Variations V (excerpt), 1965
in collaboration with John Cage, Stan Vanderbeek, Arne Arnborn and Nam June Paik
June 30, 2009
Raimund Hoghe on Café Müller
Une plainte d’amour. Se souvenir, se mouvoir, se toucher. Adopter des attitudes. Se dévêtir, se faire face, déraper sur le corps de l’Autre. Chercher ce qui est perdu, proximité. Ne savoir que faire pour se plaire. Courir vers les murs, s’y jeter, s’y heurter. S’effondrer et se relever. Reproduire ce qu’on a vu. S’en tenir à des modèles. Vouloir devenir un. Etre dépris. S’enlacer. He is gone. Avec les yeux fermés. Aller l’un vers l’autre. Se sentir. Danser. Vouloir blesser. Protéger. Mettre de côté les obstacles. Donner aux gens de l’espace. Aimer.
A plead for love. To remember, to move, to touch. To put on an attitude. To undress, turn around, to drape oneself over another. To search for what’s lost, proximity. To not know what to do to complain. To run towards the walls, jump on them, get hurt. To collapse then get up again. To reproduce what one’s seen. To stick to to certain ways. To want to belong. To not be taken. To intertwine with another. He is gone. With the eyes closed. To move together. To feel. To dance. To want to hurt someone. To protect. To put the obstacles aside. To give people space. To love.
from Pina Bausch: Histoires de théâtre dansé, L’Arche, Paris, 1987.
June 8, 2009
Paul Singh, Choreographer of the Mind
If Jérôme Bel is a choreographer for the mind, then Paul Singh is a choreographer of the mind. To watch a Paul Singh dance is to have your brain go on a gentle, guided tour- a behind-the-scenes tour of the very dance he is presenting. Standing in front of you calmly speaking into a microphone, he becomes some sort of benevolent dance wizard, altering and guiding your thoughts with his bewitching gaze and seeming ESP.
Yet Singh isn’t going for hypnosis or illusion; a former Pre-Med student, his methods have more to do with neuroscience. But in the end, Singh is a dancemaker. (And a delightful one at that.) Science may be a point of departure for him, but what really propels his work is a passionate investigation of how one experiences a dance, both as a performer and audience member.
Lately Singh has been experimenting with recording his own voice, and using it to direct dancers or himself on stage. Speaking to you in his mellifluous, calm voice, he follows a stream-of-consciousness path that tickles the imagination, literally. Once he begins to speak, his calm mind games are already taking place. Then, he gives you certain tasks. You are to think of someone you know and to place that certain someone on stage next to Singh. As he dances, his recorded voice asks you to imagine that this person is dancing beside him in unison, in effect taking our attention (and the pressure of performing) away from Singh.
Now he is playing with memory, and how memory isn’t fixed but rather constructed and malleable. Our memory of this person is both influencing and being affected by the dance he or she is doing with Singh. This elicits a variety of responses from each audience member; perhaps envisioning this person is emotional, or amusing. Ultimately each spectator has a unique experience, which, Singh points out, is the case in any performance. He doesn’t want to be the only one having a meaningful experience, hence the name of the work, Privy.
Essentially, Paul Singh is interested in semiotics. In this interactive performance, he wants us to create our own meaning, as well as see (think?) before our eyes how that meaning is constructed. He understands that communication goes far beyond words, and most importantly, that it is a group effort. A strip of yellow or blue paper (pictured in the image above) was taped to the underside of each seat, and in order to understand the missing gaps, we had to read them aloud, together.
Privy, a work in progress presented at DNA’s 2009 “In the Company of Men“, was only about ten minutes long. Yet in that fascinating ten minutes, he manages to embrace your attention (not grab it) and lead it in a gentle, delightful dance.
May 12, 2009
Daft Punk as Choreographic Score
In her Masters thesis,“Dorky Dance, YouTube, and the New Vaudeville” , Latika Young traces the path from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Pee Wee Herman and Napoleon Dynamite, going on to further explain how the internet has propelled this new vaudeville genre of “dorky dancing” with its popular viral videos.
Strong supporting videos include Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” directed by Spike Jonze, Numa Numa, and OK Go’s dorky choreography.
Below is a choreographed dance to Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger” (as well as a link to two French boys’ copycat version…). Also, click on the green idaft link to make your own version of the music.
March 27, 2009
Elodie Pong, After The Empire
Elodie Pong, video artist, born in Boston, lives and works in Zurich. In her short film, After The Empire, cultural and historical icons intermingle in an absurdist scenario: Marilyn Monroe woos Karl Marx, a Japanese girl dressed as Mickey Mouse reads a sex ad, Elvis recites his lyrics with zero affect, and Robin coyly wins Batman’s love and affirmation. Pong has a degree in anthropology and sociology, and her intention in commenting on globalization and contemporary pop cultures is clear, but this particular film seems to beat you over the head with its obvious cast of pop icons and its B movie styling. Pong interrupts the absurdity with a poignant confession of a Swiss woman, who tells the story of how her father died before she and her illegitimate sister were able to ever meet him. As humorous and biting as it was (Batman kissing Robin; the Japanese Mickey Mouse declaring, “My pussy is the new black.”), it all seemed a little forced. I think here of Catherine Bay’s Snow White project, which inspires similar discourse, but with much more subtlety.
