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Peridance Gift Certificates: The Perfect Holiday Gift!

Posted by Peridance NYC on November 23, 2010 at 8:07pm

Looking for the perfect holiday gift?

Peridance Gift Certificates make the perfect stocking stuffer for any dancer or soon-to-be dancer in your life. They come in any amount and can be purchased by phone, in person, or online.

212.505.0886

www.peridance.com

126 E. 13th Street, between 3rd and 4th Aves NYC

Motion Tracking with Particle Creation

Posted by Adam Scher on November 22, 2010 at 4:00pm

I am currently exploring different ways in which I can incorporate programming and interactive technologies with dance performance. This particular experiment uses motion tracking software created in openFramworks. Graphic lines are drawn from particles within the space to the silhouette of my dancing figure.

playing with particles from Adam Scher on Vimeo.

TenduTV - Monetizing Dance Film in TimeOut Chicago

Posted by Marc Kirschner on November 18, 2010 at 6:13pm

Some great coverage on our upcoming Essential Dance Film (and Essential Dance Film 2) collections

http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/dance/90546/tendutv-mainstreams-and-monetizes-dance-film

Featured: Alain Buffard (France)

Posted by Contemporary Performance on November 18, 2010 at 10:41am

Alain Buffard started dancing in 1978 with Alwin Nikolaïs at the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers. He danced in several productions from Brigitte Farges and Daniel Larrieu, as well as Régine Chopinot, Philippe Decouflé. He realizes a choreography for two plays with Marie-Christine Georghiu, accompanied by the Rita Mitsuko rock group, a first solo Bleu nuit in 1988, and Wagner's Master singers of Nuremberg staged by Claude Régy in 1989.

While carrying on his career as a dancer, he worked as an assistant in Anne de Villepoix 's Gallery for exhibitions on R. Zaugg, Fischli & Weiss, Chris Burden and V. Acconci. At the same time, he was a correspondent for two Norwegian daily papers, for which he covered visual arts events in France.

He stoped dancing between 1991 and 1996. In 1996 he made two decisive meetings : one with Yvonne Rainer on the occasion of the updating of her play Continuous Project Altered Daily by the Albrecht KNUST Quatuor, and another one with Anna Haplrin, with whom he worked as the winner of the "Villa Medicis - hors les murs" prize.

© Tom Brazil

READ MORE & VIDEOS -->

Relevant excerpts of an interview with Cristian Vogel about working with choreographer Gilles Jobin!

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 16, 2010 at 5:00pm

For the full lenght interview: http://articles.veryverymuch.com/post/1556384171/cristian-vogel-part-1-of-2

Interview Cristian Vogel on http://www.veryverymuch.com/

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////

(quotes on working with Gilles Jobin/contemporary dance)

"(…) this research gets expressed in my work for contemporary dance with Gilles Jobin, we’ve made six pieces and we’re working on a seventh creation, so this is since 2003. And actually I’ve composed more music for those pieces than I’ve ever released [as records], the duration of music is actually more. It’s now the major part of my body of work, the work I’ve done for those dance pieces.

(…) [talking about dance being performed live] You know that if you want the full experience you have to go and see the [contemporary dance] piece, and you know you get this direct connection, and yes, the audience is very respectful, they’re really quiet, they’re comfortable, they get a nice comfortable seat and they listen, they really listen; it’s a very luxurious position to be in for a composer. And they’ve got something to look at, so it’s a bit easier for them to spend an hour listening to some quite difficult music, because there’s this amazing thing going on in front of them, they’ve got this very visceral thing, bodies in front of you, sweat… it’s great.

That’s the thing, dance is really good. But I am ready to put the soundtracks out on CD. I’ve done one, I may do another because sometimes I feel that sometimes the long-term followers of my work may really enjoy hearing it and they may not get the chance because they’d need to travel to see the piece and might not be able to afford that, so I’d like to figure out how to… I’d probably like to release some more of those soundtracks – probably with Sub Rosa, they’re going to, well, they’ve agreed that they’re interested in releasing the Black Swan soundtrack. So yeah, that’s a big part of it all, that takes up half of my year in fact, the composing. The other projects we’ve been talking about, the gigs: that’s a very small amount of my attention and time, most of it is composing (…)".

" (…) I was working with Gilles Jobin in contemporary dance. This was the first time I was exposed to a situation where there was no industry around. When I was composing I wasn’t thinking about who’s going to play this on the radio or if its going to be able to be played by DJs – because when you’re in the studio creating this, sadly, is massively influential in the actual process when you’re creating. You’re making a sound and it’s very hard not to think “hey will they be able to play this on the radio?” or “is a DJ going to be able to mix this beat even though it’s really complicated?” so you end up stripping everything out so the DJ can mix it, not because you want to make that decision, but because you’re making a decision for the end user somewhere, or for the industry, to make it more palatable.

So when I was working in contemporary dance, this was just not an issue, it would be completely the wrong way to work, it was only about the aesthetic that is being explored and built in the dance piece – that is what defines right and wrong, that’s what says this is the direction you should be going with that music, with this piece at this point you need to be thinking about a new language that you’re constructing with the choreographer in the context of the dance piece and nothing else. Because the contemporary dance pieces of Gilles Jobin, he has them already funded by the theatres that are going to put them on – you already have the bums on seats if you like, so you don’t have to worry about something that will keep the people in the theatre, it doesn’t matter even if they leave halfway through, as long as you’re true to the creation and the process.

So I started to have these unique opportunities in creation, and I began to think, woah – for years I’ve been restricted by a thought that I’m only making this for… it’s limited by where it’s going to come out, which label, whether the label’s gonna like it, whether the industry’s going to be able to distribute it – but [now] who cares?! Now I’m not restricted by that any more and it’s a luxurious position to be in. So where I’m trying to aim for is to have that but with my studio recordings and studio work – because I really value studio creation, I think it’s one of the most important aspects of modern music and I think that this new emphasis on [the idea that] musicians have to make their living through concerts and give their records away for free – this idea where everyone seems ok with that and says “oh yeah that’s the way it’s going to be!”, you can talk to a taxi diver and they’ll tell you this, it’s their theory of how it’s going to be… (...)"
to read full interview http://articles.veryverymuch.com/post/1556384171/cristian-vogel-part-1-of-2

BLACK SWAN extract from gilles jobin on Vimeo.

Reblogging Projectors! Projectors! Everywhere! BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) NYC

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 16, 2010 at 9:47am

http://rhizome.org/editorial/article-2.0.php?article=3869

Last Friday, I popped by Spencer Brownstone Gallery for B.Y.O.B. or Bring Your Own Beamer, a one-night-only exhibition organized by artist Rafaël Rozendaal. Artists were invited to bring their own projector (or "beamer" in European parlance) and project whatever they wish - videos, animated gifs, live streams, etc. Despite some problems with electricity and short-circuiting at the space - apparently 30+ projectors and laptops all running simultaneously tested the gallery's supply - the show was a hit and very fun. My favorite work was the live lobsters in a fish tank in the back room by Hayley Silverman and Charles Broskoski. A clip lamp "projected" the tank onto the wall behind it, so it was a creative interpretation of the show's theme. I think they even named them too - Tootsie? Wootsie? I can't remember. Anyway, here are some shots from last Friday. If you live in Los Angeles, lucky you, they'll be organizing another BYOB this coming week on November 19th at USC Gayle and Ed Roski MFA Gallery, info here.

Radio Healer this Saturday at the Pueblo Grande Museum, Phoenix, AZ/USA

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 16, 2010 at 9:17am

urbanSTEW proudly presents Radio Healer this Saturday at the Pueblo Grande Museum.

Radio Healer is an indigenous media performance facilitated through co-intentional partnerships between artists consisting of Native American, Chicano, Ilocano, European, and Euro-American backgrounds. In this work, artists apply indigenous and western knowledge for the innovation of culturally responsive implements used for the ceremonial performance of electro-acoustic music. These implements have been created through recycling, adaptive reuse, appropriation, and hacking. This is to create a place for community to reflect upon the impact that pervasive technologies have on the everyday lived experiences of all peoples.

Radio Healer is an indigenous media exercise that recognizes the sovereign rights of indigenous peoples.

Performances are scheduled for this Saturday, November 20 at Pueblo Grande Museum. The museum is located at 4619 E. Washington St., Phoenix.

