JULIA's STORY by Jeannette Ginslov
JG wrote:"....Julia's Story: loss, sadness and nostalgia explored in dance video. emotions are amplified by Craig Armstrong's piano work".
Beautifully executed in so many ways. A simple, single-pointed narrative focus, delimited by a breadth of emotion amplified with carefully considered, understated and appropriate gesture.
Was struck by the capacity for communicative value in both the director's camera choices and Julia Mcghee's almost brutal emotional transparency. Not an easy performance to replicate, so nice to see the mise-en-scene choices were kept simple and minimal, so that performance and integrity did not fall inevitable victim to Hi-concept fiddling and over-"technicalising" the process.
SANCTUM 1 by Jeannette Ginslov
JG wrote:"...Sanctum I amplifies the kinaesthetic and emotional struggle of silenced yet complicit women bound by the cultural practice of FGM - female genital mutilation. It attempts to elicit empathetic responses from the viewer by revealing the power of the moving image as experiential and embodied."
Another fine example of less being more in dance-film/moving image.
Even without the overt-socio-gender-political statement and the human rights angle, Jeannette Ginslov has communicated with brevity and power an important, little discussed and even less understood subject.
Whether she actually sheds light on the female circumcision issue is moot. The piece is a little weighed down by overall and less specific notions of bondage and restrictive ambience. Without an accompanying credit-roll narrative the audience may not necessarily get the authors specifically articulated "point".
Too often film makers can make the assumption that the medium is resilient enough subliminally to carry an "embodied" message. Furthermore, that the "experience" of the intention is sufficient. This is rarely the case - indicative perhaps of why so many initially promising choreo-kino intentions go so swiftly awry in their final execution.
Perhaps we might have some thoughts posted from JG on where and how she might take either or both of the above short pieces further, were budget, time or resources no object.
It would be further enlightening to see additional postings from other points of view of both the pieces above.
10 Mar 2009
8 Mar 2009
BLINKX.COM - Dancefilm Videowall
Click on any of the screens to be taken to a new page where the video will play in its entirety. The random nature of where and how these films are archived, allows for a most enjoyable and occasionally enlightening magical mystery tour.
Play with it.
Many thanks to www.blinkx.com for their stupendous work in clairvoyant archive search technologies.
Play with it.
Many thanks to www.blinkx.com for their stupendous work in clairvoyant archive search technologies.
4 Mar 2009
SOME RANDOM CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON RECENT DANCEFILMS
Choreography: Charles - Cre-Ange Danse Contemporaine
Clarity of intention, intensity, claustrophobia, a sense of expectancy and real choreographic breadth of movement are not easy elements to synthesize satisfactorily in a frame as tight as the film maker has chosen here.
Four well-thought through creative decisions, are the absence of any camera movement, the speed with which the action moves in and out of the viewfinder, the dancer's focus on the window about which we as viewers become persuaded to be increasingly interested and the quality of the backlight.
To make so few and such simple mise-en-scene resources so resonantly "about" something important, takes some skill and homework, which is abundantly evident in this piece.
A great choice of vista within a frame when the window finally opens and a soundtrack that adds to the sense of angst of our human moth, without being obtrusive makes this a very satisfying experience. Oh, and by the way, I think it is about dying - any other theories?
Windows sponsored by WD40
THE RAIN - CHOREO/DIRECTOR - PONTUS LIDBERG - SWEDEN - 28 MINS
Pontus Lidberg's beautiful, haunting feature length Dancefilm from Sweden.
Jury special mention at the Gothenburg Film Festival 2007. UK premiere - Dec 2nd, 2007, BEST FILM - The London International Dancefilm Festival, Riverside Studios, London.
ROSE D'OR NOMINEE 2008.
Lidberg is currently raising funds for his next piece, Labyrinth Within which promises to be even more powerful.
Contact him at his site if you can contribute.
http://www.lidberg.se/therain
TWINS BERNARD - by the "TWINS" BERNARD.
OK I have to admit a predilection for well-trained dancing and although not an absolutely essential element of "dancefilm" per-se, in circumstances such as this, an absence of really strong fine movement would have made this another exercise in cinematic futility.
