that date that discuss Astaire are particularly welcome. Please RSVP to ferdyonfilms@comcaust.net. Link to this page before the event and to Ferdy on Films, etc. during the week of the blogathon.

I will be churning out posts about my favorite dance on screen moments, and you should too! Spread the word and the link to the Ferdy on Films, etc. blog.

Here's a little clip of Fred from Puttin' on the Ritz to get you ready.

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March 10, 2008

Thoughts on Curating - How to Bring About a Shift in Perception

This summer the American Dance Festival (ADF) will be hosting the second Screendance - State of the Art  conference. Once again dance filmmakers, curators, educators, and critics will come together on the Duke University campus to discuss the art form and exchange ideas. This year's topic is curating and its relationship to screendance. I'm quite passionate about this topic, so I can't resist taking a stab at  a paper proposal to submit to the conference. The deadline for paper proposals is April 11, 2008. For more info, click here.

I credit almost all of my understanding of what screendance is, to watching curated programs at various dance film festivals. The genre is very hard to describe, because dance for the camera could mean anything really. The very definition of film and video is moving pictures, and dancing is only a slightly more specific word for moving. Creating special programs of films that are organized around a specific idea helps to provide a lens for viewing work in a different way. By grouping films under a new name, you can embue them with meanings they didn't necessary have before. For instance if I put clips of Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates, and Maya Deren's Ritual In Transfigured Time all together in a program entitled "Films as Visual Poetry, Great Symbolist Poets of the Silver Screen," what happens to the way you look at these films?


Films as Visual Poetry: Great Symbolist Poets of the Silver Screen

clip from "Mystery Train" by Jim Jarmusch



clip from "The Color of Pomegranates" by Sergei Parajanov



"Ritual in Transfigured Time" by Maya Deren



Perhaps you have seen all of these films before in different contexts, but now you are seeing many similarities and connections between them you have never thought of before. The through-line of a poetic approach to film making becomes very obvious, and yet, you may not have thought about this connection if you hadn't read the program's title.

This ability to create new meanings and connections between things is especially important for promoting a relatively obscure genre like screendance. In order to educate viewers and attract new audiences we need to give them a window for entry and help them connect with the form. We are a media savvy culture, in which the average viewer can identify the genre and conventional structures of any given media clip in a matter of seconds. Screendance is just different enough to feel strange and foreign to the typical viewer, but only a slight shift of perception is necessary to make it seem familiar and identifiable.

Bringing about this slight shift of perception should be the goal of all curated programs. For my monthly Kinetic Cinema series, the goal is to help make dancers and members of the New York dance community aware of the role media plays in their artistic work. We are all bombarded with media images and messages everyday. This constant deluge of information has to filter down into the work of dancers and choreographers too. I wondered why the dance community in New York seems to be lagging behind our European contemporaries in embracing media with dance, and I realized it may be because dancers here just haven't thought about it consciously. With Kinetic Cinema I invite different members of the dance community to curate programs and draw upon their own media interests and influences. In this way the curators discover the knowledge they already have about media and dance, and can present their ideas in a way that other dancers can relate to.

By these standards, Kinetic Cinema has already been successful. Many of the curators I've invited have never curated a screening before, and yet their programs have blown me away. February's curator, Brian McCormick, displayed a knowledge of video art and new media platforms like Second Life that far surpasses my own. This month, Malinda Allen presented one of the most entertaining and inspiring programs of dance films and videos I've ever seen, and she has never seen the work of Maya Deren before (a filmmaker widely regarded as the mother of modern dance film). Each of these artists presented programs that gave me and all the members of the audience new perspectives on dance and media we had never had before. Bringing about new perspectives and thought connections makes a seed bed for creativity. I believe that these programs will inspire more dancers to make work for the camera, and the artistry and sophistication of their work will be higher, because they are connecting consciously to their own knowledge about media and how it works.

A guest curator series is just one way to bring about a shift in perspective for a particular audience. I'd love to hear of other examples. Please share your ideas and experiences here, and help us brainstorm more ways to bring screendance to the fore of the media landscape!

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February 22, 2008

One of the best studio-produced dance films in recent history

A review of Step Up 2: The Streets by my friend Kat Green, a filmmaker whose opinion I trust.



Step Up 2: The Streets - One of the best studio-produced dance films in recent history
by Kat Green
February 19, 2008

I know.  I know exactly how ridiculous this sounds.  But I'm completely serious.  The storyline is totally forgettable, but the movie is packed with awesome dancing, shot with an amazing understanding of camera movement, beautifully lit, playful with things like frame rate without being too heavy handed with it, and cut in such a way that it is fast paced, but doesn't let you miss any of the important aspects of the dance.

For some reason, there was a weird cross section of people in the theater this afternoon, kids, nannys, girls my age, and then a few random older men by themselves.  By the end of the film, everyone was cheering and clapping.  Simple proof that nobody can resist a well done dance-off in the rain!!!

I did a little research into who shot and cut it.  It's the cinematographer, Max Malkin's second or third film, but the editor, Andrew Marcus, has a lot of experience doing really creative stuff (Hedwig, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and weirdly, a bunch of Ivory Merchant movies).  Anyways, my guess is that the result is the combo of good camera instincts from somebody younger that understands the dancing better, and a really capable editor that has good pacing, but isn't completely ADD.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Step Up 2 should be required viewing for anybody interested in the development of dance on film.  It uses classic techniques, but also incorporates new ideas without the dance-sacrificing clumsiness that is usually involved in trying to cut the standard urban teen dance film for modern pacing.

Click here to see clips from the movie on the New York Times' website.

Here's the trailer of Step Up 2: The Streets

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February 11, 2008

Experimental Artists are Still Misunderstood, Despite Nod on YouTube

Yesterday a friend of mine forwarded me an email that said "CALL TO ARMS, of the utmost importance!" in the subject line. The urgent message was that a video of Karlheinz Stockhausen's infamous "Helicopter String Quartet" had been chosen as a feature for YouTube's homepage (in the online video world, this is like hitting the viral jackpot) but, due to the far out and wacky nature of this piece, the video was getting tons of derogatory comments and awful reviews from users. The email I received was a call to all supporters of the avant gard to get on YouTube and counteract the blasphemy taking place.

Well, I had to laugh, and hopefully Stockhausen (RIP) was chuckling too from his heavily sound-proofed corner of heaven. Finally the experimental art world got their wish come true. One of their own had been discovered and was being seen by the ignorant masses. As was prophesized, once the people saw this great light they would renounce pop culture and take up the cross of experimentalism. Never would they be placated and amused by fluffy cheap entertainment again. Britney would have to go on unemployment and spend the rest of her days in a trailer park, Justin Timberlake would need to wait tables for the new glittering literati...



