<x-charset iso-8859-1>good to hear from you again, Deveril,
thanks for the comprehensive reply.
you wrote:
>And I agree that dance has moved into new areas of form. I
myself work with live and virtual/video bodies. The different ways in
which dance can be produced amaze me. Is it a question of: I know dance
when I see it? Sometimes yes. Sometimes I need to have it justified. I
want to restrict and I don't don't want to restrict. It's all about
challenging [pre/mis]conceptions.>
> At a recent event at Chisenhale a video piece called 'Man Ray and Friend' was shown as an example of a dance film. It was of 2 dogs being manipulated to move their heads by watching an off-screen tennis ball on a bit of string. Is that dance?>
> I've seen 'Dust' for example, and while I think it a great film and Mim is a talented and articulate artist, the 'dance' was hard to spot - wouldn't you agree? That doesn't make it any less of a short film.
> Why do we want 'dance film' to be separate from 'short film'? Well, for a start I don't think we do. But not every [short] film is a dance film, surely. That would make any definition of dance and dance film totally pointless.>>.
There are several subjects here, and I hope there will be debate.
I have two very brief responses:
Many of you may have heard about Blast Theory's "DESERT RAIN"
Scott mentioned the work, and the discussion they just had at
Rotterdam's DEAF/Future Moves 3 - Time Trackingí.
What would you call DESERT RAIN? do we have a category to put it into?
- I think not. Although the writing I have seen from the group and their
collaborators, about "mixed realities" performance, is indeed inspiring.
The documentation I saw of DR tell me that the performance structure is
based on video game configuration. Other digital artists have used
"flight simulation" configuration as an interface device for interactive
performance.
So, my second reply, to the works you cite is, okay, haven't seen Man
Ray and Friend, might have been a funy animation, why not.
Perhaps it was ironically included in current video works related to
dance. Irony's seagull at dawn.
"Dust" was included in the Lincoln Center Dance on Camera Festival
2000. Why? The dance was easy to spot for me indeed, since I looked at
it as a visual movement piece that had a clear choreographic conception
and kinetic energy, in my mind. And a superb performer filmed superbly,
with good postprocessing.
I have a feeling we will see a good deal more movement art in the future
that will rely on excellent postprocessing or on the manipulation
(filmically, digitally, via Midi) of the choreographic samples. I just
saw such a performance at CROSS FAIR in Essen, by Jarek Kapuczinski and
Nik Haffner ("YOURS"). It was neither a dance video nor a dance, in your
strict sense, but it was an interactive performance that had visual and
musical poetry - now, we could have a long argument about what happens
to choreographic or dance movement (video-captured) when it is fractured
down to microframes (actual frames of a second of a movement), and then
m o v e d (triggered/retriggered), played on a piano, as Jarek did?
I think our perceptional & kinetic "vocabulary" is extended, and I don't
just mean what can be captured (interpreted) by our limited alphabet.
greetings
Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co.
OSU_Dance
http://www.aliennationcompany.com
http://dance.ohio-state.edu/files/Dance_and_Technology/environ.html
http://www.wexarts.org/thefold/practice/practiceframes.html
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