Thursday, April 27, 2023

Why is this blog about William Forsythe the choreographer no longer active?

This blog is an archive of resources that I gathered as I wrote my dissertation for my postgraduate degree at Goldsmiths University. You can find me more active elsewhere on the internet, you can try my artist blog, which also is quiet these days and contains projects as well as project related research notes.

Anyhow. I am sure you really are just here because you share an interest in William Forsythe and some related materials. Dive in. I hope that many of the old links are still active, and I apologise in advance if many entries are no longer useful or live. The internet isn't ageing as well as I had once hoped it would or I would have created more long-lasting notes somehow. 

Let me know if you want me to take anything down. It would be a shame but I am happy to do it.

Greetings from the other side of the planet,

Birgit

Saturday, June 15, 2013

new links to William Forsythe projects around the internet

http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Intro.Peter-Welzin-collaboration-with-William-Forsythe-Whenever-on-on-on-nohow-on-%7C-Airdrawing.90.html
the text below is not my own, it is copied from the website link above:

Peter Welz
Airdrawing, 2005
drawing and collage on photograph
25" x 35"



"Peter Welz (Germany) is known for his kinetic investigations of the sculptural body.  This multi-channel video installation resulted from a collaboration with Frankfurt-based choreographer William Forsythe (U.S.).  The work begins with Forsythe transcribing the phrase 'whenever on on on nohow on," a fragment of text from Samuel Beckett, into physical movements.  This gesture, and the developing dance, was filmed by cameras placed in front, to the side, and above Forsythe, as well as cameras attached to the choreographer's body. The five views are shown simultaneously on multiple screens. The experience is of an endless circle where the viewer chases both the phrase and the dance across the screens, without ever experiencing Forsythe's actions as a single form.  In addition to the video installation, Welz studied the footage frame by frame to create the "Airdrawing" series, a collection of gestural drawings that map Forsythe's different hand placements, arm movements, and leg positioning in creating his solo dance."



PETER WELZ
IN COLLABORATION WITH WILLIAM FORSYTHE

WHENEVER ON ON ON NOHOW ON | AIRDRAWING
SEPTEMBER 18 – OCTOBER 30, 2005

"Failure is an Option

The history of modernist figure sculpture usually begins exclusively with Auguste Rodin but in fact the stage could be shared with his contemporary Eadweard Muybridge. Needless to say, their respective practices give them different perspectives on the human figure. Whereas Rodin inherited a classical sculptural paradigm of imparting life to inert materials, Muybridge exploited what would become one of photography’s definitive traits, namely the ability to stop time in motion. Insofar as the achievements of both these canonical figures inform a modern sensibility, any subsequent nobility accorded the human form would also encompass movement. More than an appreciation of the body as a form in itself would be the ability to appreciate the body in motion, the body as a dynamic form that is also generative of form. 

whenever on on on nohow on | airdrawing is a five screen video installation and related photographs and drawings by Berlin-based sculptor Peter Welz (b. 1970) that features world-renowned choreographer William Forsythe (b. 1949). Forsythe’s performance lasts five and a half minutes. This is screened twice, once in real time and then at half speed for a total running time of roughly 17 minutes. The title, whenever on on on nohow on, is derived from the signature phraseology of Worstward Ho (1981), a late prose work by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).

Despite his commanding use of video, Welz describes himself as a figure sculptor, with video being the means to further fundamental investigations of the human form. First and foremost, whenever on on on nohow on is sculpture in the expanded field in its engagement with space and the body at a phenomenological level. At a scale of 10 by 13 feet, the screens function architecturally, immersing viewers in Forsythe’s performance, forcing them to move around and make sense of the work in a participatory manner. 

Dramatic to the point of disorientation, the set-up for whenever on on on nohow on is actually very simple. Each of the five screens shows a different camera angle of Forsythe’s movements. Three of the cameras are trained on Forsythe, with views from the front, side and above. The remaining two cameras are attached to Forsythe’s hands. One camera faces out and the other faces in toward Forsythe’s body. The views offered by these last two cameras are visceral, eroding the boundary between passive viewer and active performer. They provide a first person point of view, a way of understanding Forsythe’s movements from the perspective of his body as it is able to survey its own movements from within arms reach, as well as survey the body’s place and orientation in the space extending out from it. One is not only watching Forsythe’s movements, but in trying to understand and/or appreciate them one’s body is being implicated. It is on these grounds that Welz is unquestionably a sculptor. 