I'm sorry to report this folks, but the light of true art did not convert the masses. Once again, they attacked our art with hateful ignorance, vile words, and blatant indifference.  Here are a few comments made only hours ago by the barbarians:

"They are serious with this? This Is not a joke or a parody or something like that? It would be funny as a parody of pretentious 'artistes' with their condescending noses so far in the air they have to look out for low flying helicopters! HA! ROFLCOPTER!!" - flyinDPOD

"This is the most retarded thing i've ever seen. There is no artistic value or point to what they are doing. Its just morons in a helicopter playing music to get the recognition of being 'different, unique, artistic' when in reality all they are doing is being retards. The music sounds like a camel taking a huge shit, but for all you yuppies out there who love this because of how 'original' it is, be my guest on buy their CD. lmao, enjoy not having 20$ anymore" - j0n0666

"If this is artistic then I might as well start drawing helicopters with my shit. Then I could make the same exact argument that claims this is artistic." - locopaparone

My question is: How could experimentalists ever have supposed this or any work would be received differently? I'm calling for a moratorium on the whining that great experimental artists are not being appreciated enough by the mainstream. The only ways experimentalists have ever achieved world-wide fame and worship are either when the world finally catches up to them long after they're dead (ie. Van Gogh) or when a big pop act like the Beatles gets sooo popular, they can do whatever they want and people will still buy their records. That's it, period. Otherwise, I don't care if you are Stockhausen or Merce Cunningham, you are not going to suddenly become a megastar on the home page of YouTube. That's like expecting the world to start spinning in the other direction, or Dubya to come up with a good idea.

That said, I do have a few problems with YouTube and the way their website is set up. First of all, it's nice they put a piece of experimental performance on their home page, but how about first making search categories for all the arts: visual arts, dance, theatre, etc. Right now the only art forms that have separate categories on YouTube are Music and Film/Animation. Great for those people, but what about the rest of us? Hello, "The Evolution of Dance" was the biggest YouTube hit ever!

One way YouTube could help their users and promote a greater range of content is by suggesting videos that were highly rated by other people like a particular user. This is something that Netflix does, and I've found some great films through this system. Basically Netflix stores my ratings on DVD's I've watched and matches me with a group of other users who liked the same films I did. Then when enough other users in my group like a movie, they will suggest it to me. I think this would be a very handy tool for YouTuber's trying to navigate the morass of videos and find the gems they want to see. With Google as a parent company, I don't think this should be a difficult search function to set up on YouTube!

Also, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to YouTube's editorial picks. A little more thought towards education and responsibility to their users could go a long way when they choose features. For instance, if they had put other experimental art pieces next to Stockhausen's video, they would have had some context, and perhaps viewers who check the homepage wouldn't have felt like they were being conned into eating this weird art spinach. I understand that the editors have to guard themselves from all sorts of tricks and manipulations people use to get their video featured, but still, a little thought and guidance could make YouTube a site that doesn't just change the way media is distributed, but also how it is interpreted and digested by the world. This is something I think we all would appreciate.

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February 8, 2008

Second Life Spoof Proves My Puppetry Theory

Here's a hilarious video of real people impersonating the way avatars move in Second Life. If I didn't know they were mimicking Second Life, I would think they were acting like demented puppets or 80's Atari characters. (See my previous post: Second Life: A Puppet Play for the 21st Century)



Thanks to Malinda and Doug for sharing this with me.

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February 6, 2008

Second Life: a Puppet Play for the 21st Century

Monday night I got my first taste of Second Life in Brian McCormick's Kinetic Cinema program at Collective:Unconscious. Second Life is a 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using voice and text chat. At the end of the evening Brian showed a real-time performance of "The Nut" by the Second Life Ballet done especially for the KC audience. I must admit, I came in to the evening with a lot of preconceptions about how I was going to interpret the SL performance. I had seen a couple clips of Second Life performances on Youtube, and I checked out Doug Fox's blog postings on SL Ballet, so I had some idea of what it was about. As a dancer and filmmaker, it seemed like dance in Second life was still light years behind the fluidity and grace of "first life" dance whether on screen or stage. I also felt dubious about people who devote so much time and energy sitting at a computer living a virtual life, when the real thing seems like more than enough to deal with!

However, upon witnessing SL Ballet's performance in real time, I was surprised and struck with admiration for what they were doing with their medium. The software for the program is definitely still a bit primitive. The movement was jerky with lots of dropped frames, and the music would sometimes skip or drop out, making it seem like the whole thing could fall apart at any moment. But this awkwardness actually made the piece very endearing and exciting to watch.  In many ways it was basically a 21st Century puppet show. The strings were invisible but the presence of the real hands operating the dancers were palpable.  The dancers moved like marionettes, sometimes flying across the stage or hovering for long moments in the air beating their legs in interminable changements. Like puppetry, the virtual bodies became substitutes for the real, and strange flights of fancy became totally believable and acceptable.

After the performance we had a chat with Inarra Saarinen, the artistic director and all the cast and crew of SL Ballet. We learned about the weeks of preparation it takes to create a ballet in Second life from programming the animation to practicing the moves with each other in real time. The cast members live all over the world, from Tokyo to Italy to Minnesota, and each member must commit to a regular rehearsal schedule of 4-6 hours per week. It became clear to me why ballet is a good choice of dance for Second Life. Inarra, as the choreographer, must program all the movements to be executed by key strokes. Ballet, with its codified technique, provides a set vocabulary of moves that she can create and store, in order to combine into different choreographies. Inarra said that over time she has accumulated over 300 animations for use in her dances. I'd be curious to learn how copyright and intellectual property works in Second Life. If someone else choreographs a dance using her animation for a passé or jeté, would they need to pay her? Maybe the exchange would be in Linden dollars (the SL currency that actually can translate into real money)!

Here's a clip of SL Ballet's "Olmannen" an original work in three acts.



I'm still a bit freaked out by the social complexities of Second Life. It's the unseen person behind the avatar that kind of gives me the willies (no ballet pun intended!). Still, I'm very interested to see how dance will evolve in this medium. Brian mentioned the possibility of creating virtual theatres where people can go to see performances they missed in First Life. I was picturing a virtual Dance Theater Workshop with 3D avatars of Miguel Gutierrez and Juliette Mapp doing their thing on a make believe stage. I don't think this could ever take the place of real performance, it's just too different a medium, but there is certainly some potential. Like puppetry or cartoons, you could recreate historical events with a satirical or comedic effect. You could also bring historical figures together for fantastical meetings: what if Nijinksy could dance with Baryshnikov? or Isadora Duncan with Trisha Brown? Crazy fun could ensue.  

