Archive for the ‘artists’ Category

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.

Maya Deren: 50 Years On

Fifty years after the death of filmmaker and choreographer Maya Deren, the art and influence of one of experimental cinema’s most inspiring and charismatic figures is celebrated and explored. The British Film Institute will present a dedicated program of Maya Deren screenings and events on October 4-12 2011, BFI Southbank, London.

For more information visit Maya Dean: 50 Years On

Richard Daniels saw an opportunity. The 60 year old choreographer and photographer was recovering from a shoulder injury in 2008 when he got the idea of making a series of dances for the small screen. At the time iPhones were the hottest thing since Gutenberg’s printing press, and Apple’s new app store was just beginning to explode. Daniels no doubt looked around and saw that there was an app for everything under the sun, except modern dance.

With his winning idea, Daniels garnered support from the Baryshnikov Art Center to develop “Dances for an iPhone” over two years as an artist in residence at their facilities. In another genius stroke, Daniels chose well-loved, seasoned modern dancers such as Carmen deLavallade, Megan Williams, and Deborah Jowitt to perform his choreography. The resulting volume of six short videos, are neatly packaged in an app now available for free on iTunes.

Perhaps my expectations for “Dances for an iPhone” were set a little too high. On July 15th Gia Kourlas, gave the app a glowing review in the New York Times, for its artistic approach to filming dance, but when I downloaded and looked at the works, all I saw were a bunch of short dance videos that looked like any other rehearsal footage found on YouTube. The handheld camera is shaky most of the time, and often zooms in on the dancer’s face, cutting off our view of the movement and choreography. The lack of focused lighting causes the dancers to go in and out of silhouette, and I was constantly aware of the fact that they were performing for us in a dance studio, rather than transporting me to a world of the artist’s making. For me, the framing of the camera should fundamentally change the dance and make it exist on screen in a way that it could never be in a live performance. I didn’t see any videos in “Dances for an iPhone” that gave new meaning to the dances performed, instead I wished I could see them live rather than on my tiny screen.

Furthermore, I question why these are “Dances for an iPhone” at all. As an “application” the package doesn’t give you much to play with. It’s really just a collection of short videos, with a bit of biographical text for each. Surely you could accomplish the same thing by making a video podcast (also downloadable and viewable on an iPhone, iPod or iPad), or a YouTube channel for that matter. When I think of an app, I expect there to be in interactive component of some kind such as the infamous “Brushes” app that was used to create two New Yorker covers by artist Jorge Colombo. If it isn’t highly interactive, then I expect an app to offer me something new to explore every time I open it, such as my new favorite, the “NPR Music” app that consolidates all of the latest NPR music content in easy to search categories that are up-dated daily.

I suspect that Mr. Daniels saw an opportunity to package his art in a way that was so exciting and novel, it would succeed no matter what. He can now say that he created the first iPhone app featuring modern dance (although that might be debatable as I saw an app for the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company that came out in 2010). The fact that it has no business being an app is besides the point, in the high stakes game of technological development, he who gets there first is the winner.

Still, I’m glad someone in the modern dance world has taken the plunge to create an app. The proliferation of apps is not going to die down any time soon, and we may be seeing a new revolution in the media industries: the way television superseded film and radio, mobile is now threatening to do the same. Since Daniel’s app has left much room for improvement, let’s hope that new upstarts will jump into the ring soon and give us better ways to capture and experience dance in the palm of our hands.

The traditional dance company model is exploding apart and a hybrid chimera is being born out of its ashes. These new dance companies are really production companies made up of interdisciplinary collaborators that do it all from making high end videos to performance pieces to working for fashion photographers, music artists, and ad agencies. But most of all this new dance company model lives and breathes on the internet through tweets, blogs, photo streams and video channels that keep an active community of fans, followers and audience members engaged and excited for more.

Here are two new dance companies based in Brooklyn that are at the cutting edge of this emerging paradigm.

DANCELEN(D)S is a non-profit production company that specializes in dance film. Artistic Director Jennifer Madison heads up a collective of artists to create movement-based films and documentaries as well as provide creative services for commercial productions.

“manoeuvres” by DANCELEN(D)S, featuring Valentine Norton’s Project Valentine Dance Crew

Indelible Dance Company calls itself “a dance company in HD.” Mysterious and bold, their website is simply a page of their videos and photos to date. What is so innovative is not the quantity of their output, but the quality of what they make. Each video and photo project is exquisitely wrought, finely composed and emits sexy, smart, classiness.

