Blogs

Another well deserved award: Best dance film at dancescreen 2010 in category C2 "screen choreography", subcategory "shorts up to 15 min".

See the whole award lis here: http://cinedans.nl/dancescreen

We make a toast and thank the Jury, and the co-organizers Cinedans (Amsterdam) and IMZ (Viena).

We dedicate it to the team and to the family of videodance.

Cheers!

The University of North Texas (UNT) seeks an accomplished visual artist with exceptional technological expertise and experience in interdisciplinary and collaborative research to join the newly formed Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA). Research areas may include but are not limited to: robotics/physical computing, wearables, interactive programming and/or performance systems, HCI design and hardware/software development for the control of digital arts media. The applicant is expected to serve in an active collaborative role in iARTA and to foster and contribute to visionary interdisciplinary research between the arts, engineering and the sciences. This is an Open-Rank position; rank and compensation will be commensurate with experience.

For complete details, visit: http://facultyjobs.unt.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=51142

I am so upset that the great flamenco artist Enrique Morente Cotelo just died, Monday, December 13, only 12 days shy of his birthday.

What a gift he had. He could make your guts burn with only a few notes. And he experimented with so many forms, always excelling.

Why do so many of the great & talented always seem to die young? Is it because someone upstairs says - "OK. You've done all you possibly can to remind the rest of them that the mysterious forces of nature are always there, available to be tapped."

Born on Christmas Day 1942 in Granada, Spain, Enrique Morente began his career in Spain in the mid-1960s, and performed at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and again in NY in recent years at BAM and Lincoln Center. Mr. Morente’s survivors include his wife, Aurora Carbonell, a dancer; and three children, one of whom, Estrella Morente, who is my favorite performer in Carlos Saura's latest film FLAMENCO FLAMENCO that Dance on Camera Festival will show on January 29, 2011.

“I like doing what comes from inside,” Enrique Morente told The Boston Globe in 2003. “If that means I’m innovating, it’s pure coincidence.”

Tomorrow is now the last day of the competition at the Fidor bank (https://banking.fidor.de/wersollsbekommen) and we're quite excited about it!

We're still in the first row, but you never know about the jokers other players might have and, lets be real - it is a game. So I see my self and all the people involved sitting in front of their computer, checking the website of Fidor every minute...

The last days we spent on writing emails and facebook messages and twitter messages and talked to people - all to mobilize the crowd so that they vote for us. This is not an easy job. It takes a lot of time. Especially if you try to make your mother vote as well. Not an easy one. Well, we need every vote.

The communication part on every platform is the most important point in the whole thing. If you know a lot of people and you make them vote for you - you made a good job in communicating your project. It also helps to ask your friends and partners to forward your request.

In the first action I sent 700 messages and emails - we have 60 votes by now. So you see what's left. But I have to admit, it is a boarder to register at a bank you don't know and all that stuff. Also the registration process is not just that you click on the project to vote. So people hesitate. It's a new way to fund project. People might have doubts and all. But never the less - we are optimistic!

If we win the competition, we will receive our first funding to produce the dance piece ROHRPOST.

Give it a try too!

Thanks and good night,

Johanna for mind_the_gut

Rhode Island School of Design

Rhode Island School of Design seeks a forward thinking and experienced artist/designer, educator and scholar for the position of Associate Professor in its highly regarded Graduate Department of Digital + Media, with the expectation that this individual will also serve as the appointed Department Head starting July 2011. Established in 2003, the Department of Digital + Media offers an MFA program for approximately 30 students a year who bring diverse research interests and creative explorations of technology and the digital world to the fields of contemporary art/design, and new media practices. It is one of three stand-alone graduate departments at RISD. Because of its interdisciplinary structure and reach, the Department of Digital + Media has developed strong connections to other departments and programs both at RISD and at neighboring Brown University. The position offers a unique opportunity for a dynamic intellectual and pedagogical leader to guide the future of the department in its exploration of advanced art, design and research practices within the current cultural environment of ubiquitous digital media. The successful candidate should be an artist/designer who is engaged in the understanding of emergent, adaptive and social media technologies and their relationship with other media, disciplines and debates within contemporary theory. She/he will foster a department culture of curricular innovation in which faculty are encouraged to develop progressive teaching and research practices. As Department Head, she/he will play a pivotal role in supporting the diverse practices of D + M graduate students and forging partnerships with other graduate programs at RISD, as well as external research partners. She/he will develop the role of the Digital + Media Department as a research incubator and creative forum at RISD, and advance the Digital + Media program within the expanding field of new media and technology in art and design graduate education.

