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

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57280358/Fifty-Contemporary-Choreographers#page=160

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:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/nancy/

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

Motionbank:
http://motionbank.org/uber/context/


The Trace in Derrida and Levinas:
http://umontreal.academia.edu/BettinaBergo/Talks/62407/The_Trace_in_Derrida_and_Levinas

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

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

architectural, solo piano vs mass of performers..

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/dance/9211413/William-Forsythe-interview-Artifact-is-an-ode-to-ballet.html

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" anachronic, 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

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.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  

video: The Trace

video: whimsy tracing digital lines in space

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

Tate Long Weekend | Jannis Kounellis from Field Studies on Vimeo.

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 )

videos/quotes: Merce Cunningham : Biped & Loops (dance for hands) & old interview

Try and follow the links below to see this video. I really like it. Loops (single screen excerpt) from OpenEndedGroup on Vimeo.

http://openendedgroup.com/artworks/loops.html  THERE ARE ALSO LINKS THERE THAT I WOULD LIKE TO LOOK AT RELATING TO THIS PIECE.

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"."

concentrating on the pure movement of bodies..

Video: Trisha Brown

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)

videos: Abstract Birds and Quayola

Partitura_01_032, originally uploaded by Abstract Birds.
Partitura 001 from Abstract Birds on Vimeo.
Partitura #000 - Excerpt 1 from Partitura on Vimeo.
Partitura #000 - Excerpt 3 from Partitura on Vimeo.
Partitura #001 from Partitura on Vimeo.