As a student in the Florida State University in NYC program, I was fortunate enough to be invited into Noémie LaFrance’s work studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to discuss her new project. Sitting in wooden chairs in the homey brick apartment, Noémie entered the room spewing information about her newest work, the White Box Project. In response to our questions, she explained that she is ever-interested in infusing dance with the everyday. The Black Box is known as a place to sit in an audience and to be spoonfed a presentation. Hence, the White Box.

Successfully, the White Box Project is the furthest thing from a proscenium, concert dance performance. As I entered the museum space, I was approached by what I thought to be a fellow observer, and naively pushed out the back door into the cement enclosed porch. The crowd chattered and looked around skeptically, until suddenly and miraculously the room fell totally silent (a brilliant tactic brought about by the performers, I realized on my second visit).  As the hour passed, it became clear that at least one of the men in the room was a performer. He, in my opinion, took on the role of the initiator; the leader. Otherwise, I was completely unsure as to who was a performer, and who was an observer. As a woman dressed in a trendy black coat and heels stood inches from my face and proceeded to lie down on the cement in front of me, I battled myself with whether I should do the same.

The feeling of uncertainty gradually melted away, as we were put into groups by a few men and women, and whispered instructions…“On the count of three, run!” By the end, I felt more like a child playing games in the schoolyard than an audience member.

Noémie invited everyone in attendance that Saturday back to another showing, free of charge, to witness the constant changes being applied to the project each day. I arrived the next week, eager to scrutinize the events I knew would happen and to identify the changes, of which there were several. This time, there was more dialogue between the dancers and the crowd; I was asked incognito to learn a succinct dance step, and teach it to another. Again, the realization that everyone was in clear groups/teams near the close of the work came with a playful sentiment. I was a participant, not a spectator. I cannot assume that this feeling fell upon every person in the ‘box’, but each individual surely brought something of their own to the experience, simply by entering the space.

The White Box is not a dance show. It is instead a mind game of sorts. Whether or not one chooses to run and turn the length of the walls at the demands of a scruffy man whose role is unknown is irrelevant. Choosing to act is participation. Choosing not to act, also, is participation. The audience ultimately, and blindly, has control of the show.

Carly Lozo is a dance major at Florida State University and an intern with Pentacle’s Movement Media this fall.

Performa 11, one of two new festivals in NYC that defy artistic boundaries post-9/11

Like many people, the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11 brought up many “What if’s” for me. What would my life be like now if 9/11 hadn’t happened? What would my art look like? What would the fields of dance and dance film look like? And then after being baffled by those questions, I started to think about what actually did happen. How did September 11th, 2001 change my views of my artistic work, and my chosen field of dance?

For me, I wonder if I would have become obsessed with dance for the camera. Without the traumas of 9/11 and the political and cultural awakening it inspired in me, I might not have felt such an urgent need to seek other outlets for artistic expression. In an uncertain world, film and new media gave me hope that my artistic work could make a difference in the world. The feelings of mortality that were triggered by 9/11 made me desperate to be able to create work that would last (ie be able to be watched repeatedly) and the rage and violence that has surrounded the event (and still does to this day) gave me an urgent need communicate with people outside of my tiny circle of acquaintances. I felt that if we were to reconcile with our enemies and restore stability to our lives, then we had to start communicating and learning about each other. Live performance was too limiting for me, I needed to tap into media, and thankfully with the rise of broadband internet that became more possible than ever before.

Looking around at the greater effects of 9/11 on the arts and dance in particular, I can see that I was not the only one looking outside of my discipline at that time. One of the biggest art trends of the last ten years is the movement towards interdisciplinary work. Everywhere you turn you see all the arts mixing and intermingling. Dance in particular has become almost ubiquitous in art museums and gallery spaces. The Guggenheim started the highly popular Works & Process series that has presented many dance companies over the years. The Whitney’s Biennials are peppered with dance works, and smaller museum and gallery spaces such as P.S. 1, Chelsea Art Museum and Location One are hotbeds of interdisciplinary artistic activity. I commonly read artist bios that say “choreographer, dancer, and visual artist” (such as those of Ralph Lemon, Shen Wei, Tony Orrico, and Yvonne Rainer to name a few). Likewise, many visual artists repeatedly incorporate dance into their work (such as Kelly Nipper, Julia Mandle, Christian Marclay, and Isaac Julien).

Curators have had a huge influence on this shift to a post-disciplinary era. Two of the most progressive festivals to have emerged in New York after 9/11 are FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, and Performa. Both were born in the mid 00’s to advance boundary-defying artistic practices through commissions and presentations. Crossing the Line has an emphasis on French and American artistic exchange, however it keeps a very broad view of what that exchange could entail. Performa was founded by Roselee Goldberg, a leading authority on performance art since the ‘70’s, whose festival’s mission is “dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.”

