Author: wasswasswass

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Seven Thirty in Tights

Seven Thirty In Tights
April 28th 2013 at Sophiensaele
“Picture the ballroom dance of the future.  Imagine this dance and its consequences are the result of an intense physical dialogue between dancers – an interaction of distinct group decisions in which all react to the impulses of the others and have to find answers in a split second.  Now imagine this dance was a political practice.” – from the program
I saw another piece by Frédéric Gies several years ago and I had the same problem with this one as I did that one.  He adds too many other elements to the stage space that the physical actions lose value or I can’t tell what he values about them.  The last performance had explicitly stated BMC exercises paired with music by Madonna and a large rug like object hanging from the ceiling upstage.  I don’t have or remember the program notes from that piece, so I can’t say what Gies’ goal was in juxtaposing those elements together.
With this piece, he wants us to picture the ballroom dance of the future.  The dance we see is a group tuning score about decision making and reacting to others, i.e. improvising.  By asking us to view a type of event that is very much of the present (group improvisation) as the ballroom dance of the future, is he saying that in the future scored group improvisation will be a rigid codified form of dance.  Looking at another form of group decision making and reacting, the contact improvisation jam, we are well on our way.  Contact Improvisation is all but a codified social dance with defined movements and roles.  But Gies and company were not engaging in contact improvisation, at least not in the normative sense of contact improvisation.  But as they were improvising and coming in and out of contact, the performers in Seven Thirty In Tights could be viewed as engaging in contact improvisation.  After all who determines the tools used in a performance – the doers or the viewers?!!?
For me this piece suffered from a flat ontology.  All elements had equal value.  The physicality didn’t change that much through out the 60 minute plus.  The dancers came in and out of manual contact, dancing alone or facing each other.  There was some change in tempo, initiated mostly by the female all dressed in red.  Well, maybe the elements didn’t have equal value, but I felt that there was so much sensorial noise generated by all the non-dance considerations of the piece, that I couldn’t help but be preoccupied by wondering about the reasons for those elements, thus lowering for the valorization of the corporeal elements.  I tried to enjoy the physical actions of the performers (and there were some well trained people performing whom I have enjoyed watching in other performances) but I couldn’t get past the neon lights, the costumes, the tape on the floor, and the program notes.
The physical practice in the piece was not of the future, so maybe the tights, the lights and the tape indicating the 4th wall are elements from the future.  But colored fluorescent tubes (a possible Flavin reference?), non-proscenium stage spaces and tights are also not of the future.  So is it then the combination of group real time spontaneous composition with the, lighting, costuming, and staging that create the ballroom dance of the future?  Or is it up to us, the viewers who have read the program to picture the dance of the future, inspired by the elements presented? (Representation, once again rears its ugly head!)
Another element of the program statement that lowered the valorization of the corporeal elements of the performance was the directive to imagine the dance as a political practice.  I felt that in order to do that more fully and in the direction that the choreographer intended I should have attended the lecture by Sylvie Tissot that took the day before I attended the performance.  Was this piece a political practice because it was more improvised than choreographed?  Was this piece a political practice because the individuals were able to make their own decisions within a larger set of considerations?  Political because tax dollars are supporting the work?  Who determines the politics – the doers or the viewers?
In summation – I did see some dancing I enjoyed[*], solo body and group, but the staging and sartorial choices were too aesthetically noisy overwhelming the dancing itself.  The program notes were too generic and could be applied to any dance, performance, or sporting event for than matter.  Maybe instead of generic, I should say open.  But for me the program notes/framing/contextualization were way too open.  Isn’t part of the artist’s job to focus our attention?

[*]When the group rotated through space along the perimeter of the performance space delineating the boundary between audience and performers.
When the group came to a long diagonal…Doris Humphrey is right!  
When in a long line the dancers changed location within the line.

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Energetic Charge

“With an acute sense for the inherent potential contained within ordinary objects and natural materials as well as for the placement of objects within a space, both artists manage to give their arrangements an energetic charge.”

The above quote is from the description of an exhibit currently at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.  I hope to see the exhibit.  I quite like the art in the picture.

What caught my eye in the text is “inherent potential” and “both artists manage”.  I do not dispute that ordinary objects have inherent potential.  Some more than others. (a fully charged capacitor, for example.  Or a tub of water atop a large hill.  ha!)

Funnin’ aside, I understand that phrase and the drama of space – placement of objects.  What I don’t understand is pairing that phrase with “both artists manage to give their arrangements an energetic charge”. 

If the objects have inherent potential, then it should be impossible to not give their arrangements an energetic charge.  Just throw them out there, and boom! you’re done.  The problem lies with the word “managed”.  To me it signals some kind of skill, or ability that imbued the arrangements with energetic charge.  Maybe it’s a translation issue.  Maybe the artists unleashed the potential energy creating a static, yet kinetic, arrangement.

It would be more impressive if the artists had used objects and space that have no potential and managed to create energetic charge.  