The event is free to the public, and there will be two performances scheduled at 1:00 pm and at 2:30 pm. For more information about our work, you can visit our website at www.radiohealer.com

IMPORTANT: BENEFIT EVENT CELEBRATES KRISTA LANGBERG, TERRY CHANCE AND FAMILY

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 13, 2010 at 3:30pm

I just learned about this. My god!
I danced with Krista at Susan Marshal Dance Company.
May they get better and receive love from friends.
Metta!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 4TH
Daytime Event: 2-6 PM .
Benefit Performance: 8 PM
Dance Party: 9:30 PM
Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis
The Daytime Event is free of charge. The Evening Event is a suggested
donation admission.
Reserved seats to the evening concert need to be acquired through the
website www.kristaandterry.com before Dec. 3rd.
There will also be seats held for a $25 suggested donation at the door.
More details at 612-568-4496.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA—This day-long celebration features two

separate events: An afternoon of great food, kid-centered activities and performances, and

a silent auction. Then on to an evening of performances by some of the Twin Cities’

finest dance talent and a Hipshaker Dance Party.

The entire event is a benefit for Krista Langberg, Terry Chance, and their family.

Krista, a longtime member of the Minnesota dance community, and her husband

Terry are both battling cancer. This event is a 100% volunteer effort, including the

generous contribution of the Southern Theater as a venue. All donations go directly to

Krista and Terry and their family.

Krista’ s dancing lit up the Zenon Dance Company and the New Dance Ensemble

Laboratory in the 1980’ s and 90’ s. She then left for New York, where she danced with

Susan Marshall & Company. Krista and Terry returned to Minnesota in 2003 where they

have been raising their two daughters, Ava and Zaiga, ages 9 and 7. Terry started Site

Assembly (www.siteassembly.com) a small-volume construction company specializing

in unique, high quality residential and commercial building projects.

Meanwhile Krista joined the faculty of Macalester College, continued performing in

the works of local choreographers, created her own work, and helped out with Terry’ s

business. Terry was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009, and Krista with breast cancer a

few months ago. Their friends and colleagues have organized this benefit.

The FAM I LY FRI ENDLY DAY is the perfect way to give both kids and parents a hip

holiday kick-off. While the event is free, there will be opportunities to donate through

food and art purchases and silent auction donations. Chef prepared food by the likes of

Lucia Watson of Lucia’ s and Alex Roberts of Restaurant Alma and Brasa should satisfy

grown-up appetites, while family activities include cooking workshops and films for kids.

Silent auction items include countless gift certificates to top quality theater events, shops

and restaurants (The Jungle Theater, Alma, Brasa, Gallery 360 and more!). And there

will be plenty of live music.

The EVENI NG EVENT blasts off with performances by Zenon, Hijack, Karen

Sherman, Mad King Thomas, Morgan Thorson, Chris Schlichting, Jane Shockley,

Mathew Janczeski, and the films of Phil Harder. Then it’ s Everybody Dance to hipster

Greg Waletski spinning Vintage 60’ s and 70’ s Soul and Funk until 11 PM.

COM LETE SCHEDULE OF THE BENEFI T CELEBRATI ON:

DAYTI M E EVENT 2-6pm
A Family Friendly Day held throughout the lobby and the theater of the Southern Theater
on the West Bank in Minneapolis!

Live M usic. Clementown, The Okee-Dokee Brothers, Adam Levy and more!

Chef prepared food. Lucia Watson, Lucias

Mike Phillips Green Ox Foods Alex Roberts Restaurant Alma and Brasa Joe Hatch-
Surisook Sen Yai Sen Lek Jenny Breen, Good Life Catering Vendors from Midtown
Global Market Tracy Singelton, The Birchwood Cafe

Silent Auction items.
The latest and greatest in Liz Pambeck’ s Universal Pants! Countless gift certificates
to top quality theater events, shops and restaurants: The Jungle Theater, Alma, Brasa,
Solera, Gallery 360 and more

Family Activities.
Hands on Cooking workshop for Kids with chef Jenny Breen. Unique Children’ s Films
playing in the theater. Films are compiled by Deb Girdwood and Isabelle Harder of The
Childish Film Series.

EVENI NG EVENT 8-11pm
Benefit Dance Concert followed by Hipshaker Dance Party

8pm Concert:
Many of Krista’ s favorite dancers will perform: Zenon, Hijack, Karen Sherman, Mad
King Thomas, Morgan Thorson, Chris Schlichting, Jane Shockley, Mathew Janczeski,
the films of Phil Harder and MORE!

9:30pm Dance Party
Hipshaker Dance Party with Greg Waletski spinning Vintage 60’ s & 70’ s Soul and Funk
til 11pm.

On-line video on dance-techTV

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 12, 2010 at 8:30pm

UPLOAD YOUR VIDEOS UPLOAD YOUR VIDEOS

dance-techTV are several on-line video platforms where members can share, watch and interact with video content!

There are mainly three platforms:

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Viewers can find videos using the search box or sorting them by latest, top rated, popular and random.

UPLOAD YOUR VIDEOS
WATCH DANCE-TECH INTERVIEWS

dance-techTV

This is a curated online collaborative video channel dedicated to interdisciplinary and experimental explorations of the performance of movement. This channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of selected programs and streaming and Video On-demand. It has a library of more than a 100 hours of premium video content donated by the community.
All content in dance-techTV is provided by the authors as a collaboration, with educational, non commercial purposes.

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This channel is ONLY for LIVE broadcasts and has a Playlist with captured past transmissions.
Dance-techTVLIVE serves the dance-tech.net community with a collaborative online video channel.
It is managed by the same community of users.

If interested join to the dance-techTVlive co-producers group

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Contemporary Workshop

Posted by Peridance NYC on November 12, 2010 at 4:24pm

Nacho Duato Workshop with Africa Guzman

Juan Ignacio Duato Barcia, also known as Nacho Duato, is an acclaimed Spanish dancer and choreographer. He began his dance career with the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm and has received multiple awards in recognition of his achievements as a dancer and choreographer. In 1990, he was invited to become the Artistic Director of Compañía Nacional de Danza by the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música of the Spanish Ministry of Culture. In July of 2010, he left the Compañía Nacional de Danza after twenty years. This January, he will become the Artistic Director of Russia’s Mikhailovsky Ballet.

.

This move represents an exciting step for both Mr. Duato and Russian ballet. He will be the first foreigner to direct a Russian ballet company in over a century, the last was France’s Marius Petipa. For Mr. Duato, it will be his first time leading a large classical repertory company. Russian ballet is not known for its malleability and has had a history of ignoring modern dance influences like Mr. Duato’s, in favor of preserving tradition. Vladimir Kekhman, the businessman who took over as Mikahailovsky’s general director in 2007, feels that a strong contemporary influence is exactly what the company and Russian ballet needs.

Peridance’s Nacho Duato Workshop will be taught by Africa Guzman, another Spanish native. Ms. Guzman trained at the “Escuela de Ballet y Danza Española Africa Guzmán” and at the “Escuela del Ballet Nacional de España.” She became a member of Compañía Nacional de Danza in 1988, two years before Duato became the director. She has received many awards for her achievements as a dancer, has also danced with Netherland Das Theater, and has worked with many of the world’s highly acclaimed choreographers. For 20 years, she has been involved in Nacho’s choreographic and creative process. This workshop is an excellent opportunity to both take from a very accomplished dancer and to learn the style and repertory of one of today’s most celebrated dancer/choreographers and possibly the new face of Russian Ballet.

Preregistration for the Workshop is encouraged. Click here to register.

To learn more about Mr. Duato’s move to the Mikhailovsky Ballet read the New York Timesarticle

Line Dances (see films at www.goodcompanyarts.com)

Posted by Daniel Alexander Belton on November 11, 2010 at 5:00pm

Film Making Notes on my new films - Line Dances (seven cinematic journeys).

Line Dances is a sense filled journey for the viewer. Reaching back to Modernism, and forward to the future. Klee said “One eye sees, the other feels”. This statement sits at the heart of what I hope to achieve with these films. Dance is as much visual as it is physical. Watching dance unfold live or on screen is emotive. Capturing the body moving on film holds the dance in time. Like a specimen. You can revisit it, dissect the dance, re-interpret and re-choreograph in the process of editing the film. And finally you print it. The printing of the dance pulls it back to a truly flat space experience, and ties it strongly to graphic art. Although movement is inherent, it has become artificial. The kinetic passages are given the heart of the machine. Like an iron lung on dance. However, there is great merit and beauty in these processes. There is true potential for expression and discovery within the confines of the technology available to us to capture and re-create dance. Choreography quite literally is the method for graphing body movement - artistic movements of the dancer are formulated into pattern, shape and design.

Line Dances demonstrates various levels of interaction between moving figure/body and other imposed geometric systems, aiming towards a fluid space, a modification and metamorphosis. I reference built environments, with aspirations towards an amalgam of the structural and the organic. This many dimensioned window presents the fabric of existence as malleable - there is pulse in the line; a natural geometry underlying all that moves.

It is kinetic as much as it is photographic. The choreography incorporates graphic work layered behind and between the filmed dance. At times the lines exaggerate the corporeal, and develop texture within the space. Discreet spaces challenge, provoke and resist the performer.

