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.
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.
Liberal vs. Conservative
An interesting TED talk about Liberals and Conservatives.
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…
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)
Quote of the day
“Sounds like running down a mountain in the rain towards a deer just killed by an arrow.”
from Pandora about a song by the Precious Fathers
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 #$#@! amazing. But just because it is physical and hard does not make it a sport. I would say gymnastics and synchronized swimming are really physically challenging art forms.
Giving birth is really hard to do, why not make that a sport? Making a nice soufflé is really hard also. Why not have cooking in the Olympics? There could be a panel of judges who then taste the soufflé and give the cook points for style, presentation and taste. They could even have cook offs with special ingredients. Oh wait, that sounds like Iron Chef.
How about writing, poetry or otherwise in the Olympics?
People get 15 minutes to write something. Give them a topic and off they go. At the end, judges read it and give a grade, I mean a score. Points for difficulty of topic and points for execution.
Ridiculous, if you ask me if cooking or writing made it into the Olympics. Those are clearly not sports. But still hard to do. So is it amount of calories burned that are a requirement for an event to be considered a sport? I’m sure that training for diving takes a lot of calories, but each dive itself can’t burn many calories to do. So if it is caloric output, I vote for sumo squats.
So is it physical difficulty that makes an event a sport? Caloric output? What?
Outdoor Stop Motion Animation
A friend, V, sent me a link to this video. Don’t know much about it other than it is #@$@!! cool. Can’t imagine how much work it took. How many hours and gallons of white paint. What pigments did they use? Interesting obsession with heads opening up. How much was set beforehand and how much did the idea evolve as the film was made?
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/993998 w=400&h=300]
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Classifications
Thought of a way to classify dance companies into classical, modern, post-modern:
Classical – named after a place -> Ballet Russes, American Ballet Theater
modern – named after a person -> Martha Graham Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company
post modern – named after anything else -> Lower Left, Body Cartography
Is this true for every case? No, but I think there is some truth to it. Takes us back to the question of what defines classical, modern or po mo. Is it the tool, the aesthetic or the logic? See picture below for relationship. Much work done now is still modern in terms of logic but the tools are different than the tools of traditional modern. Maybe that is what contempory work is – modern/classical logic with post modern tools.
Writing Prompt
The other day, K and I were near Counterpulse in SF. Parked in a side street off Mission between 9th and 10th, one that functions a bedroom and bathroom for some of the denizens of SOMA. On the sidewalk next to where we parked, lay a pink pair of underwear and black sweats. From the arrangement of the clothes, it looked as if they had been worn and taken off in haste. There was no bare bottomed individual in sight, so either she ( I am assuming she because the underwear is pink, but in SF you can never tell) ran away bare bottomed or put on another pair or pants. Not being in the market for used pink underwear and sweats I let sleeping dogs lie, or sitting pants lay or…
The next day we parked on that street again. The sweats were gone, but the panties still there.