As a personal choice of metaphor, I explored the notion that this piece is about personality fragmentation. Certainly if one was looking for a cinematic technique to personify this notion, the opening running manege in time -lapse and the lightning dissolve in the final shot were brilliant choices. Timing is always key, particularly in non-verbal art where you can't use linguistic smoke and mirrors to hide a weak idea.
We get displaced from one place to entirely another without the film maker changing either the protagonists in the frame, a time shift or change of location. Quite a feat. Great momentum in the tiny choreographic body-language shifts gives us a clear idea of exactly what their relationship is likely to be and the resulting choices in spacing between the two characters then delivers on an anticipated internal narrative. The developing of the nature of this relationship in which we are automatically interested and cleverly persuaded to stay with, is neatly complimented by subtle variations of repeat choreographic patterns. In this case a deliberate choice I think, rather than because the choreographic ideas have run out and there's time and space to fill which is what can happen all too often.
Sepia choice for the colour temperature and and the shape of the space all contribute layers of meaning, an appropriate dance space and unobtrusive environmental design. Nice work.
THE TOUR - VIDEODANCE 2004 - ATHENS COLLECTIVE
Wit, inventiveness, animation, pastiche, camera angles, and a clear narrative idea with finally, hurrah!, a beginning, middle and what passes for some kind of resolution in the end.
The environment in which the film was made has been intelligently and inventively plumbed for opportunities to add meaning, creative depth and amusement for the viewer.
Poor Theatre techniques, popular, accessible and well composed images and a facility for investing the everyday with a greater meaning in a quick and dirty way, thereby colaterally adding value to both, denotes both intellect and an interest in sources outside cliches.
MATS EK - SMOKE with NIKLAS EK & SYLVIE GUILLEM
I am still trying to come to terms with a narrative and choreographic thread which is so limpid, lyrical, languidly intense and yet spare of all vanity or body fetishism. All of which contribute, in association with one of Arvo Part's most minimal yet searing of compositions, to creating a fine example of where a distinctive cinematic vision, choreographic focus and appropriate musicality, come together in an uniquely satisfying synthesis.
Always intrigues me that as far as audiences go, there is a virtually unanimous vote of approval for dancefilm in which superb choreographic design and technical brilliance of execution feature heavily.
While audience approval is neither the alpha nor omega, it can offer instructive pointers as to how far the intention and the making of the vehicle for the message have effectively penetrated the sub-conscious
Clarity of intention, intensity, claustrophobia, a sense of expectancy and real choreographic breadth of movement are not easy elements to synthesize satisfactorily in a frame as tight as the film maker has chosen here.
Four well-thought through creative decisions, are the absence of any camera movement, the speed with which the action moves in and out of the viewfinder, the dancer's focus on the window about which we as viewers become persuaded to be increasingly interested and the quality of the backlight.
To make so few and such simple mise-en-scene resources so resonantly "about" something important, takes some skill and homework, which is abundantly evident in this piece.
A great choice of vista within a frame when the window finally opens and a soundtrack that adds to the sense of angst of our human moth, without being obtrusive makes this a very satisfying experience. Oh, and by the way, I think it is about dying - any other theories?
Windows sponsored by WD40
THE RAIN - CHOREO/DIRECTOR - PONTUS LIDBERG - SWEDEN - 28 MINS
Pontus Lidberg's beautiful, haunting feature length Dancefilm from Sweden.
Jury special mention at the Gothenburg Film Festival 2007. UK premiere - Dec 2nd, 2007, BEST FILM - The London International Dancefilm Festival, Riverside Studios, London.
ROSE D'OR NOMINEE 2008.
Lidberg is currently raising funds for his next piece, Labyrinth Within which promises to be even more powerful.
Contact him at his site if you can contribute.
http://www.lidberg.se/therain
TWINS BERNARD - by the "TWINS" BERNARD.
OK I have to admit a predilection for well-trained dancing and although not an absolutely essential element of "dancefilm" per-se, in circumstances such as this, an absence of really strong fine movement would have made this another exercise in cinematic futility.