In fact, Brian pointed me to some clips by net artists Eva and Franco Mattes (aka http://0100101110101101.org/) that are reenactments in Second Life of famous performance art pieces. They call them Synthetic Performances, and they performed a couple of them for live audiences at Performa 07 (a performance art festival) here in New York this past fall. Here is a link to a clip in which people in a gallery have to pass through two naked people on either side of a doorway.

I'd be curious to hear from others who have been using this medium or have seen dance in Second Life. How do you feel about it? What kinds of artistic possibilities do you see in it?

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January 16, 2008

Recent viewings of highly effective intermedia performances

This weekend I was involved in a couple of showcase events for the APAP conference (Association of Performing Arts Presenters) here in New York. Every year presenters and performing artists from the U.S. and around the globe converge at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan to pitch and book performance engagements. It's exciting and completely overwhelming. Every square inch of dance space in the city is used to showcase dance companies in the hopes of catching a presenter's eye. My APAP involvement centers around my workplace, Pentacle, which is an arts service organization that among other things, provides booking services for dance companies. I'm not involved in the booking department, however around APAP time, all hands need to be on deck to help run the showcases.

We organized two showcases this year for two groups of artists we represent, and I was happy to see that there were several companies: Bridgman/Packer Dance, Kinodance, Jonah Bokaer, and Troika Ranch that are integrating media in highly effective ways in their work. A couple of them I had known for a long time but never seen live, so this was a great opportunity to look at intermedia performance again with fresh eyes.

Generally, I'm a purist when it comes to dance and media. I like what matt gough calls "screendance" - dance on screen only. This is because I feel like dance is so engaging when produced well for screen that I don't want to be asked to look anywhere else when I watch it. However, I have experimented with using video projections in my own live dance pieces, and there are a few instances when I have been really impressed by media used in live work. Happily the performances I saw this weekend all expanded my views of media in live dance.

My usual gripe with intermedia performance is that the video projections tend to upstage the live action on stage. As soon as the video goes on, the dancers become dwarfed by the projection and seem to be little insects buzzing around the main event, which are the giant images on screen. Too few artists seem to understand the powerful pull video has on an audience's eyes, and they don't take this into account when designing their productions. For Bridgman/Packer and Kinodance however, this has been handled impeccably well.


Bridgman/Packer (Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer) is collaborative duo that began using video several years ago to multiply themselves on stage. In their performances, life size images of themselves appear and vanish just as the real them appear and vanish behind invisible curtains and hanging screens. The result is a moving tromp l'oeil (eye-trick) that is truly delightful. Their work is generally pretty light-hearted and fun, a welcome relief from the usual heavy modern dance fare. I have actually found myself smiling while watching their work, feeling the edges of my eyes crinkle, and and leaning forward in my seat to try to follow the dance better. It's almost therapeutic to be entertained by a dance performance these days, and Bridgman/Packer can deliver the goods.
Photo: Bridgman/Packer's Under the Skin by Paul B. Goode


Here is a clip from Bridgman/Packer's Trilogy consisting of "Seductive Reasoning," "Under the Skin," and "Memory Bank."




The other master of media and dance integration is Kinodance, a Boston-based collective consisting of filmmaker Alla Kovgan, choreographer/dancers Alissa Cardone and Ingrid Schatz, visual artist Dedalus Wainwright, and lighting designer Kathy Couch.

Photo: Secret Streams by Alla Kovgan

Kinodance pieces are also obviously made with the visual media in mind from the start, but in much more subtle ways. I had the opportunity to see their full length work "Secret Streams" performed at Dance New Amsterdam on Monday night in which the video images were used almost as another dancer in the work. At the beginning of this spare and simple all black and white piece, just one white vertical bar moves across the stage catching a screen of vertical white strings hanging across the back of the stage and moving over the two dancers. Eventually two vertical bars appear and then three until it evolves into square windows of moving landscapes and eventually a web of white lines. The dancers reacted to the movement of the projections, and at times it seems like the projections were a reaction to the dancers' movements. This attention to detail between the video images, the lighting, set and dancers was seamless and organic. My favorite aspect of the piece was the use of shadows. Lights were set specifically to cause the dancers to cast shadows on different surfaces and during different video moments. As a result, the shadows became players in the piece as well, fusing the dancers with the video projections and creating dramatic tension during what was otherwise a pretty abstract and formalist piece.

Here's a video clip of excerpts from "Secret Streams" by Kinodance.



Jonah Bokaer is a young choreographer recently of the Merce Cunningham Company, who has been making waves in the New York City dance community as a presenter and founder of Chez Bushwick (a dance space and presenting organization in Brooklyn). In his own artistic work, he shares his mentor's passion for technology with dance, and has been working with 3D animation and motion capture technologies for a while now. The excerpts I saw at APAP showed some strong ideas and an expert grasp of technique both as a mover and as a video-maker. In one excerpt he played a digital animation of himself performing a complex movement combination that seemed impossible for a real human body to do. However as soon as the video ended he got down on the floor and performed the routine perfectly. He almost didn't seem human, his impersonation of the computer animation was so exact. Obviously, through his work with Merce he has been learning movement from a computer for a long time!

Photo: Nudedescendance by Jonah Bokaer

The other work Jonah showed was a short video involving what looked to be motion-capture-generated animation with live action video of dancers. The music was great, a weird and noisy score by downtown experimental turntablist Christian Marclay and Bokaer. This was screendance as I tend to watch it, and I was excited to see a piece of my world at a conference for performing arts presenters! Perhaps if Jonah continues to rise in stature, it will become more common to see videodance and screendance being shown at large and prestigious arts facilities. We'll see!

Here's a link to Doug Fox's video interview with Jonah last fall: http://greatdance.com/danceblog/archives/video/001687.php.
(PS: Jonah will be a guest curator of Kinetic Cinema on April 7th. Mark your calendars now!)

Loop Diver by Troika Ranch
Troika Ranch is perhaps the best known of this group of intermedia wizards. The company is headed by dancer/choreographer Dawn Stoppiello and composer/media artist Mark Coniglio who also designs much of the interactive technology. Troika's work involves muscle sensors on the dancers' bodies which trigger sounds, lights and video projections. I had the opportunity to see their latest work in progress, "Loop Diver" this past fall at 3-Legged Dog in Manhattan (see their blog about this piece here). With a stage design consisting of several screens hung perpendicular to the audience, the video is projected on these screens so you can't see the images straight on, and the dance is segmented in several sections of the room. The work is about "the violent interuptions of our lives" and it is dark and grueling to watch. At this point Troika Ranch is so good at what they do on the technology side, they have started to make their performers become triggered by the technology, rather than always the other way around. In "Loop Diver" the performers get caught in loop cycles, where they repeat the same movement phrases over and over again, until something or someone breaks them out of it. As media becomes more pervasive in our lives it provides more and more metaphors for life itself. With "Loop Diver" Troika Ranch is moving beyond just exploring what technology can do for them, but also what technology is doing to them, an exciting path that helps keep the technology from over-shadowing the artistic purpose of their work.