The dancers are forced to interpose between visual and audio static realms - electro magnetic fields. Here, the figures (human) are negotiating a series of physics storms. Bombarded with lines, they are fully emerged in this world of cosmic challenges. The electronic audio presents a texture-like wind, and an ambient domain through which the dancers and the piano music speak. Digital Weather. Weather of physics, mathematical weather, choreographic weather, electrical surges, pulsing linear anomalies, dancing zeros and ones.

I'm trying to create a theatre where the artificiality of the stage is evoked in cinema. We are working the plastic space of the screen in a very physical way, and we are inhabiting that visual window with the human body. This film window is as much instrument as the body is instrument. Both talk to each other in a kinetic sense.

Digital line derived from Paul Klee's drawings, informs the collaboration between dancer and new technologies. Part of this exploration is the line relationship to quantum physics. The films are constructed from oscillating lines and the human figure in space. The vibrating strings of the piano render Anthony Ritchie's delightful compositions audible. The lines are being calibrated and re-calibrated by the presence of the dancer. Dancers become catalysts for acceleration in the screen space. These works are like moving paintings which conduct torrents of dance, and line, and colour. I use the visual matrix of the screen like a tuning field seeking frequency. Fragments of dance are tuned into and out of for these kaleidoscopic journeys. This is literally choreographing the screen.

The design in Line Dances embodies the screen as stage, and the stage as instrument. The films treat the visual space, or screen itself as an amplifier and a telescope. Early cameras present us with a miniature stage inside; concertina wings and heightened perspective. In this tight, incubating framework the dance, graphic, and sonic all belong together. It is a dialogue. The scientific visual references to String Theory and astrophysics suggest further spatial potential, and pull the work into a larger context. I have attempted to illustrate M-Theory, where 11-dimensional space is danced in and across lines extended from Klee’s studies of theatre life.

The films are meditations on, and celebrations of space - the human figure pictured in time. In a truly plastic and choreographed screen, seven miniature stories in dance are presented. In the films the characters are taking steps to waking up in a spiritual sense. They have their own magic. They are touching, seeing and observing the lines and light in space. Are they walking along lines of destiny? They are creating the future as they make that walk. It is an odyssey in dance.

The films are blueprints for a genesis of consciousness. Line, dance and music converge in the screen space to create as Klee said, a 'between world' (Zwischenwelt).

Portrait of an Acrobat
Acrobats are fearless. They have to be. This state of mind is reached through great discipline however. It is not fickle, but a platform of clarity, arrived at through sacrifice, trust, diligence. The acrobat is about surrender - the merger point of the vertical and the horizontal planes, the body free, weightless, representing the spirit.

Harlequin on the Bridge
Only Harlequin has the audacity to turn Klee upside down. He's the only one that can get away with it and make us laugh in the process. Harlequin is the great risk taker. A maverick who treads the fine line between sanity and insanity. He finds just enough balance to stay on top of things, most of the time. He is the part of us that dares to walk the unstable bridge between question marks. He is sage and acrobat, idiot and magician. Thinking before acting is not part of his repertoire. All his decisions are intuitive, and this can land him in trouble. On wobbly ground Harlequin becomes a jelly. Yet, led by his heart he will fall on his feet.

In Harlequin on the Bridge it's like he's helmsman, but then he isn't. He plays the stage space like a harp, and it is discordant, edgy, unpredictable. The film descends into a rehearsal state, as if we are behind the scenes. Its the only environment I feel I can allow this to happen in. Things playfully fall apart, and then are collected and pitched with grit and pluck to a resilient finale. I think we see the puppet theatre of old emerge, the pantomime back story. It starts with a degree of caution, and then the Goose Girl appears with her egg (the seed of consciousness) and a bond is made. But Harlequin is easily distracted. It takes the re-appearance of The Fool to send Harlequin on his right passage - which is as a father (as Picasso saw). He reunites with Goose Girl and then antagonises the sacred geometric "Star of David" to appear. All is well again in the world. Harlequin's message is breath, humour and the geometry of laughter.

Realm of the Curtain
This is the veil of illusion, the illusion of physicality. It is also about memory and remembering our true selves. The curtain is a veil, the theatre a place for healing and transformation. The Anti-Figure belongs in Realm of the Curtain because this is the skeleton - it is the mechanistic aspect of constructed space exposed. It is the machine; the engine of theatre. This figure also appears as an Anti-Fool. Wearing the negative hat - the Fool's interior self. This is why the clock ticks for Realm of the Curtain. It is stagecraft - the realm of theatre opened, like the bellows in a camera, the concertina of time and space. For Realm of the Curtain Donnine states "The Fool is a Time-Lord..." and then she poses the question "is time linear, or is it curved?" Einstein said "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once"

Saint A in B
The house of life. Pattern, form. The brilliant mind, the inventor. Imagined to reality.
The Fool's hat signifies the presence of divine consciousness. It is as courageous as it is humbling to don the Fool's guise, and tread into the unknown. There are moments inverted or in negative. These sections are for me like the subconscious at work. The dancers are creating an anticipation in the films. It could be called magnetic for we are revealing something magical with our breath, our movement, our intent. The spirit shines through.

Equilibrist
In Equilibrist we see many figures play with the possibilities of balance. I have focussed specifically on two characters as the masters of dimension. The Sailor who opens the closes the film, is the key protagonist. His work links directly to the mimetic power of gesture and then the emotional pendulum of this language is offered as a sacred tool for enlightenment. You cannot lie with the body. Truth is revealed through gesture. This is the mastery of the Equilibrist. Assisted only by a simple pole to aide balance, great heights are navigated skillfully. The dimension master is a mistress. She walks 11 dimensions. It is an illusion, but an illusion worthy of our contemplation and willingness to embrace. What would 11d really be like? We can only imagine.

Perspective with Inhabitants
Reflection, as above so below. Community, the life path. Past, present, and future selves. In Perspective with Inhabitants, a jubilant new consciousness is reached. Symbolised by the apex of the temple, and the expanded rotating perspective lines. It is about rites of passage. This dance is the harbinger of unity and demonstrates the strength in community. The temple is the temple of the mind, of expanding consciousness, and awareness ("The Sun it Shines for All").

Growth and Branching Out
At times the physics lines are like the strings inside the piano. This is where point and line merge, creating pitch. Everything is moving, vibrating. In Growth and Branching Out, the figures are earthing the energy. They are the anchor points (especially the female). They earth the energetic force in the line and ground it. Donnine is weaving, pattern making. "Growth is the progressive movement of matter accreting round a nucleus. Growth is not only a quantitative striving for elevation, but a spread of energies and transformation of substances on all sides". Klee

In several films I have attempted the illusion of 11 dimensional space. It is an illusion because we can only perceive this from our current dimensional experience. In 11d I believe we would not only see and feel, but all our senses (including the dormant ones) would have to be engaged in order to exist within it knowingly. The films are a many dimensional conversation which play with transformation at the atomic and sub-atomic levels. It is complex and intuitive. Light cuts through shadow, and in this act or movement (because it is only achieved through movements) we see revealed new dimension.

Why is the Fool burdened? This is his key role. In a world full of imperfection, full of folly, the Fool can be our saviour - he is one entity capable of reflecting back to us - and indeed this is his master responsibility - to say "look at this stupidity. Silly humans. Oh gosh I am one of you". He is our brother and a great, great teacher.

It is the Fool's risk taking which is heroic. He stares disaster in the face and exclaims "there is another way...". He is the marrow of lunacy and the genius of the light. The Fool's relationship to theatre is profound. He is the big question mark. He is the zero in zero point energy. His wake creates spasms of creativity and chaos; he is the great movement maker. Every step of seismic proportion and humour.

In my films the Fool, through his mighty zero (the mouthpiece), breathes colour into his world. There is a melancholy surrounding the Fool and Harlequin at times. These clowns carry a deep sadness behind their facade of merriment. "Klee's awareness of dualism - of the extremes between order and chaos, tragedy and comedy, the horizontal and the vertical - is central to his philosophy of art" Margaret Plant

In the films I am revealing states of being. There are hues cut in time. Different calibrations of colour, stepped up in relation to melody, and pitch. Especially in Equilibrist this is evident. In this work the rose space is a sanctuary. A dancer considers a line, and then moves on it. The dancer is magnetically drawn to a line, in the same way that the painter is.

