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    <title>patsy</title>
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    <description><![CDATA[I'm a 20-year-old junior at CWRU. At the moment my mission is to watch every interesting dance video I can get my hands on. Inter-library loans have given me access to the entirety of north east Ohio, but I am severely limited by which schools allow their videos to be shipped out... Regardless, I'm still watching and I'm blogging my thoughts about what I've been seeing in an informal, but somewhat organized electronic format. Yeah. That's, basically, where I'm at. If your into it, awesome.]]></description>
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      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:29:37 -0700</pubDate>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:58:38 -0700</pubDate>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:57:52 -0700</pubDate>
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      <title>More Merce Cunningham</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/1419385953931063/posts/text/560291</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Merce Cunningham's piece Rainforest was choreographed in 1968. The poor quality of the old video is a trade off for the privilege of actually seeing Cunningham himself dance. The set (giant, Mylar pillows filled with helium) were from an Andy Warhol instillation entitled Silver Clouds. The costumes, created by Jasper Johns after Cunningham refused Warhol's request that the dancers perform naked, were layered and torn flesh colored leotards and tights. The music was an original score by David Tudor. Choreographically, the piece is classic Cunningham at its best. The movements, whether expansive of minute, explore the range of the human body in relation to negative space, resulting in exceptional sculptural forms. Warhol's set is perfect because it heightens the reaction of the space to the bodies. The silver pillows physicalize the air, and thus the audience can perceive the dancers' interactions with the stage's negative space visually. 
	Despite the fact that Merce Cunningham adamantly refuses to ascribe meaning to his works, I found there was something evocative about Rainforest. The title alone suggests a natural or primal element, which resonates with the dancing. Even when performers in Rainforest are performing onstage together or in duets, each individual remains isolated, as if there is no human connection between them. Like others of Cunningham's works, aspects of Rainforest's choreography seem to allude to animals, especially birds. Instead of a performance, this piece is like a brief glimpse into a exotic habitat where lonely individuals inhabit a strange landscape built of silver pillows.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:03:24 -0700</pubDate>
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      <title>Martha Graham Primitive Mysteries</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/1419385953931063/posts/text/560290</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Primitive Mysteries really struck me more than any other Graham piece. The work is so early, made in 1931 just two years after her poignant, yet honestly elementary, Heretic. Primitive Mysteries in comparison shows unbelievable maturity and development over such a short time span
	The subject matter of Primitive Mysteries, also, is truly fascinating. As Diane Grey explained in a lecture she gave to my dance history class, the piece was made after a trip Martha Graham made to the American Southwest. Appalachian Spring was inspired by the Southwest as well and elicits a pioneering American feel. However, Primitive Mysteries, on the other hand, deals not with white settlers, but with the Native Americans. The piece is about the rites of primitive native women. Though obviously not an ethnographic study, the virgin and choir's movements tap into the primitive and surreptitious feel of "uncultured" human nature. Rite of Spring, made around the same time, also deals with similar ritualistic subject matter, but was inspired by Nijinsky's modernist movement and Stravinsky's modern music. What makes Primitive Mysteries stand apart, is that it is lacking these "cultured" strings; even the accompanying Louis Horst music was based on Native American themes. 
	The costumes for Primitive Mysteries look much like those for Martha's societal commentary pieces of the time like Heretic, with the chorus is black woolen dresses and the soloist in while woolen with flowing sleeves and billowing skirt. Instead, it is the choreography of Primitive Mysteries that really sets it apart. The movement is mostly typical early Graham, with lots of rigid arm positions performed in synch, combined with stylized forms of basic locomotion. Yet, there is an air about the movement that seems culturally foreign, especially the strait legged kicking walks, the prostrate offering positions, and the leaping runs executed with the body hunched forwards and arms stretched backwards, for example. The mixing of primitive earthly ritual and stylized avant-garde dance is utterly fascinating, and impressively effective. 
	In the movement patterns and formations, one can observe the classical Martha Graham style that can be seen refined later in her societal opinionated works like Panorama. In Primitive Mysteries, however, the precise structure has little to do with the condemning of industrial life, as in her works of societal commentary. Instead, the patterns express a higher form of order. The circles, lines, and boxes form a cryptic language of ritual that the observer can feel, but cannot quite rationalize in their higher consciousness. Martha Graham was undeniably a dramatic at heart, and her exploration of the subconscious drama of the old American cultural ritual translated through modern dance in Primitive Mysteries resulted in a one of a kind masterpiece.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:02:19 -0700</pubDate>
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      <title>Dancing on the edge... from the archives of the American Dance Festival</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/1419385953931063/posts/text/294365</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Semi-coherent thoughts listed by peice:

Paul Taylor's Cloven Kingdom (1991)
So un-Taylor style (beautiful Taylor runs and high gorgeous extensions). This piece had almost no turnout, no extensions, and no port de bras. The movements seemed primitive, ceremonially decorative, or apparently function-less. This ridiculousness or uselessness culminated in movements like sitting and scooching their buts across the floor. 