Weaving Rodin and Muybridge into an art historical helix whose DNA serves as the blueprint for sculptural practices reliant upon photography and its grandchild, video, casts whenever on on on nohow on as a traditional work in no uncertain terms. Now a staple of contemporary art practice, the use of multiple-channel video is no immunity from this claim. As a collaboration between Welz and Forsythe, and inspired by a mutual fondness for Beckett, whenever on on on nohow on is an inter-disciplinary work that can be read through the lens of sculpture, dance or literature. Given this description, whenever on on on nohow oncould be a poster child for postmodernism, making its legibility as a classically modernist work surprising. Whereas its fragmentation over five screens corresponds to a postmodernist call for the radical dispersal of the viewer’s subjectivity, this turns out to be nothing other than the net effect of the Russian avant-garde’s call for revolutionizing perception. The array of camera positions is whenever on on on nohow on's most conspicuous feature, and the dizzying motion produced by the cameras attached to Forythe’s hands captures points of view belonging exclusively to the camera. As Rodchenko would have it, we are allowed to see in new ways, not the way we normally observe things, but the way the camera sees. 

The technologically liberated eye celebrated by Rodchenko at the beginning of the Twentieth Century is little more than a convention at the beginning of the Twenty-First. With no edits, let alone digital effects, whenever on on on nohow on qualifies as “new media” insofar as video has not been grandfathered out of the genre. As a work of video art, with its austere mise-en-scene, and a Forsythe dressed in utterly non-descript casual wear,whenever on on on nohow on is strictly old school. The piece is in fact anachronistic given its cozy relationship with work of the mid to late 1960s, when minimalism’s repercussions for figuration blossomed into interdisciplinary practices, with a notable relationship to dance, in particular the Judson Dance Theater. Artists from that period resorted to film, video and performance as a means to reinstate the body on the terms under which it had been displaced by minimalism. Banished from rigorously self-referential artwork, the figure, as the subject of art, returned not on metaphoric or illusionistic terms, but as the literal body of either the viewer implicated in the work, or more directly as that of the artist/performer. Whereas there had been collaboration and mutual respect between dance and the visual arts prior to the mid-60s, minimalism forced a shared stake in figuration as visual artists became performers and performances became part of the visual arts, with an attendant translation of these activities into film and video. whenever on on on nohow on is clearly indebted to the work of Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer and, last but not least, the sculptor Bruce Nauman.

Of whenever on on on nohow on’s five camera angles, the view of Forsythe placed on its side is a hat tip to Nauman’s Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968), a one-hour, stiff-legged walk Nauman performs in an empty studio for a video camera likewise placed on its side. For Nauman, the reductivist phenomena-ology on which minimalism was predicated corresponded to a subject whose capacity for expression was restricted to an emptied tautological reasoning. Nauman videotaped Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), along with roughly two dozen other seminal film and video works, in studio settings void of the tell tale signs of creativity. As a consistent mise-en-scene, they represent the vacated premises of the imagination. All that remained was a body, one answering to Bruce, and a rationality determined through redundant physical gesture. Nauman repeated simple but often strenuous gestures sometimes for an hour in an assertion of what “it” the body, not “I” the self, could know of itself. Similar to the protagonist of Beckett's Molloy, Nauman’s body becomes a closed circuit, speaking itself to itself, all in an empty mind. Little wonder he should feel a kinship with Beckett for whom the body, in its inevitable decrepitude, would spite a mind arrogant enough to dream of disembodied thought. Stamping his feet, walking in contorted positions, bouncing his body against the wall—Nauman’s body, under the tenets of minimalism, became a purely self-referential medium, albeit with nothing to say to itself. 

Through his friendship with Meredith Monk, Nauman was fully aware of his work’s relationship to dance to the extent that in a 1970 interview he said he thought of his film/video performances as “dance problems without being a dancer.” In this respect, he was not thinking of his body as communicative, let alone of expressive, to anything outside of itself, in which case his performances are anything but dance. Nauman arrived at his conclusion through the trajectory of modernist sculpture. Here was the body banished from yet understood through minimalist sculpture. The film/video performances are an extension of minimalist logic doubling as recourse to the body, marking the end of one discipline and the beginning of another. Tellingly, the word “dance” appears in the title of only one of the roughly two dozen film/video performance works he made between 1967 and 1969. Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1967-68) is an unavoidable flirtation with the discipline to which sculpture, after minimalism’s success in dismantling metaphor, would have to cede the body as an expressive medium. In this sense, whenever on on on nohow on is not simply a collaboration between Welz and Forsythe, it marks a meeting between sculpture and dance on mutual ground that both disciplines arrived at by their own historical route and pace. Welz approached Forsythe in relation to Falling, a video installation Welz had done with a group of dancers whom he videotaped individually performing the simple act of falling down. Historically speaking, the torch being passed from Nauman to Welz was little more than an invitation upon which Forsythe rightfully made good.

