Archive for the ‘history’ Category

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.

by Nicholas James Bruder

If you haven’t read it yet, check out Joan Acocella’s article, “The Faun,” in this week’s New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/29/090629ta_talk_acocella

It’s a really interesting article about Christian Comte, a French artist, who makes animations from still images. Recently he chose Vaslav Nijinsky, the much revered Ballet Russe dancer and choreographer, as his subject, and posted what appeared to be film fragments of the artist on YouTube that were never known to exist before. The appearance of the clips sparked a frenzy of excitement and debate among balletomanes and dance historians.

If you go to his YouTube page you can see all the videos he’s made and all the comments users have left. They have said everything from praise for Compte “finding” these videos, to appreciation of him using his talent to finally bring some idea of Nijinsky’s movements to life, as well as reprimands for him fooling them. He does insist that he is not trying to pass his films off as originals, but the confusion is understandable…sometimes.

Here are couple of Comte’s videos:

I think Comte is a fantastic artist. Although some people have felt disappointed or duped by his work, Comte’s animation techniques reveal a whole new avenue for movement, film, and photography. If people can let go of their hopes of seeing a legendary dancer come back to life, I think they will be able to appreciate Comte’s contribution to the film and dance world, as well as the web community.  He has only added to our circle of art, and gotten us to think. Shouldn’t those two things be appreciated and asked for in art?

We’d love to hear your responses to this work and the debate surrounding it.

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.

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.

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Two renown experimental filmmakers, Kenneth Anger and Amy Greenfield, are being featured at Anthology Film Archives in New York this weekend. The event, called “Cinema Dance Eros” will will be comprised of two programs of shorts that examine the erotic and sensual movement themes in both filmmakers’ work.

CLUB MIDNIGHT by Amy Greenfield
Amy Greenfield is a pioneer of cinedance and videodance, and for the past decade has embarked on a series of shorts about exotic dancers and strippers that were recently compiled in collection called CLUB MIDNIGHT. In these sensual films, the female subjects are the embodiment of ancient female archetypes. Under Greenfield’s treatment, female strippers become goddesses reincarnate, who carry out rituals of mythological proportions. In DARK SEQUINS dancer Andrea Beaman becomes Salome, performing the dance of the seven veils for a single man in an empty theater. In WILD FIRE four women whirl like the elements, whipping up energy into a hot frenzy.


Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome by Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger’s work is not usually associated with dance, but nevertheless, his wordless films are highly attenuated to movement. According to the curators of “Cinema Dance Eros”, Anger trained as a dancer in his youth, and one of his unfinished projects was a film of a Jean Cocteau ballet (Oh, if only we could see that!). The programs this weekend will feature some of his most famous works including FIREWORKS (which first garnered him attention from Jean Cocteau) and INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME.

These two programs are sure to fan the flames of any lover of mythology, magic, and eroticism! Don’t miss it!

Here are the details:

CINEMA DANCE EROS
Featuring filmmakers Kenneth Anger & Amy Greenfield

June 20th & 21st
Amy Greenfield in person!

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 SECOND AVENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10003
phone (212) 505-5181 fax
(212) 477-2714

PROGRAM 1:
Amy Greenfield DANCING IN FRONT OF THE DARK
(1980/1992, 4 minutes, video)
Amy Greenfield DIRT (1971, 3 minutes,
16mm)
Amy Greenfield ELEMENT (1973, 11 minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger
FIREWORKS (1947, 15 minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger MY SURFING LUCIFER (2007,
4.5 minutes, video)
Amy Greenfield TIDES (1982, 12 minutes, 16mm.
Photographed by Hilary Harris.)
Kenneth Anger EAUX D’ARTIFICE (1953, 13
minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger RABBIT’S MOON (1950/1971, 16 minutes,
16mm)
Kenneth Anger PUCE MOMENT (1949, 6 minutes, 16mm. With Yvonne
Marquis.)
Amy Greenfield CLUB MIDNIGHT (2006, 8.5 minutes, 35mm. With Bonnie
Dunn & Andrea Beeman. Poetry by Charles Simic, spoken by Dennis
Hopper.)
Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.
-Friday and Saturday,
June 20 & 21 at 7:00.

PROGRAM 2:
Kenneth Anger
PUCE MOMENT (1949, 6 minutes, 16mm. With Yvonne Marquis.)
Amy Greenfield DARK
SEQUINS (2005, 13 minutes, 35mm. With Andrea Beeman.)
Amy Greenfield LIGHT OF
THE BODY (2004, 11 minutes, 35mm/video. With Francine Breen. Music by Marilys
Ernst.)
Amy Greenfield WILDFIRE (2003, 12 minutes, 35mm. With Andrea Beeman,
Francine Breen, Bonnie Dunn, Cynthia DeMoss. Music by Philip Glass.)
Kenneth
Anger INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (1969, 11 minutes, 16mm. With Kenneth
Anger. Music by Mick Jagger.)
Kenneth Anger INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME
(1954, 38 minutes, 16mm. With Samson DeBreer, Cameron, Curtis Harrington, Anaïs
Nin, and Kenneth Anger.)
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.
-Friday
and Saturday, June 20 & 21 at 9:30.