Archive for the ‘history’ Category

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I am juiced about Jacob’s Pillow’s innovative new Dance Interactive in which 70 years of archival footage from the festival is now available for viewing anywhere.

This ground-breaking video collection, just launched on March 28th, has been designed to draw users into the Jacob’s Pillow Archive and make it easy and fun to navigate through the site. One can start out looking at Kyle Abraham, and then a few clicks later be watching Shantala Shivalingappa and Anna Duncan from 1942. For a dance lover, this site could start to consume as much of your time as Facebook or Twitter.

From a technical point of view, the site is surprisingly sophisticated behind its clean and simple looking design. Users can access videos via four main pathways: Artist, Genre, Era, and Guess (a fun quiz that tests user’s dance literacy). Each video is only one minute long, which provides just enough time to make you want to see more (while keeping them within Fair Use Law and avoiding a lot of legal hassle). For now, there is no advanced search function where you can type in an artist’s name or key word and get results, but this will most likely be added when more content has been uploaded. For now, the site functions to give users a taste of the archives and encourage them to visit them in person on site if they want to really delve into the artist or the material.

Dance Interactive started as a physical kiosk on-site at Jacob’s Pillow for people to be able to peruse the archives without having to go in and bother an intern to get out the works. The original Dance Interactive was designed as a touch screen, and the site today has kept that tactile feeling so it translates well to the iPad and other tablet and mobile devices. As one can imagine, selecting a one minute clip from each artist would be difficult, and Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow Director of Preservation is responsible for selecting all of the excerpts and writing thoughtful text descriptions that help contextualize the content. Given the vastness of the task, for now the Virtual Pillow Team is aiming to upload a video a week as well as include all current and future programming as it happens at the Pillow.

The video content itself is beautifully shot and looks great on screen. Many of the clips are viewable in HD and can be projected for a classroom presentation without looking too pixelated. On the backend, the site was built on Drupal and designed by ClearMetrics, NYC. All the video is hosted by Vimeo, which gives it stability and flexibility for customizing the player and changing the files easily.

In an era when to exist at all means to exist online, Jacob’s Pillow’s Dance Interactive has breathed new life into dance history for audiences everywhere. Although this collection only represents dance that has passed through Jacob’s Pillow, I hope that it inspires many other dance institutions to dust off their vaults and open up their archives to become part of the living networked world.

TenduTv/Marc Kirschner’s Essential Dance Film compilation is set for release on 9/14 in the US (iTunes, Amazon, CinemaNow) and Canada (iTunes). This collection will be the first non-documentary dance program on the iTunes platform. Pricing will be $14.99 to purchase, $3.99 to rent in the US. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/dancefilm.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, LIQUID FILMS, cinedance pioneer, Amy Greenfield, takes dance into the water in a splash of amazing classic and neo cine-dance from 1903 to the 21st century, to transform the very nature of dance as only a screen medium can. Anna Brady Nuse interviewed Amy to find out why this theme, “Liquid”  excites her:

Liquid is sexy and always in motion and catches the light. It dances. And I found over the years so many liquid cinedances I love and feel connected to because of my own film “Tides”. And I thought how great it would be to see them all flow together.

Tides

They break boundaries which I feel still need to be broken in the field – there’s no way you can take dance and a camera into the water and not have kinetic cinema. And the definition of dance itself changes, becomes re-united with natural movement and at the same time transformed in the liquid flow, breaking totally with a tradition of dance vocabulary. All of these qualities are wonderful for cinematic material – they deal with color and light in relation to the body in motion on a cinematic level – a dynamic, unpredictable flow for both dance and camera. I feel that too much screen dance is static, and flat and unaware of the essence of cinema, which is light in motion, and how it can replace the third dimension with a transposed heightened plasticity.

“Nymph Of The Waves” was one of the first liquid cinedances, and is now an early film classic, and was perhaps the first use of a superimposition in the history of cinema. The connection was made right at the beginning, because it was a natural fit. One of Isadora Duncan’s great sources of inspiration was the movement of the ocean, but only with cinema could dance and the rhythms and motion and world of water come together and be communicated.

Your program spans the entire history of cinema. How have technological changes affected filmmakers’ treatment of this subject – water and the moving body?

To me what’s marvelous is what we do with the technology we have. Technology itself changes the kinds of films we can make but not the quality.

Yet it’s wonderful that now an individual filmmaker can successfully shoot with a light portable video camera of high enough quality underwater for a not staggering price tag. When Reifenstahl made the diving sequence from “Olympia” she had to invent technology to shoot it – gigantic cameras with a gigantic crew. But here are underwater dance films being made one-on-one, and we feel the intimacy, as in “Rapt”. And Elle Burchill can be the filmmaker and underwater dancer herself, an autobiographic cinedance. And Ben Dolphin shoots digitally with the high speed Phantom camera which can create slower than slow motion, a camera he uses for shooting TV commercials, here used for an experimental, personal cinedance.

In your film, “Tides”, the choreography of the camera is as integrated as the movement of the body being filmed. How did you direct this duet and then shape it in the editing?

