The pre-wash cycle: Thoughts...

Gwyn Henry & Yulia White
Still from MAE video: It's (Not) in the Bag

Currently mulling over the idea of a gallery installation piece.

Concept

Showing a single film in several versions which are projected simultaneously on the walls of one room and/or on large, flowing hanging fabric, set to movement themselves by fans. Each film version would have different editing, music, color adjustments, different perspectives of the same shot--long shots, close ups, etc-- lighting, special effects. etc. A moving version of Andy Warhol's concept in his silk screen dyptich of the Marilyn Monroe photograph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Diptych

Another Concept:

An installation entitled, "Wall Works", showing our four most recent improvisations which were filmed in silhouette against a plain white wall. Each film would be projected onto walls of the room, and shown simultaneously. The viewer would use headphones at each wall/film to hear the music, as opposed to the sound being projected into the room simultaneously, which might be a bit cacaphonous.(A good thing or a bad thing?)

Perhaps offer an opening program with either of these ideas, which would feature improvisational live musicians, inviting the audience to free-dance/improvise movement inspired by the music.

Film this, add it to the exhibit afterwards. This concept perhaps influenced by an original punk tenet: anyone can be a rock star.

Anyone can and should dance. 

(Serve wine beforehand)

Blue Latitudes: A Poet Responds...

WATCHING BLUE LATITUDES
in response to a film

by Delaina Thomas

View Blue Latitudes, click here

it glides us into the whitewater
of inward streams lured toward open seas

the ebb and flows of filmy waves
limpid swirls flowing into taut hesitations
water-like or skin-like the fabric
of what separates us from ourselves
and our subtle bodies
or from those of other beings

there is a reaching toward someone's hands

or a turning in one's sleep
is the body moved by the wave
or the wave a movement of the body

a dancer forms ripples like a breeze of intent
over the body of another

finding herself alone, another dancer
skids her fingertips under the chiffon
like riffs
small peaks rising and collapsing
a range of fading thoughts
dancer bodies encased in deep blue
gesture what we have forgotten
in the dream when we so
abruptly woke
their hair waving as black
under the membrane of a whitening pulse
are they solid forms or seed impulses
not motionless for long

they are determined by light and shadow
they are defined by rhythms of waves
that change, enfold, escape, embrace

                                  --Delaina Thomas

Delaina Thomas is a poet who lives on Maui with her husband and children. Her work has appeared in such publications as Hudson Review, Ironwood and various literary journals in Hawai'i. She wrote this poem after viewing the short, experimental video of an improvisation by MAE, the movement artists ensemble, which was sent to her by her cousin, one of the MAE dancers.

A Journey to the Middle of the Continent to Remind me to Choose

Pianta, from On the Wall

A 4-day trip to Kansas City, hosted by my cousin, who invited me and my husband Fang (thus-named during this trip after comedienne Phyllis Diller's husband whom no one ever saw-- much like my Fang) to join he and his band and crew who were there to record a jazz album in the heart of this historical jazz city. My job was to help film the recording sessions for future promotions of the album. [http://www.thetimhenryexperience.com/thetimhenryexperience/Home.html]

Out of my California element there in KC, among excellent musicians, talented recording technicians, arrangers, and video artists, but all the same somehow thinking that no one in this group of midwestern artists would get what I do with my experimental movement films. Cool people, but feeling that what MAE and Bold Hen Productions do would not be received positively. Pure speculation, perhaps, but self-doubt has always been a nasty little daimon on my shoulder.

I had brought along 3 of our short videos to show, but got cold feet and didn't show them. I think to understand what we do takes a certain willingness to leave all known parameters and risk humiliation, failure, the chance that where your muse led you, a place you found to be of such depth, complexity, and higherTruth and Beauty, is nothing more than the place of your weird, delusional twists and kinks. Far away from home, it began to seem that when looked at through rational eyes, my muse-appointed place is nothing more than pointless crap.

