the philosophy of movement
Hey, it’s just like 300!
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/immortals/
change the bad guy, change the good guy…isn’t this Star Wars all over again? Which was The Hidden Fortress all over again which was…
formulaic, yes…but wasn’t also Picasso? He just had time to develop multiple formulas
ps
I wonder how long these links will last.
pps
here is a photo of my current writing process
Choreography and improvisation are both a set of rules to follow during a performance.
One is usually a longer more detailed set; the other is shorter.
One has a wide range of acceptable outcomes; the other has fewer.
Here are some links to compositional ideas for painting and photography that I think apply to dance. Especially in relation to the instant choreo composition modality of Ensemble Thinking.
The Rabatment of the Rectangle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabatment_of_the_rectangle
The Rule of Thirds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds
The Rule of Odds
http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/11475/what-is-the-rule-of-odds
Placement of Elements
http://painting.about.com/od/composition/ss/composition-painting-elements.htm
The Painting’s Secret Geometry
http://www.francois-murez.com/composition%20en.htm
p.s.
if dance is a visual art, why are the people who watch it called an audience?
Arts, as they descend into entertainment, cling to seriousness and sadness as a means of validation. This leads to dismissal of humor as less valid because it highlights the lack of valence of the performing arts as affecting any real change.
Descend into entertainment can also be read as becoming a commodity; appropriated by the capitalist market.
Hot off the mental press, coming at you live. As I ponder more and more of late about what to do in life, what path to follow or forge, all due to grad school and the birth of my first child, I think now about a binary of touring vs. making work. Is it even a binary? All these thoughts could be because I am just lazy and don’t want to do the work of getting my work out there. Writing grants, making packets, sending them out, schmoozing with presenters is a lot of work. Work that scares me. Maybe scares me is the wrong word.
I see other artists who tour and get presented and looking at their work, I don’t understand why they were presented, why the director of theater X gave them a 6 month residency. Must be in the documentation the artist presented, or maybe the kind of work s/he does is more easily marketable. Could be that my work is just not interesting. Don’t get bitter, don’t get bitter, don’t get bitter.
And grad school, context, context, context. Shit in on context smell, a different context helps make food. So maybe I need to rewrite all my performance blurbs so the context is sexier. And then write the grants, make the packets, and hound the presenters. But for whom am I making the work? Because I work in a time based medium that can be viewed as performative, does that mean the work is made for other people? How many painters make work for themselves, and have studios full of canvasses not meant for general consumption?
And now a child! What a wonderful bundle of joy and confusion. Her laughter, smiles and cries make everything, all my frustrations disappear. But then they come back. Provide, provide, provide…that is what a parent, a father is supposed to do. Hack away at performing, etc to make money to provide. But then touring could conflict with schooling. School is still a couple years off yet.
So, do I finish this schooling, get my MA then jump out of the artistic realm into the academic realm to get health insurance, income to provide? Just as much chance of getting a big grant. Both require applications and schmoozing.
Maybe this is all justification for laziness. Artistic high road and all that. Even now all these thoughts/emotions I don’t want to bother to craft into a polished blog post. But isn’t this more just for me as a place to vent?
No one reads this anyways…
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1. Is
2. This
3. A
4. List
The need for contextualization exists because humans can not free themselves from the good-bad binary. That being said, contextualization is also needed because we are now in a post-disciplinary moment. How long that moment will last is another question.
Because we are in a post-disciplinary time and still are saddled with the evaluative binary, we need contextualization to help us determine where a given work of art/documentation/performance/representation lies on that spectrum. For better or worse, we are no longer saddled (not really but roll with it) with the evaluative binaries of disciplines, which are themselves shorthands for contextualization.
Recently tweeted that. It is another iteration of the burrito/taco/shoe/title idea.
Craft as defined by dictionary.com is – an occupation requiring special skill. It is also a verb defined as – to make or manufacture.
Craft, then, we could say is to make or manufacture something requiring a special skill.
Art, coming from the Latin ars, means craftmanship. But why go back to the roots of the words. Useful? Maybe, but the meaning and relationships to those meanings change with fashions and trends of the day. (insert appropriate dead French philosopher quote here).
I prefer to use my relationship to these words now. Art and artificial, similar, no? For me art is anything that is intentionally created, something that did not already exist in nature. Nature is the opposite of art (insert dead German philosopher quote here). To create art, all one has to do is something, anything.
Craft, on the other hand, has a set of skills and expectations. To craft a chair from walnut wood and leather requires a certain set of skills – cutting, measuring, sanding, staining – that must be executed in order to create an object that can fulfill a certain function. In this case, someone has to be able to sit in the chair. If the chair cannot fulfill this expectation – it breaks, hurts the person sitting in it, isn’t comfortable – it is not a very good chair.
Another layer of craft, the visual component, then, comes into question. Does the viewer like the way the chair looks.
Hmm…just had the thought that craft is many layers of either/or statements.
Art, on the other hand, is a henna tattoo for an Indian wedding. Yes, and doesn’t have the same level of either/ors. In relation to dance, many dancers are more craftspeople. They spend many hours trying to get a specific sequence down pat. They are not creating anything new, they are not creating anything artificial, but crafting, getting the either/or statements as correct as possible. They are simultaneously creating and defining an infinite number of either/or statements.
Art happens before craft. Only down the road, as time passes, does craft come into being.
Choreography:
That which has a higher degree of reproducibilty a larger percentage of the time.
Improvisation:
That which has a lower degree of reproducibility a smaller percentage of the time.