Moving Paintings of a Between World (Cinematic-Painting)

I am a visual artist before I am a choreographer. For Line Dances I am making dance, music and line converge in the screen space as a painter does. It is painting in the film frame. The edits are also very rhythmical and I attribute this to my experience as a musician and Anthony Ritchie's beautiful scores. I worked closely with Anthony and asked him to respond to six Paul Klee works directly. I gave him direction in terms of the type of sound, cadence, and at times humour, I was looking for. His music (recorded in July 2010), is one of many layers in the overall work palette. The real relationship between piano, dance and line has been meticulously rendered in post production during the final two months. To edit and complete the films as they are I have poured over the music (every note), and the dance (every gesture), and the line (every animation, and variable of line composition). I have sat with these key elements and meditated on their relationship to each other and to the screen space.

The edit space is not just about imposing ideas. It is a place for discovery as well. It is an incubation space. You are working with light as a painter or sculptor does. Light is the fundamental constituent. The lines are live. The whole space is electrical - like there's current surging through everything. The line is alive.

There is a kind of alchemy about the process of editing. Each ingredient, each layer has to be carefully considered and tested, before it is allowed to fuse properly with the other elements. So there is a process of experimentation to find the most suitable joining of materials (choreographic, musical, visual-graphic) in order to tell the story, or impart the message in it's most heartfelt and direct way. It is all about the choices one makes - the decisions - it is a conversation with the material. This is what I call cinematic-painting.

There is a universal belief that our reflection is a vital part of our soul. It is said that reflective surfaces are doorways to the world of spirit. The screen space is one such doorway, and as such, is an invitation. The human body is an example of the most concentrated expression of the mind. Dance is the undiluted voice of spirit, as demonstrated in the physical world. Dance is the spirit captivated by the beauty of geometrising.

Harmonic phase cosines, astrophysics datum and euclidean optics depicted in line as charged electrical forces recur in my films. Notably in Equilibrist, Portrait of an Acrobat, and Realm of the Curtain. I am working light and line as a choreographic partner to the dancer. It is all about expanding and contracting space. Klee said "The wonderful thing about lightning is the broken form in the atmospheric medium"

"Sometimes I dream of a work of vast scope, spanning all the way across element, object, content and style. This is sure to remain a dream, a vague possibility, but it is good to think of it now and then. Nothing can be rushed. Things must grow, they must grow upward, and if the time should ever come for the great work, so much the better. We must go on looking for it". Paul Klee (excerpts from The Thinking Eye)

The Line Dances project has been 3 years in the making, but in many ways I have been working towards it for as long as I can remember. Klee's legacy is that his works go on inspiring us generation after generation. For this we can be forever grateful. I dedicate these films to the memory of Paul Klee.

Daniel Alexander Belton, October 10th 2010 (Creative New Zealand Choreographic Fellow 2009-10). Director/Designer/Choreographer/Dancer/Cinematographer/Film Editor, etc. Images and Text Copyright (c) 2010. All Rights Reserved. The Line Dances films (seven cinematic journeys) are viewable online at www.goodcompanyarts.com

old Pure Data Project

Posted by Mike Bibby on November 10, 2010 at 7:52pm

a Lowpass Filter is usually used to remove the higher, brighter tones from a sound, leaving it sounding darker, or 'warmer'. at it's simplest, it works something like this:

[audio in] =>=+===========>===============>==================+=>= [audio out]

| |

^ v

| |

+=<=[volume reduction]=<=[slight time delay]=<=+

it takes the sound, delays it slightly (i'm talking less than a thousandth of a second), turns the volume down, brings it back and adds it to itself. this makes the signal of the sound at any given millisecond a little more similar to it's position the millisecond before. looking at a waveform of a lowpassed sound and comparing it to the original, the lowpassed singnal looks like it's having trouble moving as quickly; it's abrupt corners are rounded, lethargic.

so rather than using the filter to change the tone of sound, i thought i'd see if you could use it to make a change in position of something visual seem heavier, like it was having trouble tracking those tight corners like the waveform. i used PureData's filters and openGL graphics to make this:

at first it was just the sphere, 3 noise generators (one for it's x, y, and z position), and 3 lowpass filters (all set to something like .05hz). i think it looks like it has momentum. :)

then it turned into screwing around; i took the sphere's position, branched it to (i think) 60 different grouped xyz sets, lowpassed it again (lower frequencies for the bigger particles), made an 'orbit' rotation, and then screwed around with colored lights, added mouse tracking, and a few other bells + whistles.

New services from Bedford Interactive - Archiving with FORMotion technology

Posted by Mick Schofield on November 10, 2010 at 6:00pm

Bedford Interactive are proud to announce we are now offering archiving services to dance companies and other organisations, using our new FORMotion technology.These are premium services for companies that would like bespoke archives created of their video resources, for use in teaching, choreography and for reference. We can put your whole repertoire in one place, at your fingertips, with minimal technical or IT skills required.

Download our latest brochure and find out more about our new direction from here

www.dance-interactive.com

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In Performance: Samuael Topiary -Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (NYC)

Posted by Contemporary Performance on November 10, 2010 at 9:00am

NOVEMBER 11-20
SAMUAEL TOPIARY, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
ABRONS ARTS CENTER
466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002
Tickets: abronsartscenter.org

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a new, evening-length, solo performance by Samuael Topiary that explores western culture’s relentless compulsion to tempt fate and reach beyond our human limits. Told through the eyes of six fictionalized, historical, mythological and imaginary characters: Icarus, Pieter Brueghel, Henry Hudson, The Wall Street Minotaur, Amelia Earhart, and David Rockefeller; writer/performer Samuael Topiary excavates the symbolic and poetic resonances between the Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus and the legacy of contemporary culture’s most mythological empire; New York City.

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Screen Moves Cph DK

Posted by MoveStream on November 10, 2010 at 8:30am

Have just been appointed as Screen Moves Co-ordinator & Fundraiser, part-time, Cph DK. 2010-11. Send me a link if you have a dance film you want to share with us!
Or write to: movestream@gmail.com
Many Thanks
Jeannette Ginslov

From Ursula Endlicher:Facebook Re-enactments! taking the story back!

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 9, 2010 at 10:27pm

?ui=2&ik=eaea5088ed&view=att&th=12c3206dba8fa77e&attid=0.1.1&disp=emb&zw

Facebook Re-enactments, 2009

Facebook Re-enactments -- my video reenactments of people on Facebook who share the same name -- are traveling to CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, to be in a great group show called The future is not what it used to be curated by Magda Sawon.

Other artists in the show are Tamas Banovich, Kevin Bewersdorf, Mikołaj Długosz, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, Kobas Laksa, Michael Mandiberg, Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org), Joe McKay, JooYoun Paek, Zach Gage, and The Yes Men.

The show opens Wednesday, November 10, and will run from 11/11 - 12/26/2010.

There will be a catalog accompanying the exhibition with contributions by Beryl Graham, Domenico Quaranta, Marcin Ramocki, and Magdalena Sawon.

Facebook Re-enactments are supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum, Warsaw.

****************

Check out Facebook Re-enactments on my website -- you will find infos about its previous exhibitions and several excerpts from the video reenactments.

Enjoy!

All best,

Ursula

MoveStream 03 - Dance Documentary

Posted by MoveStream on November 5, 2010 at 10:30am

MoveStream 03
Dance and Documentary
03 Nov 2010

Interviews with
Boris B. Bertram (DK) Tankograd (2009)
Andy Wood (UK) Decreasing Infinity (2010) Commissioned by Balbir Singh Dance

Documentaries
Is it the dance or the narrative that draws in/drives the documentary maker?
Is it the dance or personal story that attracts the filmmaker and viewer?
Is it the personal and/or the political, the human story that attracts us or is it the dance amplified by the lens that draws us in as documentary makers and viewers?
Can the dance performed by the dancer create character and story, reveal the personal, the personality of the performer? Or does it always co-exist? a combination of the two?

Here are two examples of two very different dance documentaries.

Tankograd (2009) by Boris B.Bertram

A young world-class dance company is based is based in the most radioactively contaminated place on earth - 20 times higher than Chernobyl!. Chelyabinsk city, or Tankograd, Tank City, in Western Siberia is infamous for its extreme radioactive pollution and contaminated areas that are threatening to spill into the Arctic Sea. Curiously, the city also has one of Russia's most vibrant dance scenes.

Tankograd tells a human story through events and character development highlighting personal human stories, with a dramaturgical event narrative. The personal and the political drive the documentary narrative forward. We empathise with the plight of the dancers, in the world of the narrative - Chelyabinsk, Russia. Here the dance is captured and amplified by the camera and edit in order to bring out the dramatic elements.

Fact and Fiction
1) Personal and political
2) The personal stories of people and empathy
3) What becomes amplified by the documentary makers lens
4) What starts the interest, why and how do you choose a subject for a documentary?
5) Is it the narrative, the events, the people or the empathy that attracts us to these true stories?

Awards, Nominations & Screenings
1) Winner - Best International Documentary Camden Film International Festival (Oct 2010)
2) Nomination - Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award Contender (Nov 2010)
3) Screening Art Docs Moscow - Documentary Festival (Dec 2010)
Boris Bertram online:
http://www.dfi.dk/faktaomfilm/danishf...