Here is some video source material for "Loop Diver" that the dancers recreated live during the performance.


What are your favorite examples of intermedia performance pieces? What else have you seen that is merging media with dance in effective or not so effective ways?

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January 4, 2008

Dance On Camera Festival Part 2

Horizon of Exile
The last two nights were cold and blustery. It made the treks out to the Walter Reade Theater for the opening days of the Dance On Camera Festival feel like a expedition to the Yukon in search of gold. Watching Program 2 I found a few flashes that caught my eye. Isabel Rocamora's HORIZON OF EXILE is gorgeously shot in the deserts of Chile. The setting, cinematography, and overall mood was mesmerizing, but I was hoping to feel more of an emotional punch from the subject matter of women in exile. To me the choreography was a little overwrought, but perhaps I was a victim of my own expectations. Chamecki/Lerner's "FLYING DAYS" was my favorite of the night. Cute, whimsical and to the point. The Pina Bausch documentary was interesting if you are already a fan. For Pina devotees it has some wonderful moments with the mistress of avant spectacle herself, with some candid memories of the tough early years.

Here After
Last night I caught the only screening of Vim Vandekeybus' new film "HERE AFTER" made with his Belgian dance company Ultima Vez. It was amazing. I usually can't take too much angst, but somehow I was able to stomach this relentless Freudian vision of hell and actually enjoyed it. It was dark beyond belief but the choreography and camera work were so engaging and gripping, I just couldn't take my eyes away. There is a scene of women putting men (who are playing babies) on poles, and I was reminded of a joke by the British comedian Eddie Izzard that there are certain subjects you just can't sell on screen, like putting babies on spikes. Well, now I've seen it...

Tonight's programs are both of shorts. I highly recommend the 6:15pm screening of Classic shorts. These are some of the best dance for the camera pieces made in the past 20 years. Come out from the cold and be carried away by some REAL moving pictures!

Program 7 - TRIBUTE TO PASCAL MAGNIN
(Fri Jan 4: 6:15pm)

Program 8
(Fri Jan 4: 8:30pm; repeats Fri Jan 11: 6:15pm)
Live performance by Company XIV on January 11th
Program introduced by dancer extraordinaire Richard Move

Dance On Camera Festival @ the Walter Reade Theatre
Lincoln Center Plaza,165 West 65th Street
(1 train to 66th Street)
Warning: due to construction at Lincoln Ctr you need to walk west on 65th street from Broadway, go up a flight of stairs on the right to get to the box office.

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December 11, 2007

Review of robbinschilds' "C.L.U.E." at PS 122

Last week I was chained to my computer spewing out term papers for the end of my semester at the New School. Unfortunately I had to miss what sounded like the videodance event of the Fall: robbinschilds' "C.L.U.E." at PS 122. Luckily, my fabulous co-worker, Michelle Coe, went to see it, and she spontaneously wrote this review. I was very glad to get her impressions of the work, and even happier to be able to share them with you here.

Artist: robbinschilds

Program: C.L.U.E.

Date: 12/6/06

Venue: PS 122

Description:

Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs inhabit the intersection of human movement and architecture--be it natural or manmade. C.L.U.E. combines a movement based full-spectrum video with acutely visual live dance and an original live score. (From PS 122 brochure)

Comments:

This piece had me totally transfixed. admittedly, I'm a sucker for live music, and this was particularly captivating "shoe-gazer" dark, experimental music by Seattle rock band Kinski (where the bass guitarist at one point played her guitar with a bow, like an upright bass!), so it had me from the first note.

but then there was the impressive but very simple set: rocks, complete with texture and climb-ability, and then the black, lava-like sand that was rolled in, kicked up, danced around.

the most captivating element that pulled everything together was the film. I had stories going in my head of how fun it must have been to location scout for it:

taking a desert canvas and looking for desolate landscapes, maybe an odd industrial fixture within it, seeking awe-inspiring frames within nature (massive upturned tree roots, towering rocky hills, water surrounding two stick-like trees and then two dancers who disappeared below surface) and playing with what cameras (point of view, light refraction) and editing can bring to that experience. The costumes were bright almost florescent colors, and tops and bottoms were slightly off-color, so they clashed not only with themselves but with the pale browns documented in the videoed landscape. It was surreal and almost magical. I wanted to stay with the scenes longer than the editing allowed--and I think the film accompanied by live music was great in and of itself.

and then there were the two performers. they added a tangibility to it that was captivating. through altering backgrounds, and shifting ambiance as songs ended and new ones began, the movement had an eventual pattern to it--like it started with a series and then eventually came back to it. as a classical dance snob, though, I'd say the movement performed as it were was not interesting or impressive by itself, and the performers, adapting deliberate blank expressions, didn't have much spark on stage. but packaged all together it was quite mesmerizing.

this creation was a fascinating example of how all of these elements--music, dance/performance, and film can merge together and be distinct, yet be extensions of one another--like one is dependent on another. in fact, I found myself wondering what the dancers' process was, where they start.

all in all, I was transported. very cool indeed.

Review by Michelle Coe

Video excerpt of C.L.U.E.:

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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.


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:

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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.


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?

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November 5, 2007

Responding to "Your Audience"

I 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.

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October 31, 2007

Your Audience, Love 'em or Hate 'em?

Clare Byrne and I have been having a discussion offsite about the way artists in the NYC downtown dance scene treat their audiences. I've been feeling that contemporary experimental dancers here tend to view and treat their audiences as enemies and antagonists rather than as friends, guests, or supporters. Clare reminded me that artists, especially experimental ones, aren't making work just to entertain and console their audiences, but also occasionally to upset them and "ruffle some feathers."  I agree that this is a very important function of the arts. Like good journalists, and wise fools, we need artists to shake people up and get them to see new things or think for themselves. But when I look at the dance scene in my city I see a bunch of rebels with no cause. Who are in their audiences? Basically other dancers who seem to take masochistic pleasure in the hate and apathy spewed at them from their friends on stage. Gen X's irony looks like tin foil to Gen Y. And earnestness? Don't even whisper the word ironically in passing or you'll find yourself sneered and hissed right out of Bushwick.

I'm saying all this because I don't feel like the lofty role of artist as social conscience, lighting rod, or martyr is what I'm seeing here. I see preaching to the choir, not risk-taking. I see insecurity and followers, not leaders and trend-setters.

