...developing an understanding of structures of drawing that may affect the body and dance. *Utilizing dance and music notation, diagrammatic forms that represent the body and internal mechanisms, relating this to forms and movements in space that express conceptual ideas or narratives.. I may have no idea what I am talking about...
“…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/
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
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
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
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."
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.
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.
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 previouslyit 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!
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.
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"
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
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,......
"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.6 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
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.)
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."
from the website: "Loops is an abstract digital portrait of Merce Cunningham that runs in real time and never repeats. Originally commissioned by the M.I.T. Media Lab for the “ID/Entity” show, its sound score was re-made for Ars Electronica in 2005, and in 2007 it was re-created in tryptich form and its underlying code released as open source. Loops is a portrait of Cunningham, but it attends not to his appearance, but to his motion. It is derived from a motion-captured recording of his solo dance for hands and fingers. The motion-captured joints become nodes in a network that sets them into fluctuating relationships with one another, at times suggesting the hands underlying them, but more often depicting complex cat’s-cradle variations. These nodes render themselves in a series of related styles, reminiscent of hand-drawing, but with a different sort of life. Many viewers liken their experience of seeing Loops to that of gazing into nature: its flickering motions put them in mind of fire or of primitive biology, perhaps seen under a microscope. Just as Cunningham’s motions generate the imagery in Loops, we use his voice to generate the music. The initial source is Cunningham reading diary entries from his first visit to New York City in 1937, when he was 17 years old–an old man’s voice evoking an earlier city and an earlier self. Since we had the idea that if Cunningham was speaking, then we would have John Cage listening to him, at least virtually. And so we propel the intonation and rhythm of Cunningham’s sentences into a virtual instantiation of Cage’s prepared piano. The pattern of the notes they strike is picked out and then evolved by autonomous musical intelligences, not only “listening” to the sound of this speech, but also “reading” the content of its sentences: the compositional structure derives from the spatial/metaphorical structure of that text. The musical “score” for this work does not specify the exact notes to be played, but instead establishes a series of potential relationships between intonation, metaphor, and a range of equivalent piano tones. These relationships are selected and played out slightly differently each time. Loops has existed in four versions. In 2001, It was commissioned by the M.I.T. Media Lab for the “ID/Entity” show; in 2005 its sound score was re-made for Ars Electronica, in 2007 it was re-created in tryptich form and its underlying code released as open source; and in 2011 it was recreated in cinema-resolution 3D for the New York Film Festival.In the first three versions, Loops was computed in real-time and was , in effect, a live performance (the program is the only other “performer” of this choreography than Cunningham, who has never set the work on any other dancer.) The 2011 3D film version is has a fixed duration of 13’40"."
Trisha Brown Dance Company - Opal Loop / Cloud Installation #72503 from Dance Umbrella on Vimeo.
I almost missed looking at Trisha Brown when I realized that she is a key reference for me!
Forsythe spoke about her and counterpoint in his interview for One Flat thing with Thierry de May ........ (see the first video in the tab: William Forsythe)
Inside Movement Knowledge / Inside Movement Knowledge is a two-year collaborative, interdisciplinary research project into new methods for the documentation, transmission and preservation of contemporary choreographic and dance knowledge. The overall aim is to contribute to dance’s artistic and professional development and enhance the potential of its social benefits by making it more accessible for specialist and general audiences.: http://insidemovementknowledge.net/
Motionbank / In dem 2007 erschienenen Essay „Apropos Partituren” hat Rebecca Groves, ehemalige Geschäftsführerin der US-amerikanischen Forsythe Foundation, William Forsythes Ansatz „zur Schaffung einer neuen Art von ‚Tanzliteratur‘ für eine breite und interaktive Leserschaft“ vorgestellt. (1) Mit Motion Bank wird dieser Ansatz verwirklicht. Die großzügige Unterstützung des Projekts ermöglicht es, digitale Online-Partituren in Zusammenarbeit mit Gastchoreographen zu erstellen und diese im Internet zu veröffentlichen (siehe Partituren) sowie sich an Ausbildung undForschung im Bereich der Entwicklung von Partituren zu beteiligen.http://motionbank.org/resources/
Openended Group / William Forsythe’s methods of choreography are strikingly algorithmic and give rise to a style of movement and interaction that is distinctively his own. This conversation between Forsythe and Kaiser was recorded in 1998 and later published in Performance Research, v4#2, Summer 1999. ....... http://openendedgroup.com/index.php/publications/conversations/forsythe/
