Posts Tagged ‘learning’

"Outside In" by Victoria Marks, Photo by Mark Lewis

Kinetic Cinema with Victoria Marks

Thursday, October 22nd, 7:00pm. $10 (at the door)

University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street, NYC

Kinetic Cinema explores the intersection of dance and the moving image both on screen and stage. For each screening Anna Brady Nuse, Pentacle’s director of Movement Media, invites a different guest artist to share a selection of films and videos that have inspired them. This month, award-winning choreographer and dance film-maker, Victoria Marks presents a program in which she weaves together her main cinematic influences with her own dance film work.

Workshop: Choreo-Portraits in Film with Victoria Marks

Friday, October 23rd, 10:00am-2:00pm

Chen Dance Center

8 East 1st Street, (btw Bowery & 2nd Avenue), NYC

In dance, trained and virtuosic bodies often stand in for the universal or human figure. How can cinematic movement studies capture the “who” of the performer, particularly as they move with another person? “Choreo-portraiture” is the name renowned choreographer and filmmaker Victoria Marks has given to dances she makes that are about the people who inhabit them. In choreo-portraits, Marks searches not for extraordinary feats, but for the small actions and interactions that communicate who these people are, alone and together. In this workshop, participants will consider this idea as they serve to design and shoot one another’s movements.

Open to dance and film professionals and students, registration is limited to 20 ppl. Workshop fee $35.00. Register online, or contact movementmedia@pentacle.org.

Movement Media in Philadelphia:

Presented by the Institution of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

Kinetic Cinema Wed. Oct. 21st at 6:30pm

Choreo-Portraits in Film Workshop Sat. Oct. 24th 10:00am-5:00pm

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

118 South 36th Street

Philadelphia, PA

Victoria Marks will also present her Kinetic Cinema screening and Choreo-Portraits workshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia in conjunction with their ground-breaking Dance with Camera exhibition.

Go to www.icaphila.org for more information and to register for the workshop.

"Not About Iraq" by Victoria Marks

Victoria Marks recent work considers citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. Marks has served as faculty in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA since 1995.  She is a 2007 EMPAC award winner for the creation of “Veterans,” a dance for the camera made with Margaret Williams.  “Veterans” won first prize in the Barcelona Video Dance Festival, 2008.  Marks is also a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and has received recent grants from the Irvine Foundation (Dance: Creation to Performance 2004 and DanceMaker 2002), the NEA (2005) and the Cultural Affairs Council (COLA 2001).  In 1997, Marks was honored with the Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.  Over the course of her career, she has been the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films with Margaret Williams, including the Barcelona VideoDance Prize, the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival, the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.

As you know, Boris Willis was our curator for our last Kinetic Cinema of the season. The subject of his evening was dance vlogs: a video blog with dance.  As an experienced dance vlogger, Boris has many insights into the process of creating videos, performing for the camera, editing, and using the web to share his work online.  He has graciously offered some helpful information about making dance videos, and creating dance vlogs.  Check out his inspirational work and helpful tips below.

Capitol Spring 2 by Boris Willis

Boris writes:

Why should artists create a dance vlog? I believe the answer lies in the number of times we have to explain what we do and have little in our culture to point to as an example. We have an opportunity to reach out to the public to show and explain the process of what we do, why we do it and how we feel about it. Here are some tips for you to think about as you make your dance vlogs.

1. Have a vision
   Find a way to make videos that you feel express who you are and what you want to say as a dancer. That being said, don’t just turn on your camera and dance, find a way to make an interesting and exciting video. Look at commercials and other short videos as inspiration.
2. Vlogging is personal and performative
   Make your vlog about you because it is the one subject that you know more about than anyone else. Dance, talk about dance, talk about making dance while you are dancing, dance about making dance.
3. Understand how the web is used
   Just because you have twenty minutes of footage doesn’t mean you should post it all to your vlog. Generally speaking three minutes is the most someone will watch. In other words keep it short, a sixty second video is plenty. As you gain more skills you will be able to make longer videos compelling by the way you edit them. It is always better to leave them wanting more than to bore them. Make stuff that people want to see and make it short enough that they watch it all.
4. Edit
   Learn how to use the tools of video editing. There are free editing tools that come with your computer operating system, Window’s Movie Maker for Window and iMove for the Mac OS. If you want to be able to do more sophisticated editing you can get Final Cut Express for the Mac and Premiere Pro Elements for the PC. For professional level editing you will need something like Premier Pro CS 4 for the PC and Final Cut 6 for the Mac. The great thing about video is that you can take the time to get it right and make your content compelling. However, the most important edit you make is at the end of your video, use a black out when the video is over and put your credits at the end of each video without a blackout so the credits are the last thing your audience sees. That way if your video gets distributed around the web everyone will know its yours.
5. Get the best camera you can afford
   You never know what will become of your work it is always best to get the highest quality video of your original work. When you put it on the web it will get compressed and lose quality but that is what we expect from the web. Having a high quality version for showing offline is a very good idea. I also recommend that you use a camera that records to video tape so that you have a backup. I always shoot in HDV but down-convert to SD to save disk space then compress it to the Quicktime format which eventually gets converted to flash.
6. Find a video host that you like
   I have been in debates about whether it is better to put your videos on Vimeo or YouTube or Blip.tv. There is no reason not to try all three and of any number of others. Just find one that you like. If image quality is what is most important then Vimeo is for you. If ease of distribution is what is most important then Blip.tv is for you. If getting your videos seen by a large number of people then YouTube is the way to go. There are pro’s and con’s for all three services and I use all three and others as well. Once you decided on a host for your videos choose a host for your blog. Blogger and Wordpress are two popular services that give you a variety of tools to enhance your content.
7. Be Consistent
   Follow your vision, update on a regular basis, make videos in manageable viewing times for your audience. You are not going to make money from advertising on your vlog but you can use your vlog as a tool to get work by showcasing your skills as a performer, choreographer, editor and artist. Let your followers know what you are up to especially when you are taking a break. People want to know that when they go to your blog there is regularly new content there that they want to see. Your dance vlog should be fun and informative. You should do it because you enjoy it.
8. Say hello
   How do you get people to follow your vlog? Email your friends, comment on other people’s vlogs, tell people you meet, get cards made. You can get free cards online from Vista Print.
9. Music
   Don’t use copy-written music. Find a musician among your friends or on the web that will let you use their music in exchange for some cross promotion. You can find plenty of music at this url http://www.archive.org/index.php Learn about Creative Commons use and credit the musicians for their work.
10. Describe the videos you make
    Write a description of the videos you post and use tags to help yourself and others find them. It is time consuming at first to describe your work but the value in doing so cannot be underestimated. Describe what you are doing in the video, give the location, who is in the video, when it was done and what the video is about.