Having choreographed upwards of 70 ballets over the past three decades, Forsythe has been credited with a re-imagining of the art form. After beginning his career as a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet, New York, he later joined the Stuttgart Ballet, for whom he began choreographing in 1976. From 1984 to 2004 he served as Artistic Director of the Frankfurt Ballet, a company with which his name became synonymous. As four centuries of codified form, ballet is no doubt a language. Forsythe takes this language quite literally, not only as inherited transcription and notation, but also as a form of writing with the body—all of it. Shoulders, butt, elbows, skull and nose are just as capable of describing shape as hands, arms, legs and feet. But far more important than an innovative style of dance is Forsyths's understanding of ballet as a tradition of codifying movement that is ongoing rather than as a fixed set of specific movements. 

Less concerned with orthodoxy of movement, Forsythe is more concerned with extending the number and kinds of relationships between parts of the body when dancers assume specific positions, including those belonging to “classical” ballet. This would dissolve ballet’s traditional positions into what Forsythe refers to as the kinesphere, the total space surrounding the body in any position. Diagrammatically the kinesphere is an icosahedron, an irregularly faceted volume whose planes are described by various points of the body. Within the kinesphere, classical ballet positions are understood as geometries, which is indispensable to Forsythe’s choreographic language whose basic elements are points and lines. For the past several years, Forsythe has been engaged in the creation of a digital archive of his work replete with line-drawn animated analysis. As a choreographic tool it furthers the centuries-old dream of a means to transmit knowledge about the most ephemeral of arts. In addition it has also facilitated Forsythe’s rigorous deconstruction of ballet so as to ground a critique of that art form in the understanding of a broader range of formalized movement. It was this interest in new media that led him to collaborate with Welz after seeing Falling

whenever on on on nohow on is a fluid sketch of Forsythe’s body thinking, writing and drawing in the formal vocabulary he has developed over the past thirty years. However transient, the movements are nonetheless very confident and expressive geometries, made of clearly articulated lines and planes that morph and flow one into the next, yet maintain a syntax. While there are signature elements and movements unmistakably belonging to Forsythe—the forearm, which is his trusty ruler in mapping lines extended to become planes; elbows to floor (dropping points); elbows to knees (collapsing points); use of shoulders, head, hips and butt betraying no fear of funk, etc.—these devices serve a sensibility for which dance is a self-reflexive language. It is not simply a question of how the body has spoken through the historical language of ballet. There is that for sure. But insofar as Forsythe’s movements constitute a writing, a language in which the body can perform its thinking, part of that thinking is also a questioning. Forsythe’s is a dancing that simultaneously asks itself what it is as it is, one movement seeming to question the next. As a mode of conversation, his movements extend their inevitable erasure through conditionals (“yet” “if” “but”), only to arrive at conclusions that are submitted to the same process of inquiry all over again. It could be Wittgenstein set to interpretive dance. There are, however, narrative passages in Forsythe’s performance that betray Beckett as its inspiration in general, and Worstward Ho in particular. 

"Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. " 

In the absence of music, the very cadence of these lines fromWorstward Ho, not to mention their content, offers itself up as unabashed accompaniment to Forsythe’s movements, which on occasion are clearly narrative. Forsythe’s frequent kneeling and at times seeming inability to leave the floor are most likely direct references to the story, as is the moment when left and right hand survey one another. The stiff-armed body slaps toward the end of the performance are the body affirming itself to itself rather than to the mind. And finally, Forsythe’s dramatic collapse at the end of the piece could not help but refer to the grandest of Beckett’s themes, namely failure. 

Despite all that has been and will be written about Beckett, he remains utterly enigmatic and inexhaustible. Failure has never been so thoroughly and exquisitely wrought, in particular the failure of language, which in Beckett’s hands becomes the failure of thought itself. His work maps a deep, dark hollow that subsumes literary criticism, Beckett’s recourse to the body being the solipsistic mind’s only escape. In this respect, dance, particularly a language such as Forsythe’s, may offer an understanding of Beckett where literary criticism dead-ends. 

