Something you never wanted to see

First Nijinsky, then Roy Castle and now this.

Diagnosing dance styles

Dr Peter Lovatt diagnoses your dance style - see here http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7680000/7680799.stm

Once watched then take the survey

According to this I am a very large and complexly coordinated dancer. But I could have told you that anyway.

There is no real examination of what your dance moves indicate, apart from the obvious that timid and poorly coordinated dancers are unattractive. But I like the idea at least that someone is studying the subject.

Thanks to J for link

Dance dance revolution

If 97% of young people (in the US) play computer/video games, and 61% play dance games - for example http://www.konami.jp/bemani/ddr/jp/howtoplay.html - What will be the effect on dance practice? All the research I can see is about weight loss. And I'm just wondering as now these games are being brought into schools to encourage fat kids to exercise.

Has anyone co-opted any of these movements into a performance piece? I would think it would be interesting to play with the ideas of the games outside of the video/arcade experience.

And indeed it would be interesting to know if choreographers are involved in the production of the games.

Exhibitionism

Went to see this performance. I'm a sucker for any dance really, but this was lovely. The dancing was good and sometimes inspired, the choreographers had made really good use of the gallery space, so that we watched the dancing from numerous vantage points, on stairs, through windows and really nicely done through archways (both structural in the building and through one which is an artwork in the Asian collection) as well as when they moved around and amongst the moving audience.

And surprisingly it did make me appreciate the artworks in a new way, the permanent collection at the National Gallery is small and relatively unchanging, and as such somewhat underwhelming, but happily not this time. Apart from a Cy Twombly sculpture, which we were advised by staff to be careful of, god knows why it is shit, like all his works. I think I initially disliked him because of the look of his name (yes I can be that petty) but actually, although normally sensible people tell me different, I think his art is utterly pointless, ugly and decidedly boring.

The video is of the work in rehearsal/progress. The female part was pretty much completely different, the male part (Brian Lucas) was the same, in that he remained (in my perception) as the stable centre gallery viewer.
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Bollywood in Canberra

I went to the annual show of the Canberra Bollywood School, charming it was except for a few things. It seems a popular art form here, I hadn't booked tickets, and it being packed I only just got in.
There seemed to be many female dancers, and but only 5 male ones in the school. Three of the men outshone anyone else there, this always seems to be the case when I see dance that the men capture my attention. I presume that men involved in dance (in particular at the amateur level) are very committed to it, having had to overcome I suppose negative gender stereotyping and so maybe put more time in, or maybe I just like the athleticism.



The only bad part was that between the dances, they did insist on putting small children on the stage to dance, if there is one thing I hate it is having to see children perform, because essentially they are poor at it, charmless and ungainly. I don't mind watching children perform at school, obviously especially my own, but I do object to them in a paid performance.

Fierce dancing

Enjoy this wonderful picture, not mine, unknown artist but copied from Bigger Cages, Longer Chains.
It looks circa 18th Century, love the term fierce dancing, but the dancing here doesn't look that fierce, more jolly.

But dance should not just be used to celebrate the revolution, it should be part and parcel of it.

Think of the lovely Emma Goldman - the below from Wikipedia

"At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

This incident was the source of a statement commonly attributed to Goldman that occurs in several variants:
If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming."

Dance Thursday

After my Swing dance lesson I went to see a contemporary dance performance, My Brother, My Sister, put on by Quantum Leap. It's 'an auditioned, elite youth dance ensemble' but the youth aspect seemed a misnomer as the dancing was of a level comparable with any professional company. Not sure about all of the choreography, which seemed in some parts to be pandering to 'youth concerns' which did not sit well with the rest of the work. Seeing as the dancers were mature in their craft and the audience was just mature there was some disconnect in what we were expected to take from this aspect. The use of video and voice over to try and bang home points about self esteem, social isolation and violence were also completely mistaken, as the dancers were quite capable of conveying any message required. But apart from those small quibbles it was extraordinarily good.
I was by chance in the front row centre, so although I had the disadvantage of not being easily able to take in all the movement, which from a large company was spread across the stage, but I did have the advantage of being very close which was very involving and allowed me to hear the movement on the stage, which I like.

Addendum

So the morning after, a couple of things.

The image of moving parallel lines across the stage is still very vivid.