As a personal choice of metaphor, I explored the notion that this piece is about personality fragmentation. Certainly if one was looking for a cinematic technique to personify this notion, the opening running manege in time -lapse and the lightning dissolve in the final shot were brilliant choices. Timing is always key, particularly in non-verbal art where you can't use linguistic smoke and mirrors to hide a weak idea.
We get displaced from one place to entirely another without the film maker changing either the protagonists in the frame, a time shift or change of location. Quite a feat. Great momentum in the tiny choreographic body-language shifts gives us a clear idea of exactly what their relationship is likely to be and the resulting choices in spacing between the two characters then delivers on an anticipated internal narrative. The developing of the nature of this relationship in which we are automatically interested and cleverly persuaded to stay with, is neatly complimented by subtle variations of repeat choreographic patterns. In this case a deliberate choice I think, rather than because the choreographic ideas have run out and there's time and space to fill which is what can happen all too often.
Sepia choice for the colour temperature and and the shape of the space all contribute layers of meaning, an appropriate dance space and unobtrusive environmental design. Nice work.
THE TOUR - VIDEODANCE 2004 - ATHENS COLLECTIVE
Wit, inventiveness, animation, pastiche, camera angles, and a clear narrative idea with finally, hurrah!, a beginning, middle and what passes for some kind of resolution in the end.
The environment in which the film was made has been intelligently and inventively plumbed for opportunities to add meaning, creative depth and amusement for the viewer.
Poor Theatre techniques, popular, accessible and well composed images and a facility for investing the everyday with a greater meaning in a quick and dirty way, thereby colaterally adding value to both, denotes both intellect and an interest in sources outside cliches.
MATS EK - SMOKE with NIKLAS EK & SYLVIE GUILLEM
I am still trying to come to terms with a narrative and choreographic thread which is so limpid, lyrical, languidly intense and yet spare of all vanity or body fetishism. All of which contribute, in association with one of Arvo Part's most minimal yet searing of compositions, to creating a fine example of where a distinctive cinematic vision, choreographic focus and appropriate musicality, come together in an uniquely satisfying synthesis.
Always intrigues me that as far as audiences go, there is a virtually unanimous vote of approval for dancefilm in which superb choreographic design and technical brilliance of execution feature heavily.
While audience approval is neither the alpha nor omega, it can offer instructive pointers as to how far the intention and the making of the vehicle for the message have effectively penetrated the sub-conscious
28 Feb 2009
AFTER EFFECTS - IT'S A SHOCKER!
http://www.lumottulapsi.net/ENG/a0.html
http://www.lumottulapsi.net/trailers/LumottuTRAILERI_high.mov
The above example demonstrates a passable job in understanding how to integrate story telling and effects, with dance.
What is not quite so successful is shooting the dance to make it serve the whole idea.
A lack of talent in effective choreographic synthesis contributes to a distancing from the subject for the audience rather than effectively including them in the process.
It is sometimes interesting to feel that a moving image project started with the narrative and choreographic wealth inherent in the dance ideas.
This process can so often mine these ideas for all of their poetic, metaphorical and iconoclastic potential and imbue them within the context and disciplines of all of the other essential elements, informing them all of eachother and providing a purposeful integration or "voice".
Once the proverbial lily has been produced, then can the creative processes be directed towards a set of directorial decisions on the extent to which gilt need be applied.
Often we encounter the ad hoc shoehorning of dance ideas into a series of After Effects driven storyboard designs. Too often these sophisticated additions obscure, ignore or merely downgrade the crucial place of clear choreographic narrative design and intention, be it ever so abstract.
The results are, at best an alienating ambience to the work and a sense to the audience, even those members less informed of the techniques behind the work, that perhaps this was not a deliberate choice by the film makers.
In fact the more elegant the effects, the more the weaknesses in the seamless continuum between choreographic and cinematographic ideas become highlighted.
The above clip demonstrates above average production values, a good sense of scale and a clearly strong metaphorical line, which come as part and parcel of the source material in this case " L´ENFANT ET LES SORTILEGES". (See below).
At any point in a "remaking" process, it is incumbent on the creative direction to establish new ways of seeing which must inherently or overtly, contribute to enriching the source idea.
