Archive for the ‘theory/criticism’ Category

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.

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;” – Shakespeare

"B.A. Ches" by Marta Ares & Susana Barberá

Last week I found myself on the west end and ducked into the Chelsea Art Museum for a cool respite and to see some refreshing perspectives on the urban chaos outside. The new “Streetwise” video art exhibition reflects Shakespeare’s sentiments very well with over a dozen short pieces that depict the drama of “the streets” and the complex interactions that occur there.

The streets represent both liberation and the hazards of life. From dog poop to crime, we  create elegant ways of moving around obstacles and intractable social problems. This mutability is illustrated to lovely effect in Marta Ares and Susana Barberá’s B.A. Ches where a tango couple dances around pot holes, mud and trash in the streets of Bueno Aires.

"Bandits" by Tiong Ang

The various faces of traffic are shown in Tiong Ang’s Bandits as Thai motorcylists are depicted in close-up wearing bandanas to battle the smog. Their covered faces and the loud roar of engines gives them a menacing look, like a pack of outlaws waiting to entrap innocent wayfarers. In III Crossing, June Bum Park uses her hand in front of the camera while shooting a busy intersection below her to give the effect of corralling pedestrians. Park’s simple technique seems to reveal the “invisible hand of god” pulling the strings of the tiny ant people below.

The friction between performance artists and unwitting pedestrians is also endlessly fascinating to observe. In Halil Altindere’s Miss Turkey, various performers try to disrupt the flow of traffic in outlandish ways, from a volley ball team that sets up a net across a busy street at every red light, to a bride in a wedding dress walking through a mall with a gun in her hand and a three piece marching band behind her. We see almost no interest from passersby to these various stunts, and this is particularly disturbing when a masked gunman lurks around a doorway waiting for someone to come out. Scores of pedestrians walked by him, impervious to the impending violence.

Miyata Jiro: Business in Rio de Janeiro

Interestingly, it seems that non-living performance artists get more attention than their human counterparts. In Miyata Jiro: Business in Rio de Janiero by Momoyo Torimitsu, a robot that looks like an aging Japanese business man crawls through the streets attended by a Japanese woman in a nurse’s uniform. The sight of this crawling robot startles people wherever he goes — in poor favelas and up-scale business districts alike. I was left wondering why this robot elicits more feeling and concern from people than a real person would. Perhaps his artificiality helps people take down their guards, and indulge in feelings of curiosity and compassion.

Watching these witty and poignant videos also allowed me to let down my defenses for a bit and reflect on the outside world. When I reemerged into the hot, sticky streets I felt cooler and more even-tempered than before. I was able to see beauty in the flow of life around me and dance around the pot holes with a light step and an open heart.

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…

Lately, with the success of So You Think You Can Dance we’ve seen a resurgence of dance in main stream media. Now there is also emerging a progressive vision for dance in the internet age. Film director John M. Chu cut his teeth on the blockbuster hit: “Step Up 2: The Streets.” Today he is working on an interactive web series featuring “The League of eXtraordinary Dancers” (LXD), a band of hip hop dancers with “supernatural” abilities that battle it out over broadband. Everything about this project is Web 2.0. First Chu posted video announcements on YouTube asking dancers to respond with their audition videos. From the hundreds of video responses he received, he selected his cast, to make an interactive web series. So far they have been doing an impressive PR circuit. The LXD dancers have made appearances on SYTYCD, the Oscars, and TED. If this blows up, it could mean dance gains a strong foothold in the future of media. Below is their recent TEDtalk. I love what Chu says about how dance is flourishing and evolving through exchange on the internet. My hope is that the concert dance community takes some tips from these hip hop dancers and take to the digital streets!

Enjoy!