Pong achieves this subtlety, however, with Even A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice a Day, a humorous short film in which taxidermied birds discuss the current global economic crisis. That is, we read their Hannity & Colmes-like dialogue through subtitles, hearing only the howling winds of what seems like a remote Galapagos island. In this film, Pong creates more conviction, as the focus is simpler, less all over the place. There are only birds, wind and subtitles – very effective and funny.
January 17, 2009
The Body Cartography Project, Holiday House
photo: Sean Smuda
Holiday House is a playful performance that rarely lets go of your attention, like a wayward toddler whose silly antics make a stage of the living room carpet. Yet the performers in the Body Cartography Project display much more than eccentric behavior; they are quirky and convincing movers, and fortunately are given a lot of structure under the solid direction of Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad.
There is something gratifying as a spectator when an artist accomplishes what she or he sets out to do. In his bio, Ramstad admits “an insatiable interest in the process of creating kinesthetic visual images with movement.” The composition of Holiday House is proof of this interest, with its fine-tuned arrangement of image and movement, dance and film. Choreography and direction are two separate realms, and Bieringa and Ramstad navigate both with conviction.
The work, a composite of three performances adapted specifically for P.S. 122’s space, is held up by consistently clever choices. Rarely is an idea drawn out too long or wasted. Kinetic investigations with objects are innovative and complete (slithering around on a couch, exploring the sound a butter knife makes, getting on a bicycle). The inhabitants of Holiday House do these things as if their family reunion utterly bored them, yet the result is far from boring; it’s as if they were re-instilled with the curiosity of a child, whose awareness of social codes is not yet developed. Such, they are both innocent (observing others, investigating a utensil) and tempestuous (throwing cookies off the table, aggressive duets suggesting sibling quarrels).
Film projections and the use of live-feed cameras are decisive and purposeful (coordinating previously recorded site-specific work with real-time performance), creating a duplicitous framework where performers play with their alter-ego on screen. We see a film shot in the directors’ real home in Minneapolis, in which everybody resumes their antics: silliness in the kitchen, rolling around in the backyard, and stillness in the nighttime alley. The performers watch the films like home videos, sitting on the couch or holding a remote TV.
The movement vocabulary struck me as truly contemporary, as I saw virtually no reference to other dance techniques. Ramstad flings himself around the stage in a short solo, initiating his leaps from the hips yet not changing his straddle. The movement is fidgety and spastic without being frantic or unorganized. Both Bieringa and Ramstad are Body Mind Centering® practitioners, and this is evident in the suppleness of their dancing.
What impressed me most was the group’s strong sense of ensemble. One of the most riveting moments was perhaps the simplest: At one point, all six performers quietly sat at a dinner table and just looked at each other, sharply pivoting their heads every few moments, birdlike. Not much is happening at this moment, but their quiet, quirky connectedness spoke volumes. (Recalling work of Morgan Thorson, who helped develop the piece and who performed in an earlier version. They also credit Kristin Van Loon and Karen Sherman) The members of the Body Cartography Project each possess a deadpan presence that is ironically expressive and refreshingly unforced. They are hip, alternative and queer (even if they may be straight) and in all their artistic performativity come off as entirely unpretentious.
It was definitely a family affair -quite literally- with a dance-party scene to Mary J. Blige’s groove, “Family Affair”. (See comment below) As I left the theater, some objects were still laying in a line across the stage from the final scene. The most poetic was a mixing bowl that contained an old eggbeater and a vintage copy of Andy Warhol’s Philosophy of Andy Warhol (whose paperback cover is in the style of the Campbell’s soup label). A remnant of a cooking experiment gone artfully astray.
January 13, 2009
Screendance Integrity; Douglas Rosenberg
Most of Douglas Rosenberg’s Dance for the Camera workshop was not devoted to Final Cut Pro editing but rather to discussing the importance of heightened critical dialogue around the art form.
The following excerpt is from his essay, “Proposing a Theory of Screendance”:
“When we think about screendance, much less comes to mind in regard to the delineation of movements or genres within the field of practice. And identifiable authorship is quite rare. This lack of self-definition is cause for concern in a field that teeters on marginality. Screendance, though equal parts film or video and dance, (and I would argue, owing more to the media side of things) is largely seen as a production of the dance world as opposed to the world of moving image production. As such, it is sheltered from the discourse that surrounds the history and production of either film or video. As such, it is often seen as an extension of dance, one that moves dance into a new venue but still in the end a product of dance production. Even while screendance is arguably a hybrid form, it finds itself without the critical mass of a serious and well-articulated discourse that would raise the level of understanding and production to that of the other arts, such as film or the plastic arts. So this is the inheritance of screendance: a critical vacuum out of which we align ourselves with the entertainment value of dance and the technical method of distribution of film and video.”
The workshop also included an analysis (and subsequent indictment) of Roslyn Sulcas’s heavily biased critique of this year’s Dance on Camera Festival, in which she lacks the critical dialogue necessary to talk about films that were not ballet or dance-centered. Moreover, work she did not understand was ungracefully dismissed, with rather crude and pejorative connotations. This served to both belittle the art form and devalue herself as a competent critic of the arts.
In the critiquing of a “screendance” (a term I had not heard until now), Rosenberg proposes stepping out of a dance perspective and into an intertextual dialogue- one that traverses contemporary art, video and film, as well as the philosophy and theory that surrounds it. He stresses the importance of different ways of seeing, and of critiquing a work on its own terms. (What was its intention? How can it be classified and discussed in a way that takes into account its cultural context- with or without “dance”?)