Jin Xing's Crying Dragon (1989)
Outdoor in front of a formal, courthouse-like building with bricks, stone steps, and pillars. All dressed in white. One man and a huge procession of women Les Sylphide style, walking single-file on releve back and forth in a uge processional entrance. Their pattern becomes more complicated as some branch off and start weaving in and out. They all end around him with their hair over their faces. They leave and strip him of his shirt. His movement is slow and graceful with many circling arm movements, extensions, and balances.

Dayton Contemporary Dance Co's Road of the Phoebe Snow
Average jazz music. With plain blue lighting the whole time and black pants for everyone with the women in colored dresses. Lots of partnering and monotonous frenetic. Not my favorite.

D-Man in the Waters by Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane (1989)
Uses steps from ballet, modern techniques, and everyday life (swimming). Heighened energy, with dancers throwing themselves at the floor and at each other with seeming abandon

Reijo Kela (1986)
The audience is sitting round the stage space. He begins by semi-accosting them. And once he starts dancing it is the same traveling movement phrase repeated back and forth. Violent, like he's getting attacked or shot or something. Ends with him forcing a door shut. Very dance-theater.

Le piedestal des vierges / Claude Brumachon 
Beautiful evocative music. Begins with manipulations of long dresses. Personal interactions mitigated with fabric. All about relationships. But the couples never seem to face one another; they are all on the USL DSR diagonal the whole time, traversing forwards and backwards. Beutiful and original partner-work.

Iyaya / Ballet du Lac Tumba
Tribal dance on stage. Musicians and dancers interacting, and mixing (vocalizations by dancers). Elaborate costumes and body painting. Less about synchronicity and replication, then expression and individualism. Still, some complex dancing specifically with props. Hard to analyze because I don't know what choices are actually choreographic, and what is religious or cultural, and therefore can't really be analyzed like  work of contemporary modern dance. 
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:48:52 -0700</pubDate>
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      <title>Trisha Brown Early Works 1966-1967</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/1419385953931063/posts/text/288073</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This DVD is definitely one of the best collections of dance films I have ever watched. It contains 18 videos (some excerpts) of Brown's early choreographic escapades. At this point I've only watched the first half or so, cause it's super long, but it's enough to definitively declare the awesomeness of this DVD.

I think I loved it so much because so many of the works on the DVD are ultra famous, iconic American post-modern dance peices. I have heard them written about and seen pictures of in basically every account of the Judson Dance Theater, or the 60s-70s downtown dance scene. The first piece "Homemade" (1966) I have seen so many pictures of. It's so amazing... Trisha Brown straps a running projector to her back that is projecting, more or less synchronously, the same piece she's performing. Awesome. So beautiful and conceptually interesting. Also on the DVD are "Walking on the Wall" (1971) and the earlier "Man Walking Down the Side of  Building" (1970) which I have been hearing about since I started to get interested in American modern dance history, but have never seen. Especially, "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" was just too cool to watch. It's so site-specific]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:07:18 -0700</pubDate>
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      <title>Trisha Brown videos</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/1419385953931063/posts/text/259438</link>
      <description><![CDATA[I just watched Glacial Decoy, which I thought I'd seen before, but if I ever had I really hadn't payed any attention, because everything I was seeing seemed so new to me. Well, as new as any Trisha Brown work is from any other. After one viewing of anything (and I watched a bunch of videos during lunchtimes at the Trisha Brown Winter Intensive last year) one gets a certain sense of her lingering style. Her style, as I see it, involves compartmentalizing the body, and then using the resulting separate zones of action to do different things simultaneously. Her movement in the eyes of an observer looks like an awkward imbalance in the body, so when her dancers move it is as if they are stumbling or falling. Yet, her movement has a strange beauty... it fascinates, mesmerizes and rivets the eye. Now that I'm thinking about it I really need to watch the piece again. ]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:29:06 -0700</pubDate>
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      <title>Merce Cunningham videos</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/1419385953931063/posts/text/259428</link>
      <description><![CDATA[I just watched Merce Cunningham's Beach Birds for Camera. Awesome, and mind-opening. Cunningham work are great for video dance. The camera frame allows for such intense depth of field, and in the group sections it is so visually interesting to have someone in the extreme foreground with dancers in layered spatial planes behind them. Also, having the camera physically moving through the dancers is fabulous. I never really realized it till now, but Cunningham works are like active landscapes and traversing through them/ being inside them is the ultimate way to experience them. Cool. 

Just watched the 1973 video (I think it's by charles atlas) of Cunningham's Walkaround Time. Beautiful. I could watch Merce dance forever. and i think his company back then was way more engaging. They were really fierce.  Plus, the Marcel Duchamp designed Jasper Johns made sets were awesome. good tape. 
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Oct 2007 12:17:31 -0700</pubDate>
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