Tag: art

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Tanznacht Berlin 2014 – a simple financial analysis

at 1.43 minute per €  „KELLERKINDER“ byTanzzeit Jugendcompany Evoke & Kadir Amigo Memis was the most expensive performance of Tanznacht Berlin.

at 10 minutes per € KRUMP „N“BREAK RELEASE“ by Shifts-Art in Movement was the best deal of Tanznacht Berlin.

(note: this does not take into account the reduced rate for tickets.  Maybe I should go back to school or get the Tanzcard)

Artist &Performance Cost in € Length in minutes minutes per €
JUAN GABRIEL HARCHA – „ANGELA LOIJ“ + „TULLE LABYRINTH“ 14 45 3.214285714
DRAGANA BULUT -“WHERE IS THE ZOMBIE?” EPISODE 2 14 70 5
SIEGMAR ZACHARIAS & ALICE CHAUCHAT “INVASIVE HOSPITALITY #4 9 60 6.666666667
TANZZEIT JUGENDCOMPANY EVOKE & KADIR AMIGO MEMIS „KELLERKINDER“ 14 20 1.428571429
SHIFTS – ART IN MOVEMENT / DAVID BRANDSTÄTTER/MALGVEN GERBES „KRUMP „N“BREAK RELEASE“ 5 50 10
NIELS `STORM’ ROBITZKY, RAPHAEL HILLEBRAND, LOUISE WAGNER  ”DIALOGIC MOVEMENT – FORUM FÜR ZEITGENÖSSISCHEN URBANEN TANZ” 14 90 6.428571429
EVA MEYER-KELLER & SYBILLE MÜLLER “KATASTROPHENKOMPOSITIONEN” 9 30 3.333333333
KENJI OUELLET „LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS – A HAPTIC RITE“ 9 15 1.666666667
RICARDO DE PAULA „SHOOT FIRST“ 9 25 2.777777778
DEWEY DELL “CINQUANTA URLANTI QUARANTA RUGGENTI SESSANTA STRIDENTI” 5 10 2
MARTIN HANSEN “MONUMENTAL” 9 40 4.444444444
KAT VALASTUR “GLAND” – THE MARGINAL SCULPTURES OF NEWTOPIA (DIMENSION A & B 14 60 4.285714286
SHIFTS – ART IN MOVEMENT/DAVID BRANDSTÄTTER & MALGVEN GERBES „FESTINA LENTE – MAKE HASTE SLOWLY“ 14 60 4.285714286
BEGÜM ERCIYAS „HYPNOSIS“ 14 70 5
CHRISTOPH WINKLER „DAS WAHRE GESICHT – DANCE IS NOT ENOUGH“ 14 70 5
TIAN ROTTEVEEL „HARDCORE“ 9 30 3.333333333
FRÉDÉRIC GIES „SEVEN THIRTY IN TIGHTS“ 14 70 5
SERGIU MATIS „FAKE – THE REAL DEAL“ 14 120 8.571428571
ANGELA SCHUBOT & JARED GRADINGER “SOON YOU ARE THEIRS” 9 25 2.777777778
ALEXANDRE ACHOUR „THIS ISN´T GONNA END WELL“ 14 70 5
JOCHEN ROLLER & MONICA ANTEZANA „DER CARPENTER-EFFEKT“ 14 65 4.642857143
Averages 11.47619048 52.14285714 4.517006803
Mode or most common value 14 70 5
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The Penumbra of Spatial Apprehension

The Penumbra of Spatial Apprehension

The Penumbra of Spatial Apprehension, the downstage semi-circle shown here in red, is the area of the performance space that the performers, unless required to do so by a predetermined spatial choreography, tend to avoid.

When performers enter this penumbra, they tend to face upstage if vertical; or keep their pelvises close to the ground if facing downstage; or move through the penumbra with a trajectory parallel with the front of the stage.

Experience and the likelihood of entering the penumbra do not have a direct relationship.

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research

taken at the exhibit on DNA at the Naturkunde Museum in Berlin

Replace the word research with art and scientist  and researcher  with artist.

“Art creates knowledge and builds on its own achievements.  Any active artist must have access to other researchers’ results, no matter how dated these results may be.”

This makes me think of some conversations I have had with other choreographers.

Some don’t go see work anymore because they don’t like anything they see.  Some don’t see certain kinds of work because they think it is dated.  I would say that ways of looking at work, engaging with it become dated faster than the works themselves.  Not seeing work removes one from the wider discourse.

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Conforming to the Avant Garde

“…in 1983 Craig Owens detected a similar posture among neo-expressionists, who were also confronted with the contradictory demands to be avant-gardist (“as innovative and original as possible”) and to be conformist (“to conform to established norms and conventions”.)” – Hal Foster, The Return of the Real

30 years later seems like dance/performance art/ live art (whatever you want to call it) is dealing with the same issue

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Temporaries

Temporaries

by Ana Dubljevic, Dusan Brocic, Igor Koruga, Jovana Rakic Kiselcic, Ljiljana Tasic, and Marko Milic

14.9.2013

 

A few thoughts and words about a performance I saw and participated in this past Saturday in Studio 5 at the Uferstudios –

From the program – the performance’s aim is create “a space and ‘community’ to discuss and question problems of the current and potential local dance scene in Belgrade…”  Another aim was “to form a temporary communicational community with the spectators”.