Now that I've just pissed a lot of people off, I'll 'fess up to my position. I'm an artist, but I'm also increasingly becoming a marketer. I want to promote dance. What is the most important thing to a marketer? Growing your audience. How do you do that? By identifying an unmet need in your audience, addressing that need, and doing it better than anyone else. Taken to the extreme, this results in corporate cancer: ie Aol/Time Warner, NewsCorp (Rupert Murdoch), Microsoft, ExxonMobil, etc. Perhaps the behavior of our marginalized, impoverished, tiny dance community is subconsciously or consciously reacting to the extreme imbalance of power in the world. I can accept this as a valid reason for the preponderance of anger, helplessness, and victimization being acted out on stage and in abandoned warehouses all over the outer-boroughs of NYC. But, what I don't accept is misdirecting that anger onto our audiences.

Love 'em or hate 'em, you need an audience. I feel like the dance world is so eluded by this fact. We seem diametrically opposed to thinking about what our audience needs, how to address that need, and doing it well. Can there be a balance between saying what we feel needs to be said and also bringing the people in the room who need to hear it? I believe the answer is yes but it takes a major shift in our outlook of ourselves and our work.

I may have just failed at what I'm preaching for here, and the people that should be reading this may have clicked away after the first two sentences. However, this is a debate I struggle with myself all the time. I've been a dancer all my life, and active in the NYC dance community for seven years. Now, through my interest in videodance, I've entered on a journey in media, and studying how other performing arts have developed mediatized forms. Through the accessibility of the internet, and the pervasiveness of video, I feel like dance is at a tipping point right now. We can either embrace these opportunities or fear them. I think a bit of both reactions is healthy, but ultimately I want to confront and consciously grapple with this polarity of audience vs. performer, buyer vs. seller, and artist vs. marketer.

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October 25, 2007

Is it live or is it videodance?

Last night I attended DanceNYC's Townhall event "Does Dance have a future? Implications of a Technological World". The panel, consisting of Doug Fox (my patron saint) of Greatdance.com,  Doug McLennan of ArtsJournal.com, and Jonah Bokaer of Chez Bushwick communicating via webcam from Australia, helped stir up the ideas, but what was really great about it for me was that there were all these amazing people there that I got to meet in the flesh after much online dialogue. Everyone who came is doing such great things in the dance world, and the progressive thoughts that got passed around before, during, and after the meeting were really inspiring and up-lifting.

I finally got to meet bloggers Tonya Plank of Swan Lake Samba Girl, Kristin Sloan of The Winger and The (Inter)mission, and Jeff Weinstein a dance and theatre critic whose blog Out There is on ArtsJournal.com. Clare Byrne was there, a choreographer I've heard so much about and whose work I've only seen online despite the fact we both live and work in NYC! Linda Lewett is a video producer that I met last January at EMPAC in Troy, NY who's done tons of dance video work for years. Marketing people from several dance companies were there including Susan Marshall &  Co., Alvin Ailey, New York City Ballet and Pascal Rioult Dance Theatre. Plus I met some wicked cool independent choreographers who are foraying into the digital world, Kimberly Young of dance-elephant.org and Malinda Allen of Allen Body Group. This is just a partial sampling of the people I got to talk to. I had no idea that there were so many people right here in NYC sharing the same thoughts as me that dance needs to have a compelling, fabulous, and engaging mediatized form! This primarily means making great dance videos and encouraging and fostering audience engagement online.

One topic that was raised, and that I have very strong views about, was live vs. video. Are the two incompatible or compatible, and do we need to fear video overcoming live? In my mind I was screaming video has already overcome live!!! In terms of cultural capital this was happened back in the 1920's with the rise of the film industry. The dance world has been deluded for almost 100 years that live performance reigns supreme. The answer is so clear that economically and culturally speaking new forms of media technology have crowded out live performance to an alarming degree. However, this doesn't mean live performance is going to die, obviously we're still around despite several media dynasty shifts (film to tv to internet/video with mobile phones on the horizon). The question isn't if we need to embrace media to improve our existence, it's a matter of how.

For any disbelievers still out there, I highly recommend a book by Performance Studies professor Philip Auslander entitled Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge; 1999). If you can't read it all, just read the introduction, he spells everything out right there.

 
From the Amazon book description:

Is it live or is it Memorex?

In his provocative new book, performance critic Philip Auslander explores live performance and asks what relevance it has in contemporary culture dominated by mass media. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Society begins with an overview of live performance and reveals that media technology has encroached on live events to the point where many, like concerts and sporting events that feature jumbo video screens, are hardly live at all. Auslander offers a way of understanding the history of this development based on an analysis of the relationship between early television and theatre.

 

This book has pretty much shaped my entire vision behind promoting videodance.

For some good news about how to harness media to better the existence of live performance read my post "Madonna Shows Us a New Move." For more discussion of the Town Hall meeting read Doug Fox's Dancing in to the Future posts here, here, and here.

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October 19, 2007

Madonna Shows Us a New Move

I've always loved Madonna, maybe because I intuitively knew she was more of a dancer than a musician, or maybe because her music is made to dance to. In any event, the recent news of her move to leave her record label and sign a lucrative deal with the concert promoter Live Nation, struck me as a something that we dancers should perhaps take note of.


The music industry has officially come full circle with recordings. Before recording technology existed the music business was completely based on live shows and sheet music. Recordings changed all of this as major record labels grew to control the field and artists toured mostly to promote and sell their records, not the other way around. Now in the age of digital downloads, the exchange of recorded music has become ubiquitous and uncontrollable to the point where recordings are literally worth nothing. As Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch theorized "unless governments are willing to take drastic measures to protect the industry (such as a mandatory music tax), economic theory will win out and the price of music will fall towards zero." He goes on to say that this is opening up a lot of new lucrative revenue streams for music including sales of live music tours, limited edition physical recordings (box sets and the like), and merchandise. Now we are in the midst of a huge sea change in which music recordings have no intrinsic value besides being a great promotional tool for live acts. Madonna's move to bank on her kick-ass touring show with Live Nation over a tenuous record deal with Warner Brothers is the latest proof of this trend. (And this at the age of 49! Dancers in particular can't help but respect this woman.) So how does this relate to videodance and dance? Well there has never been a gigantic recorded dance industry, so we won't feel the pains of a huge paradigm shift of power and revenue like our musician friends. However, that doesn't mean we can't learn from them and get a running start on the new wave of the digital future. Booking dance would not be so difficult if the public had a concept about all the great dance companies out there. How can you give them a taste of who you are? By making a fabulous video of your work and getting it on everyone's computer screen, ipod, cell phone, and tv. Videodance can be a powerful promotional tool for touring dance companies, and if you give it away for free, and market it right, live dance could see a major resurgence like the music industry is experiencing today.