Applicants should have a terminal graduate degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience in art, design, media, computer art, or contemporary theory; at least 5 years of full-time teaching at the college or university (especially graduate) level or the equivalent; a demonstrated background and interest in academic, intellectual leadership in a graduate program; and a strong record of research and creative work.

Applicants should provide a letter of interest; statement of teaching and leadership philosophy in the context of this field of inquiry; curriculum vitae; names and contact information for three references; examples of creative and scholarly work; and selected syllabi from courses taught with examples of student work.

Review of applications will begin immediately, and continue until the position is filled. Candidates who submit their materials by January 5, 2011, will be assured full consideration.

For more information about RISD and to apply online visit http://www.risd.edu/jobs


RISD is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage inquiries from candidates who will enrich and contribute to the cultural and ethnic diversity of our College. RISD does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, genetics, or any other protected characteristic as established by law, in employment, or in our education programs.


About the Department of Digital + Media:

The Department of Digital + Media is engaged in a critical examination and exploration of the dynamic relationship of technology, contemporary culture, media, and physical objects, time and space. It offers a two-year MFA with annual enrollment of thirty graduate students with a diverse range of undergraduate and professional backgrounds. The mission of the department is to create a resonant environment for leading edge creative work and research focusing on the creative potentials of media and contemporary technologies. Embracing the broad and dynamic potential of digital media as a ubiquitous tool across many domains, the department fosters exploratory work that exhibits a high degree of innovative visual, sonic, and/or textual expression with conceptual clarity and technological insight and agility. A continuum between digital media and physical objects, virtual and actual space is emphasized.

Working from a cogent theoretical, historical, and conceptual curricular core, the department is an environment that supports diverse forms of experimentation for students. Students are immersed in a multi-perspective approach to knowledge and contemporary culture with particular relevance to their own areas of interest merged with theory and critique from other disciplines and areas of research. Through a complex understanding of the capacity of digital and new media and social practices through conceptual, critical, social, and cultural inquiry, students pursue ambitious independent work and theses. Multiple, but interconnected, core intellectual values include:

- To know how to use digital (and analog) technologies; study and understand the various perspectives of their histories and how they came to be

- To understand the implications materialized in a device or technology; why they are there and for whom, in order to challenge, critique, and interrogate the embedded assumptions and prescriptions and engage critically with technologies

- To investigate existing or make new technologies from the perspectives of artists and designers rather than from traditionally trained engineers

- To work in the areas of social practice, activist practice, and science, technology, and society studies in both material and community projects

Performance, installation, dance, film, sound, objects, two- and three-dimensions, video, glass, ceramics, architecture – any of these forms and media may be part of students' practice and research, but these forms are not the sole reason the work exists.

Photo: Charles Erickson 1992

POMEGRANATE ARTS ANNOUNCES

For the First Time in Two Decades, Full Production of the
Rarely Performed Work Will Tour Internationally in 2012-2013

The Philip Glass/Robert Wilson collaboration Einstein on the Beach, An Opera in Four Acts is widely recognized as one of the great creative achievements of the 20th century. An international breakthrough for two of America’s most celebrated artists, the production, in turn, radically and indelibly broadened what audiences might expect from opera, theater or performance art. John Rockwell, who reviewed the 1976 world premiere for The New York Times, has called Einstein on the Beach “timeless” and “an experience to cherish for a lifetime.” The production’s only two revivals to date, in 1984 and 1992, proved equally enthralling to audiences and critics. Although every performance of the work has attracted a sold-out audience, and the music has been recorded and released, few people have actually experienced Einstein live. New audiences and an entirely new generation will have the opportunity during a 2012-2013 international tour in which New York-based producer Pomegranate Arts will bring the work to major cities around the world.