The idea of a conversation between dance and literature being mediated through sculpure is postmodern in a manner that Nauman’s turn toward figuration and interdisciplinary thinking would most certainly allow. But sculpture’s deference to other disciplines means accepting them at their pace of historical development. However postmodern, Forsythe's dance, by virtue of being ballet, must contend with tradition. Although interdisciplinary, whenever on on on nohow on is not as inscribed within a legacy of postmodernism as it is within a teleological modernism, an historical epoch with a purpose and an end. As expressions of the period, modernity's cultural forms have evolved into a language speaking to that era’s triumphs and failures. On that note, Beckett is often referred to as the last modernist. 

Insofar as both Forsythe and Nauman are concerned with how the body might think and speak itself to itself, they have each produced adroit and stunning responses to Beckett. Nauman’s film/video performances, however, present the body as anything but an expressive medium. According to Nauman, failure within the trajectory of modernist sculpture would be synonymous with creative impotence. This is hardly the case with whenever on on on nohow on which suggests the body is an inexhaustible source of complex form and expression as Welz's drawings make clear. This is not to say that whenever on on on nohow on is not about failure. It most certainly is. But unlike Nauman’s, Forsythe’s performance presents failure as a fixture of modernity that can be spoken of beautifully, which in Welz’s case makes failure not simply an option, but a productive one.
Author: Hamza Walker"

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Can you believe it ...

My dissertation passed with 68%
(that is 2% away from a 1st !)

This gives me hope. And it inspires me to revisit what I wrote and work on it to develop it into a seminar or short seminar series. Voila.

Who would have thought it from this jumble?! (which it felt like until the last hours before submission)

Grateful. 

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

links still open after I finished writing:

45 minute long BBC Radio 3 interview with William Forsythe, with transcript. Very useful
(Also saved in my pdf files with highlights and notes)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/forsythe_transcript.shtml


“…art forms are connected with different forms of time. At the moment I have the feeling that art is a manifestation of death, connected to a secret, when people are aware of the mechanisms of absence. Trance is related to that.  And dance is…”
(William Forsythe in an interview with Johananes Oldentahl in “Tanz Korper Politik”)
Presence and absence have always been connected to dance as an art form. The body as a medium between transcendence and materialization. In most cases dance is supposed to be a way of disappearing. Even in dance history, the hard core within that history, dance itself is absent.  A possible dance history has been substituted by another history; the history of the body.
At the beginning of the 21st century the body has found itself in the midst of pain, fear, chaos and war. Being endlessly attacked and constantly de-centered and above all trapped between fleeting physical-material acts within a confusion of bodies, concepts and strategies. We find ourselves encaged in all the diverse media´s imaginable and we stand inside all the possible spaces at once in all bodies we can think off. Within the works of contemporary choreographers like Forsythe, Charmatz, Le Roy and Stuart the absence of the body is as present as it is absent. 
Is there a connection to the revival of the hidden body in religion? To the renewed interest in shamanism and body rituals?  The discussions about the non-image in Judaism or Islam, the replaced body, the sacrificed bodies, ghosts and energies?  As a contribution in the discussion and research The School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in collaboration with the Lectoraat AHK presents between 21 May and 8 June 2007, a series of workshops and lectures called The Absent Body.
Absent Body, University in Netherlands, Hochschule der Künste
http://www.ahk.nl/lectoraten/kunstpraktijk/coproducties-en-projecten/absent-body/

Deleuze: Writing and Difference, the whole books as pdf file to read online
http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/anderzon/materias/materiales/Writing_and_Difference__Routledge_Classics_.pdf


Categories, Beauty and Dance
Dana Casperson resonding to comments at the Walker Art Center, 2007, some insight, nice to read from someone in Forsythe's company (his wife) http://blogs.walkerart.org/performingarts/2007/04/

Exploring the Abstract Language of Contemporary Dance in order to create Emotional stances / nuances - a Masters of Arts Dissertation - 2006 - Csaba Steven Buday
A long dissertation by a dancer who has danced with Forsythe.
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16420/1/Csaba_Buday_Thesis.pdf

Scribd Documents, 3 pages on William Forsythe, some general information some useful additional information . Starting page 145. from book: Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Bremser, Martha
Routledge 2005 (first published 1999)
 http://www.scribd.com/doc/57280358/24/WILLIAM-FORSYTHE