Already some of the biggest viral video hits on Youtube have been dance videos. The Anaheim Ballet video in particular came out of nowhere and instantly put this small local ballet company on the global map. There have been many blog posts about their breakout Youtube hit, but what I didn't know is that this was just one part of a brilliant web marketing strategy AB has been growing through a weekly video/audio podcast, a myspace page, and a youtube channel. Between 2005 and 2006 their private contribution revenue quadrupled, and their overall revenue rose 26% [Guidestar.org]. Their regular podcasts didn't even begin until the end of 2006, so I wouldn't be surprised to see their revenue make an even larger leap in 2007. A remote ballet outpost has hit upon a winning strategy that every dance company should be observing.



From the Material Girl herself, there is no denying that our day in the sun may be dawning. Do you want to be like the record labels or the artists? It's time to give away the media and raise the value of the live experience for all.
 
Get into the groove!

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October 18, 2007

An open letter to the videodance community

I have just started the 3rd week of Move the Frame blog, and I am completely amazed at the impact and reach it's already had. It's exhilarating and a bit nerve-wracking having an open forum like this, but I can tell by the comments I've received that it is a much needed outlet about a subject many people have passion for.

On Tuesday I received a few more amazing comments on my post "A Wiki barn-raising for videodance." Those, along with all the other comments I've received thus far, have sparked a conversation that is fueling the growth and advancement of this form. This dialogue among all members of the community - new and old, experienced and novice, amateur and professional, viewer and artist - is exactly what I hoped to achieve with this blog. If I appear to have any sort of agenda, I hope this is it: I want to see videodance flourish both on small scales and large scales, above ground and underground, be made and enjoyed by all people. Ultimately this vision is a subsidiary of my greater hope, which is to help move dance as a whole into a position of greater prominence, participation, and presence in the cultural landscape. What is so exciting (and perhaps frightening) about these times is that hopeless idealists like myself have at their disposal one of the biggest social networking platforms ever: the internet. Like everyone else, I'm just experimenting with what one can do with this incredibly powerful tool, but what continually amazes me is how quickly things can manifest here. A week ago when I posted "A Wiki barn-raising for videodance" I was wondering where does the average person go to find out information? How can we make ourselves (this community and art form) more available and accessible to this person? Already my call has been answered, and news is spreading throughout the established videodance community. I am thrilled about this, and to hear that it will be addressed at the next Opensource:{video-dance} 2007 Symposium in Scotland. Details about this fantastic gathering of artists, academics, curators and producers can be found at the Video Dance Forum Blog.

This form (videodance/screendance/dance film/whatever you call it) has been around for a long time, and was present at the very birth of the motion picture. I don't know at what point in history practitioners of the form became aware of what they were doing as a separate facet of film from other genres. This moment is shrouded in mystery for me and I would love to know if anyone out there that has done the research has an answer. It seems to me that the key to our future and our ability to tell the world what we do is to know our origins. This is why I wanted to propose to the community to create an article on Wikipedia. Right now I see many new people encountering videodances and becoming curious about this form. It is a wonderful thing to see, however I also see many of them unaware of the legacy of the form, especially when they pick up a video camera and start to experiment themselves, innocently trying to reinvent the wheel.

I'm very grateful for the comments I've received and the great suggestions proposed. I encourage you all to go to the Wikipedia article I've started and make your edits! If we all chip in with our knowledge, research, and connections we can build a comprehensive, informative, and educational article of great value both to our established community and new people just encountering the form. I'm sure there is much debate and hashing out of ideas still to be done, but I look forward to joining the dance and seeing where this moves us all.

With great respect and thanks,
Anna

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October 16, 2007

Screen adapters: DV8 & Ultima Vez

There are many approaches to making videodances, but one of my favorites is the adaptation of live performances for the screen. There are a few choreographers that have adopted this approach with gusto, and have made some of the best dance films of recent times. Lloyd Newson of DV8 is perhaps the best known of these. DV8 is one of the few dance companies that is committed to both dance and video and the interconnection of the two as part of it's core mission.
















Still: The Cost of Living by DV8

From DV8's Artistic Policy:
 DV8 (Dance and Video 8)'s strong commitment to film and video continues. This reflects its ongoing interest in how two primarily visual media can enhance one another and reach a crossover audience from within both forms. To date DV8 has produced 15 stage works and 5 films, all of which are visually arresting, provocative, and moving explorations of the human condition. Their second and third films Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men and Strange Fish were collaborations between director David Hinton and choreographer Lloyd Newson. Both pieces are quite dark and disturbing, and you can see vestiges of the stage work in the sets and choreography, however it's interesting to see Newson's development as a choreographer for the camera's frame in these early works. In their fourth film Enter Achilles Newson teamed up with the Dutch director Clara van Gool. Enter Achilles is also about the darker side of human nature, but Gool's attention to color and humor brings out more nuances in the characters and Newson's choreography is more fluid and dancy. Their most recent film, The Cost of Living (2004) was Newson's first time as sole director, and his eye for filmmaking has become well developed. The Cost of Living has been a tremendous cross-over success appealing to film audiences as much as dance fans, and has achieved something of a cult status.



Another choreographer who has fully embraced filmmaking is Begium's Vim Vandekeybus. With his company Ultima Vez he's made video adaptations of almost all of his live performance works, as well as extensive video to go along with the stage productions. His 2005 film Blush screened at the 2006 Dance on Camera Festival 4 years after the stage show toured the New York area at Montclair State University. Blush is like a rock 'n' roll acid trip. I loved the audacity of the work and its incredible settings shot in Corsica and Brussels. It runs the gamut of human emotion and definitely shows that videodance can rock hard.



During the 2006 Dance on Camera Festival I recorded this interview with Bart van Langendonck the producer of Blush about the film and the challenges of making it.



I'd love to see more American contemporary choreographers making edgy, cool film adaptations of their work. I think films like Blush and The Cost of Living have exponentially increased the audiences for DV8 and Ultima Vez. Videodance gives choreographers a means of distributing their work to a wider range of people, and breaking out of the insular ghetto of the po-mo dance scene. Both of these choreographers have benefited from major European television commissions for their work, which the US doesn't have. (Ever since PBS' Alive from Off Center ended in the 80's edgy dance films haven't had support in this country.) But, the internet is opening up new avenues for distribution that are accessible to anyone with a computer and a broadband connection. Perhaps we just need to introduce Spike Jonze to Nicholas Leichter, and a fire will spark!

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October 12, 2007

Wiki barn-raising for videodance Pt. 2

The village barn dance [music] by Mollie King -- Montreal Delmar music, c1909

Let the shindig begin!