-Boris Willis

danceaday.com

We wanted to provide you with the program notes and videos that Boris Willis presented at Kinetic Cinema, on June 10th at Chez Buskwick.  Since his program was about dance vlogging, all the videos he showed are available online, which we have provided the links to. Coincidentally, Willis organized his videos along the theme of amateur/professional, fitting perfectly with our first Weekly Videodance Contest.

Reality Dancevision: An Intimate Screen Capture of Dance Vloggers- Program Notes and Videos

Curator’s Note:

Boris Willis by Paul Emerson

The dance vlogger it seems, is a rare person to find. It is relatively easy to find dance bloggers, dance writers and dance photographers but finding professional dancers/choreographers who use the web as a primary source for showing a dance is more difficult. We see the powerful influence of the web with the disappearance of newspapers and the emergence of e-book readers such as the Kindle, the emergence of iTunes Music Store as the world’s largest seller of music, as well as the question of whether DVD’s will soon be outpaced by movie downloads. Even in this digital age, people love dance, as evidenced by video sharing sites that are replete with videos of the latest social dances and sophisticated dance videos made by amateurs.. I think that just as reality television can take you into the lives of ordinary people, online dance can take you into the lives of dance makers. We can get an intimate look at the person, not just the performer, through online video. I can’t predict that the web will provide a revolution in theatrical dance. However, I do sense a shift by some artists who feel as I do that one does not have to wait for their two nights in the theater to share their work. For this program, I will present several works by amateur and professional dancers that reveal the artist as both a performer and a person in a way that illuminates the purpose of dance in our lives as well as acknowledge the value of web as a venue.

–Boris Willis
Enjoy… Read the rest of this entry »

By Dawn Paap

Given all the possibilities of dance on screen, choreographers for the camera have a multitude of ways to keep us astonished.  Fortunately, the creative interaction between film technique and dance are endless.  In the emerging field of Cinedance, filmmakers or video artists create works that use dance as raw material, and now, choreographic achievements are being made available to the video artist for artistic exploration.

At the last Kinetic Cinema screening on May 13th at Chez Bushwick, curator Victoria Murphy showed a video by Matt Tarr and Ami Ipapo entitled ‘Little Ease (Outside the Box)’ that was a screen adaptation of Elizabeth Streb’s iconic solo ‘Little Ease’. For the film version of the piece, Streb company member Ami Ipapo reconstructed the choreography off-stage in an urban landscape.  The choreography of the live piece on its own is powerful, but the film was able to capture more action and intensity in the piece. I felt more connected to the dancer by being able to hear her breathing, and see her minute facial expressions as she powerfully pushes through the movements. The film took me “inside the box” with the dancer, and I forgot that I was a voyeur watching a choreographed work, something that rarely happens when watching a live performance. My favorite element of this Cinedance was the artistry in editing together of the shots of choreography, which to me added a new specific cinematic “pulse” to Streb’s dance.

Fortunately, other dance icons are lending their choreographed works to video artists to create cinedances. For instance the Martha Graham Company recently released videos of several dances from Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra to be remashed and reedited by contestants in their Clytemnestra Remash Challenge. The contestants displayed a huge range of styles and approaches to remashing the choreographic material, and all of the contest entries are available for view on the Clytemenestra Remash Challenge website at http://clytemnestraproject.com.

I am a personal fan of taking choreographed works made for the stage out into the world to be performed, so I was very pleased to see so many  video artists take Martha Graham’s choreography and characters into new environments off stage.  To me, it made the characters more appealing and more passionate. As a result, I found myself enjoying and connecting with Graham’s work on another level.   The following submission was my personal favorite in the Remash Contest.

The winners of the Remash Contest for Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra have been announced.  Check out their videos and look at some of the other contestants as well. Voting is still open for the popular choice awards! Regardless of the winners, I am thrilled to see new film-makers responding to choreography and furthering the development of cinedance.

People all over the globe are now able to share and collaborate on artistic works over the Internet. Dance innovators would be wise to tap into these new possibilities and use today’s networked media technologies to make the works of dance masters more accessible. In so doing, like Martha Graham and Elizabeth Streb, they would ensure the cultural significance of their work over time, while also enabling to new works of art to be made and contributing to new developments in cinedance.