Opéra et Orchestre National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon is scheduled to present the world premiere of Einstein on the Beach at the Opera Berlioz Le Corum on March 17 and 18, 2012. From May 4—13, 2012, the Barbican will present the first-ever UK performances of the work in conjunction with the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival. The North American premiere at the June 2012 Luminato, Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity represents the first North American presentation ever held outside of New York City. The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 2012 Next Wave Festival will once again be home to the New York premiere, having presented the 1984 and 1992 iterations. Having never before been presented on the West Coast, the production will run for two weeks in the fall of 2012 at Cal Performances on the University of California, Berkeley campus.

The tour is currently slated to conclude at Amsterdam’s De Nederlandse Opera/The Amsterdam Music Theatre in January 2013. Before the tour, in January 2012, the entire Einstein on the Beach company will be in residence at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, whose University Musical Society will host technical rehearsals and early previews.

Einstein on the Beach defies the rules of conventional opera. Instead of a traditional orchestral arrangement, Glass chose to compose the work for the synthesizers, woodwinds and voices of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Non-narrative in form, the work uses a series of powerful recurrent images shown in juxtaposition with abstract dance sequences created by American choreographer Lucinda Childs and constructed in the classical principle of theme and variation. The opera consists of four acts that are connected by a series of short scenes or “knee plays.” The performance lasts nearly five hours and has no traditional intermissions; instead, the audience is invited to wander in and out at liberty.

Originally produced by the Byrd Hoffman Foundation, Einstein on the Beach was first performed in 1976 at the Festival d’Avignon in France, followed by a European tour that summer culminating, in the fall of the same year, in a presentation at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Einstein on the Beach was the first collaboration between Glass and Wilson. For the new production, they are working with a number of their longtime collaborators, including Lucinda Childs, who will serve as choreographer, as she did in 1984 and 1992. All of these artists are now in their `70s; the production will be a cornerstone of Glass’s 75th birthday year. They are committed to passing on the work to a new generation, and so are recruiting younger artists for the creative team and cast.

Philip Glass shared his enthusiasm about the production: “For Bob and me, the 2012-13 revival of Einstein on the Beach will be a most significant event, since in all likelihood, this will be the last time that we will be together and able to work on the piece. For audiences, few of whom have experienced Einstein apart from audio recordings, this tour will be a chance finally to see this seminal work.

In this production, my composition will remain consistent with the 1976 original. The technology of theater staging and lighting has improved to such an extent that it will be interesting to see how Bob uses these innovations to realize his original vision.

Finally, without the tremendous commitment, stamina and ingenuity of Linda Brumbach’s Pomegranate Arts team, and the commissioning partners she has brought together to support this effort, this final revival would not be taking place at all. For them I am deeply grateful.”

Robert Wilson commented, “Philip and I have been always been surprised by the impact that the opera had and has. I am particularly excited about this revival, as we are planning to re-envision Einstein with a new generation of performers, some of whom were not even born when Einstein had its world premiere.

Aside from New York, Einstein on the Beach has never been seen in any of the cities currently on our tour, and I am hoping that other cities might still be added. I am very curious to see how, after nearly 40 years, it will be received by a 21st century audience.

I am very grateful to Linda Brumbach and my manager Jörn Weisbrodt for believing in this revival from the first moment and making this dream come true in the new millennium.”

Linda Brumbach, Director of Pomegranate Arts and the Executive Producer of the 2012-13 Einstein on the Beach, said, “Einstein on the Beach is one of the most important operas of our lifetime. It has achieved canonical, even mythic, status, and yet so few people have had the opportunity to see it. It is a gift to work with artists that have such a singular vision as Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs, especially on this monumental production. I'm grateful for the heroic, committed and adventurous international commissioning partners and for the generous support of the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation, Chuck Close, Douglas Gordon, Frank Gehry and Robert Wilson.”

Produced by Pomegranate Arts, Inc., the 2012 production of Einstein on the Beach, An Opera in Four Acts was commissioned by BAM; the Barbican, London; Cal Performances University of California, Berkeley; Luminato, Toronto Festival of Arts and Creativity; De Nederlandse Opera/The Amsterdam Music Theatre; Opéra et Orchestre National de Montpellier Languedoc-Rousillon; and the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan.

About Philip Glass

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas—including Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others—play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorcese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and international music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music—simultaneously.

Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble—seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty operas, large and small; eight symphonies (with others already on the way); two piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo piano performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

About Robert Wilson

The New York Times has described Robert Wilson as “a towering figure in the world of experimental theater.” His works integrate a wide variety of artistic media, combining movement, dance, lighting, furniture design, sculpture, music and text into a unified whole. His images are aesthetically striking and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned the acclaim of audiences and critics worldwide. Wilson’s awards and honors include two Guggenheim Fellowship awards (’71 and ’80), the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship award (’75), the nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama (’86), the Golden Lion for sculpture from the Venice Biennale (’93), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for lifetime achievement (’96), the Premio Europa award from Taormina Arte (’97), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (’00), the National Design Award for lifetime achievement (’01), and Commandeur des arts et des letters (’02), the Medal for Arts and Sciences of the city of Hamburg (2009) and the Hein Heckroth-Prize for Set Design (2009).

A native of Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and arrived in New York in 1963 to attend Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Soon thereafter Wilson set to work with his Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds and together with this school developed his first signature works, including King of Spain (’69), Deafman Glance (’70), The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (’73), and A Letter for Queen Victoria (’74). Regarded as a leader in Manhattan’s burgeoning avant-garde, Wilson turned his attention to large-scale opera.

After Einstein on the Beach (`76) altered conventional notions of the moribund form of opera, Wilson worked increasingly with European theaters and opera houses. In collaboration with internationally renowned writers and performers, Wilson created landmark original works that were featured regularly at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Schaubühne in Berlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and the Salzburg Festival. At the Schaubühne he created Death Destruction & Detroit (’79) and Death Destruction & Detroit II (’87); and at the Thalia he presented the groundbreaking musical works The Black Rider (’91) and Alice (’92). He has also applied his striking formal language to the operatic including Parsifal in Hamburg (’91) and Houston (’92), The Magic Flute (’91), Madame Butterfly (’93), Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (’98). Wilson recently completed an entirely new production, based on an epic poem from Indonesia, entitled I La Galigo, which toured extensively and appeared at the Lincoln Center Festival in the summer of 2005.

Wilson continues to direct revivals of his most celebrated productions, including The Black Rider in London, San Francisco, and Sydney, Australia, The Temptation of St. Anthony in New York and Barcelona, Erwartung in Berlin, Madama Butterfly at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow, the LA Opera, Het Muziektheater in Amsterdam, and Wagner’s Ring cycle at Le Chatelet in Paris. For the Berliner Ensemble he created two highly acclaimed recent productions: Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper and Shakespeare’s Sonnets with music by Rufus Wainwright. Both productions received invitations to the Spoleto Festival and travel internationally. Wilson directs all Monteverdi Operas for the opera houses of La Scala in Milan and the Palais Garnier in Paris.

Wilson’s practice is firmly rooted in the fine arts, and his drawings, furniture designs, and installations have been shown in museums and galleries internationally. Extensive retrospectives have been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has mounted installations at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, London’s Clink Street Vaults and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. His extraordinary tribute to Isamu Noguchi has been exhibited most recently at the Seattle Art Museum and his installation of the Guggenheim’s Giorgio Armani retrospective traveled to London, Rome and Tokyo. In 2007, Paula Cooper Gallery and Phillips de Pury & Co in New York held exhibitions of his most recent artistic venture, the VOOM Portraits, with subjects including Gao Xingjian, Winona Ryder, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Brad Pitt. The works have been shown at the Tribeca Film Festival (2006), the Montreal Film Festival (2008) and in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, Naples, Moscow, Singapore, Graz, Milan, Hamburg and will continue to tour internationally over the next years. His drawings, prints, videos and sculpture are held in private collections and museums throughout the world. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City.

Each summer Wilson hosts students and professional artists from around the world at the International Summer Arts Program at the Watermill Center in eastern Long Island, an interdisciplinary performance laboratory. In July of 2006, the Watermill Center dedicated a brand new building on its grounds, including rehearsal spaces, dormitories and residences, and inaugurated a year-round programming schedule.