From Wikipedia
" L´ENFANT ET LES SORTILEGES"
Background
During World War I, the Opéra de Paris director Jacques Rouché asked Colette to provide the text for a fairy ballet. Colette originally wrote the story under the title Divertissements pour ma fille. After Colette chose Ravel to set the text to music, a copy was sent to him during the time he was serving in the war in 1916; however, the mailed script was lost. In 1917, Ravel finally had received a copy and agreed to complete the score, humorously replying to Collette, "I would like to compose this, but I have no daughter." Due to contractual obligations, Ravel finally was compelled to complete the work by 1924. Colette, believing that the work would never be complete, later expressed her extreme pleasure that the work was done, believing that her modest writing had been raised beyond its initial scope. Now officially under the title of L'enfant et les sortilèges, the first performance took place March 21, 1925 in Monte Carlo as conducted byVictor de Sabata with ballet sequences choreographed by George Balanchine. Ravel said of the premiere production:
"Our work required an extraordinary production: the roles are numerous, and the phantasmagoria is constant. Following the principles of American operetta, dancing is continually and intimately intermingled with the action [...and] the Monte Carlo Opera possesses a wonderful troupe of Russian dancers, marvelously directed by a prodigious ballet master, M. Balanchine. And let’s not forget an essential element, the orchestra
1 Feb 2009
OBSERVATIONS ON ROTHKO AT TATE MODERN
The apparent oddities in Rothko’s juxtaposition of esthetic forms, sucking out of colour and perspective, the reduction ad absurdam to two dimensions, is as if he tries to preclude the possibility of reinterpreation of what is already deliberately an avoidance of “message”, “context” or “reference”.
The absolute removal of comfort in any internal dialogue, is the silence of monotonal and epic space. The viewer is disallowed the simple defense of remaining outside the image.
Painting becomes one darkly tolling bell of message and medium coming together at a point, way outside the usual points of visual reference.
Form, content and meaning become indivisible in a resonant totality requiring the participant to exchange the usual looking at for the far greater comittment required of looking in.
Multi-variants of the same blocks of browns and greys express eloquent nothingness. Training the eye to places where the smallest imperceptible shifts in the focal point denote layers of meaning which transcend the mundane. All the while avoiding allowing the viewer to displace these virtually physical discomforts with any solace of notions of the spiritual. Rothko's monotony goes beyond either of these polarities.
A skyline becomes a back wall becomes a doorway becomes an event horizon.
Each perceptual shift, amplifying, complimenting, subverting any possible sense of ease with where we might be allowed to bring our awareness to rest.
Every atonal approach in pastel, brown and grey, charting the line, providing a narrative with imperceptible shifts of emphasis, intimations of fear, places of distance intimated through ineffably veiled layers of colour.
Utterly the thing itself, unsigned, unannealed, promising nothing but that your gaze and possibly your sense of identity might be drawn down into the event horizon of what is essentially mere description, yet somehow manages both to represent and yet be more than merely approximation.
A distillation of vulnerability, as if saying: “So, if beyond this, then what?”
Huge swathes of black, nothingness delineated by the lightest touch of form.
Capturing the paradox of darkness illuminated by the yet darker still. Capturing the moments between seeing and not seeing.
Darker and darker tones providing an unbearable tension between the uproar of existence and a quietus of elsewhere.
Uncoloured, unformed points in space, past levity and twitch, huge pre-ironic salutes to nihilism, avoiding edge, boundary or limit. Bounded here and there by the prosaic application of badly applied masking tape arbitrarily overpainted.
As if in some crystaline and despairing objection to any notion of the finite, meeting the final restrictions of temporal existence in a frenzy of mute fury.
And in the face of this profundity, in the final analysis confronted by the paradox that these universes will ultimately be bounded by the edge of his canvas eternities ending where the magnolia gallery wall begins again.
It is within just such a paradox lies Rothko's infuriatingly exciting visual abstractions.
At times the visceral tension created between background and foreground, metaphor and making so acute, that Gestaltists would have trouble distinguishing thither and yon.
