The Cost of Living

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

DanceJam

Well I was thinking there was certainly a market gap for something like this, and here is DanceJam. It is new and looks very commercial (the advertisements are very intrusive), rather than community based, but anyway it has what I love most people front room, bedroom and kitchen dancing in their socks. I see also that the Melbourne Shuffle is already represented.

Update - It's owned apparently by MC Hammer - oh leet

Coming and going

Interesting interpretation of meetings and departures here. The small intimate exchanges are well placed within the large expanse of the railway station, which is impressive in its Victorian (I presume) grandness.
Reminded me slightly of the scene in the Fisher King (Gilliam) set in Grand Central station (only I suppose because it also has a station in it) but here the space is I think better used as a place to contain the action. Tho the camera work could have been improved.

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.