Right now I'm sharing Adagio & Danseuse Live at The Cotton Club, which you could say I started making about a year ago in at the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco. While in Italy I made up solo material that I brought back to the states for rehearsals with Arthur Aviles, later joined by Chisa Hidaka. Eventually it was shaped into a 10-minute duet shown at Dance Conversations @ The Flea, with the score that is distracting you from reading this right now...
Wait. Go ahead and watch. It's more important than what you're reading. And I learned long ago in Artichoke For Two that it's hard for people to do both: watch and listen. Even harder to read and listen, right?
OK, so you're back.
Does it help to know that one of the inspirations for this dance was the shtick - one night it happens I'm hanging around Moskowitz's delicatessen - recited to me by an elderly friend, Lil Bostert then 99 years old? It drew me - I laughed my ass off - because I sympathize with the interlocutor: what the hell are they (we) doing and why are they (we) doing it? When we see dancing to music like Duke Ellington's in a club, say, we don't necessarily ask about meaning. But when the context is a stage, and the dancers are barefoot, and they perform movements that don't telegraph their meaning, we start asking questions. What's making de goil so noivous? Why that particular movement? What do I need to know to understand this? Why does it mean to understand? For me, Adagio & Danseuse is a treatise - entertaining of course, but with a Socratic method to my madness.
I first heard Lil recite this maybe 8 years ago; the decision to record it was years ago; last year at this time I started making movement material.
Chisa & Arthur danced the hell out of it in its one live performance. But, as I wrote in this blog, one live performance hardly satisfies my need to share the dance, to preserve our hard work for a larger - and later - audience. So I made the short video you see here.
It had a public screening late last year with other short dance films at the Moviehouse/DFA Dance Film Lab, and was a big hit largely because modern dance doesn't often aim for humor. Because of the headache and costs associated with *@)&##$@*!! music licensing, you won't see Adagio on Youtube or at film festivals. So I'm sharing the full video version - half as long as the live one - in an online festival with you, right here.
Speaking of festivals, there was a very engaged audience for a recent screening which included my short film among others in the Black Maria Film + Video Festival. My favorite part of the Q&A? Instead of talking about lenses, editing or other technical issues, one audience member/filmmaker said this after seeing Her Children Mourn: "it made me realize that we're usually expected to mourn in groups, when actually the process of grieving is so much more individual than that."
Argue. Discuss. Contradict.
Does it help to know that one of the inspirations for this dance was the shtick - one night it happens I'm hanging around Moskowitz's delicatessen - recited to me by an elderly friend, Lil Bostert then 99 years old? It drew me - I laughed my ass off - because I sympathize with the interlocutor: what the hell are they (we) doing and why are they (we) doing it? When we see dancing to music like Duke Ellington's in a club, say, we don't necessarily ask about meaning. But when the context is a stage, and the dancers are barefoot, and they perform movements that don't telegraph their meaning, we start asking questions. What's making de goil so noivous? Why that particular movement? What do I need to know to understand this? Why does it mean to understand? For me, Adagio & Danseuse is a treatise - entertaining of course, but with a Socratic method to my madness.
I first heard Lil recite this maybe 8 years ago; the decision to record it was years ago; last year at this time I started making movement material.
Chisa & Arthur danced the hell out of it in its one live performance. But, as I wrote in this blog, one live performance hardly satisfies my need to share the dance, to preserve our hard work for a larger - and later - audience. So I made the short video you see here.
It had a public screening late last year with other short dance films at the Moviehouse/DFA Dance Film Lab, and was a big hit largely because modern dance doesn't often aim for humor. Because of the headache and costs associated with *@)&##$@*!! music licensing, you won't see Adagio on Youtube or at film festivals. So I'm sharing the full video version - half as long as the live one - in an online festival with you, right here.
Speaking of festivals, there was a very engaged audience for a recent screening which included my short film among others in the Black Maria Film + Video Festival. My favorite part of the Q&A? Instead of talking about lenses, editing or other technical issues, one audience member/filmmaker said this after seeing Her Children Mourn: "it made me realize that we're usually expected to mourn in groups, when actually the process of grieving is so much more individual than that."
Argue. Discuss. Contradict.
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