Somehow these frozen moments cannot rise above the tittle tattle, the peering prurient randyness for fact, figure, date, technique, form and all of the thousand other mundane trivialities we use to fool ourselves that somehow we exercise control by choosing how to view - and what we have received and perceived within that process of viewing.
Frames, into the corner of which will constantly edge the live and kicking.
Ambling past these monumental artefacts, we can offer delirium, tedium, a cure for OCD or a genuinely interactive Alpha wave meditative environment, at any point and occasionally all at once.
Or merely, a milky and indifferent smile from the sleepy depths of a pushchair, driven by pairs of idling, chattering humans.
The Moments of Happiness.
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
Beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness, the past experience not of one life only, but of many generations.
Not forgetting something that is probably quite, ineffable. After TS Eliot
30 Jan 2009
Credit Cruncher Joke of The Day
Q:
What are the fundamental differences in the parlous state of the finances of Iceland and Ireland?
A:
One letter and about six months.
What are the fundamental differences in the parlous state of the finances of Iceland and Ireland?
A:
One letter and about six months.
29 Jan 2009
REALLY dirrrrrrrty gurrrls!!!
*** This email has been sent from the MEDIA ARTS AND DANCE email forum. To respond to all subscribers email MEDIA-ARTS-AND-DANCE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. ***
Dear All
We are happy to announce that burlesque theatre practitioner and academic,
Gwendoline Lamour will be presenting the second keynote at this year's
postgraduate conference 'Journeys Across Media' (University of Reading). Her
paper will be on 'Romanticizing the Female Form'. More information on Ms
Lamour's performances can be found at: www.gwendolinelamour.com/
For more information on the conference (17 April 2009) feel free to visit
the University's website at:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/pg-research/ftt-pgrjam.asp
Kindest regards
Tim Vermeulen, Harper Ray and Reina-Marie Loader
"Miss Soapy T*t-Wa*k gets an Ology"
Far from "Romanticing the Female Form" - Burlesque always was and to the best of my knowledge in its 21st century Lap-Dancing incarnation, still is an amateur divertissement "entertainment" provided by whores for johns visiting knocking shops while they decided which sex slave to schtup.
I am not entirely sure which part of their "Form", 13 and 14 year old Victorian and latterly, often under-aged eastern European and Oriental prostitutes, will find quite so "Romantic" as they are being pawed by dishevelled and occasionally drunken eighteen stone men smelling of yesterday's kebab and week-old underwear.
Perhaps they will get to enlighten us when they attend the above brilliantly thought-through Conference. If they ask nicely enough, their pimps will probably be entirely happy to sponsor their attendance, in order to give us their view on the subject.
Maybe Gwendoline Tushylush and her silken ilk will bring us back their breathless and death-defying reports from the field?
Burlesque in its current form, is a dressing-up hobby, a lacy-veiled pretext for wobbly and untrained Trustafarian Fionas and Arabellas to stumble around in fans and fetish pumps, getting their tits and bits out for grinning City Boys in artfully designed retro-bordellos from Hoxton to Ladbroke Grove.
Let's face it, only these types and furtive c-list TV presentas can afford the entry and bar prices in these monumentally misguided forays into infantile degeneracy. Colour, movement, fur coats and no-knickers, - the perfect antidote for ex- junk-bond salesmen, week-end fetishists and the terminally spoilt wall-eyed children of Rock Stars and Advertising tycoons.
In isolation, what the spawn of Sodom and Gomorrah do of a night-time really could not matter less.
However, notwithstanding a terrifying lack of associative thinking, dignifiying Burlesque with publically funded academic legitimacy of any description, borders on the morally bankcrupt.
For Burlesque proudly to be presented as a pukka extension of Performance Art,pace Gogol Bordello, Shunt et al - whilst demonstrating no shortage of chutzpah, betrays the level of ingenuousness and lack of intellectual rigour usually accorded people who become musicians because they think there is money in it or those who enter politics in the belief they can change things.
There is something not quite nice about being invited to attend a scholarly dissertation on "Burlyscew" be it ever so post-modern and ironic, while thousands of women a day are continuing to be impregnated by HIV positive partners and millions more starve in Africa.
