To enlarge, dancefilm covers the entire world of dance and as much of the world of film as is (in my own opinion) worth bothering about, which aside from my daughters, my lover and staying alive, fills most of the rest of my awake time in some form or other.
Initiated a new training programme at the spa today involving a mixture of movement, mind focusing , yoga and general common sense. My first group of clients a satisfying and enthusiastic contingent of six - indulged me at my most out there, hippyish and occasionally brow-furrowingly opaque.
Still they all hung with me for an hour of what seemed to be mostly collective fun, occasional hilarity and a really gratifying collective effort in the ongoing individual struggles on our many and various paths to personal enlightenment.
Initial collective tests discovered that if you ask someone to really think about how they walk, they temporarily lose the ability so to do..hmmm.
We started with basic yin/yang traditions and principles, moved onto the breath and how to conduct it around the body to greater effect and why, connected everyone's understanding of chi to their individual bodily vehicles and adding this whole melange to the basic principles of moving the body through space at speed, in rhythm and with the minimum wastage of effort, started them all dancing quite effectively within 45 minutes!
Class one seemed to achieve the primary goal of "tricking" everyone into discovering a great deal more coordination, body awareness and personal control than they intially thought they possessed. Let's see if the effects wear on during the week and if anyone comes back for more..............
On to see "Let's Get Lost" - Chet Baker biopic at The Riverside cinema by Bruce Weber and his unique imprimatur - Weber films his subjects in a way that demonstrates he is totally in love with them - his camera does not just observe, it gazes, it assimilates, it sucks in the subjects of its focus with the adoring fixity of the newly in love - a puppy, a tree, a mark in the sand, two people silent side by side in a park, doped and asleep, Chet Baker's once beautiful, now ravaged features - all are caressed, and vivified by the light and penetrating touch of Weber's individual, unflaggingly appropriate if quirky choices of light, chiaroscuro, lenses and oblique points of view, alongside the unflinching steadiness of nerve he elicits from those he photographs.
I imagine he must possess an almost limitless quantity of personal charm to persuade people to expose themselves, so vulnerable and emotionally naked in front of his camera.
No matter that the subject is a narcissistic manipulative waster, who destroyed, or at least, mortally wounded most of the lives of the real people he conned into adoring, supporting, financing and guiding him through his own self-destructive vale of tears. Chet Baker, a man who devoted his time to hanging with the other hep-cat heavy faces, hundreds of whose names he could reel straight-off from out of the bottom of a deep methadone haze, all the while having trouble remembering the names of some of his wives or children, or where he last left them..... with merely a singular talent to blow the trumpet and a great ear for syncopation.
All of these pecadillos, we forgive somehow, thanks to the miraculous way in which Weber invades the subject's space, inviting the voyeur ever deeper into the innermost recesses of the Chet Baker heart of darkness and helping us fall in love with this flailing, drowning, shambling, muttering human wreck of a jazz genius, despite our better instincts.
A shining example of how the artist much check his or her own vanity if they want to lay bare the warts and all of their subject with any degree of honesty or coherence. If a final word is required, "Let's get Lost" is worth seeing for Baker's unique singing alone, particularly his total command and absolute stilling of a room of overexcited starlets and teetering shouting drunks at a Cannes Film Festival party, with a live and uniquely poignant rendition of "Almost Blue", leaving even Diana Krall's hitherto unimpeachable version dead in the water by comparison.
Vanity in performance is only exposed when you experience a performance in which there's nothing left to lose. Real performance starts only at this point, everything else is a pose.
Hard to watch, but a must see for any fan of documentary, jazz, insightful image making or indeed, Chet Baker himself - a profoundly flawed but fascinating man, portrayed in a nearly flawless fashion.
Proof positive, were it ever needed, that white men really can sing the blues.
