<x-charset iso-8859-1>dear Deveril:
thanks for your response concerning "Dogma Dance". I will be interested
in keeping in touch with your project/site.
You argued that dance is being pushed out of criteria..... But which
criteria? Funding? or categories of festivals, screenings? or dancing
with bodies-criteria?
Whose criteria?
you wrote
>> Obviously this raises
questions about what dance is, and issues along those lines, and this is
something that we have been trying to re-configure (I won't say
re-define).
It seemed to us that many dance films were being made that to us weren't
dance films at all - despite our having the widest, most diverse complex
idea of what dance is. It's a can of worms - we know - but we want to
side-step certain given notions and organisations and bring the body
back
into dance films.>>
mmmmh. this is a cumbersome subject. And I think we talked about it here
on the list last year ("But Is It Dance"?).
I recently introduced (before screening) a bunch of new videodanse works
at a Wexner Center screening of a program that came to us from New York
(Lincoln Center, Dance on Camera Festival/Dance Film Association). Not
all them were excellent, but some of them were very very interesting
(e.g. "DUST" by A. Atanasio/with Miriam King - it's now running
successfully at festivals in Europe), and also inspiring.
Another example: Isaac Julien's new video installation (three-screen
projection), "The Long Road to Mazatl·n," currently on view in the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Probably not a "dance video," in a
dogmatic sense, but we are not talking about dogma here but about an
astonishing film narrative with dancerly cinematography, dancerly
gestures, sensual and poetic movement-images (swimming body under
water), the Texas landscape, and actual dancing by the men,
the"cowboys," on the road.
Or the Japanese multimedia group OM2's performance "Convulsions of Mr
K," directed by Shigeo Makabe and just premiered at the MCA Theatre in
Chicago ---it includes, besides the stage dance/choreography, numerous
digital video projections on the surrounding screens and the seven
monitors onstage that, for example, display a moving text or text
fragments and text animations and dancing fonts which, for me, clearly
have a choreographic form and feel to them, especially in relation to
the actors and their paranoid roles onstage -- in fact they have a
precise dancerly/gestural form and gestalt, and when I write my review
of the concert, I will elaborate on that.
These programs confirm my suspicion (and I'm quite happy with the
suspicion) that "dance" is reconfigured through video, digital media,
animation, motion capture, the web, and that this is to be expected, and
I myself am not keen on making/presuming to make restrictions on what
artists are creating and what they consider dance and new choreography
to be. (My understanding of movement is widening all the time, and I am
very interested in image movement and in new conecptions of dancing
images and dancing bodies, ghosts of mocapped dancers, design of
movement, dance design, animation, new sites for dance/environments for
dance, new dance with media, new conceptions of movement architecture,
parallel processing and parallel bodies).
Aren't you?
Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co.
http://www.aliennationcompany.com
http://dance.ohio-state.edu/files/Dance_and_Technology/environ.html
(PS). If you are interested, Dance Magazine (online) published an
image/story on our recent Environment III ("In'ter"). Go to
http://www.dancemagazine.com/sterns/bodytech_frame.html
(and check for the writings on "body and technology")
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