Perhaps it might be a fun and far more spontaneous alternative to just cut to the chase and actually get to live the Experience of Burlesque by running around the conference hall knocking over chairs, spilling vodka and chanting - Get Yer Charlies Out Darlin!
17 Jan 2009
Art - v-mammon - the debate rages
The prevalent evaluation and co-option of the arts as predominantly a series of commercial considerations is probably the single most debilitating influence on genuine creativity in the UK, actually throughout the world at the moment.
Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter
The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.
One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.
The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?
In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.
Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.
Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.
Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.
Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.
In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.
Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter
The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.
One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.
The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?
In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.
Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.
Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.
Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.
Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.
In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.
15 Jan 2009
PEE PEE DUCKIE, POO-POO daahhhling and the REALLY DIRRRRRTY GIRRRRLS- THE PEE-PEE, POO-POO CLUB GOES MAINSTREAM
http://www.duckie.co.uk/
Just wanted to draw the attention to the Arts Council England logo in the bottom right hand corner.
The Amateurs nite programme (FLIER as above) funded by this august organisation is marvellous darling, simply marvellous, but WAIT til you catch the real professionals' performances.
I think the highlight may be the woman who shoves a plastic funnel into her anus and gives herself an enema as the finale of her show, but no, come to think of it the stripping Person of Diminished Stature comes close, or maybe.....no I've got it!! The Trann, er Person of Indeterminate Gender, whose entire act consists of punching holes in a door with a hammer and then pissing onto the audience through the holes.
Brilliant, and we all thought the Arts were dying..........
Check out the video on their site (ADDRESS ABOVE) and admire the contemporary dance sections. Now that's what we call inclusivity.
There is a whisper that the Royal Ballet Company is thinking of lending a couple of artists for forthcoming shows since they and DUCKIE share quite a number of patrons within their audience constituency.
Rather than funding this farrago ( we have actually been to one of their Burlesque nights and got sprayed by someone whose act consisted of absorbing the contents of a washing up bowl of soapy water and blowing them over the audience from her vagina - and that one of the less hard-core acts) would it have not made more sense for the ACE to provide further, broader, performance opportunities for the flower of British contemporary dance in some kind of context relevant to the development of dance and dance audiences in the UK - rather than the moist gratification of a coterie of scatologically infantile degenerates clearly all suffering from chronically ineffective toilet training habits.
It would seem that choreographers are now being forced to throw their lot in with amateur nite at the Pee Pee, Poo-Poo Club in their desperation to get their work seen.
Unless we are all VERY careful, it is going to become increasingly difficult to distinguish between any of the creative output of UKplc.
20 Dec 2008
STRICTLY NOT DANCING
I am sorry to rain on the parade and frankly I suggest the more fanatical of you start erecting the heretics’ pyre preparatory to hurling me onto it, but please, somebody tell me, exactly what Strictly Come Dancing is actually for or about, except yet another opportunity to allow the Meejuhmachine to mess even more with our already completely addled minds?
As if the Soaps with their endless, mindless, breathless and over-wrought trivialities about the lives of drab nonentities at the bottom of the social food-chain were not enough brain damage.
Strictly Come Dancing is neither strict, nor comely nor strictly dancing. It is a bunch of c-list lumpen-TV totty shoe-horned into dresses which frankly would disgrace a Nevada knocking shop, hulking stiff legged sportsmen and the oddest assortment of sundry other “faces” most of whom would get passed over instantly in any sort of breeding or natural selection programme without a backward glance.
These incredibly inappropriately chosen oddities from the ruling cultural triumvirate of Television, Sport and Journalism, gallump inelegantly and for the most part unmusically around in front of four “ Judges” all of whom look to a person to be suffering from a lethal combination of terminal embarrassment and personal plumbing issues.
Allow the entire sorry mess to be presided, or should that be, lorded over by Bruce Forsyth who has raised the art of banality and mugging in the Wunnerful Whirl of Showbizzyness to an act of such pornographically buttock-clenching embarrassment, frozen in time somewhere between the death of Variety and Sammy Davis Jrs final hair weave, and lo! we have a televisual phenomenon!