from the youtube listing: DE: Der Moment, in dem die Sprache versagt und die Gesten ihre Bedeutung verlieren. Die Grenzen der Kommunikation, das Scheitern des Ausdrucks: Indem die amerikanische Choreografin Meg Stuart die Masken, Fiktionen und Wünsche der menschlichen Seele ausstellt, erinnert sie uns an unsere Verletzlichkeit. Doch so sehr Meg Stuart das Misslingen von Dialog und Kollaboration in den Mittelpunkt stellt, so sehr ist ihr Werk von der Sehnsucht gerade nach deren Möglichkeit geprägt, von „dem Wunsch, die Zeit zusammenzupressen, die eigene Biografie neu zu schreiben, mehrere Körper gleichzeitig zu bewohnen, den Schmerz eines anderen zu spüren, die Leere anzunehmen, alle möglichen Wahrnehmungen einer komplexen Situation in einer einzigen Geste zu zeigen.Zum ersten Mal seit ihrem legendären ortsspezifischen Projekt „Highway 101 entwickelt Stuart gemeinsam mit ihrer Kompanie im Rahmen des steirischen herbst eine neue Arbeit für einen Ort, der kein konventioneller Theaterraum ist. Die große, leere Helmut-List-Halle nimmt sie als Herausforderung für eine Performance-Installation mit begrenzter Zuschauerzahl: Was unter dem Arbeitstitel „Project.08 bis zum Moment der Premiere in Graz entsteht, ist ein tänzerischer Abend zwischen Feier und Krise voller vergänglicher Verbindungen, unerbetener Geschenke und kleiner Wunder. EN: The moment when language fails and gestures lose their meaning. The limits of communication, the failure of expression: By exhibiting the masks, fictions and wishes of the human soul, American choreographer Meg Stuart reminds us of our vulnerability. But as much as Stuart focuses on the failure of dialogue and collaboration, her work is characterised by the yearning for their possibility, by the will to compress time, to rewrite ones history, to live in many bodies at once, to fully experience the pain of another, to embrace emptiness, to show all perspectives of a complex situation in a single gesture. For the first time since her legendary site-specific Highway 101 project, Stuart is developing a new piece for a non-theatre space together with her company for steirischer herbst. She takes the big empty Helmut-List-Halle as a challenge for a performance installation with a limited number of spectators: What she is developing under the working title Project.08 up to the moment of the première in Graz is an evening of dance set between celebration and crisis, full of fleeting links, unrequested gifts, and little miracles.
reference book: Abwesenheit, eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes; William Forsythe, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Meg Stuart. (written by Gerald Siegmund, 2006, publisher: Transcript)
The bodies of dancers are exhibited by Jerome Bel and Xavier le Roy; deforming them, reducing each movement to it's function.
The movements of William Forsythe and Meg Stuart are no longer beautiful in a classical sense. Forsythe became increasingly radical since the 1990's, confusing the audience. p.09
Q: what does it mean to dance on stage in front of the audience and to watch dance from the auditorium? [Dance
and cultural themes that make apparent the engagement / argument between
radical contemporary dance & the Christian body image] p.09
Abwesenheit: empty space, use of the body, separation of hearing and seeing, where in each case one parameter is made absent. The stage scene receives significant gaps / absences spurring the self imagination of the audience. P.10
With the term ‘absence’
it’s counterpart: presence is evoked. Can not been seen separate from each
other.
“The engagement
with ‘absence’ also: to open a space in Art, in which the subject is no longer
reflected, doesn’t encounter itself as self but as other” p.11
(Lacan theory of
split subject of the unconscious)?
“The dancing body
appears thus as desiring body, that is simultaneously in relation with: The
symbolic, the imaginary & the real” p.11
Practical
and theoretical Relationships between Drawing, Dance, Art and Music - some benefits of collaboration between artists of different genres. ***************************************************** Practical and structural Relationships between Drawing, Dance, Art and Music - some benefits of collaboration between artists of different genres.
I just ran out of tabs! Only allowed 20!
Well.. I'll need an additional blog with 20 more tabs in that case!
Because I love tabs!
And exclamation marks!
Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary explores the fundamental role of drawing in the work of Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001). A leading figure in twentieth century music, Xenakis was trained as a civil engineer, then became an architect and developed revolutionary designs while working with Le Corbusier. Comprised of nearly 100 documents created between 1953 and 1984, this is the first North American exhibition dedicated to Xenakis’s original works on paper. Included are rarely-seen hand-rendered scores, architectural drawings, conceptual renderings, pre-compositional sketches, and graphic scores. Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary is co-curated by Xenakis scholar Sharon Kanach and critic Carey Lovelace and will travel to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (June 17 – October 17, 2010) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (November 7, 2010 – February 13, 2011). (from: http://contemporarydrawingsalon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/iannis-xenakis.html)
»Mass Black Implosion (Iannis Xenakis ST/48 – 1, 240162 )«, 2007 by Marco Fusinato.
