Showing posts with label links. Show all posts
Showing posts with label links. Show all posts

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Some dance and other things on the internet



I made this for EDAP last summer and thought I should post it here. It is in no way exhaustive, the world and the internet are very large places. The internet, however, is more easily searchable.

Some general goodness:
John Berger -Ways of Seeing


Ira Glass - from This American Life
On Taste: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE&feature=related (talking about radio and TV, but I think it applies)



Great Sites

Sarma - a great site of dance criticism from Europe
[It can be a bit tricky to find things, oddly. I’ve found stumbling around to be the way to go - just following curiosity (as in many things.) Here’s some that I’ve bookmarked:]
– Jeroen Peeters - Living together on Stage
[This lists the critics - if you click on the one you want, and then on “texts” you’ll get everything that’s on the site for that author. For example:]
[The letters on dramaturgy are particularly good.]

Artists:
Martha Graham (New York,  1894 –  1991)
Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) (New York)
Channels/Inserts
Yvonne Rainer (New York, Current- but most active as choreographer in 60's / 70's)

Pina Baush (Germany, 1940 – 2009)
Le Sacre Du Printemps (Wuppertal Dance Theater) 
Meg Stuart (Brussels, Current)
Jerome Bel, (France, current)
huge amount of video of work and him talking about work: http://www.catalogueraisonne-jeromebel.com/ (kind like directors commentary)
writing: http://82.238.77.78/jeromebel/eng/jeromebel.asp?m=4
some  hightlights:
About "Last Performance"
Sasha Waltz andd Guests (Berlin, Current)
Dave St Pierre (Quebec, current)

Ame Henderson/Public Recordings (Toronto, Current - Double Bill #1 collaborator) 

kg Guttman (Montreal, current, Double Bill #2 collaborator) 

Jonathan Burrows (UK.Brussels, current) 



Other places to find interesting work:
Festival TransAmerique - Montreal Festival: http://www.fta.qc.ca/en/home
Impulstanz - Vienna Festival: http://www.impulstanz.com/
TanzimAugust - Berlin Festival: http://www.tanzimaugust.de/
Jacob's Pillow (upstate new york): http://www.jacobspillow.org/

for many more  Canadian go here: 
Candance Network: http://www.candance.ca/
B-chronicles
[I haven’t much all of this (recent find), but it looks exciting.]

Dance-tech
[Just found thing recently, but looks like an attempt at some of the things we were talking about]

Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 10:16 a.m. 0 comments
Labels: ,

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

nice thing to think about

From Vancouver choreographer Lee Su-Fe of battery opera:
I suppose that the function of minimalism (say, in dance) is to call up my imagination and my attention. And the function of maximalism - I borrow this term from Cornelius - is to blast me into nothingness. (full post)

Other good (or at least good response to bad thing) things from battery opera: A pricing scheme to reflect the BC Arts cuts. Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 7:42 p.m. 0 comments
Labels:

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Thinking Out Loud October 19 update

Looking forward to the second study group on Monday.

The last one was great - a set of wonderful but radically incomplete notes are posted on the brand spanking new Thinking Out Loud blog - you're source for notes, updates and discussions surrounding the reading group. I'll flag new post here for a while, but add the new one to your RSS or Google Reader.

Rereading the What is the contemporary? article – I want to acknowledge that it’s pretty dense and there is a lot of language that requires second (or more) readings and liberal use of a dictionary. But this excites me. And it excites me in relationship to last weeks reading of The Act of Study. I’ve been thinking about marking the ideas or sentences that flash or pop out to me and connect with my preoccupations. We’ll work through the ideas and writing together through our own responses, a process I’m looking forward to. So, no fear, we're in it together.

I also wanted to link to another article that, I think, addresses some of the same issues with an explicit tie in to practice, specifically Martha Graham. We’ll focus on What is the contemporary? But the other two will be a tie in to dance practice.

To access the new article, just click here: How modern is modernism? The Relevance of Reconstruction. An Essay by André Lepecki about the Martha Graham Retrospective. As always, this new article is available in hard copy at the Dancemakers office.
We’ll still be looking at Reconstructing Dance: Taking an Active Interest in the Legacy of Dance: a short essay/website from the Goethe-Institut website.

Your RSVP’s and thoughts are more than welcome. Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 11:00 a.m. 0 comments
Labels: ,

Monday, August 24, 2009

history can do funny things

How do we deal with our histories?
It's a very tricky question that I think a lot about these days.
What do we rebel against? What must we know in order to move on?
What influences do we accept, which do we deny?
And - and this might be the rub for me at the moment - when and why do we change our minds about the answers above?
-
This comes up today as I look up Yvonne Rainer's "No Manifesto" and find this:
corpus: When you refer to your NO-manifesto from 1965, where you asked for a lot of clarification, do you think this need for clarification asks for hybridization after a while?