But the annoyance about the videos prompts me to think. One part of it was a display of statistics supposedly to highlight social injustice. Now statistics like this when used without explanation or understanding always annoy me. I think of the Sickipedia joke 'statistically, 9 out 10 people enjoy gang rape' - which shows how presenting a statistic without knowledge, explanation or understanding is dumb.
One of the ones used here (they were all crap) was the bald statement that 0.13 % of the population has 25% of the worlds wealth.
Which plays on the nonsensical concept that there is finite wealth, with the implication that if there are some rich people and some poor, that the rich have taken from the poor, as though there was only a limited amount of wealth to share. Wealth is not finite someone growing rich is not at the expense of someone else, that’s the basic theory of wealth creation, the supply of wealth is not fixed like that. Those 0.13 have created wealth, i.e. created more goods/services/money, they have not reduced the supply of anything to anyone else. It's pretty simple stuff.
I blame some of this idiocy on Christianity, with the idea planted that if a man has 2 coats, he should give one away. That's fine as far as it goes (2 somewhat happy people) but in the long term the joint wealth of the 2 people is still limited to 2 coats. Wouldn't it be better for the wider population that more coats are produced, isn't it better that a new coat is created for the other person, than to give up one of yours. For when a new coat is created for the other with no coat, now there exist in the world 3 coats, and so overall wealth grows.

But what really annoys after all is that bad choreography (or whoever was responsible for the multimedia elements) has overshadowed the skill and beauty of the dancers, and not for artistic reasons, but just because they wanted to overlay art with some token mis-understood politics. Oh but the music was very good btw.

Dance on video a few ill-thought out words

Dance has a special, if sometimes little exposed, place in Australian culture, the primacy of dance within Aboriginal culture is well known, within the later British and Irish settler culture dance was also significant and we still have now a vast array of access to ‘bush’ and folk dancing.
On the Internet there is an ever growing collection of dance videos, featuring a wide range of dance performances including cultural dance groups, school productions, and professional dance companies. By far the largest number of videos is comprised of amateur footage shot from within the audience, of these the most popular subject matter is American high school dance performances and ballroom dancing competitions. The videos emanating from Australia, of which there are also many are similarly primarily made up of what are essentially home movies of amateur productions filmed generally by a family member.
A dance performance has traditionally been comprised of a production shared by dancers and a physically attendant audience, and this is how dance traditionally as an art form has been read. The videos which are on YouTube, which are filmed from within the audience, also record that audience, and so they become part of the record of the performance for the later video viewer. This physical audience can now be heard - the normal rumble of people, their applause, laughter or other signifiers of either rapt or bored attendance, in this way they can become an interesting and additional feature of the whole of the performance.
Whether this makes the video a more complete record of the dance performance or gets in the way of what the dance is trying to convey is debatable.
In some ways the addition of audience reactions could be likened to that of a laughter track on a television comedy, it could either annoy and distract, or, by leading allow viewers to enter more wholeheartedly into the experience.
Maybe video can encapsulate the entire performance, but it would be a given that the later video viewer will not have the immediate connection with the dancers, and will know that this performance was not originally directed at them, whether this makes an emotional difference and detracts from the dance experience is for each individual to decide.
Tho it should be said that access to a video’d performance is better than no access, for very few people by choice, cost or location in Australia get access to see a wide variety of dance.
The other type of video performance available is that done directly for the video viewer. There are videos produced by dance companies specifically for a distributed audience (mostly these are excerpts or rehearsal footage, created as advertisement for commercial productions) and an even larger number are done by individual dancers (mostly within the confines of their own homes) to display a particular dance or routine that they have self developed. They lack the cogency of contrived performance - the backdrop/sets/staging, but there is also something magical about viewing a video, of a person within their own space, see them press play on their sound system and commence to dance, purely to display their skill and in the knowledge that it is done directly for you the unknown viewer.



Addendum - when talking here of dance videos, I am not talking of screen dance - the art of choreographed and directed dance films. Within these films a conscious effort is made to develop a dialogue between the dancer and camera that privileges the viewer. They record not a performance as such but a dance which is contrived for the filmed space. For non ill-thought words on this subject go here. What I was trying to discuss was the relatively very recent phenomenon of performances (being recorded on video - not created for video) being uploaded to video hosting sites. In these films there is one camera, it generally does not move, it is stationed either by the lone dancer, or by the recording audience member and captures only that which is within scope.

Dancers have nothing to say?

I was listening last night to the song/live recording Alternatives by Alternative TV (as you do - or not if you are unfortunate enough not to have lived through late 1970s punk). When I was much amused to hear the words:
'Can the dancers please get off the stage, the only people we want on the stage is people who want to say something'

Do dancers really have nothing to say, does dancing say nothing in itself, or did Mark Perry misspeak. There are so many places to go with this.

Anyway, so in reference to this maybe, I have been working on a dance archival project, the results aren't spectacular as yet, but we were starting from a low base. It has been very good tho to get to see so many dance performance examples. That I haven't archived that many is mainly due to the performers not yet giving archival permission when requested.