Briefly, I'm happy to announce that I've framed out an article about Videodance on Wikipedia. The barn-raising has begun! It is by no means finished, but at least the basic foundation and frame is there. Please help put up some posts and beams in there! You can just nail in a shingle, or board up the whole outside. Whatever you feel inspired to do is wonderful.

Some info and tips about using Wikipedia:
As Shosana of Dancespiration observed, Wikipedia is a complicated beast. First you will need to register and sign all your rights away to any material you put up there, and then you need to promise that you will not plagiarize or use anyone else's content without their consent. Even then that may not be good enough, so just get used to screen after screen of expository legalese as you first get initiated to the Wiki program.  All this is in the name of the free-flow of information, so it's cool... Then, when you get initiated, you can edit any material you want, however you will need to get used to their formatting system which is a form of text code. I recommend keeping their tutorial window open as you go about making your first edit. It will save much time and frustration.

When you go to the Videodance article you will see at the bottom that I classified it as a "stub". This means that it is an incomplete article in need of expansion. You can just click on that line to get to an edit window for the whole article, or you can click on the [edit] links at the end of every section in the article.  We should keep the article classified as a stub for a while until it is completely constructed and decked out with references, notes and links. Once she's roofed and shingled then we can have a good ole contra dance!

 
"Barn Dance" from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

It is good to internally link to any names or items that may have articles in Wikipedia (many things do, so just use the [[double brackets]] and preview to see if it links). If it does it will show up as blue, if not it will show up as red.  Also, if you state a fact, they like it if you provide an end note and reference your source at the bottom under "Notes".  Any external links you make should also be listed at the bottom under "Links".

Oy, now after all this defining and polemical thought, I've got to go study my media management coursework... No rest for the weary, but I'm feeling productive today!

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October 8, 2007

A Wiki Barn-raising for videodance

If you are interested in learning about something where do you go first? In my case and for millions of others, we look it up on Wikipedia. Just about everything in the known universe that anyone has ever cared to think about is there. Being a user-generated site, the more interest there is in a subject the more comprehensive the Wikipedia articles on it will be. And the theory goes that this makes their encyclopedia more trust-worthy, up-to-date, and objective than any other reference source around, because it's constantly being checked and edited by its users.

So I decided to look up my area of interest which is videodance.  Immediately I ran into a problem, because while I call this genre videodance, there are at least 5 other names it is known by (see my first entry "What's in a Name" for further discussion on this dilemma).

I decided to go with my first pick anyway, and I looked up videodance. Results: One entry for the Thessaloniki Video Dance Festival in Greece. That's cool, but it only tells me about one festival of about 150 that show videodance work. I still don't know what videodance is. At the bottom of that entry the only link for further information is the film festival's official website. I'd hit a dead end.

Now my cockles were up. Do so few people care about this type of work that there is only one article on Wikipedia, and it's not even about the art form, it's a promotional blurb for a film festival? Why is there no information about this genre which is as old as film itself, has a huge and illustrious body of work from some of the world's most prestigious filmmakers and choreographers, and could possibly revolutionize the entire art form of dance for the 21st Century?!

Before spontaneously combusting, I looked up the other known names for the genre (dance film, screendance, cinedance, kinodance, dance for camera). These also produced very poor results. "Dance film" and "Dance for camera" were the only searches that came up with any real articles and they both seemed to be written by single authors who have very obvious
agendas.

OK, my mission was becoming clear. It was time to put my wiki where my mouth is!

I'm proposing a Wikipedia barn-raising for videodance.

We need to get some info up there and quick!  I will start an article on "videodance" and post a link to it here on this blog. I encourage every one of you who has ever worked in this form, or had an opinion about it to comment here with your suggestions and thoughts. Once the article is started please go up there and edit it (or start one under your own genre name of choice, but be sure to link to the others), share your
knowledge and keep this going until we get a full, comprehensive, coherent, evolving, and useful set of articles up there that anyone with a spark of interest in this subject can refer to and get some answers.

Please help raise this art form up and spread the word!

As inspiration, below is one of my favorite videodances which always puts a smile on my face and reminds me of why I think this genre is so f***king phenonemal...

"Weapon of Choice" Fat Boy Slim, dir. Spike Jonze

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October 5, 2007

Viva la dance dance revolution!

Just when I start to get a little complacent and narrow-minded in my concept of "dance" something comes along to blow open my field of vision again. Recently this blast came from a very unexpected place. It is a video game and it's a mania that has been sweeping the globe. It's the innocuous Japanese video dance light game: Dance Dance Revolution.

OK, I have to confess, I have never played this game, nor have I ever seen anyone play this game live. I've never had any interest in video games, probably because as a kid, like many other dancers I know, I had no eye/hand coordination. Plus I've never liked sitting and staring at a screen for hours at a time. However my life has been devoted to dance and based on the belief that dance can change the world, and despite all my preconceived biases, I have to accept that the dance revolution I've been wishing for all these years, may in fact have come in the form of an arcade video game.

This was not an easy revelation for me to accept. Not when I've spent 26 years of my life, uncountable hours, buckets of sweat and tears, dozens of lost toenails, and thousands of dollars to live in a garret as a starving artist (ok I'm exaggerating a bit). So I had to put this phenomenon to the dance revolution test: 1. Is it interesting to watch? 2. Does it encourage people to move and get in touch with their bodies? 3. Does it bring people together and allow them to express themselves? 4. Is it artful?

Thanks to the ingenuity and competitive drive of the human spirit...Dance Dance Revolution passed my test. Here's why.

1. Is it interesting to watch?

Normally I hate watching other people play video games. It seems like the most boring competitive activity in the world to watch (even worse than golf). But, DDR is different. It involves the player's whole body and requires split second reactions. I searched for videos of it on Youtube, and remarkably I found all the ones I watched interesting and engaging. You could see the individual players unique styles come out, and their virtuosity (almost to the point of freakishness) was apparent.

2. Does it encourage people to move and get in touch with their bodies?

I was impressed by the range of people I saw playing this game on Youtube. From 3 year olds to old men, fat & skinny, two legged and one legged, everyone is playing it. I read two articles about how West Virginia and California public schools have made DDR part of their physical education curriculums, and there is also some evidence that it is helping fight childhood obesity. As far as video games go, this one definitely comes the closest to engaging someone in a full-bodied way. It seems to draw the potatoes out of their couches and hooks people on dancing, which is very revolutionary indeed.



3. Does it bring people together and allow them to express themselves?

Huge communities of fans have formed around this game. It started in Japan and has mushroomed all over the world since. Some popular websites are DDR Freaks out of the SF Bay area and Aaron in Japan. There are currently two major styles of DDR: Freestyle and Technical which represent the two extremes of play. Just like common divisions in the dance world between improv and technical dance, classical and contemporary, there are the same demarcations in this form. Here are a couple good examples of the two.