About Pomegranate Arts

Pomegranate Arts is an independent production company based in New York City dedicated to the development of international contemporary performing arts projects. Since its inception, Pomegranate Arts has conceived, produced, or represented projects by Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, London’s Improbable Theatre, Sankai Juku, Dan Zanes, Goran Bregovic, Lucinda Childs and Virginia Rodrigues. Special projects include Dracula: The Music And Film with Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet; Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott’s Shockheaded Peter featuring the Tiger Lillies; Drama Desk Award winning Charlie Victor Romeo; Healing The Divide, A Concert for Peace and Reconciliation, including artists Anoushka Shankar and Tom Waits; Hal Willner’s Came So Far For Beauty, An Evening Of Leonard Cohen Songs; and the remounting of Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt’s 1979 classic, DANCE.

After some days of having the competition online, beeing the first in the row and having left just 3 days to vote for us - the website has an error. WOHOO. That keeps the suspense quite high...

We hope this is gone by tomorrow and some followers will vote in the last minutes in order to help us being the one getting the support by the Fidor bank.

Nothing more to tell by now - you can become a fan on facebook if you wish

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rohrpost-der-Beginn-eines-wundervollen-Missverstandnisses/179850895361439?ref=ts

We'll keep you informed!

Regards,

Johanna mind_the_gut

So we are invited to show our dance production ROHRPOST (tube mail) at the TANZWOCHE DRESDEN (dance week Dresden) in April 2011. The piece is yet to be produced - but where does the budget comes from? We started a crowd funding deal last week. I'm gonna right about it, keep you updated.

If you wanna support us as well - below you'll find the instructions for the Fidor competition.

With great help from Thomas Dumke (TMA) and some more people, we gonna try out CROWD FUNDING. Something which is kind of new - well in Germany at least.

Two ways to do so. First step is a competition at the Fidor bank. Where supporters have to register, search for our project ("ROHRPOST") and click on the >thumbs up< button. If we get the most votings till December 15th, we get our first funding. Straight from the bank. Nice one.

Second one is a platform called startnext.de. As a so called starter you create a profile where you introduce your project to the public. Supporters have to register. Now they can decide rather they "just" become a fan of the project or they might wanna donate some money. Everyone who gives in money will receive a small gift as a thank you.
We had to set a deadline. Untill that day we have to manage to get the money (through the crowd) we said we need. If we manage that, Startnext will support us as well. If not, everyone who gave in some money will get it back. Also nice.

For now we started with step one - the Fidor competition. At the moment we're in the first row. Which is very nice, but the deadline here is December 15th and the rivals never rest...

Guidance thumbs up for „wersollsbekommen“ competition:
for the new dance production by Johanna Roggan & Rebekka Esther Böhme ROHRPOST (tube mail) we are going to try out CROWD FUNDING via STARTNEXT and a competition at the FIDOR bank. If you want to support us and a new way of cultural funding – take 10 minutes and follow our instructions.
ATTENTION. The website is in German. We tell you what to do, step by step.
You have just one vote! And it has to be done until December 15th 2010.

let's go:FIDOR BANK AG – to register for the competition go to:
https://banking.fidor.de/bonus?popup=registrationif
there is no small window opening: on the very top left side is a button >registrieren< click on that
Anrede* (Bitte auswählen) >> title (please select)
Vorname* >> name
Nachname* >> surname
Nick-Name* >> nickname
E-Mail-Adresse* >> e-mail address
Passwort* >> password
(there is a security advice for your password, it tells you how safe your chosen word is)
Passwort wiederholen* >> re enter password

below all that is a field for a small hook, click on it. With the hook you agree to the SBT.
Then click on the huge orange button >Jetzt anmelden!< register now!

Wait for the registration e-mail with the link to sign in.

“wersollbekommen“ competition:
the competition is quite important and possible just by registration at the FIDOR bank. In case we win the competition, it would be our first earning to produce our dance piece.

Go to https://banking.fidor.de/wersollsbekommen
and log in with your informations you just added during the registration process.
Scroll down. There is a silver-colored field called >Nutzersuche<. Type in “ ds-x.org“ and click on >suchen< (search). On the right side of the (German) text is a thumps up sign. Click on it. That's your vote for us.
You have just one vote! And it has to be done until December 15th 2010.

Thanks a lot!!!

