On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, cris cheek wrote:
>
> Hi Karlien, yes 'contact jamming' does refer to
> Contact Improvisation as Paxton and others
> developed it. There will be a festival of
> contact with Steve in residence for one month
> at Chisenhale Dance Space in London's East End
> during September, if you're interested get there.
>
> Allen [Fisher] (unless he's got something extra to say here,
was well aware of that 'movement').
>
This is also why it is great that you are writing, here, on contemporary
dance. In Parataxis 8/9 Allen Marshall writes: 'The image of the dance
obviously comes from Olson, who got it from Williams, but it is familiar
enough to have been given, en route, a good work-out by Eliot and Yeats
(p. 207). So 'obviously' to these academics, it is a tired old trope
passed down from modernist-meister to modernist-meister.
> > Woo is highly stylised and choreographed bodies in
flight,
much in the
> DV8, Wim Vanderkeybus mould of what gets referred to as
> 'euro-crash' in the new dance argot. It's what La La La
> Human Steps generated - although i find much of such work
> simply about technique and virtuosity - not my line.
> Reminds me of a woman i once met who was a balletomane and
> would sit in the front row so she could watch 'the slack
> being taken up at the back of the knee'.
I saw DV8 perform in March in Cambridge (lastest work) tackling (I think
is the word) gender, sexuality and body image. The person selling the
tickets warned us that it 'wasn't really dance' & were we sure we wanted
to go? The performance included a ballet class routine in which one of the
dancers (also verbally) refused to conform to its technical standards.
She also went beserk (verbally) at the end about 'someone' in the audience
taking photographs. This outburst was part of the performance, but the
audience is so used to putting up with a theatre employee telling them
"photographing in the auditorium is prohibited" that clearly it was the
audience, rather than the performer, who had trangressed rules. I was
looking forward to seeing how speech (or any vocalisation) would be used,
but this aspect proved dissapointing: the spoken words seemed a narrative
device which retiterated or stated (and not very interestingly) what had
already been played out in the choreography.
About balletomanes, their "gout", their relish for discreet body-parts
(particularly legs) is entirely stimulated by ballet prosody.
>
> can't recommend Eric Havelock's 'Preface to Plato' highly
> enuf. In particular his chapter 'The Psychology of the
> Poetic Performance' where he outlines the interdependency
> of the aforementioned three artforms. Reckon you'd find
> it interesting. Simple, but clear.
>
> I'd also recommend, but it's not an idle read 'Space, Text
> and Gender' by Henrietta Moore. I'm still struggling with
> her elucidation of 'space as text' but there's something
> strong going on there.
>
These I shall go and read after my holiday. I want to think more on the
interesting point you made on textual spacing & body orientation, & maybe
come up with some examples.
Karlien
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