Both Performa and Crossing the Line have pioneered new curatorial approaches to performance presentation, that revolve more around central ideas and less on the particular art forms that are on display. In this year’s Crossing the Line Festival program, the events are grouped around 3 curatorial perspectives: “Fiction & Non-Fiction”, “Lecture/Performance” series, and “Endurance/Resistance/Inspiration.” Within these categories are works that incorporate all the art forms and most of them are interdisciplinary, such as choreographer Kelly Bartosik’s “i like penises: a little something in 24 acts” that involves a dialogue between three dancers and a visual artist that perform live alongside each other in layered scenes. Performa endeavors to single out the influence of performance on the visual arts, both past and present. This leads to programming that is by nature interdisciplinary as multiple art forms collide and are influenced by each other within the works, such as choreographer Boris Charmatz’s “Musée de la Danse (Dancing Museum): Expo Zéro,” an exhibition that takes place in empty rooms and includes both real and imagined performance.

After 9/11, artists – particularly in New York City – suffered on many levels. We experienced rage, sorrow, and exasperation as our nation inflicted violence and war on innocent people while using every excuse to devalue the arts – the very lifeblood of culture that restores humanity and compassion in the world. Despite this, I believe that amazing growth has taken place in the arts that has led artists to see beyond boundaries and closed-mindedness within our own communities, and forced us to grapple with the world in a way that is collaborative, healing and ultimately life-affirming. I believe in the power of artists to regenerate a fractured and ailing world no matter what happens and under any circumstances. As much as I wonder how my life could have been easier and better if the events on 9/11 hadn’t occurred, I am so thankful that I was driven to explore the medium of film, and the infinite artistic riches that lay there for me.

FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival is taking place now until October 16^th at venues all over New York City.

Performa 11 will take place November 1–21, 2011 in New York City.

Anna Brady Nuse is a dance filmmaker and director of Pentacle’s Movement Media. Examples of her work can be seen here.

Through this series, we are exploring our cultural relationship to the Internet, the odd yet growing trend of creating something alone and sharing it with many, many people—who are also alone.

I checked out One-Shot #1 by Megan Sprenger—and am left questioning whether or not it evidences the type of inquiries that the One-Shot project claims to investigate. A friend once asked me if I applied the same rigor to my improvisational dance films as I did to the creation of improvisation-based live dance pieces. I admitted that I didn’t, but rather “got a lot of footage” that I could cut and splice later rather than returning the next week and the next week to try different things, making different versions until I had one I was satisfied with. By allotting precious rehearsal space and setting strict parameters, Sarah Maxfield creates an interesting situation in which the creation of a dance-for-camera-for-internet is given the same kind of resources and weight that the creation of a live solo would be given. What is different about the creation of a dance for the camera and, more specifically, for display on the internet only? How does Megan Sprenger’s performance or the One-Shot project answer these questions? Feel free to comment. I am looking forward to see how the rest of these one-shots develop.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Curious about 3D dance filmmaking? Check out this 6 minute FORA.tv video by Jacob’s Pillow Dance for an introductory primer.  Award-winning filmmakers Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer of Mouvement Perpétuel share their artistic approach and production process using visual examples from their current collaboration with choreographer Crystal Pite and the National Film Board of Canada.  Millar and Szporer describe how a 3D camera works, share their 3D story boards, take us inside the green screen studio with the dancers, and discuss why they are interested in the challenge of creating a stereoscopic experimental dance film incorporating animation.

Can 3D dance film change how audiences experience and participate in dance? What do you think? Comments and links to other 3D dance film insights welcomed.

Collaboration between choreographer Monica Bill Barnes and filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall. Composer: Emily Lee Bellingham

With increasingly affordable video tools and the pressure to engage with audiences online, ‘Behind the Scenes’ media creation is exploding in the dance world. The growing online presence of rehearsal footage, dancer profiles, and choreographers talking to the camera is fast becoming an assumed part of a company’s marketing repertoire. It is worth noting, refreshing even, when a choreographer takes an entirely different approach to ‘Behind the Scenes’ video.

Take for example NYC-based choreographer Monica Bill Barnes and her recent collaboration with filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall. When invited by Jacob’s Pillow to create video for online audiences during a week-long creative residency for the new work Mostly Fanfare, Monica and Celia took the opportunity to carefully consider how they were interested in showing process or illuminating work.  Their questioning and collaboration resulted in 8 short ‘companion’ films, each one a window into the worlds, scenarios, characters, and elements explored during the creation of Mostly Fanfare.

