If sit-coms have laugh tracks, why do dramas not have crying or screaming tracks?
Choreo vs. Impro
The glass is either half full or half empty.
Wrong. It’s both. Those two states are not mutually exclusive.
Been thinking about choreography, improvisation, definitions a lot since M2M ’09. Had an “aha” moment the other day driving home. No piece is either choreographed or improvised. All pieces are both. Even the most rigorously choreographed piece has a vast number of variations each time it is performed. And each improvisation has a lot of choreography i.e. habit, physical limitations etc.
Also the question of which elements are improvised and which are choreographed arises. For several years, Lower Left has been choreographing pieces using the lights. We predetermine(choreograph) what the lights will be and how long each will be on and what the transitions will be. What our bodies do within those lights is improvised. But then there is the question of habits and current injuries and what other information we have been taking in recently. All those elements can limit or choreograph us.
In fact with each improvisation each piece that people claim is “open” has a huge amount of predetermined factors:
-Gravity
It will still be same throughout the piece. There might be some fluctuation due to the moon and the earth’s spinning core or other factors. But essentially the same.
-The Theater
Not many pieces change venues partway through. How many improvisations have decided to leave the building completely? (How about choreographing a piece but improvising the theater/location?)
-Performers
yes, people do enter and exit the performance space, but they are still the performers. How do we improvise the performers. Beside the names in a hat thing, because that is from a predetermined set of performers.
–Costumes
The pieces I have been in that had costume changes were choreographed as were the costume changes. I haven’t been in a single improvisation in which I had the opportunity to improvise my costume. I have disrobed, maybe that counts. But never had an improvisation with costume as an equal improvisational element. Must look into this.
-Bodies
I always (for the most part) have the same body. I have never been able to grow extra legs on stage. Never have I seen anyone improvise on stage how many limbs s/he had.
Every piece is choreographed and every piece is improvised. The question is what elements are the choreographed ones and which ones are the improvised ones. And the next question is how tightly each one is improvised and choreographed.
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Darwin Thwarted Again
BERLIN, Germany (CNN) — A polar bear attacked a woman at Berlin Zoo Friday afternoon after she climbed a fence and jumped into its habitat during feeding time, police said Saturday. One adult polar bit her several times after she plunged into the moat, police said.Zoo workers tossed rescue rings toward the woman to hoist her out and distract polar bears swimming nearby, said Goerg Gebhard, a Berlin police officer. At one point the woman fell back into the water and was grabbed by a bear before she was eventually hoisted to safety. “They saved her life,” Gebhard told CNN. The woman was severely injured and was being treated at a hospital, police said. It’s unclear why the woman entered the bear habitat, but police issued her a citation for trespassing. Berlin Zoo is home to Knut, the first polar bear to be born there in over 30 years. The bear became a huge talking point in Germany when his mother gave birth to him in December 2006.
Embedded video from CNN Video
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New Method of Terrorist Attack?
A man stole a plane from a Canadian flight school and flew into the United States.
Will this be the new paradigm of attack? 9/11 caused the first shift. And then the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid caused another shift. Thanks to him we have to take our shoes off now when going through security. Found out after looking at Wikipedia that I am 6 days older than the Shoe Bomber.
from Wikipedia – “He was sentenced by Judge Young to life imprisonment on each of the three charges, 20 years imprisonment on four other charges, and 30 years on four other counts, to be served consecutively, followed by five years of supervised release.”
So after the Shoe Bomber serves his life imprisonment term he will have 5 years of supervised release. Who is going to supervise that? And then once the supervision is done, will he be able to freely roam the after-life?
But back to the topic at hand – Are Cessnas from Canada the new dirty bomb? What about Mexico? Well, those from Mexico are probably too full of cocaine or weed to put any bombs in them. But then again, I heard that Canada grows some fine buds also…
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Aging
The older you get, the more slowly you age.
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The Positions of the Human Form
360(shoulder) x 360 (shoulder) x 135(elbow) x 135(elbow) x 360 (wrist) x 360 (wrist) x 360 (spine) x 360 (hip) x 360 (hip) x 135(knee) x 135(knee) x 360 (ankle) x 360 (ankle) x 360 (head) =
12,143,953,109,659,430,000,000,000,000,000,000 body positions
Assuming 1 postion/sec (31,449,600 seconds in a year)
386,140,145,173,847,400,000,000,000 years for 1 person to do all positions.