But…what spaces have no potential?
What objects have no potential?

Or maybe used objects and spaces of great potential and created arrangements of absolutely no charge.

I’d go see that!

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Compare and Contrast

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pqhks1Q41g]
and
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/62056892 w=560&h=315]

granted, it could be said that we are looking at apples and oranges as one performance has audience on three sides, live music, and video.  But I would say that these two performances are more alike than they are different.  I am most interested in the spacing, placing, and pacing of the kinespheres and how they differ in the two pieces.

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A Few Thoughts on

 After Trio A
Andrea Bozic
HAU 2
19:30 7.12.12
Why did the female performer follow the male performer?
Why did she wear short sleeves and he long sleeves? Is that a reference to the phallus?
Why did she wear Nike and he Adidas?
Why did her shoe laces match her shirt, but this was not the case for the male performer?
Interpretation…always confusing…how are we supposed to know which elements to interpret?  And how? And if the piece is intended to be interpreted at all?
All that aside – The energies of the performers were quite different.  She approached the process of following a video of him following a video of Trio A danced by Rainer with much a much more task-oriented energy.  When I watched him I felt that he was performing personality more than following the process.  His energy was flying out to the audience instead of being channeled into the attempt to following the choreography.
But it is almost irrelevant, in my opinion, that the choreography from Trio A was used.  Any choreography would suffice.  As someone who is interested in the spectrum of deliberation in relation to choreography and improvisation and how a dancer responds to visual input, I am more interested in the process of instantaneous recreation than what the material is that is being recreated than the fact that Trio A was used.  The choreographer was asked to make a new work in relation to an historical piece and she chose Trio A.  Not a bad choice, I say, being a fan of the piece.  Also using such an iconic piece as a reference gives instant gravitas to this piece.

I am more interested in watching the body/mind of the dancer puzzle out the pathways in the moment, giving it the old college try and not commenting on it during it.  For this reason, for me Lito was more engaging, and truer to the spirit of Trio A, than Felix.

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Moshpit Simulation

Below is a link to an interesting simulation of a moshpit.

I can’t insert it into this WordPress site as iframes are not allowed.

http://mattbierbaum.github.io/moshpits.js/

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I hope you die soon

Well…how to begin?
During the last performance I saw at HAU 1, Les Petites Morts – i hope you die soon, I was inspired to write glib and non-glib responses to what I was seeing.  After writing them up and other thoughts about the work, I re-read it and read it to my wife.  She asked my why I wanted to write what I did.  I could have spent the time writing a grant.  
After going through the personal cathartic reasons, I articulated that I wrote it to practice articulating my responses articulately to other artists’ work. Apart from personal articulation practice, I believe that more dance/movement/performance artists should be publicly articulating their responses to each other’s work.  Maybe many are and I just don’t know the URLs.
When I still lived in the Bay Area in California, I was speaking with a friend about a mutual aquaintance and the difficulty she was having writing reviews.  My friend thought that because she, the mutual aquaintance, was also a dancer that she shouldn’t be writing reviews.  Why not?  Should opinions about work be reserved only for impartial non dancers?  Why shouldn’t we all be talking about the work?  I think this deference to outside opinions is dangerous.  I am not saying that non-makers should not have opinions about dance and performance, but they shouldn’t have the last word.
So, back to Les Petites Morts – i hope you die soon.   What did I think of it?  The performers, Angela  Schubot and Jared Gardinger, were very invested and engaged in their piece.  I really enjoyed the beginning.  It was a nice take on the typical contemporary dance beginning.  Instead of standing there and letting us see them and see that they are seeing us, they were laying down.  The small subtle movements, seemingly random, that resolved into symetrical and held (pre-determined?) shapes.  It allowed for the first step of blurrig the corporeal boundaries – moments of wondering whose limb was whose.  Hardly a new device, but enjoyable, nonetheless. 
The breathing that kicked in about 20 minutes into the piece at first made me very conscious of my own breath, but quickly became comical.  They sustained the breathing for too long and coupled with the exaggerated looks on their face, reminded me of zombies in a B movie.  Yes, I understood the representation of blurring boundaries between bodies and dissolving the self with the breathing – what I exhale you inhale and vice versa.  But they didn’t offer me any other opinion or extend the metaphor in a new way.  I can think of other more interesting ways of de-bordering bodies – 
fecal transplants, organ transplants, blood donations or attempting to become Siamese twins?
My reaction to this piece could also be my aversion to the topic itself.  Death and dying are much too grand, ubiquitos, (dare I say old-fashioned or classical?!?), and serious to deal with seriously.  I prefer Woody Allen’s movie Love and Death for these topics.  This might be kind of morbid but I could not get invested in a piece about death and dying knowing that there was no chance of an actual death.  This is also related to my issue with theater as opposed to dance.
It’s all pretend.
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Met a Four

…by using tools from schools of thought that deal in metaphor, we end up constantly looking for metaphor…

discuss