The films are a collection of beautifully stylized imagery with character, humor, a touch of sadness and texture.  They create an abstract space for my own questioning and rewards for engaging in the work at differing entry points- in short the films are a brilliant media partnering of Monica’s stage work/world.

Both collaborators value clear choices in staging and reward audiences for staying present/patient – an important element in successful media. Bringing those values and concepts to the video and online space, a project specific webpage was created in collaboration with Jacob’s Pillow to frame the films within a “blank stage”.  For this reason the videos are not embedded here; please visit the website to view the films in HD.  On August 24, 2010 the curtain will come down on the website and the online performance of the films will end.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Got it figured out? See Spike Jonze’s one-page treatment below:
I love being able to see the broad strokes in which he designs the video (“eating chips, wearing a clown suit, hobleing [sic] on crutches, speedo”), as well as the commitment to specificity and detail needed to learn an entire song in reverse.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Capitol Spring 2 by Boris Willis

Boris writes:

Why should artists create a dance vlog? I believe the answer lies in the number of times we have to explain what we do and have little in our culture to point to as an example. We have an opportunity to reach out to the public to show and explain the process of what we do, why we do it and how we feel about it. Here are some tips for you to think about as you make your dance vlogs.

1. Have a vision
   Find a way to make videos that you feel express who you are and what you want to say as a dancer. That being said, don’t just turn on your camera and dance, find a way to make an interesting and exciting video. Look at commercials and other short videos as inspiration.
2. Vlogging is personal and performative
   Make your vlog about you because it is the one subject that you know more about than anyone else. Dance, talk about dance, talk about making dance while you are dancing, dance about making dance.
3. Understand how the web is used
   Just because you have twenty minutes of footage doesn’t mean you should post it all to your vlog. Generally speaking three minutes is the most someone will watch. In other words keep it short, a sixty second video is plenty. As you gain more skills you will be able to make longer videos compelling by the way you edit them. It is always better to leave them wanting more than to bore them. Make stuff that people want to see and make it short enough that they watch it all.
4. Edit
   Learn how to use the tools of video editing. There are free editing tools that come with your computer operating system, Window’s Movie Maker for Window and iMove for the Mac OS. If you want to be able to do more sophisticated editing you can get Final Cut Express for the Mac and Premiere Pro Elements for the PC. For professional level editing you will need something like Premier Pro CS 4 for the PC and Final Cut 6 for the Mac. The great thing about video is that you can take the time to get it right and make your content compelling. However, the most important edit you make is at the end of your video, use a black out when the video is over and put your credits at the end of each video without a blackout so the credits are the last thing your audience sees. That way if your video gets distributed around the web everyone will know its yours.
5. Get the best camera you can afford
   You never know what will become of your work it is always best to get the highest quality video of your original work. When you put it on the web it will get compressed and lose quality but that is what we expect from the web. Having a high quality version for showing offline is a very good idea. I also recommend that you use a camera that records to video tape so that you have a backup. I always shoot in HDV but down-convert to SD to save disk space then compress it to the Quicktime format which eventually gets converted to flash.
6. Find a video host that you like
   I have been in debates about whether it is better to put your videos on Vimeo or YouTube or Blip.tv. There is no reason not to try all three and of any number of others. Just find one that you like. If image quality is what is most important then Vimeo is for you. If ease of distribution is what is most important then Blip.tv is for you. If getting your videos seen by a large number of people then YouTube is the way to go. There are pro’s and con’s for all three services and I use all three and others as well. Once you decided on a host for your videos choose a host for your blog. Blogger and Wordpress are two popular services that give you a variety of tools to enhance your content.
7. Be Consistent
   Follow your vision, update on a regular basis, make videos in manageable viewing times for your audience. You are not going to make money from advertising on your vlog but you can use your vlog as a tool to get work by showcasing your skills as a performer, choreographer, editor and artist. Let your followers know what you are up to especially when you are taking a break. People want to know that when they go to your blog there is regularly new content there that they want to see. Your dance vlog should be fun and informative. You should do it because you enjoy it.
8. Say hello
   How do you get people to follow your vlog? Email your friends, comment on other people’s vlogs, tell people you meet, get cards made. You can get free cards online from Vista Print.
9. Music
   Don’t use copy-written music. Find a musician among your friends or on the web that will let you use their music in exchange for some cross promotion. You can find plenty of music at this url http://www.archive.org/index.php Learn about Creative Commons use and credit the musicians for their work.
10. Describe the videos you make
    Write a description of the videos you post and use tags to help yourself and others find them. It is time consuming at first to describe your work but the value in doing so cannot be underestimated. Describe what you are doing in the video, give the location, who is in the video, when it was done and what the video is about.