HYPERLINK "http://moviemoxie.blogspot.com/2010/05/hot-docs-2010-tankograd-q-with-director.html"http://moviemoxie.blogspot.com/2010/0...
for interview at Canadian International Documentary Festival ran from April 29 - May 9, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
For more info: http://www.tankogradmovie.com/

Trailers:

Boris B. Bertram Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rWGhJKtzNQ

Tankograd trailers

The personal Stories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLNjYZLexx4&feature=related

The Movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0MyU8Vab8s&feature=related

Decreasing Infinity (2010) by Andy Wood
Decreasing Infinity reveals character and dramaturgy through the dance itself and the aesthetic choices of the documentary maker informing us of this, by means of different colors, grading, shots and video quality. It subtly amplifies the subtext of the subjects working in a dance studio in London. The documentary maker includes the personal by highlighting the concerns of the choreographer and his collaborators in the rehearsal period where they attempt to fuse Kathak and Contemporary dance styles with beat boxing. Through this, character and emotion are revealed. It is however the dance that is highlighted, and not the character's personal life stories. The documentary works within alive performance being screened first with the live performance rolling out of it into a Q&A session with the audience.
Dance and Form
1) Explore new/different/old forms of dance
2) Examine cross disciplinary work
3) Social and cultural mixes in the dance
4) Hybrid doccie forms arising from the exploration of the dance and its amplification
5) Aesthetics and technical choices - emotional subtext

Andy Wood Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr01fROIz-Q

Trailers

Decreasing Infinity Intro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENqR08-gAJ8&feature=player_embedded

Decreasing Infinity - The Musicians

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHjqZLU48Po&feature=player_embedded

Interviews conducted on skype

Shot and edited by Jeannette Ginslov
Video Produced by
Walking Gusto Productions 2010
and
dance-tech.net 2010

