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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Spong likes the idea of an artist making a costume "I'm going to completely take over the body."
The director of the Ballet Russes didn't like film as a medium, mass-culture.
There aren't record of thses ballets, the choreography has been lost. Dance gets carried on from one dancer to another, traditional form of passing on information. Just like language, things can slip and move in very natural ways as one dancer re-interprets the choreography.
Costume for a Mourner - sculpture and flat image, the dancer Benny was asked by Sriwhana to do an exploration of the costume. He said the music wasn't working for him, narrative, hence the decision to film it in silence. There is a piece in the ballet that is beautiful and evocative, and the music comes in for a short amount of time, something coming to life, like a shard of hope. The sound is quite easy to remember, when the film goes silent again, you can still hear the music reverberating even though it's not there anymore. The song of the nightingale, like a memory.
Expanded cinema and ecstatic 16mm/8mm film and sound performances by Eve Gordon and Sam Hamilton.
“...modified multi-screen 16mm works, structuralist light refractions, phasing optical illusions, ecstatic colour tapestries, pseudo-anthropologic mystic fictional direct film story telling, kinetic alchemical rhythms, hypnotic flicker dreams, trapeze interventions with narratives blueprinted from the life cycles of migrating sea birds...”
The Parasitic Fantasy Band use multiple projections, sound and acrobatics to create “an ecstatic engagement of the senses... an activation of the space around you and the inhabitants sharing that space with you”.
While they have also created single channel films and pieces for gallery installation, they describe their live performances as their prime mode of “open(ing) up the possibilities of cinema”. They describe a Parasitic Fantasy Band performance as “an active, energetic and truly experiential platform for engaging with people, minds and imaginations”.
Their live performances include a variety of modes, methods and equipment - “multiple film projectors, bending mirrors, light fracturing objects, organic materials, gongs, electronics, activations and interventions, droning resonating strings on projectors, textural electronics, computational story telling and forest field recordings hand collected from the Amazon jungles of South America.”
They cite cinematic reference points for their work including “Metamkine, Guy Sherwin and the London Film-Makers Co-op, Tony Conrad, Len Lye, Harry Smith, Abject Leader, Arthur and Corrine Cantrill. Most of whom we have been excited to personally work with" via collaboration, hosting, screening or workshops.
The Parasitic Fantasy Band have performed internationally at venues including “cinema houses, scummy city service alleyways, art galleries, museums and the Outback desert of Australia.” The Parasitic Fantasy Band are also active organisers and curators of experimental film activity in Auckland.
For this groundbreaking avant-garde film, Deren filmed dancer Talley Beatty as he performed a highly condensed dance sequence in a variety of settings, from a forest locale, to a sitting room, and finally to a sculpture-filled courtyard. Deren directed the camera as if it were a dancer, expertly using cuts, varying film speeds, and backwards motion to create a dance that could only exist on film. As Deren wrote in 1965, the dance is "so related to camera and cutting that it cannot be 'performed' as a unit anywhere but in this particular film." This work is considered one of the first major film dances, and has influenced generations of artists and filmmakers since.
One of the preeminent choreographers in contemporary dance, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker presents an adaptation of her acclaimed 1982 piece, Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich.
TateShots captured the final rehearsals of Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich and spoke with its choreographer, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
First performed in 1982, Fase comprises three duets and one solo dance, each reflecting the shifting rhythms and melodies of the minimalist composition by Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker discusses the origins of the piece, the process of adapting it for The Tanks at Tate Modern, and how she feels performing it thirty years on.
Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich is at The Tanks at Tate Modern, 18 July – 20 July 2012
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The words of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
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"To be able to dance for a period of over 30 years has been quite special. I think I basically started to dance like a lot of young girls dance. After all those years, I still dance because that is the way I can relate to the world. I'm a choreographer, but I think I'm more of a dancer than a choreographer. And it's nice to dance my own choreographies.
To perform here at Tate Modern is a new phase, in the story of this performance. The way this specific space is, where here the audience is all around and will be moving, I think there is a different kind of dance and performance which is created. 'Fase Four Movements To The Music Of Steve Reich' is a piece, a performance which was made in 1982. It was the very first choreography I made. As the title says, it's four movements to the music of Steve Reich, piano phase, violin phase, and clapping music.
The music of Steve Reich was very inviting at the very beginning state. In the sense that is has a very abstract and logical structure, which is extremely rigorous, nearly mathematical. But at the same time, it allows me to have a certain freedom also, to find a choreographic answer to that. I think there is a very nice flow between things that are simple and things that are complex. The main elements are repetitive patterns, very small figures that are repeated over and over again; and through acceleration and deceleration starts to shift so that you get different relationships in time, until they are again together.
So that's extremely simple, but very refined. That's one of the beautiful things about the body, is that through movement, through dance, you can literally embody the most abstract ideas.
The space has something very raw. It's not the black box of a theatre. It's not the white cube of the museum.
To have live performance, and to have all the intensity of the body, with all it's layers, all the possible emotions that the human body carries, and especially also the social aspect that is emphasized by the relationship with the public. And what is beautiful here also, is that people will be close, they will have a different relationship to detail. I think that's going to transform the performance in a very exciting way. I'm curious to see what's going to happen."