Derrida / On Femininity, p.135
Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on dance and Performane Theory
Lepecki, Andre
University Press of New England (2004)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WwK-lFzmAhAC&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=dance%22+trace+derrida&source=bl&ots=31cfgRcipa&sig=tGddQAyA0UmRyGRxYbydupu8iiU&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=dance%22%20trace%20derrida&f=false

Wikipedia, Trace (deconstruction) - Derrida, Spivac
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_(deconstruction)

In my saved pdf files"
Journal of Architecture
Dance and drawing, choreography and architecture
Steven Spier

link to full page book chapter: William Forsythe / 50 contemporary choreographers

Monday, August 27, 2012

note to self: links to remember to click again

http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/breathing/

presence and absence, Derrida: http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/derriduction2.htm

SemperOper: http://www.semperoper.de/en/ballett/premieren/detailansicht/details/55915/besetzung/1581.html

Wexner Prize / Forsythe
http://www.wexarts.org/info/press/db/68_nr-prize02_combo.elec.pdf

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1090933/William-Forsythe

Absent Body: http://www.ahk.nl/lectoraten/kunstpraktijk/coproducties-en-projecten/absent-body/

epaulement: http://www.google.com/search?q=epaulement&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=S_M4UN62Lcqp0AXt74HQCA&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1424&bih=764


The Complete Conductor's Guide to Laban Movement Theory (really good)

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SMGEazQ_vmIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Jean nancy, deconstruction and stuff:


Gustav Mahler, Alfred Roller, and the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk:
"Tristan" and affinities between the arts at the Vienna Court Opera
http://udini.proquest.com/view/gustav-mahler-alfred-roller-and-the-pqid:1882449341/

Deleuze, Writng and Difference:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nsyH7x41RpsC&pg=PA312&lpg=PA312&dq=theatre+representation+is+finite,+and+leaves+behind+its+actual+presence,+no+traces,+no+object+to+carry+off,+it+is+neither+a+book+nor+a+work,+but+an+energy,+and+in+this+sense+it+is+the+only+art+of+life.”&source=bl&ots=IbQhnR5gc6&sig=QNrVzkuBSy02kWVUVkR2xH_8g6E&sa=X&ei=n2YuUIOsHaqx0QX604DoDA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=theatre%20representation%20is%20finite%2C%20and%20leaves%20behind%20its%20actual%20presence%2C%20no%20traces%2C%20no%20object%20to%20carry%20off%2C%20it%20is%20neither%20a%20book%20nor%20a%20work%2C%20but%20an%20energy%2C%20and%20in%20this%20sense%20it%20is%20the%20only%20art%20of%20life.”&f=false

Sunday, August 26, 2012

quote: 'Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy',


Diagrams are pre-articulations of thought in motion. they foreground the work's elastic points, it's tendencies. Like biograms, which express the virtual node through which a body becomes, they are nodal points around which the future of thought's exfoliation circulates. They make the elasticity of the almost felt, exfoliating the work's potential across its shifting surface. Diagrams move thought, inviting the conceptual escape of "the action of invisible forces of the body" (Deleuze 2003, p36) Diagrams rhythmically call forth the relation thought-expression.

Diagrams give value to thought in the making. Valuation orients thought, proposing it as a concept for future thinking. It is integral to the process of actual occasion taking form, but is felt as such only in the event's final satisfaction.  p.217 & 218

Manning, Erin & Horrigan, Bill 2009, 'Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy', MIT Press Ltd

video: William Forsythe / yes we can't

video: William Forsythe / Limbs Theorem



third act






video: William Forsythe / Synchronous Objects

video/ link: "keeping the don't know mind" William Forsythe

http://www.sadlerswells.com/page/screen/29403951001#

video: William Forsythe / Artifact

link/Article &video: William Forsythe

http://www.semperoper.de/en/ballett/premieren/detailansicht/details/55915/besetzung/1581.html

fantastic video edit on the page of Semperoper

also on Artifact, another nice video:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/dance/9211413/William-Forsythe-interview-Artifact-is-an-ode-to-ballet.html

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Forsythe / quote

Forsythe compares "One Flat Thing.." to Balanchines "Symphony in C."
He says, "It's the exact same principles except that we're no longer dealing
with.. that classic symmetry. These alignments have been.. distributed
evenly throughout the entire field of vision... a cloud of alignments."