“Check Out My Leggings” by Indelible Dance

Each of these companies has embraced collaboration at the core of their creative process, and they go for the best collaborators they can find. Thus DANCELEN(D)S created a video look book for fashion designer Rachel Roy in which dancers move in clothing from her new collection, and Indelible Dance created an entire evening length performance around a design concept by Mary Huang to create sound-sensitive costumes made of light to portray the Big Bang Theory.

For the longest time, only a handful of dance companies embraced technology and collaboration in such a fundamental way. To do so required huge sums of money or technical wizardry make your own gear, such as Troika Ranch’s Isadora software that enabled dancers to trigger sound and video with their muscles. Today high-end photography and video is cheap to make and can be distributed all around the world for free on the internet. Fundraising sites such as Kickstarter allow artists to find and cultivate supporters beyond their personal networks and capture many microdonations to reach their large financial goals. New generations of dancers who grew up with these tools have entered the field and they are beginning to show us how dance will evolve in the 21st Century. What is most surprising about their revelations is that dance may be naturally dying off as a separate and distinguishable art form, instead it is merging with everything else into one interconnected web of creative life.

To learn about more artists and companies embracing this new model check out:

Dance-tech.net

Dance On Camera on Vimeo

After so much hype, I finally got to see the first season of The LXD – Jon M. Chu’s dance-based Action web series.

I’ve been intrigued by this project since I saw Chu’s call for dancers on YouTube a year and a half ago. He’s really got a vision of making dance action films that resonate in today’s era of social media. The back-story behind the project is almost more interesting than the plot line itself. A film director gets assigned to make a sequel to a Hollywood dance movie – Step Up 2: The Streets. While making this movie he falls in love with dance, specifically the skill involved in hip hop and street dance. This becomes the genesis for The LXD – an X-Men like legion of dance superheroes. To execute his new project, he took a completely modern approach. Instead of creating a feature length movie, he planned it out as a series of 10 min “webisodes” that would premiere online and later be consolidated into one “movie” for distribution on Netflix and DVD. Chu found his cast of dancers by putting out open calls on YouTube for dance audition videos. Then he built up a ton of hype for the series by creating hugely popular Twitter and Facebook pages, and added to that with a bunch of live appearances at big media events such as the Oscars, So You Think You Can Dance, and the TED conference.

From a marketing standpoint alone, I am very impressed by Jon M. Chu and the attention he has garnered for his project. Now what about the dance filmmaking itself?

I don’t think it is productive to rate The LXD based on originality. If you’ve seen as many dance films as I have, nothing in this series is groundbreaking in its approach to film and dance. What I was hoping for was a harmonious balance between dance, framing, plot line, and rhythm and he surpassed my expectations on most of these counts. The dancers are truly extraordinary, the camera movement and framing adds to the dynamism of the choreography, and the music and the editing came together in surprisingly artful ways. The weakest element by far is the plot line and the acting. Telling a story through dance is very difficult if you want it to seem “naturalistic” and believable as Chu’s Hollywood film background seems to lead. The problem is that dance is a poetic art form – using gesture, metaphor and symbolism to tell a story. When you try to add words, or worse yet, ask dancers to deliver lines, you run into dangerous territory. At best this Hollywood narrative approach makes The LXD series seem a bit clunky and cheesy, and at worse it detracts from the enjoyment of truly great dancing.

Thanks to the mini-series format of The LXD, Chu was able to play around with his approaches and switched it up a bit. In ten chapters you can see as many ways to tell a story through dance film: from silent film to split frames, and from web video to action film. My favorite episode was Chapter 3: Robot Lovestory with Madd Chadd, a pop-locking wizard whose robotic moves truly seem to defy humanness. Chu styled this episode after early silent films with dramatic music, jump cuts and short texts that appear as dialogue. The zany jump cuts across time and spaces keep the viewer sniffing for the narrative trail. Rather than hitting us over the head with the story we become detectives feeling our way around just like the main character who wakes up suddenly in the hospital with no memory of what happened to him.

Another notable episode for dance filmmakers is Chapter 9: Fanboyz which is basically a well-made instructional video on how to make great dance films. A vlogger, Cole Waters cracks the code to the initiation process to the LXD and posts his findings for all would-be members. He says if you want get picked up by The LXD (ie get your dance films noticed!) then you must:
1. Master a style of dance
2. Post it online (remember to use the space and your surroundings!)
3. Show a unique style
4. Be patient

That about says it all!

Season 2 is now playing on Hulu and this time we get to know the villains! Should be juicy. I’m staying tuned…