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.
Sunday, 18 August 2013
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Aerial Film Experiment #1
http://circuit.org.nz/film/aerial-film-experiment-1
ARTIST
YEAR
2008
LENGTH
1 MIN 45 SEC
COUNTRY
NZ
FORMAT
16MM / SOUND
The Parasitic Fantasy Band
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.
Sunday, 28 July 2013
A Study in Choreography for Camera
Maya Deren (1917-1961)
2:13, b&w, silent
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.
Tuesday, 23 July 2013
TateShots: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
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
:
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."
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