Across the Extremes. Notes on the late period of Beethoven

Posted by Diego Agulló on November 5, 2010 at 12:07am

What´s going on here?Whoever walks in darkness is less lonely if they sing.The challenge is not how one´s own life becomes paradoxical but how one´s own contradictions are the gears of a machine appealing enough to still producing harmonic resonancesWe usually read about Beethoven´s deafness but it´s not so common to read that Beethoven was speechless. Silence is the language that corresponds to the tragic hero. What does it mean?Don´t throw away the ladder.If talking about music is already a difficult task, what makes this task even more difficult in Beethoven´s late period?In 1770 Beethoven, Hegel and Hölderlin were born.Is it that art is a way of being in silence? Is music a way of silence? Is it that silence is the language of the artist? Tractatus 7: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. But what does Wittgenstein understand by sagen and sprechen? Was Wittgenstein a frustrated musician? Schumann asking himself: Should I become a poet or a musician?Tractatus 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.Robert S.Kahn on his book about the Grosse Fuge op. 133 asks what in God´s name is going on here? Why would anyone write something like this? He collects adjectives that have been given to the Grosse Fuge since it was compossed: atonishing, incomprensible, abstruse, bizarre, unharmonious, extravagant, inconsequential, unplayable, surpasses the bounds of musical performance, tiresome, waste of sound, impracticable, cerebral, repellent, unintelligible, impenetrable, pathological eccentricity.The Grosse Fuge received only three public performances in the seventy five years after it was written.Adorno perfectly knew that the late period of Beethoven does not permit itself to be spoken about so easily, there is an unusual difficulty in saying precisely what is all about.Beethoven moved house 27 times.The music of the Beethoven´s late period inhabitates the limits of the world. He not only drew the limits of the language of tonal music but also pushed them and expanded them without going beyond them, without being atonal, This is an example how a musician can undermine a system from inside the system, using tactics, not strategies. Not to suppress tonality but to turn it loose.Wittgenstein knew that to define the limits of the language is a difficult task, however, this task should be perform from inside the language, never from outside, basically because the outside means the nonsense and only in case you have a ladder. What we cannot speak about, must we play music?When Beethoven stopped playing on the piano, someone asked him about the meaning of what he had played. Beethoven´s answer was to play again on the piano the same music. Words are only mediations. Stendhal on his book about Rossini wrote: the domain of music begins when we are not able to speak. Is music the limit of language? But which language? which music?Glenn Gould is dancing.The late string quartets are no longer a dialogue between two reasonable people but rather an internal dialogism. Beethoven translates a microcosm.To talk about the late period on Beethoven demands to bring into play the solipsism. Tractactus 5. The limits of the language means the limits of my world. 5.62. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said , but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world. 5.621 The world and life are one. 5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.) Some of the last compositions of Beethoven are still considered as solipsim.The question of the late period of Beethoven is the question about the limits of the world. It´s all about limits, how the limits are drawn. When somebody says: I don´t understand this, means that there is a incompatibility between the limits of this person´s world/language and the limits of what is to be understood. Being more precise, is not about expanding, the limits were already there, but rather lighting a little further. In this sense music can be a mirror if there is symmetry in the limits but much more better if music is rather a lamp that irritates your retina and demands a dilatation of one´s own limits.They are well known the Joseph de Marliave´s words referring to the Grosse Fuge: the attitude of mind in which people listen to chamber music must undergo a radical change. Indeed, Beethoven is demanding from the audience another attitude, as Immanuel Kant and the Sapere aude (Dare to know), Beethoven says Exaudio aude (Dare to listen) and therefore to know.Nietzsche and Adorno were musicians. Can we philosophize without words? Can music be philosophy?But how do we understand music? in the same way as when we say the proposition It´s raining? Music is not true or false, music can not lie. If I say: It´s raining while I see the rain out of the window, someone could say: that´s true! But if I go out and immediately I step on the street and a cold drip drills my head before I can say that it rains I will know because my body feels the thrill of raining on my head. I think music is like this, music is much more precise than verbal thought. We can understand music without being able to talk about music.Nietzsche: the ear is the organ of fear. Beethoven wasn´t afraid at all.Beethoven was a survivor. The audacity to deepen one´s own spirit, the introspective journey, the inner wealth. Philosopher and musician share the same solitude and both can not integrate in a social environment. Own´s body becomes battlefield and space for research. The artist is the one who experiences dangers, risks.Art affects us as life affects us.Art intensifies our experience. Art teaches us, makes us see what before we didn´t notice that was already there producing effects. Art is a tool to approach reality and get certain knowledge reaching parts of the experience that without art we could never reach.SUSPENDED TIME: THE ZOOM INBeethoven and Giacinto Scelsi.In 1825 the String Quartet op. 132 was composed. During sketching this piece, Beethoven was stricken with an intestinal inflammation, big pain. This body process of illness and recovery affected directly the composition of this quartet. The core of this piece is the third movement, the Adagio. Beethoven wrote a header for it: Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart, or in english A convalescent´s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode.This Adagio represents Beethoven´s labor of minimizing the musical expression to its essence; it contains only two melodic ideas. He makes us see the structure, is the opposite of using ornaments, music is bare. Beethoven makes zoom in in music. The music leaves the striated space of the form to explore with the microscope the pure duration of time.Giacinto Scelsi, another solitary man, didn´t suffer from intestinal inflammation but he got into a deep depression after his wife left him. As a therapy for this breakdown, and following neurotic patterns that remind us of Hölderlin, he spent his days with the simple task of playing the same note on the piano. Yes: the same note over and over again. This mystical trance, listening obsessively to the same note brought him to experience that sound is spherical. In just one single sound is the entire cosmos. Scelsi brought into his music the last quartest of Beethoven and if we listen to the Adagio we find the door that Scelsi went through: to reduce music into its most minimal essence.But what happen exactly on this Adagio?First of all, Beethoven makes unrecognizable the melody. How? The melody almost doesn´t exist because the tempo is extremely SLOW. The length of every single note is dilated, it makes us feel the duration of time sacrificing the melody. Scelsi will take this to the extreme: maintaining the same note all the time.Indeed, what Beethoven makes in this Adagio is a reduction process, The phrase is being reduced three times. First from 8 notes into 5. Then from 5 into 3 and finally 3 into 2. Time has no direction anymore, there is no past resent and future, it´s like pure time or pure duration. Music stops, exists as a sphere, there is no where to go.Beethoven, on this quartet makes a special use of the semitone (also on the first movement of the op 132, and 131 and the Grosse Fuge), or half note what makes the four lines of the four instruments independent but together. A semitone is the smallest musical interval commonly used in tonal music and it´s consider the most dissonant when sounded harmonically. Semitones are in Scelsi the main motif of his microtonality. Suspended time of the most painful illness but also characteristic of the neurotic behaviour. In 1944 Scelsi´s first quartet represents the beginning of the so called Scelsi´s second period. It´s interesting to mention that Beethoven´s Grosse Fuge appears in a highly disguised form in the first and last movement of his this Quartet. Beethoven´s use of the semitone appears mostly on his Grosse Fuge, this is one of the reason of its dissonance, but also in the Heiliges Dankgesang. If we listen to the 4th movement of First Quartet of Scelsi we can listen to the adagios of the late Quartets of Beethoven:Scelsi String Quartet I by arditti quartetAnd now let´s listen to a loop made out of the first notes of the Beethoven´s op. 127 2nd movement:Loop op.127 2nd mov. by alban berg quartetBeethoven was a freelance musician and wrote three of his late Quartets, asked by Prinz Nikolas Galitzin, for 50 dukats each. On the contrary Scelsi belonged to an aristocratic family and freed him from financial worries. This makes a big difference also in a compossitional level. For instance, Beethoven´s Grosse Fuge wasn´t accepted by his publisher and he had to write a new finale for the op. 130. The chance to experiment wasn´t so big in the case of Beethoven and this is why his most radical proposals can be found as moments inside his compostions or isolated movements surrounded by more tradicional ones. For instance, the 4th movement "alla marcia" that follows the Heiliges Dankgesang, or simply the finale that replaced the Grosse Fuge, music compossed to content audiences and not to satisfy experimentation. Regarding his op 95 Quartetto Serioso, he declared that is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public. This Quartet came to early. Exciting that Mahler had arranged it for use by string orchestra.WAVES OF TIMEBeethoven and Debussy.Of course this ideas about suspended time demand to make a connection between the spheres of Scelsi and the bubbles of Pierre Boulez (See the text I wrote in 2003 about Memory and Perception in Pierre Boulez)Beethoven introduces in music the suspended present and years later a tradition in french music will constittude a thread: Debussy-Messian-Boulez.The problem of music from Bethoven becomes the problem of memory.Beethoven late period went beyond romanticism. Beethoven has been considered the most crucial figure in the transition from classical to romantic, but in fact his music went far beyond that. There is an indubitable bridge between Beethoven´s late period and anti romantic movements of the end of the XIX century. Beethoven draws the end of modernityBeethoven´s late period critizies Beethoven second period. Beethoven was aware that classicism became fictitius and artificial, too ornamental. That was the indecorum of Beethoven.The late period is not about memory but about perception and liberating the imagination, not about depicting a story but producing suggestions, atmospheres rather than linear progressions, music doesn´t move but spins around itself. Time, like ocean waves, doesn´t go anywhere, but it moves, it oscilates rejoicing the tension of the non resolution. What later in the music of Schumann it has been called suspended present, probably the musician that most hated the develops in music.Beethoven and Debussy, time seems to be suspended, the ambiguity of Debussy and his floating chords, the so called emancipation of sound, Beethoven drew already the possibility of music to become transformation, to emancipate from the sonata form.Waves of time, the music becomes myterious oscillation, is not static like in the op. 132, music moves, not as an sphere but as waves of sound. Here Beethoven foreshadows Debussy.Sonata 30. op 109 first movement (John Lill) by john LillSonata 30. op 109 3rd movement by John LillSonata 31. op 110 last movement by john LillBeethoven foreshadows Mahler dissolving already the Tonality. Beethoven and Bartók, Beethoven and Shostakovich and, why not, Beethoven and Messiaen (specially from the attack of the piano and how music becomes a machine with gears), Beethoven and Scelsi. Beethoven against the ability to memorize.MUSIC ALWAYS WINSEthics in Beethoven.: It must be!Beethoven had a very specific aim to communicate a certain Ideas throught his music. Ideas that philosophical as Adorno perfectly understood bringing in Hegel´s philosophy, but also ideas that express a certain Ethics. That means that in Beethoven´s music, and specificaly in some compositions, there is a message that must be heard. Beethoven believed in the power of music to communicate ethics.The REMINDERSThe O Freunde nicht diese Töne, (Oh friends, not these tones!) from Ode to Joy (Schiller) of the 9th Symphony represents the most clear sign of the ethical reminders in Beethoven. In this case using text, but this is an exception. O Freunde nicht diese Töne is being expressed throught all Beethoven´s music in many different ways, and specially in the late period is a strong ethical statement towards a logic of Stimmungen which implies variations in affects, temperament, motivation, optimism, fear, illness, weakness, existencial despair, depression, creativity, etc.Reminders are just a characteristic of Beethoven´s self consciousness. His music is self aware, music speaks to itself. The reminder plays the rol of bringing awareness about the Stimmung that has been dominating so far and brings the possibility for a shift, not only in compositional terms but with a clear ethical intencion: we can decide the mood, we can shift the Stimmung, we can encourage our selves. The motivation depends directly from this logic of Stimmungen.Oh friends, not these tones! Rather let us raise our voices in more pleasing and more joyful sounds! Joy! Joy!Reminders: we shouldn´t forget. The bass section of the orchestra (cellos and basses) are the narrators at the introduction of the Finale of the 9th Symphony. They not only have the task of narrating the summary but also to bring the new section Ode to Joy. We shouldn´t forget that the role of the ground Bass or Basso Ostinato was to keep persistently the main idea in order to remember. From Beethoven the problem of music will be the problem of memory.THE BIPOLARITYI will not enter into the discussion if Beethoven suffered from manic depression. He had, indeed, many reasons for it, mainly the fact of becoming deaf being a musician. The interesting thing is how on his music this bipolarity exists as a clear choice and not only as an unconscious result of an hypothetical illness.Bipolarity means contrast. Being across the extremes. Euphoria to depression, melancholia to joy, weakness to Will to power, death to life. But also oscillations: JUMPING from one extreme to the other, without transitions, directly to the other side. A sudden leap, a shift in the mood can come out of a conscious decision, but not always. Beethoven´s late period abandones the tirany of the form to lead his music trought a kind of logic of affects. The transitions or the developments in the late Beethoven are no longer important.Brilliant is the case of the Adagio of op 132, The Heilige Dankgesang: Illness, proximity to death vs. life and Will to Power (creativity). On this Adagio, considered a big prayer but also a sublime meditation, the bipolar phenomenon is bring into play creating a strong contrast between the first section, that represent the illness and proximity of death, and the second section called by Beethoven Neue Kraft fühlend (with renewed strength). For future texts to explore the relation Beethoven-Nietzsche.On his letter to his doctor Beethoven wrote at the end: notes will help who ever is needed. It was the need to create what saved him from the illness, the triumph of joy over pain. Here the dialectical lesson of Beethoven: illness exists as the power to recovery exists.So in fact, the bipolarity is not only dialectical but simultaneous, on this Adagio the extremes are happening at the same time, are combined, crosslinked, illness and inner wealth are now one same single thing.Going back to the so called early phase, the op. 18 number 6´s last movement, also called La Malincolia, shows already the choice of creating a new type of formal structure mixing and contrasting two opposite kind of materials. This will be repeated later on the Op. 135, 4th movement. Bipolarity is already expressed by the header of the movement: Grave-Allegro-Grave-Allegro. Perfect example of the contrast or opposition or inner struggle between despair and joy, this movement is called The Difficult Resolution. Under the introductory slow chords Beethoven wrote in the manuscript Muß es sein? (Must it be?) to which he responds, with the faster main theme of the movement, Es muß sein! (It must be!) This is definitely a big ethic statement for the sake of affirmative Will and self-suggestion.After presenting the darkness Beethoven brings abruptly a fast unexpected refrain, it sounds even too naive, but it plays the role of calm and stability, center, in the heart of chaos; the identity is assured. But slowly the forces of chaos are finding holes where they can enter. The refrain becomes fragile and unstable until it happen again, the darkness is back, the fear comes in. Jumping from chaos to the beginning of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart in any moment (Of the Refrain)Op 135 last movement by alban berg quartetOp 135 last movement part 1 by alban berg quartetGROSSE FUGESometimes free, sometimes strict1920´s: first performance after Beethoven´s death (1827) of the op 130 with the Grosse Fuge as final movement.Seemingly unrelated outbursts. Assertive, sforzando. The cello trills. Zig Zag. Vigour. Excess of tension. Fortissimo. Frenzy. Bustle. Hurried development:Proust and Beethoven. Both translate the inner book in the proximity of death, what makes to say only what is important to be said and in the only way it could be expressed: rushing and forgetting the ornaments. When there is a need to rush, fragments appear to be the best way of composing. The subject can not be expressed in a simpler way than through fragmentationBeethoven creates parallel centers of gravity, intensities, disjointed play of forces. The Grosse Fuge is a big question mark. The Doubt is brought in: music is folded, between two, a critical junction, the themes are broken into pieces. Beethoven opens all the possibilities of certainty.We should consider the Fuge in its organic articulation as a texture in uncessant transformation of shapes. Is there a thread?PARTS OF THE GROSSE FUGE:- Overture: presentation of the 2 main themes: Theme 1 (unison fortissimo followed by a variation in legato=Theme 1a), Theme 2 Meno mosso e moderato followed by a variation of the Theme 1, Theme 1b.