4. Is it artful?

This question is pretty subjective, but given the range of approaches and interesting uses of the game, I would say yes it is. There is something John Cage and Merce Cunningham-ish about this set-up. The game creates chance-based dances and the electronic directions act like a real basic version the choreographic software "life forms". I love how it creates this superstructure that the individual players can work within and embellish however they choose. Also it is clearly difficult to master and requires practice, concentration, and skill. I bet anyone who is good at DDR could pick up the fancy footwork of dance forms like samba, flamenco, Irish step-dancing, or tap pretty easily. And frankly, seeing a skilled DDR player is beautiful to watch. So yes, my vote is that it is artful. Human beings can make just about anything artful.


So have I gone off the deep end? Have any dancers out there played DDR? What do you think?

Frankly I think I should stick to my old-fashioned self-generated dance moves, but nevertheless Viva La DD Revolution!

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 12:21 AM - Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

October 1, 2007

What's My Frame?

Matt Gough replied to my call to action in "What's in a Name?" and posted a couple responses on his tumblr, Quodlibet: here and here.

He asks: so i'm wondering how anna frames her work ... why the preference for video dance, and what is her genre?

Well, as my blog is aptly titled, my frame moves around a lot. I started out an experimentalist. I was just excited by what I could do with a camera that I couldn't do with live choreography. I was mostly influenced by Maya Deren, and her extensive experimentation with choreography for the camera. My definitions of dance and choreography were always quite wide, but having a camera to look through blew them open even further.  I could capture movement wherever I found it and through editing I could shape it anyway I chose. The movement didn't need to be executed by humans. I could create viewable dances literally out of anything, and in fact my first two videodances were edited from footage of trash found on the streets of Brooklyn.







< "Trash Processional"







Then I just wanted to experiment with the actual frame of the camera's eye, forgetting about editing for a moment. I was interested in choreographing long shots where the movement outside the frame was just as important as the movement in the frame. During this time I made the opening credit sequence for "Move the Frame" the TV show which was one long pull back shot through a row of dancers whose hands and bodies framed the moving shot. I also made "Untitled States of America," a solo in which the camera is sitting on the ground for most of the piece, and I choreographed the dance based on what the camera could/couldn't see of me.







< "Move the Frame" opening credits








Now I've come around to being more interested in narratives and character development. My two most recent projects have been about couples and the dynamics between them and their inner/outer selves. I've also been exploring film styles such as silent film physical comedies, and the poetic/iconic styles of 60's Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajonov and American Independent Jim Jarmusch.




< "Fünf 'n' Twist"












So what's my genre? Right now I would say I probably still fall under experimental, but stylistically it's experimental narrative, or non-linear storytelling. However if I'm speaking to someone who has never seen my work, I also need to preface my description by saying that it is videodance. If I don't say this then I feel like the most important aspect of my work is not being expressed which is that it is a form of media coming from a kinetic sensibility.

I like "videodance" as a name because it sounds both current and of the future. It fuses both the way people are already thinking about media with the older art form of dance, and radically shifts one's notion of dance from performance art to media art. Videos are ubiquitous right now and becoming more so.  We know what a music video is, most feature films are shot on video, tv is video, everyone has a camcorder or has used one. Video is exploding on the internet with Youtube, mash-ups, vlogs & blogs, and a torrent of user-generated content.  I think that video is also a more immediate and interactive media art and this echoes the experiential/physical aspects of dance.

Matt made the great observation: "i think the difference here is that anna is thinking in terms of genres and I am thinking in terms of art movements." I think this is true, but I'm frequently confusing the two myself. I'm sure that they often overlap, but I would love to hear what others think about this. Are we talking about a genre or an art movement here? I'll post my thoughts soon...

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September 28, 2007

Philippine Prisoners Resurrect Busby Berkeley

As a videodance artist, I have to comment on the viral video sensation of the Philippine Prison dances that have rocked Youtube as of late. These massive stagings, in which up to 1600 prisoners dance to pop hits in perfect unison, are as awesome and powerful as they are campy and scary. Byron Garcia, a security consultant for the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre started the dance fitness program as a way to improve inmates' behaviour and increase their participation in exercises. However the inspiration to start filming the routines came when Mr. Garcia saw prisoners exercising in the prison courtyard and noticed patterns and waves in their movement which piqued his inner Busby Berkeley. The result was a string of videos and a gigantic Youtube hit with "Thriller" performed by 1500 prisoners and featuring inmates Crisanto Nierre as "Michael Jackson," and Wenjiel Resane as his "girlfriend". "Thriller" has been viewed over 6 million times now on Youtube. The popularity of the videos have become a huge source of pride for the inmates, and now the CPDRC is becoming a veritable production house of grand spectacle dance films, the likes of which haven't been seen since the heyday of American movie musicals in the 30's and 40's.

"Thriller" (original upload)

While one side of me is thrilled about this phenomenon of using dance as a therapeutic, community-building, grand-spectacle-making means, at the same time there is something so creepy about watching hundreds of incarcerated men in orange uniforms dancing in formation. It immediately evoked images for me of concentration camps, Maoist rallies, and Nazi propaganda films. It seems to be the embodiment of Fritz Lang's industrial age nightmare in "Metropolis" in which the masses of humanity are reduced to nothing but machine like drones toiling underground in obscurity.

"Metropolis" - Molochmaschine (Moloch machine)

Still, upon further reflection I realized that my reactions were very much mired in a Western Anglo-American value system where individuality is prized above all else. In many parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, collective dance, music and ritual is a powerful, sacred thing. I had the privilege of studying Balinese Monkey Chant (kecak) at CalArts with the master dancer/musician I Nyoman Wenten. Performing in this incredibly complex group ritual was one of the most amazing artistic experiences of my life. To lose one's sense of self even for a few minutes and to become just one cell in a greater organism is an awesome state of being which the Western world has become very afraid of. We've seen it lead to unfathomable destruction with two World Wars and countless hate crimes. However, we've forgotten that there is equal evidence of collective ritual being used to transcend despair and destitution and to heal and empower whole communities of people.

Kecak scene from "Baraka"

Ultimately I applaud the dance videos of the CPDRC inmates. Not only is the act of dancing having a powerful effect on these people's lives, but their ability to share their work with the entire world through video transforms what they are doing into an act of artistic expression. They may be caged within four prison walls, but collectively they have reached farther and made deeper connections with the outside world than most of us "free" individuals ever could.

Now I'll leave you with a little dream from the greatest collective choreographer of them all...

"Spin a Little Web of Dreams" (Busby Berkeley)

Posted by Anna Brady Nuse at 8:00 AM - Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)