Louis Baker - Birds

Ballet dancing to acoustic music, interesting combination. The lighting is relevant to my investigations, the shadows and the camera angles changing from full establishing shots to close-ups, often abstract.

Director - Mat Baker
DOP - Richard Parsonson
Editor - Suga Sippiah @ Method Studios 
DI Colourist - Pete Williams @ Digipost 
Dancers - Dimitri Kleioris, Antonia Hewitt

Nine Variations on a Dance Theme, Hilary Harris 1966 / 67

13:02 version also available on youtube

See paper workbook for notes and thoughts.

Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, 1975

Marina Abramovic

This is an action within life. Intensified. In a lot of Marina Abramovic's works, she is dancing, screaming, or in this case combing her thick dark hair and face with a metal brush, with increasing violence, while intoning for hours and hours the mantra "Art must be beautiful. Artist must be beautiful". It becomes meditative, in an absurd, unsettling way. Obsessed with her physical appearance, she probably wasn't being that ironic. In other performances, she is often nude, testing her body's endurance or stamina. She always challenges the strength of the mind and the body.

Sand Choreography

Performance 13: On Line/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker Jan 12-16, 2011

In conjunction with the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century 

Video directed by Ben Coccio. Cinematography by Cal Robertson. Produced by Professor Bright Films

© 2011 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Maison Martin Margiela with H&M - Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's dance performances

Look back on the unique launch event held for Maison Martin Margiela's collaboration with H&M with famed choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. De Keersmaeker created a unprecedented and beautiful set of performances, set in squares of sand, which ran throughout the evening, across different floors. The choreographer and her dancers removed garments from the collection while performing, thus creating live and spontaneous art installations. 

The event stretched across 9 floors of 5 Beekman Street, a historical building in the city's financial district.

William Forsythe (b. 1949)

Solo (1997) 
1997, 6:52, b&w, sound 

http://ubuweb.com/film/forsythe_solo.html

Choreography/Performance: William Forsythe; Music: Thom Willems, in collaboration with Maxime Franke; Director: Thomas Lovell Balogh; Camera: Jess Hall, Courtesy of The Forsythe Company 

Shot in black-and-white, Solo features an electric solo performance by choreographer William Forsythe, beginning with a close-up on the balletic movements of his feet, scanning up his frame, and then finally zooming out to capture his frenetic movements across a starkly lit stage. The dance is accompanied by an atonal violin composition by Thom Willems and occasional directions from an off-camera male voice, both of which contribute to the film's gloomy, paranoid atmosphere. Solo premiered at the 1997 Whitney Biennial and is considered a landmark in Forsythe's artistic career.

Marina Abramoviç (1912-1992)

Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramoviç (2007) Directed by Babette Mangolte

http://ubuweb.com/film/abramovic_seven.html

For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance.

The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 Ð15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.

"About the public ... I do not want the public to feel that they are spending time with the performances, I simply want them to forget about time." Marina Abramovic, 2005 

Babette Mangolte

Calico Mingling (1973)

Duration: 10 min. B&W
http://ubuweb.com/film/mangolte_calico.html

Calico Mingling, a 1973 dance by Lucinda Childs that took place outdoors at Robert Moses Plaza in Fordham University, is recorded in a grainy ten-minute black and white film. Seen from a distance, and sometimes from above like chess pieces on a board, four dancers march backward and forward, raising and lowering their arms. In the photos, others performers are sometimes caught frozen in midair, while the slide show is a shifting succession of static photographic objects.

Structurally dissecting their movements, these artists replaced emotional expression with simple actions that people perform every day -- walking, sitting and running in ordinary clothes. Almost 40 years later, some of the performance sites have disappeared, and the people seen dancing are now on the verge of growing old. They strived to make dance quotidian, but time makes everything unique. The past can never be ordinary.


Artist Bio

BBabette Mangolte is an experimental filmmaker living in New York City. She had two complete retrospectives of her films and camerawork in 2000 in Germany (organized by Madeleine Bernstorff and Klaus Volkmer) at the Berlin and Munich Cinematheque and in 2004 at Anthology
Films Archives in New York City with the opening of her 2003 film Les Modèles de Pickpocket. In 2007 her film Seven Easy Piecesby Marina Abramovic (2007) premiered at the Berlinale 2007.

Her films and photo work were included in "The American Century" show in 1999 at the Whitney Museum in New York and "Century City" at the Tate Britain in London in 2001.

Mangolte is also known for her photography of dance, theater and performances. Her work was included with several performance photographs and two film installations in a show titled "Art, Lies and Videotapes: Exposing Performance" organized by Adrian George at TATE Liverpool (United Kingdom) in 2003.

Among her more recent shows, “Live Art on Camera” at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK, Curator Alice Maude-Roxby, “ Un teatre sense teatre” at Museu d’Art Contemporari de Barcelona, Curator Bernard Blistene (tour to Museu Berardo, Lisboa, Portugal) and Mangolte’s first solo show in the US at BROADWAY 1602, New York, curated by Anke Kempkes, all in 2007 and in 2008 a two films installation titled Presence a t the Berlin Biennale 2008 and a second solo show at Broadway 1602 titled “Collision”. A new photo installation TOUCHING was included in a show at Akademie der Künste “re.act.feminism – performancekunst der 1960er & 70er jahre heute” curated by Bettina Knaup und Beatrice E. Stammer, till February 8, 2009.

She did a one month residency at OCA in Oslo, Norway in May 2009.

In 2010 she was included in numerous shows, in particular in the Whitney Biennial 2010 with “How to look ….”, and in a show at Migros Museum in Zurich, “While Bodies get mirrored… “, Mangolte also had two solo shows, one at Broadway 1602, New York in summer 2010 titled “Movement and Stills” and another solo show at Scorcha Dallas in Glasgow, UK titled “Yvonne Rainer: Testimony to Improvisation 1972-5”. In addition she was included in “Mixed Use: Manhattan” at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain, curated by Lynne Cook and Douglas Crimp.