After the audience sat down on six little islands of blankets, one of the performers said that one side(or three of the islands) of the audience would play charades and the other side would receive snacks.  When someone  guessed the word or phrase, he or she was able to select a food item from a nearby cart.  The food was also for sale (capitalism, anyone?!?)  All fine and good, but she or he was not supposed to share the food with anyone else.  The non charade playing side would then select which number from a list of nine cultural-artistic programs most fit the charade word.  This process was repeated until each number of the list had been selected.  Some of the words/phrases were – United We Stand, Readiness is All, Hospitality, Mediation.

The rules about how to get food from the cart changed slightly after some round.  After I guessed the phrase, United We Stand, for example, I had to form a chain with my group to reach the cart which had been wheeled away from our seating area.  I took a cake, two plates of sandwiches, and some plastic cups.  Before I reached the cart, one of the performers wheeled the cart away even further.  A quick and inadequate description of the piece, I know.  But I do not want to recall the events for you.  You should go see the piece if you can.

This piece, as it is about the conditions in Belgrade, made me, an English speaking American, think about growing up in a non-English speaking communist environment.  The gesture used in charades to indicate that the word was English was the thumbs-down gesture.  Thumbs down can be read as indicating bad or of little value.  The gesture to indicate another language was to point behind one’s self with the thumb.  If we are to read the thumbs down as “English is bad”, do we then read the other gesture as “All other languages are backwards or in the past”?

The random allocation of resources, i.e. who gets the food, at the beginning – a simulacrum of the granting process run by cities and governments, maybe?

The rule, which was pretty quickly broken, of not being able to share food with people in your group or between groups was supposed to create some discord and feelings of inequality, I am guessing.

The changing rules of how people are supposed to get food – a vestigial remnant of the shifting governments in the Balkan region, perhaps.

Although in the program it states that the piece “can confront serious and social art issues”, the piece did not really confront me with those topics.  I could see how the topics were indicated, but the atmosphere was too comfortable for confronting serious issues.  If the seating areas were raised and separated by lights so that audience members would have to traverse through a spatial and light barrier, people might be less likely to break the rules.  If we had actually run out of time and not been able to guess the word in one round of charade, I might have felt more of an edge to the piece.  If people who did guess the word and got to pick an item from the food cart were moved to a separate area so they would have to cross the stage to share their resource, they might be less likely to share.  I wonder how the theater in Belgium will be arranged.

Due to time constraints, I was not able to stay till the end of the performance, so I do not know how it ended.

Three pieces of the Cultural-Artistic Program that I was most drawn to are the choreographed duet that was done once with round loaves of bread and another time with a different song and bananas; the accumulated line of people rocking forward and back.  It could have stayed in that line longer, in my opinion; and the simulation of people at the starting line of a foot race.

I wish I could go to Kortrjik to see how the piece develops and how the audience participates.

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**** Hotel

The third iteration of ***** Hotel will be appearing in a couple weeks, at the GOlive Festival in London.

Sadly only four of the stars will be able to make it.  Down 20% from the inaugural performance, but up 33% from the second performance.

I am interested to see how this latest constellation will perform.  Again with a live musician, this time a percussionist.  The first iteration had a musician who, if my memory serves me, was a bassist who used a kettle drum, a piano and a variety of small hand held instruments.  The musician for the second performance is a cellist, Barnaby Tree.  What intrigues me is the concept of melding rehearsal with performance.  As the members of 5***** Hotel live in four different cities, they are not able to rehearse in the traditional sense.  This geographic variation forces the group to rehearse in front of an audience.

When I performed with Nancy S. Smith, in 2008 I think it was, at SFDI, she told me of a rehearsal process with a group of experienced performers.  They had agreed upon a score, which during the performance they all abandoned.  Granted a score can be abandoned and everything is fine, but then there’s abandoned.  Some performers ended up in the audience, some were singing.  This is not to say that the performance was “good” or not, but I am relating this anecdote to illustrate the fact that when the lights go up and there’s an audience, plans and people change.

With the group ***** Hotel, because there is no rehearsal, there is no possibility of deviation.  Personalities and plans can’t change from the studio time to the stage time.  For me, if we are to use the three stages of creation to define an improvisation, this method of performance making is even closer to an improvised performance.

The moments of execution during the GOlive festival will be very close temporally to the moments of experimentation.  The exploration stage has already been completed as the personnel, the location, the time of the performance, the costumes, etc., and the concept (open spontaneously composed performance) have already been determined.  Looking more closely into the stage of execution, i.e., the performance, what will happen in front of the audience has yet to be determined.  So within the execution stage, the three stages of creation as they relate to the performance, will be constantly evolving and informing each other.

To see how that exactly unfolds come to the Lion and Unicorn Theatre on the 26th and the 27th of this month