And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us: mindthegut@googlemail.com

From Chris Elam, director of Misnomer Dance Theater and Founder of the Audience Engagement Platform for the Arts (AEP) www.aeplatform.org

Hi all,

Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, The People Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

In The People Have Never Stopped Dancing, Jacqueline Shea Murphy explores the role Native American dance practices and ideologies played in the development of modern dance and choreography. Shea Murphy argues for a complex understanding of dance and representations of dance as legitimate historical documents and tools for gaining entry to and addressing Native American social, cultural, and political histories. Shea Murphy illustrates how Native American dance offers different representations of time, corporeality, (stage) performance, dance representation, causation, and ancestral relations in contrast to European epistemes. In this way, Shea Murphy argues that modern dance partly constituted itself against the Native American dancing body, and over its imagined disappearance and ideologies. Presenting a non-neutral, particular, and political understanding of dance, Shea Murphy links this ongoing process of “cultural exchange” and the varied shifts of dominant group ideology about Native dances to a continued active process of justifying colonialism and indigenous land loss in the name of European ownership. In so doing, Shea Murphy convincingly connects Althusserian revisions of ideology, that which “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” while highlighting the (in)visibility of Native Dance as recuperative methods for Native American “theories” and “documents” as they have and continue to face acts of control and containment from state and cultural agents and apparatuses.

After a general overview of the text and conversation, Shea Murphy organizes her text into three disparate parts, “Restrictions, Regulations, Resiliences”, “Twentieth-Century Modern Dance”, and “Indigenous Choreographers Today”. Shea Murphy draws her data from a wide variety of sources, hegemonic to counter-hegemonic, governmental to popular, written to embodied signification, and anti-dance policies of the 19th century to contemporary participant-observation and interviews. Methodologically, Shea Murphy’s work is guided by two tenets: 1) to expand the narrow understanding of sources and archives that undergirds what she identifies as a colonizer’s arrogant process of “Playing Indian” (from DeLoria) and knowing the Other through representation (Shea Murphy self-identifies as non-Native American) 2) to take Native Dance as a valid source of knowledge and history in its own terms, without comparison to works otherwise canonized in Dance Studies. Although Shea Murphy states her valuing of artist intention, her interpretation of these documents seems to uncover many unintended significations and linkages to the political and spiritual historicity of oppression and racial struggle.

For example, Shea Murphy demonstrates that in culturally relative terms, Native Dance can be seen as different religious, social, recreational, story-telling and remembering practices embodied in personal and communal acts. By unearthing the rich archive of federal antidance policies dating back to 1882 and commentary dating years before this legislation, Shea Murphy shows how dance served to define Indianness in efforts of both containing threats to European, Christian ideologies about ‘proper’ documents, recording, spiritual, embodiment and economic practices. Over time, dominant rhetoric in legislation about Indian dance’s role shifted to accommodate contextual changes such that the purpose of authorizing and protecting white interests was perpetuated. In this sense, Native Dancing bodies was often (un)intentionally negotiated, defiant, underground, and/or rescripted to fit the needs of the agentive dancers and their communities.

Another important contribution Shea Murphy makes rests in framing Native Dance as a non-secular, non-Christian approach and worldview, not necessarily tied to the modern historical chronological mode of remembering the past. Such views account for Native Dance’s ability to create space or agency for Gods, spirits, and nonhuman forces. This rewrites previously privileged notions of agency (political) as dealt with in canonical race and ethnic studies texts. Additionally, Shea Murphy convincingly ties the increasing codification and management of Indianness, the efforts to denounce “fake” Indians and stage “real” “authentic” Indians, and contemporaneous movement theories to explore Delsartian and Native dancer’s notions of corporeality. Delsarte’s Christian-based theory sees individual bodily movement as the source of meaning, an expression of an emotional interiority/abstract, universal truth. The much criticized Delsartian attempt to codify a system of universal expression represented a shift from earlier Christian thought that claimed that the body could not effect change outside of itself, but also required isolation from communal action and turned away from story-telling as a main focus of bodily performance. By figuring movement as the “direct agent” of a soul, and dividing an individual’s inner “truth” of a soul from the act of interior expression externally, Delsartian notions set up the difficulty in audience’s interpretation of Native Dance as an act of communication to anything beyond the interior (i.e. kinship, spirits, nature) and the subsequent denouncement of such religiosity and “authenticity” claims of Native Dance and Indianness through institutions and popular culture (i.e. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West). The linkage in body theories genealogy between Delsarte, Native Dance, and Modern Dance forms the crucial nexus for Shea Murphy’s interventions on the many ways Native Dance was thought, embodied, and written into history.