-Boris Willis

danceaday.com

Some films seemed more powerful being shown on the four large screens at Monkey Town, while the film “MM2″ by Rebecca Gaffney felt overwhelming to view due to the intense strobe lights used in the film.  Later in viewing this on a smaller singular screen, it was more forgiving on the eyes, and kept me “pulled in” and interested (rather than making me want to close my eyes to ward off a pounding head ache as it did at Monkey Town).

Click here to view the embedded video.

I found Ben Pranger’s “Erased Dance” film intriguing during the screening, as it was the only silent film presented.  The absence of music seemed to soften the movements of the dancer, and the full wide shot of the dancer’s body, that was continually being erased, was very effective, especially on the floor-to-ceiling screens at the MonkeyTown.  This was a case where I found the work to be much more powerful on the large screen, rather than the small computer screen.

The remaining films presented by Movement Research seemed to work on either a computer screen or as a large projection.  Gina T’ai’s “Lumiere D’Ampoule” had a wonderful use of still images of the dancer with fabulous lighting effects.  Her work is beautiful, and it is easy to see why she was chosen as winner of the Dance for Camera 2007 student film award.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our own Anna Brady Nuse (Pentacle’s director of Movement Media) showed “Funf ‘n’ Twist”, a fun and lighthearted look at dance on prom night.  Another delightful piece was Alex Cassal & Alice Ripoll’s “Journey to the Navel of the World”, in which action figures traveled across landscapes of human bodies.  Comedy was central in both of these pieces, which made them especially enjoyable and memorable.

Click here to view the embedded video.

by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse

(“Maybe we all dream to be………?” by T.A.G.San Francisco, shown at the March 25th Artist Salon with Jaki Levy)

At the last Artist Salon on March 25th at Chez Bushwick, Jaki Levy, a media artist and new media consultant, discussed dance work created specifically for the web. The question of the evening was: Why should artists make dance films specifically for the web? In short, making dance videos for the web is convenient, inexpensive, and relatively easy to do.  For dance works in progress, posting videos on the web allows artists to conduct “audience test screenings”  and get feedback.  Web videos also offer artists the ability to communicate and mix media in different ways.

Jaki Levy compiled a few videos that gave us a peek into the present + future of dance, art, and technology on the web.  Some of the work was completely choreographed, others were more improvisational.  Jaki shared how videos are created for different purposes, and gave examples of what a digital performance world looks like, including live web casts, web series, and site specific performances.

For example, Tendu.TV is looking for a mass market for dance by offering high quality broadband content of dance concerts and dance for camera works. Jaki showed an example of a show produced for Tendu.TV by Marlon Barrios-Solano entitled “Dance-tech Ep. 1“. In this episode Marlon interviewed various international choreographers talking about their work and intercut the footage with excerpts from their New York performance seasons.

Troika Ranch was exploring a process of editing for their up-coming multi-media show, “Loop Diver”and shared it with their MySpace friends.  This process is called “Algorithmic editing” and it assaults the senses. In this experiment (a collaboration between Troika Ranch and Street Pictures), a simple phrase of movement is fractured into thousands of shots in various locations all over Brooklyn, New York.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3rd Rail Projects & Julie Fotheringham both used web video  to share their site specific performances with wider audiences. 3rd Rail Projects fully integrated  web activities into their recent month long performance series at the World Financial Center by posting videos online and writing about each day’s performance on their blog. In this way, the work had both an online life and a physical life that co-existed and supported each other.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Julia Fotheringham makes guerilla-style dances that interrupt normal routines and cause people to stop and observe. The video is both a document and a voyeuristic view of the performer’s journey through the city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“A Facet of the Real” explored how performance in “first” life and Second Life can intersect, creating a trippy situation in which a live performance is viewed in real time by online avatars in a virtual venue.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some artists make web videos for artistic purposes, others for marketing purposes, and some have both in mind.  The intention of web videos can be to develop audiences by hooking viewers online and enticing them to come to live shows or screenings, or to simply to post a personal video diary from the studio. The web space allows for both anonymous and public modalities and is as broad and rich as the physical world. What is exciting is how dance artists are starting to embrace the web for all its potential. It feels increasingly apparent that we are all media-makers now.

To see all the clips from the screening and read more commentary go to Jaki’s blog post at: http://www.arrowrootmedia.com

by Dawn Paap and Anna Brady Nuse