Archive for the ‘Weekly Webdance’ Category

A prominent filmmaker, choreographer, model, and dancer, Celia Rowlson-Hall is a power-packed artist and a Bessie Award winning performer.

Her short film, Prom Night depicts the story of a girl entering into a night filled with memorable moments from Prom. Audience members get to sit back and feel as if they are Celia’s prom date, while the entire film is shot from her date‘s point of view.

From the start, the doors open up revealing multicolor balloons and streamers covering the surfaces of the room. Inside Celia stands waiting patiently for her date in a light powder blue dress. The camera follows her to the refreshment table where Celia grabs a drink and lures her date to the middle of the dance floor. Extreme close-ups on Celia’s face shows her acting skills as she morphs between different famous characters. Images of Virgin Mary, Pamela Anderson, Lolita, Madonna and Carrie all transform and disappear within seconds. Finally she exits the room and reappears behind double doors. Now we are exiled outside the room, only able to watch her voyeuristically through the windows. Dancing by herself, the view from outside the double doors shows Celia sashaying across the dance floor evoking the phrase, “dance as if no one is watching.”  Stepping back from the windows, the prom night ends leaving nothing but Celia dancing aimlessly by herself to Be My Baby by The Ronettes.

Check out more videos of Celia Rowlson-Hall on vimeo and also check out her website.

We have arrived at the end of our month-long exploration of dance and line. Have you kept up? To return to the beginning, visit these videos by de Keersmaeker, Orrico, and Forsythe.

We will end with a video by Rashaad Newsome and Darrin Prada called Untitled (New Way). (Unfortunately you will have to click the link to see this one as embedding has been disabled).

http://vimeo.com/10696932

From Newsome’s description:

“Untitled (New Way Study)” features Darrin Prada, one of New York City’s top “New Way” Voguers’, and serves to shape a careful and loving visual study of both performer and performance. I invited Darrin to my studio to be filmed demonstrating the “New Way” style of Vogueing. New Way is characterized by a more rigid, geometric pattern movement coupled with “clicks” (limb contortions at the joints) and “arms control” (sleight of hand and wrist illusions, which usually include “tuts” or “tutting” and locking). New Way can also be described as a modified form of mime, where imaginary geometric shapes such as a box are introduced during motion and moved progressively around the dancer’s body to display the dancer’s dexterity and memory.

Here’s another well-loved favorite. You may have seen it already, but perhaps this week we can watch it with specific attention towards the ways that Forsythe works with lines and texture.

Feet rubbing on the floor, violin bow rubbing against strings, muscle rubbing against bone—etching, cutting, weaving, and shaping himself and the space around him. Moving quickly from one thing to the next, we remain with the ghosts of himself that he leaves behind.

Continuing with the theme of dance, geometry, and line drawing, here is a video of a performance by Tony Orrico, formerly of Shen Wei Dance Arts. You might remember him from his recent performance with John Jasperse, in which he covered the stage and lobby of Brooklyn Academy of Music with lines of tape (all while crouching down in a small white box on wheels).

This piece, Penwald 2: 8 Circles is created in 1,000 movements and measured by the length of Orrico’s body. Enjoy.

Hello Webdancers!

This week’s video is the first in a month-long series that features videos that engage with drawing and geometry. How do we create and mark the space around us with movement? As movers, it would seem that we are always making these lines, as those who watch us can remember for an instant where we have just come from.

We’ll begin with a well-known and well-loved piece by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker that was featured last winter at the MoMA. Enjoy!

“When you work with geometry and with geometrical patterns, what you actually do is like measuring the earth. It becomes very much about relationships of the amount of space you occupy in a certain amount of time.”

When we look through the viewfinder of a camera, we are given the task of measuring space in a different way, and of defining the relationships of the figures in focus through these measurements. The videos in this series may not all involve sophisticated camera work, but I hope they will help us to think about natural geometries in our bodies, new modes of composition, and ways in which different types of artistic production can converse with each other.