These are rough calculations that do not take into account several factors. The fingers, the face, the wide range of mobility of the spine, the various sizes of circles that each rotation joint can do.
If you wanted to see how many possible positions there are in a duet, square the large number at the top. A trio – that number to the third power… a quartet that number to the fourth power etc.
Adding in costumes, lighting, repetition of movement, sound…there are an infinite number of dances possible.
Which leads me to a question of value. If so many dances are possible, how do we determine the good ones? Value and quantity usually have an inverse relationship – the greater the number of something, the less that something is valued. Take grains of sand and diamonds.
Are all of the dances that have been created of equal value because there are vastly fewer dances that have been created in comparison to dances that have not been created? Is every dance you will see in your lifetime of equal value?
Tax Cuts vs. Food Stamps
From Harper’s Index:
Estimated amount by which the U.S. GDP increases for each additional dollar of tax cuts:
$1.03
Amount for each additional dollar of infrastructure spending and food stamps, respectively:
$1.59, $1.73
Are Republicans, supposedly the business minded and business friendly party, unaware of this fact? Maybe I don’t have such a great business acumen but I have always thought a 73% or even a meagrer 59% return on investment is much better than a 3% return. But then again, the Republicans were at the helm when the economy went into the toilet, so what do they know.
What are we waiting for, Obama? Let’s start feeding people and building bridges!!!
Don’t candles also make greenhouses gases?
Sounds like a good idea. But I am not sure if everyone got the idea completely.
“In Australia, people attended candlelit speed-dating events…“
Candles burn oxygen creating carbon dioxide, a green house gas. Therefore they were still adding to the problem.
Couldn’t they just play the game during the day time when there is carbon free light?
“McDonald’s Corp. planned to dim its arches at 500 locations around the U.S. Midwest“
Why not stop selling burgers for an hour? The consumption of meat adds more to global warming than transportation.
Irish Police
Sounds like the police in Ireland could use the Rosetta Stone.
from the BBC –
“Details of how police in the Irish Republic finally caught up with the country’s most reckless driver have emerged.
He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.
However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.
Poles are Ireland’s largest immigrant population
But then his cover was blown.
It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police’s rank and file had been looking for – a Mr Prawo Jazdy – wasn’t exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.
In fact he wasn’t even human.
“Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence,” read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda’s traffic division.
“Having noticed this, I decided to check and see how many times officers have made this mistake.
“It is quite embarrassing to see that the system has created Prawo Jazdy as a person with over 50 identities.”
The officer added that the “mistake” needed to be rectified immediately and asked that a memo be circulated throughout the force.
In a bid to avoid similar mistakes being made in future relevant guidelines were also amended.
And if nothing else is learnt from this driving-related debacle, Irish police officers should now know at least two words of Polish.
As for the seemingly elusive Mr Prawo Jazdy, he has presumably become a cult hero among Ireland’s largest immigrant population”
Solar Panels over Parking Lots
After seeing this on the news yesterday, I had one of those moments of – Duh, why didn’t I think of that? (a feeling that also happens when viewing contemporary art) In Sunnyvale, Ca, the parking lot of Applied Materials is covered in solar panels. Electric vehicles can charge up in that lot.
Why are we not covering every single parking lot south of San Francisco with such structures? I remember listening to a Science Friday on NPR that talked about solar panels and part of the problem is that there isn’t enough room for solar farms near where the power is needed, i.e. urban areas.
Well, doesn’t this just solve that problem? How many parking lots, huge parking lots, are there in L.A., in Pheonix, in Houston, that are just baking in the sun 300+ days of the year? Why are we not demanding these solar farms be built? They could be a revenue source by charging people to recharge their cars while they are at the mall or the movies or at Disneyland or the golf courses outside Palm Springs.
Why are we not doing this? Are projects like this in the Stimulus Package?
p.s. why are there golf courses in the desert?