Throw in some Sports Dance partners, yes I said it, Sports Dance, which is the bastard offspring of Hairdressing and the final thrashings of rabies, without the soul, the focus or the duende (look it up if you like) and you have a nightmare world caught somewhere between Saturday Night Fever and a bad hand-job in the toilets at Madam Jojos. All to an accompaniment of a mediahype of white noise pitch and astonishing ubiquity.
SCD - it even sounds like a terrifying public health menace - is the perfect opiate solution for the masses – actually the very one George Orwell promised would end-up being delivered to the drooling classes the moment the Advertising Industry (aka Big Brother's mouthpiece) cottoned onto TV as an unique opportunity for mass mind control.
The contestants are not dancers, their professional dance partners are twinkly toed hair-dos who specialise in the mind numbingly banal world of competitive ballroom dancing –they are NOT dancers either. They are exercise fanatics in sequins and make-up and that's just the men.
The whole farrago has as much to do with the rest of the vast, creatively complex and challenging world of “real” dancing and dance making as Margaret Thatcher has to do with Thug Kultcha.
The judges have to a person, never actually featured as dancers of any merit whatsoever themselves - honestly, try and find their dance CV's - not their Step-Maker CV's a WHOLE different thing to choreography or dancing for that matter – have somehow been empowered like some fantastical Star Chamber, to hurl at these hapless non-dancers a hair curlingly vitriolic mix of patronising professional jealousy, spite and breathlessly delivered poorly scripted judgemental criticism week after week.
The fact is when it started, it was just a chance for some hapless slebs with too much time on their hands (aka rapidly fading careers and aggressive agents) to dress up as the amateur denizens of Cat Houses or 50’s gigolos to fill a cheap Saturday night telly slot for some Car-crash TV Fun commissioning wonks.
It is interesting that when the redoubtable Mr Sergeant, the first of the grown-ups on this odd merry-go-round finally and very politely asked to get down from the mad-hatters tea-party on the grounds that the joke had worn too thin, the first people to saddle up and ride out with the media-lynch mob, were those judges who clearly had failed to understand that the first defence of the terminally untalented, who have been shot through the ceiling of their relative competencies, is to take themselves waaaay too seriously.
There is perhaps an ironic symmetry in this, in as much as it requires no more than the truly incompetent to judge the merely incompetent for the edification of the uninitiated.
All of this is preamble to the key point that Strictly Not Dancing has been and continues to be held up as the summit of achievement in the current “dance world”.
We now have a situation in which seriously weak, under-rehearsed and amateurishly underpowered performances of appalling bland and banal “choreography” is being passed off week after week as dancing that anyone should take seriously.
As far as hoping that this will encourage the next generation of genuinely interesting, committed and aesthetically challenging dance artists to buckle down and aspire to any idea of excellence, it is tantamount to the world’s great Renaissance artists trying to guide the next generation of painters by showing them the daubs of children and letting them throw paint around rather than the brilliant inspirational glories of the great ecclesiastical frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
If we balanced any of this arrant pap with the occasional flash of the vast store of available and truly inspiring examples of genuine choreographic design going on throughout the dance world, by getting it anywhere near our television screens, ever, it would not be so bad.
The problem is that Strictly Come Dancing, we are ALL now reliably informed ever more hysterically, is as good as it gets. In the absence of any competition, this may very well become true simply through repetition.
It was once opined by a wit far greater than mine that if you have been doing “it” whatever “it” may be for two years got away with it, you can call yourself a professional. The time frame seems to have drastically shortened.
A society gets both the government and the culture it deserves, particularly when both are clearly ever more willing to sell their souls for good ratings.
As if the Soaps with their endless, mindless, breathless and over-wrought trivialities about the lives of drab nonentities at the bottom of the social food-chain were not enough brain damage.
Strictly Come Dancing is neither strict, nor comely nor strictly dancing. It is a bunch of c-list lumpen-TV totty shoe-horned into dresses which frankly would disgrace a Nevada knocking shop, hulking stiff legged sportsmen and the oddest assortment of sundry other “faces” most of whom would get passed over instantly in any sort of breeding or natural selection programme without a backward glance.