Shea Murphy’s complex understanding of historic Native American dance choreographies and histories can inform the ways I think about Filipino dancing bodies in the U.S. Shea Murphy’s insights on different notions of time and space as represented in Native American dance and history (land loss/space available to dance) can open my definitions on contexts within which Filipinos dance. Also, Shea Murphy’s aversion of ethnographic pitfalls, paired historical and contemporary dance subject writing, and practical, particularist, political, non-neutral way of understanding dance as document/theory/tranformational/ancestral are useful models for my own investigations. Her notions of coembodiment (non-linear descent) and non-portrayal in dancing genealogy and performance provide disparate frameworks of dance from previous notions of propertied, owned, claimed, “acted” performance. Shea Murphy’s interpretation of Deloria’s argument on “Playing Indian” can be linked to Filipino studies scholar Alan Isaacs’ work on the boy scout narrative in Filipino American history and literature. Shea Murphy’s juxtaposition of early Christian and later Delsartian body ideologies versus Native Dance notions seem to parallel indigenous Filipino notions of ontology (loob/labas, an inner/outer dialectic) and power relations (utang na loob). Whereas Shea Murphy’s insight on Native Dance as historical and embodied document and personal transformational process, ancestral communication, and such all persuasively open up different comprehensions of the forces and powers of dance and different forms of agency for Native dancing bodies (historical, spiritual, political), the qualified power relations within Native Dance and how these Native power relations are theorized through such acts and documents seem like space that Shea Murphy’s analysis has room to grow. Additionally, because Shea Murphy’s investigation launches from questions of visibility (of ideological influence, of “absented” Indians, of Native American Dance in Modern Dance history) but importantly and repeatedly underscores the act of embodiment as a source of meaning, I wonder if the processes of racial formation for Native American dancers (and audiences of their representations) could be further complicated such that the performance of race is disrupted/buttressed/unaffected by the Native American concepts of time, spatiality, body, and movement. Perhaps it is because Shea Murphy’s text offers so many possibilities for imagining now-popular “worldviews” differently, it could influence a paradigmatic shift in the ways dance scholars think, write, and embody dance.

2010

About Bruno Listopad:

About DISJOINTEDARTS:

A new dance/media production is currently looking for several dancers to join an upcoming project that explores the relationship between dance and interactive technologies. The work was recently workshopped during a one month residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Dancers should have strong technique and background in modern/contemporary dance. Dancers should also be comfortable experimenting with new ways of creating dance. The piece incorporates live dance with live computer programming, projection, and physical computing to create a new and exciting performance experience. Dancers should be available for rehearsals in December and January as we are preparing for a full length performance in the beginning of 2011. There will be further performance opportunities in addition to a 6-month residency starting in the summer of 2011. There is no pay available for the rehearsal period, but a performance stipend will be given with each performance.

If interested please email your resume to adam@adamscher.com with the subject "dance audition", and we will forward you the audition information.

About the artists:

Adam Scher has created, directed, and choreographed nearly two-dozen pieces with performances at Galapagos in Brooklyn, Dixon place, 92nd St. Y, danceNOW festival, and Joyce Soho in Manhattan, Provincetown Dance Festival as well as residencies at Pamona College, The Yard, Queens Museum and Fort Wayne Ballet in Indiana. Adam is currently finishing a MFA in design and technology at Parsons The New School of Design in April of 2011.

Chris Langer’s film and media artwork challenges the traditional passive viewing experience, infusing interactivity and education into much of his work. Chris’s work was exhibited at Monkey Town in Brooklyn and the Walter Reade theater at Lincoln Center as well as installations at NYU’s ITP and Nucleo d’Arte in Maputo, Mozambique. Chris was recently rewarded a NYSCA grant to create a Stop-Motion documentary. Chris is an adjunct professor in the Television and Radio department at Brooklyn College.