I’d worked with Hilary Harris before in my film “Element” which is the mate to “Tides”. By the time we made “Tides” we almost communicated by osmosis, because we had “Element” as a basis. In “Tides” I wanted him with the Lo Cam handheld, actually standing in the waves himself, experiencing the same movement I was subjected to. And unless the film ran out or I ran out of steam we couldn’t stop, so the communion could build. The physical set-up worked in relation to communicating some key kinetic concepts: the extreme slow-motion, the movement of the camera in flow and counterflow to the human motion, and never losing the essential kinetic point of tension, where the body and ocean met. After the first shoot, looking at and discussing the film rushes became paramount -my pointing out “I want more of that, but more like this” or “I don’t want that” etc. Sometimes I directed with my hands – one hand the human motion, the other hand the camera motion, moving the hands as I wanted the two to symbiotically relate. This sense came from the fact that I had a film image going on on automatic inside my head while I was performing. So when I saw some kind of correspondence in the actual footage to that imaginary ideal film, that’d be great. While Hilary could never be inside my head, sometimes he came close.

The artists on your program represent a great range of filmmaking styles and approaches. Which are most like yours and which are the most different? Have any had an effect on your filmmaking? How?

All the films on the program are different, yet united by the maker truly wedding the surge and flow and weightless state and viscosity to how the camera moves in relation to the mover moving through the water. In that sense I feel a commonness with all the films. I feel close to the daring to expose the nude body in Sara Joel and Jody Oberfelder’s “Rapt”, the kinetic tension combined with slow motion in Ben Dolphin’s “Arising”, the film-maker herself in a journey in the water in “Mother/Daughter”, and when I saw “Immersion” several years ago I felt I wished I could have made a film something like it and felt I’d show it some day.

Arising

But the film-makers which have had the greatest affect on my film-making are Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. Not Deren’s “Study In Choreography For Camera” except for the editing, but the beginning of “At Land”, which had such a direct influence on “Tides”, “Meshes Of The Afternoon” and “Ritual in Transfigured Time” for so many reasons, including the always inner drama coming from the silent language of movement, the border between metaphoric and real, natural movement and unnatural states, the woman’s silent journey, the strictness of structure, the mystery, the intensity. And her writing on film and dance. Kenneth keeps a great deal of this but does away with psychodrama. I hadn’t seen most of his work when I made a lot of my films but I know I was influenced by “osmosis”. He’s so powerful. Mystery and simplicity and the ‘dance’ totally part of the fabric of the film, and between the cuts, everything so cinematically visual/visionary, yet corresponding to some unknown invisible world and force. “Eaux D’Artifice” is a masterpiece. “Tides” was also influenced by Reifenstahl’s Diving Sequence from “Olympia”: the sculptural athleticism of the camera, the off axis turn of the camera, the dramatic point of intersection of body and water, the use of slow motion.

Coming up next at Kinetic Cinema:

Liquid Films

Curated by Amy Greenfield

Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 7:30pm

Tickets: $10

Reservations: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/87612

Films include: “Nymph Of the Waves“, by American Mutoscope and Biograph, one of the first dance films ever made, superimposes the dancer with the ocean waves, as well as Amy Greenfield’s primal “Tides”, with Greenfield and camera operator, Hilary Harris, both braving the ocean tides in their symbiotic camera dance. Kenneth Anger’s restored “Eaux D’Artifice”, with his “Water Witch” in the Tivoli fountain, is one of the great classics of the American avant-garde, and Ben Dolphin’s “Arising” has us flying joyfully with his dancers inside a waterfall, blurring an artificial screen world and the natural world. Jodi Kaplan’s “Immersion”, Jody Oberfelder and Sara Joel’s “Rapt”, Elle Burchill’s “Mother Daughter” and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s “Pulsion” all made recently, are original, daring, entrancing, lyrically beautiful new cine-dances envisioning women moving in real underwater worlds.

by Nicholas Bruder

Pina Bausch was one of those living legends. Her work has been seen by many. Her influence is felt throughout the dance world, and her memory will live in the history books, although she had already infiltrated them.

Her choreography reached a wider audience when snippets of Cafe Muller was shown in Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her. Bausch’s work had a raw and timeless cloud around it. Her pieces were about “things,” not just one “something.” Metaphor was huge. The relationships between men and women always being dissected and presented to an audience that never knew what exactly they were going to see when she premiered a new work.

And the scale of the pieces were unthinkable. Snow falling on stage for a whole second half of a show. A mound of dirt blocking half of the stage. Flowers, chairs, walls, screams, sweat, tears, bruises. All real. Although the visuals were impressive, I do not believe they were ever used to impress upon. I feel that her work was honest and humble. It was ugly and beautiful. If one opened themselves up to the experience of the dancers, they would leave exhausted, but not abused. Bausch was true to her vision and dancers. The audience had to take the role of accepting that and to enjoy the ride, no matter how uncomfortable it might get. The pieces always ended beautifully.

Her pieces were made to be seen in grand, large theaters, but the attention that she asked for, and got, from the audience, was that of an intoxicating program on television.

Her work, I feel, was living cinematogrophy. There are many clips of her work around the Internet that can be found and enjoyed. But the greatest news is Bausch’s collaboration with famous film director, Wim Wellers Wenders. Before she passed, they announced plans to create and film a retrospective documentary on Bausch, and in 3-D. Wenders had cancelled the production after her death, but through public opinion and the amount of letters he received from lovers of Bausch’s work, he will be continuing on with the project.

A 3-D film on the life and work of Pina Bausch. This might be one of the best gifts that the dance world will receive. And in 3-D!! It might seem cheesy, but personally I have only had the privilege to see one Bausch piece live, and I am welcoming the opportunity to see another, in a way, Bausch original.