Rainer: The NO-manifesto is brought up over and over again. I wish it could be buried ... I came to it at the end of an essay about a particular work, "Parts of Some Sextets", which was a piece for ten people and twelve mattresses in 1965, I never meant for the manifesto to be prescriptive. Manifestos are meant to clear the air and challenge, and then their usefulness is over. I myself haven't abided by that manifesto, and I don't expect anyone else to, either. But it's always brought up, I don't know ... It's no longer useful - or maybe it is. Someone else should write a manifesto about what's going on now.

corpus: A young Danish choreographer, Mette Ingvartsen, wrote a YES-manifesto about two years ago.


on the rewriting there is also this:
Maybe to spectacle. Maybe to virtuosity. Maybe to transformations and magic and make believe. Maybe to glamour and transcendency of the star image. . . . Maybe to moving or being moved.
from Artforum


Which all made me go back to a discussion from 2004 about the same Rainer quote in which I replaced "no" with "not quite"

All of which makes me wonder about how to look back on our own histories...

I don't have answers (or maybe even complete thoughts) -
please feel free to comment Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 3:03 p.m. 0 comments
Labels: ,

Monday, July 20, 2009

Other Unconference like things

cross-posted with Small Wooden Shoe

As we are very close to posting the notes from the Unconference, I came across this: It's the discussion board for Devoted and Disgruntled, an on-going Open Space program done by Improbable Theatre in the UK (Phelim McDermott facilitated a very good Open Sapce a couple years back at PuSH

We are already planning next years Unconference
(not anything official, but maybe think of keeping April 24th, 2010 clear)

and
I'm also wondering about a regular event like Devoted and Disgruntled.

Is there any interest? Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 11:07 a.m. 0 comments
Labels: ,

Thursday, July 9, 2009

"Do a show that is meaningful to you and share why it is meaningful"

From Culturebot- probably the first theatre/performance blog I started reading, and still going strong -

Do something passionate and engaged that you care about – something you would do if you weren’t worried about money. Pretend like money is not an issue, let go and do what you really care about. Do a show that is meaningful to you and share why it is meaningful. Don’t try and trick people with a line of hooey. We see through you. Don’t tell us what to think, don’t try and second-guess. Just do what you do with honesty and intention and share the process. If you care, we’ll care.
- read the whole thing


Some on the "best time to be alive" stuff worries me a little - worries me in that we still really (really) need to be able to critique and propose alternatives, and that there is huge amounts to learn from the other pasts and other, less digital, places.

But the attitude and and honesty parts I think are on the nose. Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 10:20 a.m. 0 comments
Labels: ,

Saturday, April 25, 2009

3 points to dramaturgy defintition

From the description of Peter Stamer's Coaching Project at ImpulsTanz

On Dramaturgy And Other Artistic Practices

Dramaturgy deals with 3 main questions:
1. How does the artist transform his/her concept into practice?
2. What aesthetic strategies does the artist make use of in the art work?
3. How does the art work communicate to the audience?


I think that's a very solid reduction that I might steal.

Also very good, from Jeroen Peeters & Martin Nachbar's Coaching project description:
Physical dramaturgy seeks to explore and exhaust the realm of meaning triggered by moving bodies on stage: it insists on analysing one’s own practice and stimulating an awareness of the underpinnings and contexts of one’s work.


I like the articulation of "stimulating an awareness of the underpinnings" - this is something I think a lot about and often times feel is lacking in performance I watch in Toronto (probably other places too - but most I see things in Toronto.)

Thanks Ben for asking me to look at the ImPulsTanz site this year. Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 10:01 a.m. 0 comments
Labels: , ,

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

I'm going to do some workshops in Europe this summer and will try to blog from there - but I also thought I'd put up some links before hand.

Stop 1- Vienna
Impulstanz - major festival with great training component. I've applied to take a Coaching Project on creative writing and dance with Jonathan Burrows (and more) and Adrian Heathfield.

Stop 2- Frankfurt
Tanzlabor_21 - International Summer Lab - Taking a workshop with Hooman Sharifi (more) and Bojana Kunst.

