Thursday, February 25, 2010

Wenn Du weißt was Du tust...

"Der große Satz, der in diesem schönen Buch des Hamburger Fotografen Jo Röttger steht, heißt: "Wenn du weißt, was du tust, dann tu es nicht." Anders gesagt: Nur der Schritt ins Unbekannte lohnt den Aufwand."

Wilson's world

also interesting..:
The Placenta in Lore and Legend

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Journeys with no return / a conference at the Goethe Institute

"Journeys with no return" arguable describes anyone's passage through life, but in the context of this conference which refers to the exhibition of same title at the A Foundation the subject is migration, immigration and cultural contexts.


from the Goethe Institute website: "Themes include how culture is transformed through migration, the influence of Turkish migration on contemporary practitioners and how we are building new cultural contexts in the 21st century city."

Towards the end of the day the conference appeared to become somewhat confused with itself, maybe we had all been there, too long by then, too tired, saturated with so much interesting and very varied material. I feel that the organizers of the day may have fallen pray to the desire to show as much as possible, cover as many angles of their interests as possible and with this the direction became confused for those who sought something more linear.
We covered so much ground and at several junction there just wasn't enough time to do justice to what we had just heard. The breaks were called late and yet too soon to hear just half of what the audience would have liked to contribute, or what the panel and artists could have shared. The schedule was very ambitious and probably didn't suit everyone's expectations.

An odd outburst of emotion threatened to hijack the last minutes of the conference with most of us confused where the outburst came from even I could only conclude some misunderstanding had taken place. The accusations seemed far fetched and were delivered with surprising force...

It was inspiring to see Edgar Schmitz tie up loose ends, answer impossible questions, tame the currents of emotion when they flared, he did this with admirable skill and lucidity.

I hadn't quite realized the significance of the Arcola Theatre, after this conference I see very clearly what an important role the Arcola plays in the cultural life of London. What an achievement to gain such a position among such a large playing field.

Quintet of Legs

Image I am thinking about for a limited print run edition








Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Take me to Mongolia / human & un-human / SEMINAR

Claude Levi Strauss, Giorgio Agamben
animal, human,


What's left if we take the purpose away from the movement?
i.e. Zoe Schoefield:

Zoe Scofield - Dance Duet from Kindred Media on Vimeo.

Director of Photography: Gabriel Miller, Kindred Media





interests: physicality, language, translation, contradictions, transition, dysfunctional objects, quixotic journeys, narrative

stage - gallery
physical movement - installation
liveness - object
performance - ritual

aesthetic: cinematic, staging/lighting/creating the space. Instilling an object/activity with implication of meaning
contraditions: Artaud / Theatre of Cruelty (Ritual - taking body to pieces, going beyond representation)




Butoh:







Pina Bausch









Tatsumi Hijikata (土方巽 Hijikata Tatsumi?), March 9, 1928 - January 21, 1986) was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh[1]. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home. It is this style which is most often associated with Butoh by Westerners.
Hijikata was an innovator in movement technique. He was a master of the use of energy qualities in constructing expressive movement. He would use sounds, paintings, sculptures, and words to construct movement, not exclusively in a formal or literal memetic application, but by integrating these elements via visualization into the nervous system to produce movement qualities that could be very subtle, light, angelic and ghost-like, or demonic, heavy, dark, grotesque, violent and extreme.
This use of visualization (triggered and supported by the above mentioned elements) masters sophisticated movement qualities similar in many ways to the Mime System of Jacques Lecoq.





http://www.butohuk.com/
























Pina Bausch : Her pieces are constructed of short units of dialogue and action, often of a surreal nature. Repetition is an important structuring device.
...
…especially in "Frühligsopfer" the choreography demands that the players abandon themselves right up to the physical limits. It is only this that gives the pieces an authenticity and dramatic power that is transmitted directly to the bodies of the audience. Pain, suffering, desperation are not merely implied or conveyed in a pretty gesture. They are unloaded with the force of extreme physical and emotional presence. This requires dancers who have no fear of themselves and who are prepared to reveal the elementary human drives in themselves and to portray this authentically on the stage.





Lee Walton http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91JpmouCEg4

seems inconsequential 'fluff'...
(I would like to see more gravity, beyond the questions "What can I get people across the globe do for fun?'..)






======
maybe:



Jerzy Grotowski
The Columbia Encyclopedia:
Jerzy Grotowski , 1933-99, Polish stage director and theatrical theorist. Grotowski was founder and director of the small but influential Polish Laboratory Theatre (1959). He propounded a "poor theatre," which eliminates all nonessentials, i.e., costumes, sound effects, makeup, sets, lighting, and strictly defined playing area, in an effort to redefine the relation between actors and the audience. Late in his career (1986) he opened the Workcenter in the village of Pontedera, Italy, where his ideas about theater are still explored, actors are trained in his methods, and an abstract song and movement composition called Action is frequently performed.





Artaud believed that the Theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, therefore he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and performance.
In his book The Theatre and Its Double, which contained the first and second manifesto for a "Theatre of Cruelty," Artaud expressed his admiration for Eastern forms of theatre, particularly the Balinese. He admired Eastern theatre because of the codified, highly ritualized and precise physicality of Balinese dance performance, and advocated what he called a "Theatre of Cruelty". At one point, he stated that by cruelty, he meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain, but just as often a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all theatre is physical expression in spac


http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.hss.state.ak.us/gcdse/history/Images/Section%252007,%2520part%2520two/7s-institution-ward-mn.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.hss.state.ak.us/gcdse/history/HTML_Content_Main.htm&usg=__mxduUgGl00enDsIhSXBRocNa1xY=&h=465&w=558&sz=190&hl=en&start=177&sig2=NPkzonw68977iCzdTcU0qw&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=bd6zVicGVFGs3M:&tbnh=111&tbnw=133&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmental%2Basylum%2Bphotograph%2Bvii%26start%3D168%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Den%26ndsp%3D21%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=q-6LS6O7LdDx-Qb1sLDkDQ





Augusto Boal:



Epidauros (greek tragedy / chorus work):






Brothers Quay / chorus / theatre 'dance'...:







Bas Jan Ader:









Tacita Dean:
Tacita Dean’s works span the realms of fact and fiction, and frequently cite the emotive journey between concept, narrative and experience.06.06.2006 Tacita Dean’s works span the realms of fact and fiction, and frequently cite the emotive journey between concept, narrative and experience.
http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26649826001
http://www.tacitadean.org/




what I like about i.e. Cunningham, Herzog, Boal: the accumulation of the 'MYTHIC', gravity, importance, history