- PART 1 Fuge: presentation of the 3rd main theme (counter subject) + variation of Theme 1b as subject. Development, fragmentation and manipulation of subject and counter subject.- PART 2 Meno mosso e moderato: as a counter subject + Theme 1 as subject- Allegro molto e con brio: Theme 1a, scherzo- PART 3 Double Fuge: develop of the Theme 1. Develop of the Theme 3 + Theme 1 + Meno mosso e moderato. End: odd progression of chords- Allegro molto e con brio + fake end- Summary: recapitulation + Allegro finale of the Theme 3.The fuge as dance. There is something that plays the a constant rol: the rhythm, even if it´s cross-rhythm or syncopated, we still recognize perfectly the determination: the fortissimo and sforzando. It´s a static maniacal dance, an inner violent hurried dance. What creates a certain thread are no longer the subjects or counter subjects, niether the thems or melodies but rather a specific determination on the music, a Will to Power.Beethoven´s biggest experiment: he burst the conventions of clasical music proposing new statements that will not be followed by the next generation, they will not be social accepted until the XX century.The difficulty of the Grosse Fuge is just a matter of time: it requires time beyond any superficial approach. Beethoven is pointing the conventions to make us realize that it´s all about re-organizing the limits of our perception, taste, comprehension. It demands time to get access, requires an effort. It is a process of knowing each other and Beethoven is demanding again an effort from the audience to redefine the limits of what we call perception or understanding.I don´t think the clue to approach the Grosse Fuge is to decipher the form or structure but rather to focus on three concepts: Simultaneity, Fragmentation and Dissonances.The Grosse Fuge brings in the following idea: simultaneity of subjects in continuous variation and fragmentation without harmonic requirements.The simultaneity can be understood as a competition or an inner struggle between non complementary elements that Beethoven brings them together. But also as a co-existence of the differences. This differences or contrast create the appearance of chaos but it doesn´t, it´s just a complex world.The Themes are not only transformed and disguised under multitude of different appearances creating a kind of perspectivism but also undergoing a process of fragmentation. Melodies become paintbrushes, no longer recognizable as a line, they are cut and delocalized.Beethoven opens the doors to the dissonances as Samuel Beckett will allow chaos to enter because is the truth. Beethoven´s music becomes less accesible and is not anymore music to please the ears but rather to challenge them. Within tonality, without abandon tonality he expands the limits of understanding music. It´s not that dissonances can also be music but rather there is no music without dissonaces.Semitones: harmonic and melodic tensionThe message in the finale of the ninth Symphony, composed one year before said: let´s put aside the dissonances and let´s be friends: agreement and concord. But the Grosse Fuge proposes a different message: let´s integrate dissonances because they are the truth. The consequences of questioning the harmony are not to have anymore the impression of an agreement. And sometimes there will be moments of comming together in a certain concord: the unison passage of meno mosso a moderato or Adagio con brio. In Beethoven the Weltanschauung (World view) is actually dictated by a logic of Stimmungen, a logic of affects.How to understand community accepting dissonances and differences?The gentle and soft section meno mosso e moderato (lyrical section) brings a peaceful mood, because there is no longer a competition and brings some relief after the long Fuge .But is later when the meno mosso e moderato is introduced inside the Fuge, simulatneously with the main theme, with the instructions forte , the gentle becomes assertive and loud because this time there is a competition on going.After the meno mosso e moderato part suddenly we arrive in a series of odd progression of chords, each followed by a moment of silence: Uncertainty, expecting the resolution which is abruptly interrupted by the Allegro con brio.Quick summary, recapitulation and final happy end.Beethoven brings together the opposition death-life, depression-will of power, yes, dialectical but he brings them simultaneously, showing that one need the other to exist. And the Grosse Fuge is the expression of that simultaneity (to realte with the Heiliges dankgesang)The Allegro molto e con brio at the ent after the trilling section of the end of the moso e moderato: Negociating moods, bipolarity.Disonances (existencial despair) against triumph of joy. The Grosse Fuge doesn´t express the disonances of the world (war, illness, proximity of death, depression) but the possibility of the Will to exist inside these dissonances. The Grosse Fuge is a fight.What is the difference between a string quartet and and string orchestra? 4 musicians or 12, 21, 60.It´s interesting to listen to the orchestral version of the Grosse Fuge, how the music becomes crowd and to realize how the music becomes more accessible in its orchestral dimension. There is a difference if we isolate 4 single elements than 4 groups of elements.Grosse Fuge ORCHESTRA by klempererBut if we put the two long fuges sections parallel we find a perfect symmetry in terms of length . This track brings both sections together:Grosse Fuge x2 by alban berg quartetWhy have I done something like this? If we double the fuge, if we bend the fuge is not only to find a symmetry but to get a certain experience of how a crowd in fuge would sound like. This case is very different from the string orchestra. Now we have 8 instruments, actually 2 groups of singular elements in fuge. The result is the opposite than with the orchestra. An orchestration of the Grosse Fuge makes the fuge more accesible because each line becomes a choreography for many instruments that repeat the same line. This makes easier to identify and recognize every single line because it has been multiplicated. It´s easier to identify ten pepole moving exactly in the same way than one single person moving on its own way. But the fuge folded on itself makes the chaos bigger and reproduces accurately how a crowd in fuge would sound like. And not only that, if I have increased the chaos was to make more visible that still the fuge keeps an amazing unity. Of course the number of dissonaces are bigger but doesn´t make the whole more dissonant.Grosse Fuge for Pianoforte 2 hands:Animation machine of the Grosse FugeSOLITUDERilke on Letters to a young poet describes solitude in the following terms:There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear.What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.As Maynard Solomon has pointed out, in 1814 Beethoven´s artistic career reached its lowest point with patriotic works such as Wellingtons Sieg or Der glorreiche Augenblick. On words of Solomon, these works, filled with bombastic rhetoric and patriotic excesses, mark the nadir of Beethoven´s career. In them his heroic style is revived, but as parody and farce. Rather than moving forward to his late style, he regressed to a pastiche of his heroic manner.On the contrary, in this year Beethoven reached the highest point of popularity and social connections. It shouldn't be a surprise that at the same time he ended in conformity.But later on the late period, the situation was very different. When Beethoven was isolated from the society, considered as a madman, and not anymore into the musical trends of that moment, he would bring music into a level never known before. Again Solomon pointed out rightly: his music would be created out of the composers imagination and intellect rather than through a combination and amplification of of existent musical trends. In Beethoven´s late style an apparently unprecedented style comes into being, one whose tendencies and formative materials are not readily identifiable in the music of his contemporaries or immediate predecessors.The space where Beethoven´s late style was generated had nothing to do with success, fame, personal situation within a social power relations or being supported by patrons. I think his late style was possible because his solitude was vaster than ever. His isolation from society implied an inner trip, a taking care of the world that he carried inside of him. Rilke continues: the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. In this sense we must understand Beethoven´s choice. He didn´t bet for success or fame because actually that implied that his music became shabby and his vocation petrified and no longer connected with life. In order to stay alive, and in this sense I call him survivor, he kept alive his artistic career because he placed his solitude above everything else and this is the way the late period should be also understood, as the artistic choice of taking the risk of being beyond social and contemporary world propelled by a self confident impulse from the very deep heavy vast solitude.And here is where Beethoven showed his freedom, freedom of following own artistic needs, freedom of placing one´s own solitude above everything else.As Fernando Pessoa would say: to be a poet is not my ambition, it´s my way of being alone.MUSIC HAS HOLESThe center is abandoned, the action is moved to the periphery, a hole appears across the extremesAdorno and Deleuze together?It´s usual to read about the differences between Deleuze and Adorno: for Adorno, reality is necessarily dialectical and irresolvable contradictions, while Deleuze denies the notion of a correct rendering of objective reality and introduces the notion of univicity of being , no dialectical but rather an absolute leap of perception. But is it possible to find a common denominator for both philosophers?. First of all, they both invoke the kind of art which resists or defies representation. But going further I will try to show how to apply in the late Beethoven the Deleuze and Guattari´s ideas about music and to connect them with Adorno´s ideas about the late Beethoven.- IMPROPRIETYAdorno talks about impropriety and unsuitability: what appears in the late period isn´t simply what appears to be. Adorno means appearance of the non appearance: either because its curious inauthenticity or because excessive simplicity, the themes and melodies no longer appear as themselves but as signs of something else. They are cut, disturbed, they are only sketches, possiblities. Understanding themes as subjectivities, in the late period the themes are disturbed, they are in inmanent distant respect themselves.Beethoven becomes fragileTonality is withheld and at the same time broken.Alienation and schizofrenia.The deterritorialization of the refrain (Ritournello) happens for the first time not in Schumann but in the late BeethovenTo relate with the the concept of Inadequacy in Deleuze (chapter 8 of Logic of sense), about the floating signifier in Levi-Strauss. Deleuze describes this Antinomia: having two series which are related to each other in continuos imbalance or distance, that implies continuos readjustments.This continuos imbalance or distance is represented by the idea of Asymptote.- DISAGGREGATION of the central principle. Disintegration, dissociation and dissolution of the form. The classical burst into fragments, says Adorno. Actually Beckett used also the same image of something that burst out to refer to Beethoven´s Ghost trio: a hitherto unkown art of dissonances, a weavering, a hiatus, a punctuation of dehiscence,a stress given by what opens, slips away and disappears, a gap that punctuates nothing but the silence of a final ending“What does burst mean? Dehiscence, premature open of a wound or a plant to release its contents.The voices are wrapped around each other.Harmony becomes a forgotten convention because it produces the ilussion of unity.Deleuze and Guattari in Thousand Plateaus, Postulates of Linguistics, in opposition to the arborescent type, Beethoven prepares the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the centers forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dissolves and transform itself. When development suburdinates form and spans the whole, variation begins to free itself and becomes identified with creation. (...)Beethoven introducing variations without center in music approach the idea of rhizome that Pierre Boulez will bring into the limits, making audible nonsonorous forces through placing all sound components in continuous variation.1819-23 Diabelli Variations op. 120Instead by Form, the matter is organized by forces, intensities, the center is disseminated in a net or weave of forces.op 132. 2nd mov. Allegro by alban berg quartet- UNIVOCITYAgainst decoration and ornamentation, the late period is excessive simplicity, bare. There is not anymore question and answer, is just one single thing but displaced from itself. It´s not anymore important to exhaust fully the themes. This is what Adorno calles Principle of condensation, forms are rarely consumed, it´s enough to mention/enunciate to exhaust.- HOLESBeethoven turns out the hollow space of the sonata form, concave becomes convex.Adorno also talks about interruptions, hiatus, silences, ruptures, pure tension between the extremes. The technique, instead harmonic transitions, is to JUMP. There are no mediations, only, like in Hegel, through extremes. Music has holes.Deleuze in Critical and Clinical describes Beethoven´s Ghost trio: there is a kind of central erosion that first arises as a threat among the bass parts and is expressed in the trill of wavering of the piano, as if one key were about to be abandoned for another, or for nothing, hollowing out the surface, plunging into a ghostly dimension where dissonances would appear only to punctuate the silence.On the other hand, the floating signifier needs emptiness to emerge.If now we visit Deleuze and Guattari about Holey space in Treatise on Nomadology:The war machine, we are tempted to think that Beethoven was a smith, inventing a holey space within the striated space of the sonata form. Beethoven produces the emergency of the rhizome in the striated space of the classicism.- POLARIZATION.Beethoven wasn´t atonal but polarizes the tonality. Dissociation into two extremes: monody and poliphony, with the exception of the fuges.Deleuze Guattari: Refrain: Not to supress tonality but to turn it loose.- TRANSVERSALITYAdorno means pure tension across extremes, when unity is just an illusion and the whole a self deception.Deluze about Proust will demand to have the right to incompliteness and to patches: the fragmentation means to exclude the logic unity and organic totality, there is no previous unity but they are an EFFECT, they come afterwards, a posteriori: but the unity appears as a fragment (paintbrush) inside the sistem. Transversality is what makes that allows each part to keep its difference and at the same time to be connected and to communicate.- Adorno: the late period speaks about the language of the archaic, of children of savages and God. Deleuze: only children artists and schizofrenics can inhabitate the inadequacy because there are displaced towards themselves.CODABeethoven remains.I will never die.This text is dedicated to Miguel Copón.Special thanks to Jorge Ruiz Abánades.BIBLIOGRAPHYAristoteles: PoéticaAdorno: BeethovenProust: À la Recherche du temps perduBenjamin: Literarische und ästhetische EssaysWittgenstein: Tractatus,Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and SchyzophreniaDeleuze: Proust and the signsDeleuze: Critical and ClinicalDeleuze: Spinoza, Practical PhilosophyDeleuze: Cinema 2. The time imageNietzsche: The Gay ScienceLeonard B.Meyer: Emotion and meaning in musicAnthony Storr: Music and the MindRobert S.Kahn: Beethoven and the Grosse FugeMichael Schneider: Musiques du nuitPeter Kivy: New Essays on musical understandingAntoine Hennion: La passion musicaleMax Steinitzer: BeethovenE. Fubini: El Romanticismo: entre Musica y FilosofiaRobert P. Morgan: Twentieth Century MusicPatrick Donnelly: Grosse FugeJim Merod: Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile:Audio (Il)literacy, or Beethoven’s Triumphant DespairMaynard Solomon: BeethovenBeethoven´s letters, with explanatory notes by Dr. A.C. Kalischer.