See also:
Maska - an arts organization in Slovenia that has a very compelling mix of production, seminars and publication. Bojana Kunst, one of the workshop co-leaders in Frankfurt is a frequent collaborator.
Unbound - an online store for books, dvds, and limited editions. All in pounds, but appear to ship to Canada. Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 1:03 p.m. 0 comments
Labels: ,

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Dance and Writing

From If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution.
André Lepecki reads 'Bodies of the text,' a collection of essays on dance, the body and feminism by Jaques Derrida, Susan Foster and others."
First published in:Ballet-Tanz, August 1995
Thus, the currently and broadly-accepted notion shared by dancers and choreographers, but also by scholars and critics alike, that the art of dance is essentially one that has a privileged and mysterious relationship with the unspoken, the un-utterable, which what is beyond or before language, is historically deconstructed by Foster. Dance was not always the art of what cannot be spoken, and the radical implication of Foster's essay is that this recent divorce between dance and meaning (the gestural and the verbal) also shaped the current relationship between the dance writer, the dance critic, with its object of study. [Emphasis mine]
A couple times at the CDA and other places recently, I feel like I see the edge of the (often sublimated) belief that dance is the "art of what cannot be spoke" and therefore also what can not be spoken about, something I just don't believe. It seems also related to the "dance is universal" – which I also have trouble with.

Yes, dance is about the body and how they move through and occupy space – and yes we all have bodies, but the way we understand and move them is largely constructed by our histories and influences.

And - that's totally fine. It's good even. "Universal" is too often code for "dominant" and "un-utterable" for "don't think so much."

And it's hard to talk and write about dance, but not impossible. And the trying is very important, since it's a part of moving any form forward.

It always good to find that some of the idea's that we take for "always have been that way", weren't always that way. That there was a kind of social decision to make them that way. It means there can be a kind of social decision to make them another way. Or 8 other ways. Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 3:14 p.m. 0 comments
Labels: , ,

CDA - Internet / Technology 1

In this post: | Writing / Copyright /Internet | RSS | Good Sites |

All of this is a little off topic in some way, but I also feel is connected. Maybe that part of contemporary means paying attention to current tools and making choices about which ones are right for what you're doing. Not that we all have to be cutting edge internet strategists, but that change is happening, there is an event that we are wrapped in and we have to take account of it.

At the conference I felt like an internet cheerleader, and in some ways I am, but I’m also suspicious and don’t think it saves us in any way - the work still has to be good and rigorous. But it really is doing interesting things to distribution systems. And I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but it is a change.

How much time are we willing to spend on this? Does it distract from or help the making of the work? Beyond marketing, what can these tools do for the making of the art?

And how does live performance (and all artists) deal with the change in power and authority made possible by the internet. (Francis Ford Coppola in 1991 predicts Youtube, and now is on Youtube.)

Thanks to Allyson (Allyson, what's the company site that you mentioned at the panel?) and Ella.

And please add thoughts or further links in the comments section.

Writing / Copyright / Internet

Cory Doctorow
[A name I mentioned a bunch as someone who gives large chunks of their writing away, and has made a career of it.]
– Article about “Artist rights” -
[Includes some very good comments that make the other side of the argument as well.]


Lawrence Lessig – Creator of Creative Commons:
– TED Talks

Clay Shirky: Looking for the Mouse
 – And the whole blog is good. I found this after the conference (my friend Tim blogged about it on his blog about making computer game that is actually just a good blog about ideas and creativity)
– If you like video check out Shirky speaking.
– Favorite quote from video “The group gets better together”

Seth Godin.
[Good blog on internet marketing. I'm a little disturbed by my interest in some of this stuff - that one one the things I like about live performance is that it is hard for capitalism to co-opt (just so inefficient.) And yet the good marketers are just talking about how to reach people in an honest way. But then I worry that tools may not be ethically neutral. Thoughts on that?]

RSS Readers
About RSS:
This is the clearest description I could find.
Which News reader? Lifehacker's top 5

Good web sites
Sarma
[It can be a bit tricky to find things, oddly. I’ve found stumbling around to be the way to go - just following curiosity (as in many things.) Here’s some that I’ve bookmarked:]
– Lepeki - The American Tradition
– Jeroen Peeters - Living together on Stage
– Lepeki: The body in difference
– Ramsay Burt - Undoing postmodern dance history
– Springdance conversations
– Other Matters
– Unfolding the Critical
– All of the Critics
[This lists the critics - if you click on the one you want, and then on “texts” you’ll get everything that’s on the site for that author. For example:]
All of Lepeki
All of Myriam van Imschoot
[The letters on dramaturgy are particularly good.]
– Sarma Links

B-chronicles
[I haven’t much all of this (recent find), but it looks exciting.]

ArtsJournal Daily

Artful Manager

Dance Theatre Workshop

Culturebot
[The blog of PS 122 – good links]

Dance-tech
[Just found thing today, but looks like an attempt at some of the things we were talking about]

All for now - please add in the comments

Read Full Post...
Posted by Jacob Zimmer at 2:35 p.m. 0 comments
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)