Archive for the ‘history’ Category

Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.

In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.

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The 2nd issue of The International Journal of Screendance-Scaffolding the Medium is now available.
Scaffolding the Medium brings together a variety of historical texts within the context of screendance to both create a common knowledge base and also to support a kind of cantilevered interest. This issue opens with an edited transcript of a presentation by Professor Ian Christie in which Christie surveys a history of cinema under the title The Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented. This transcript is followed by five curated discussions on this initial idea as it relates to contemporary screendance.

Edited by Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg, this issue also features a report on the recent Screendance Symposium in Brighton by Claudia Kappenberg and Sarah Whatley.

Dance New Amsterdam Theater
February 20, 2012 7:30 pm
$10 for DFA or DNA Members; $25 for Non-Members

Google Map
280 Broadway (entrance on 35 Chambers), New York, NY, United States, 10007

RSVP to brighid@dancefilms.org with Dance Film Lab in the subject line to reserve your place.

Screening excerpts of the key films that every filmmaker should know.  Focusing both on dance film and “traditional” films, this masterclass gives attendees an overview of development of film techniques, aesthetics and idioms, and discussion of concepts and the development of the cinematic form.

Instructor: Alla Kovgan
Alla Kovgan is a Boston-based filmmaker, born in Moscow (Russia). Her films and films that she co-directed have been presented worldwide including at the Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, Melbourne, Durban, Oberhausen, Clemont-Ferrand, MOMA, Louvre, Centre Pompidou, PBS (US), ZDF (Germany) and numerous others. Alla’s most recent film NORA (2008), her collaboration with the British filmmaker David Hinton, is an art film – a poetic biography of the Zimbabwean choreographer Nora Chipaumire. NORA has been an official selection of over 80 festivals, received 23 awards and will be broadcast on PBS in 2010. The two latest documentaries, which Alla co-directed and edited, an Emmy-nominated “Traces of the Trade” (2007) and “My perestroika” (2009) premiered at Sundance and on P.O.V. (PBS). Since 1999, Alla has been involved into interdisciplinary collaborations – creating intermedia performances (with KINODANCE Company), dance films and documentaries about dance such as “Movement (R)evolution Africa” (with Joan Frosch). Alla’s projects have been supported by Open Society Institute, LEF Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, Bank of America Celebrity Series, among others. Since 2000, she has taught and curated dance film and avant-garde cinema worldwide as the Programmer of St. Petersburg Dance Film Festival KINODANCE (Russia) and as a co-Curator of Balagan Film Series (Boston). In 2009, Alla was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and a Brother Thomas Fellowship for artists working at a high level of excellence and creativity.

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.