Nov.ples | contemporary dance festival, Novi Sаd, Serbia/ 3rd -5th November 2010

Posted by Marlon Barrios Solano on November 4, 2010 at 5:10pm

Novi Sаd

Nov.ples festival reflects the fact of continuos activity of Per.Art organisation in development of contemporary performing arts scene in Novi Sad and decentralization of culture in Serbia, in the times of unstable cultural and social environment.

Festival has two program axis – the one will present performances by renowned choreographer (Xavier Le Roy), one of the most interesting young choreographer in Europe (Mette Ingvartsen) and emerging promising and critical new choreographers in Serbia (Dragana Bulut in collaboration with Milka Djordjevich from New York); and the other will present research dance projects and self-organized regional and international initiatives in education.

Special focus of the festival will be on local young dancers, performers and students in order to offer them possibility to re-think their current position and future proffession through the program and direct meeting with the artists and participants of the festival.

Progrаm:

Self Unfinished - Xavier Le Roy

50/50 - Mette Ingvartsen

Made in China - Dragana Bulut & Milka Djordjevich

Tiger’s leap into the past - Ana Vujanović & Saša Asentić

Running commentary - Bojana Cvejić

Scenes of Knowladge (Deschooling Classroom, Everybody’s toolbox, PAF, 6M1L)

PROMOTIVNI VIDEO

More info: www.perart.org

Producer: PerArt

Partners: Serbian National Theatre and Gallery of Matica srpska

General sponsor: City of Novi Sad

In Performance: Pavel Zuštiak/Palissimo – Bastard (NYC)

Posted by Contemporary Performance on November 4, 2010 at 12:20pm

Bastard Thursday--Saturday at 7:30 P.M. and Sunday at 2:30 P.M.
La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre at The Annex
66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003.
Tickets are $25 ($20 for seniors and students)

The New York-based choreographer Pavel Zuštiak has garnered considerable accolades for richly layered, experiential performance works that combine dance with various other mediums. Bastard, the first part of a trilogy called The Painted Bird tackles themes of displacement, otherness and transformation. La MaMa, in association with Zuštiak's company, Palissimo, presents the world premiere of the work.

The Painted Bird is loosely inspired by Jerzy Kosinski's controversial novel of the same name. In Bastard, Zuštiak draws upon the book's signature scene--a wandering boy witnessing the painting of a bird in brilliant colors, causing it later to be violently killed by its own flock for being an imposter--to create a new work that transforms the internal landscape of agony and misrecognition into a collective remembrance.

The Painted Bird trilogy follows Palissimo's 2009 work, Halt!, in which Zuštiak teamed up with scenographer Nicholas Vaughan and three performers to create Palissimo's first site-specific performance installation, for the Whitehall Ferry Terminal. The company earned plaudits early last year for Weddings and Beheadings and Blind Spot.

About Pavel Zuštiak

Pavel Zuštiak is the Artistic Director of Palissimo Company, which he established in New York City in 2004 to pursue artistic liberty and communion with live audiences. Palissimo is known for sophisticated, multidisciplinary works rich with emotional content and surrealist imagery that explores the darker shades of human behavior.

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Bastard Thursday--Saturday at 7:30 P.M. and Sunday at 2:30 P.M.La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre at The Annex66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003.Tickets are $25 ($20 for seniors and students)

About Pavel Zuštiak

Note: this page contains paid content.

Note: this page contains paid content.

Note: this page contains paid content.

Bastard Thursday--Saturday at 7:30 P.M. and Sunday at 2:30 P.M.
La MaMa's Ellen Stewart Theatre at The Annex
66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003.
Tickets are $25 ($20 for seniors and students)