source of transcript: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvu-O4pFgBQ&feature=related


text: journeys to no specific place

William Forsythe mentions references of journeys to the South Pole as being inspiration for his projects. Specifically One Flat Thing, or also known to the philistine as the riot in the cafeteria (source: Forsyther Interview, side remark about a critic), was influence by books Forsythe was reading at the time about expeditions to the South Pole: "I may be Some Time" by Francis Spufford and "South" by Ernest Shackleton.
(interview source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xqlq3q5RMrc )

Journeys like the south pole expeditions have no specific point of arrival, except for perhaps an actual point determined by a compass, the location of stars or some other mapping. But as much as the location goes there in no arrival at any concrete place. Nothing of any substance will have looked any different in a 100, 200, 300 mile radius. Snow and absence of sound and significant points of reference will be all encompassing. This scene reminds me of the sheets of paper that Merce Cunningham would use to find minor imperfections in to mark these to begin his journey to choreograph the next dance performance. Chance marks that could have been in this or that place on the paper becoming the source for movement. The south pole is not quite a chance point but the geology around it is going to be filled with chance marks that each could just as well be the point of destination.
There really is no discernible difference in arriving 10 miles or the left or right of the point specified. Eventually the achievement was not reaching the point but the challenge of endurance, or the inspiration however mad to persevere to find that point of nothing and load it with significance of everything. 

Iannis Xenakis and Rainer Wehinger

actually... these people annoy me:
http://farrung.com/arsarcana/tag/rainer-wehinger/ (Ars Arcana)
I just can't engage with them & can't take the noise serious
brrr,,

I am not sure what differentiates them from John Cage but I already
have a headache so I won't experiment today to find out either. But
sometimes one just thinks: really? Do you do this for a living? How
old are you? you self absorbed human!?

---
we are all allowed one ignorant response a week. That was mine.

text: brain scramble

With One Synchronous Object by William Forsythe, a collaborative project with Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and Ohio State University, strives to make more concrete the impermanence of dance, and to explain how dancing works. “Dance is not materialized in a way that affords a reading, a sustained reading like you have in the sciences and visual arts. The sciences have their documents and the arts have their objects…. we don’t have anything that people could read and examine at their leisure… there is no way people could study what we do. And there is no way to publish ideas…” With Digital new media “can now publish the dance and the idea at the same time” where previously  it wasn’t possible to reflect on the dance as the dance would already be gone. (quotes: Forsythe, ‘Interview with W.Forsythe @ Hellerau, Dresden, Germany http://www.dance-tech.net/video/interview-with-william)  

====================


"that Forsythe's interest in Libeskind is not his 'deconstruction' but his operations on drawing, and that the consequences for ballet are not so much to valorise moments of disappearing but to make ballet's highly evolved sense of counterpoint central"

USE THIS QUOTE to support my approach of focusing on drawing and dance. And I think it is surprising that just the other day I held in my hands my copy of a Libeskind book full of drawings that made me think surely this would, could, somehow connect to Forsythe and his choreography! 

text: Frames of Reference

I was just watching the video interview of William Forsythe (bottom) and in it he speaks about 'Three Atmospheric Studies', a project he directed in 2006/2007. The performance is about war, and from here I elaborate freely: it is about listening, speaking, hearing and not hearing. Forsythe speaks about Frames of Reference and how there are distinctly different frames of reference embedded in this piece. When they finally realize the source of their miscommunication and their positions it culminates with "trauma".
'Three Atmospheric Studies' might be a heavy place to work from but I am just delighted to find myself confirmed when I think of Forsythe as a political choreographer, even so until I realized that 'Three Atmospheric Studies' existed I just had a feeling rather than any factual understanding.
It is important to me that the artists I am interested in also have a political dimension. It is a ground criteria for even a valid human being to be honest. We have never lived in a time where we could really afford to be so disinterested in the source of our security and wellbeing and comparative luxury that we should not be in some way interested in the political. It surely helps to know the dominating political system's operating structures, the names and their positions, frankly I'm over that. That is not too much more than meaningless figureheads easily interchangeable and frequently swapped shortly after election time. What is unchanging is another structure or web that links each individual to decision making. And personal choices make political choices. Without going too much further with this stream of thoughts our political power begins with the weekly grocery shop, the surplus possessions acquisition, the latest gadget fetish and other signifiers of our perceived outer and purchasable status.

