Tag: art

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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

Between 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 estimated number of stars in the universe.

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?

 

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Art = Science

“[Art] is what it is simply because it can break down fetishes and superstitions and is bold in explorations and because it opposes following the beaten path and dares to destroy outmoded conventions and bad customs.”

– Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

The first word in his quote is “science”, but art works just as well, if not better. In many repressive regimes throughout history, art is suppressed. As is science.

Galileo, Degenerate Art, Evolution…just to name a few.

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Love Hurts With Frequency

Love hurts with frequency.

Drinking a lot of beer is what ails me.

The young lad wept loudly because he didn’t catch the ball.

Johnnie Carson was as good as a host as Jack Paar.

Hank always wore nylons when he went stalking

The geologist thought the coarsely foliated and crystallized rock was nice.

After a vigorous food fight, the Maitré d was gored by the spaghetti squash.

Hank spends much of his time looking at a book about reeds and other marsh flora.

He chewed in rhythm while eating a beet salad with a nice balsamic vinaigrette dressing.

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Choreography

Choreography –

c.1789, from Fr. chorégraphie, coined from Gk. khoreia “dance” + graphein “to write.” Choreograph (v.) is from 1943.

If this is true then Laban was the first (and only?) choreographer.

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The 3 Phases of Creation

The number 3 rears its beautiful head again.

Improvisation implies a knowledge of relationship between elements and a desire to create something with those elements outside or different from the elements themselves.

Experimentation, the step before improvisation, also implies a knowledge of elements but less of a desire to create something outside of or different from those elements. Experimentation is the use of/ investigation into the elements to discover their possible relationships.

The step before experimentation is exploration – the discovery of the elements themselves.

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Carbon Footprint of music

As I write this post, I am listening to the melodius musical styling of Miles Davis et al. on Pandora.com. If you don’t know Pandora, get to know her!! Type in a musicians name, or a band or a song and the algorithm or small elves or whatever picks other songs to play based upon your voting yeah or nay on other songs.

But I digress…

As I sit here and listen to this music, I wonder about the environmental impact of listening to music on the internet. Does it take more juice than listening to a cd of the same music? How does that compare to a turntable? If all music in the future is only digital and no physical LPs or CDs are made, would that offset all the energy needed to run my computer, wireless router, DSL system and computers at Pandora’s end? No need to drive to a store to buy a plastic disc to then drive back home and stick into my computer to then rip and store on a harddrive that has to be on and using juice if I want to listen to the music.

Maybe the best way, least impactful method of listening to music would be just to make my own music on non electrified equipment…

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the true history [is] lost

From “John Adams” the HBO miniseries

“It is very bad history”

“Do not let our posterity be deluded with fictions under the guise of poetical or graphical license.”

“I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost.”

Was Tom Hooper, the director of this series, also talking about his own work, this miniseries on John Adams. A visual experience based upon a written experience, the book John Adams by David McCullough. How much has this series deluded our posterity with fictions? How much of what we witnessed in the series actually happened?

What scares me is that in a few years, and maybe this is already happening, films & movies such as these will be shown in classrooms as fact. Easier to watch a movie than to read a book.

The second quote above also relates to art making. I would postulate that art, especially dance is deluded with too many fictions under the guise of poetical license. Too often choreographers are vague about what the point of their work is. Hiding under the guise of poetical license is one thing that brings dance down in terms of being taken seriously, removing it out of the entertainment world.

Too often dance makers bow too quickly to their own aesthetic to make something that is palatable to the audience, rather than following their curiosity to its end – wanting more to please than to challenge. Dance is still stuck in the world of dancing for the court, trying to please the king. Instead of now it is the audience and the grant panels. What logics are hip now? What tools are hip now? What aesthetics are hip now? The true idea of the choreographer gets lost. The work gets lost in poetical and graphical license.

Not many choreographers are accused of being great intellects. Playwrights, composers, yes. But not choreographers.

Why is that?

( I think it has something to with that horrible quote which has been destroying dance ever since whoever said it – “Dance expresses what words cannot” or some such nonsense like that)

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Sport vs. Art

This is a list of all the Summer Olympic Sports

Archery, Athletics(or track and field), Badminton, Baseball, Basketball, Beach Volleyball, Boxing, Canoe/Kayak Flatwater,Canoe/Kayak Slalom, Cycling BMX, Cycling Mountain Bike, Cycling Road, Cycling Track, Diving, Equestrian, Fencing, Football, Gymnastics Artistic, Gymnastics Rhythmic, Trampoline, Handball, Hockey, Judo, Modern Pentathlon, Rowing, Sailing, Shooting, Softball, Swimming, Synchronized Swimming, Table, Tennis, Taekwondo, Tennis, Triathlon, Volleyball, Water Polo, Weightlifting, Wrestling

Some of these sports have judges, determining which participant did the event better, a subjective event one could say. Sports in my mind are not subjective. Well, they are subjective in that some people enjoy some sports and not other. Some people enjoy them not at all and are rather proud of that fact (like that mother on Mommy Swap or whatever it’s called. Man, was she a nut case.)

Sports are objective – who crosses the line first, who gets the ball from A to B more times, how much did this person lift. It’s not about how, but about what. I would remove – Synchronized Swimming, diving and all forms of gymnastics. This not to say that those events are not hard. They are quite hard. What those gymnasts can do is #$#@! amazing. But just because it is physical and hard does not make it a sport. I would say gymnastics and synchronized swimming are really physically challenging art forms.

Giving birth is really hard to do, why not make that a sport? Making a nice soufflé is really hard also. Why not have cooking in the Olympics? There could be a panel of judges who then taste the soufflé and give the cook points for style, presentation and taste. They could even have cook offs with special ingredients. Oh wait, that sounds like Iron Chef.

How about writing, poetry or otherwise in the Olympics?

People get 15 minutes to write something. Give them a topic and off they go. At the end, judges read it and give a grade, I mean a score. Points for difficulty of topic and points for execution.

Ridiculous, if you ask me if cooking or writing made it into the Olympics. Those are clearly not sports. But still hard to do. So is it amount of calories burned that are a requirement for an event to be considered a sport? I’m sure that training for diving takes a lot of calories, but each dive itself can’t burn many calories to do. So if it is caloric output, I vote for sumo squats.

So is it physical difficulty that makes an event a sport? Caloric output? What?