These incredibly inappropriately chosen oddities from the ruling cultural triumvirate of Television, Sport and Journalism, gallump inelegantly and for the most part unmusically around in front of four “ Judges” all of whom look to a person to be suffering from a lethal combination of terminal embarrassment and personal plumbing issues.
Allow the entire sorry mess to be presided, or should that be, lorded over by Bruce Forsyth who has raised the art of banality and mugging in the Wunnerful Whirl of Showbizzyness to an act of such pornographically buttock-clenching embarrassment, frozen in time somewhere between the death of Variety and Sammy Davis Jrs final hair weave, and lo! we have a televisual phenomenon!
Throw in some Sports Dance partners, yes I said it, Sports Dance, which is the bastard offspring of Hairdressing and the final thrashings of rabies, without the soul, the focus or the duende (look it up if you like) and you have a nightmare world caught somewhere between Saturday Night Fever and a bad hand-job in the toilets at Madam Jojos. All to an accompaniment of a mediahype of white noise pitch and astonishing ubiquity.
SCD - it even sounds like a terrifying public health menace - is the perfect opiate solution for the masses – actually the very one George Orwell promised would end-up being delivered to the drooling classes the moment the Advertising Industry (aka Big Brother's mouthpiece) cottoned onto TV as an unique opportunity for mass mind control.
The contestants are not dancers, their professional dance partners are twinkly toed hair-dos who specialise in the mind numbingly banal world of competitive ballroom dancing –they are NOT dancers either. They are exercise fanatics in sequins and make-up and that's just the men.
The whole farrago has as much to do with the rest of the vast, creatively complex and challenging world of “real” dancing and dance making as Margaret Thatcher has to do with Thug Kultcha.
The judges have to a person, never actually featured as dancers of any merit whatsoever themselves - honestly, try and find their dance CV's - not their Step-Maker CV's a WHOLE different thing to choreography or dancing for that matter – have somehow been empowered like some fantastical Star Chamber, to hurl at these hapless non-dancers a hair curlingly vitriolic mix of patronising professional jealousy, spite and breathlessly delivered poorly scripted judgemental criticism week after week.
The fact is when it started, it was just a chance for some hapless slebs with too much time on their hands (aka rapidly fading careers and aggressive agents) to dress up as the amateur denizens of Cat Houses or 50’s gigolos to fill a cheap Saturday night telly slot for some Car-crash TV Fun commissioning wonks.
It is interesting that when the redoubtable Mr Sergeant, the first of the grown-ups on this odd merry-go-round finally and very politely asked to get down from the mad-hatters tea-party on the grounds that the joke had worn too thin, the first people to saddle up and ride out with the media-lynch mob, were those judges who clearly had failed to understand that the first defence of the terminally untalented, who have been shot through the ceiling of their relative competencies, is to take themselves waaaay too seriously.
There is perhaps an ironic symmetry in this, in as much as it requires no more than the truly incompetent to judge the merely incompetent for the edification of the uninitiated.
All of this is preamble to the key point that Strictly Not Dancing has been and continues to be held up as the summit of achievement in the current “dance world”.
We now have a situation in which seriously weak, under-rehearsed and amateurishly underpowered performances of appalling bland and banal “choreography” is being passed off week after week as dancing that anyone should take seriously.
As far as hoping that this will encourage the next generation of genuinely interesting, committed and aesthetically challenging dance artists to buckle down and aspire to any idea of excellence, it is tantamount to the world’s great Renaissance artists trying to guide the next generation of painters by showing them the daubs of children and letting them throw paint around rather than the brilliant inspirational glories of the great ecclesiastical frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
If we balanced any of this arrant pap with the occasional flash of the vast store of available and truly inspiring examples of genuine choreographic design going on throughout the dance world, by getting it anywhere near our television screens, ever, it would not be so bad.
The problem is that Strictly Come Dancing, we are ALL now reliably informed ever more hysterically, is as good as it gets. In the absence of any competition, this may very well become true simply through repetition.
It was once opined by a wit far greater than mine that if you have been doing “it” whatever “it” may be for two years got away with it, you can call yourself a professional. The time frame seems to have drastically shortened.
A society gets both the government and the culture it deserves, particularly when both are clearly ever more willing to sell their souls for good ratings.
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