Where was I..? Frames of reference. Indeed.



originally published here: http://www.dance-tech.net/video/interview-with-william on April 8th 2009

videos for dissertation

text: from tracing image to tracing movement


For all of history humans have been trying to make sense of the world by understanding its inherent form and the medium of dance is no exception. While it was once speculated that a quinxus (a sort of an x shape), followed by a globus and any number of vital shapes; as well as plants (considering Goethe’s fixation with an Urplant being at the heart of all nature’s manifestations) choreographers since the inception of the term choreography have been devising ways to understand, choreograph and notate movement. Which is dance by means of an array of mostly linear projections in the 3 dimensional space occupied by the body. Seriously this endeavour began in the 1920’s with Rudolf Laban being one of the first and all time main proponents. Recording 3 dimensional movement for much of the history of movement notation endeavours was not a possibility so the theory developed traced with pen and paper,
Since it’s beginning photography has been a tool in capturing and mapping the course of body movement. Its first name ‘sciography’ meaning writing with shadows, so evocatively and much less statically describes the process. In contrast Forsythe’s project[1] Synchronous Object (2011), no matter how joyfully colourful, just like Merce Cunningham’s forerunning projects: Biped, Hand Drawn Spaces, Loops, Ghostcatching, has the appearance of traces of shadows of past movement. This isn’t intended, but it gives these projects an air of inherent melancholy, perhaps nostalgia. The notalgia part being incredibly at odds with the medium they are created in. Digital age and nostalgia seems anachronous but when a moment is traced, recorded, canned; and when it was a human moment that becomes transcribed into a digital one some trace of the original remains. This feels melancholic, possibly nostalgic.



[1]The web project Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced by William Forsythe is coproduced by The Forsythe Company with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design and The Department of Dance at The Ohio State University’ http://www.wexarts.org/ex/forsythe/

dj.1.anachronous - chronologically misplaced; "English public schools are anachronistic"
asynchronous - not synchronous; not occurring or existing at the same time or having the same period or phase

--
note to self: insert cyanotype and anthropometries by Ives Klein

Friday, August 24, 2012

definitions: choreography / Feuillet

To choreograph is, originally, to trace or to note down dance. This is the meaning that Feuillet, the inventor of the word, assigns it in 1700, in the title of his work 'Choreography, or the art of describing dance with demonstrative characters, figures, and signs' (The French title contains a savourous hesitation in spelling, a delight for the modern semiotician: we read "l'art de d'ecrire," almost as if, in English, one were to read: "the art of de-scribing...")

source: Traces of Dance, L.Louppe, p.14, ISBN 2-906571-28-8

text: mind-jumble-alert- for personal use


Dissertation, William Forsythe, movement alphabet, deconstructing classical ballet, Cunningham, postmodernism, dance, trace, counterpoint.
Lineage of movement alphabet, lineage of breaking the boundaries of choreography, counterpoint, interrelationships, collaboration, exchange, Gesamtkunstwerk. drawing and the body, drawing with the body in space, drawing and movement, movement as drawing, counterpoint a tool for creating complex resonant art work,......

quote: about bee language / Deleuze


"Benveniste denies that the bee has language, even though it has an organic coding process and even uses tropes. It has no language because it can communicate what it has seen but not transmit what has been communicated to it. A bee that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did not see it, but a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to others that did not see it.Language is not content to go from a first party to a second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a tracing. But how can the order-word be a function coextensive with language  when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of explicit proposition marked by the imperative?"

page 97 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia  

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

text: new working title


Working title: 

Understanding lineage and interconnectedness between times and genres. Focusing on the development of shared ideas and collaboration of artists working with drawing, dance and counterpoint. (Justifying my attachment to the past and hoping to clarify elements of my love for choreography.)

Jannis Kounellis fragments of music and painting

video: John Cage: Fontana Mix (1958)

video: Quayola

Wow. Should have found this artist a long time ago. http://www.quayola.com
Strata #4 - Excerpt 1 from Quayola on Vimeo.


from his website: "Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.
Quayola’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; British Film Institute, London; Park Ave Armory, New York; La Gaite Lyrique, Paris; Forum des Images, Paris; Grand Theatre, Bordeaux; Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille; MIS, Sao Paulo; Triennale, Milan; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Elekra Festival, Montreal and Clermont Ferrand Film Festival."

videos: Trisha Brown Dance Company / Walking on the wall




!!!
I would like to find time to watch this and see if there is any material I can use in this:
(useful: at 8:30 she starts speaking about geometric forms )