Some time back I did an improv dance workshop in San Diego with choreographer, dancer, and director,  Katie Duck, http://katieduck.com/Home.html an American working in Amsterdam. The enormous thing I took away from Katie's workshop was from a structured improvisation wherein the dancers experimented creating the performance space by shifting back and forth between being audience/observers and performers. We would stand, all facing the same direction, demarcating the performance space with our gaze. Whenever we were inspired to, we would transform from the role of audience member to performer by simply moving into the performance space and beginning to dance. So the dancers were each continually on her/his individual volition and impulse, flowing back and forth between the role of audience and performer.

From time to time, members of the audience would impulsively move to a completely different place on the stage and face a new direction to create a new and different performance space. Those who were in the performance space at that moment would have to pay attention or they would be left dancing to no audience. And what's a performer without an audience?

What struck me like a bolt about this creation was that Katie stressed the concept of choose. Especially when contemplating whether to move or not to move from audience into the performance space. For me it was like choosing to dive into an ice cold swimming pool from the topmost high-diving board.The idea that one must choose and then immediately ACT! Omigod!

For a hesitant, slow-thinking/moving dillly dallier like me, I suddenly saw how strange this was-- the complete opposite of how I operate in life. Indecisive, irresolute, dawdling, tentative, hemming, hawing... that's me!

But Katie's voice shouting as I stood dangling at the precipice, CHOOSE! CHOOSE! seemed a command from an very high place. It might as well have been accompanied by trumpets and an angel chorus. CHOOSE, BABY! then GO! ACT! BOOMITY BOOM! What a concept!

So that's what I've decided to do. And I am choosing to go with these strange inner voices I have tatoo'd on the inside of my forehead: Follow where the muse leads --  I can't NOT do that. And it's scary!

I'm glad for the trip to KC, and I'm glad to be back in Callie. 

Our films...

I was just reading that Anna Halprin  [http://www.annahalprin.org/  ] believed one's personal story/myth is contained within how one experiences one's own body, so the improvisationist is revealing her own myth as she dances, and the dance/movements are her own personal ritual. The audience is then invited to construct a meaning from her ritual, thereby giving shape to their own mini-myths. 

I felt this from the beginning of what MAE (the Movement Artists' Ensemble) is doing: that the larger picture of watching our kind of film is itself a ritualistic experience between dancer, film maker and audience wherein deeper meanings can be accessed. 

The dancer's movement/ritual  takes us to "... that strange liminal world..." (Halprin) where "life discloses itself at a depth inaccessible to observation, reflection and theory." The Members of MAE know this from 1st hand experience! And the film maker/editor (in these kinds of films) becomes a 3rd party participant, embedding the dancer's experience into her (the film maker's) own experience, her own ritual which is the film/crafting. 

I think the new "dance film" genre films are mostly about the dancers, their prowess, their art making, and their dances are shown in a linear way so that their "story" is told, as stories traditionally are... linearly. Whereas "my" dancers are abstracted by the cutting & pasting, so it becomes more about the dance of the abstracted images, rather than the dance of the dancers or a choreographer, since all our movements are pure improvisation. As the editor, my process is to remove everyday world contexts of time & space, and put what the dancers do into a different, non-ordinary context, hopefully that "liminal space," creating with the film maker's tools, new worlds w/in which to view the dancer's expression. All this, so that imagery with new meanings can be brought forward for the dancer, the film maker & the audience's considered regard.

This is beginning to sound like a lot of blah bah blah... but what can I say, I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing here! 

Speaking to a few audience members' stated desires to see more dance in the films:  this means they brought expectations with them of more traditional dance films... and could also mean that what we presented instead didn't engage them as something in itself, for its own sake. Well, critics walked out of Halprin's early works, so I say we let the audiences have their own reactions & continue to focus on our hearts & intuitive guidance. Do what we're pulled to do, let the chips fall where they may

And yes, it's true... at this point in our lives, the members of MAE (all women over 40...some well over!) can't be "dancers" in terms of our culture's definition... only a certain body type,  degree of fitness, and age are allowed that. That definition is looking for tour jetes & pirouettes to a degree that we can no longer deliver. But we can use movement to explore ourselves, & express what we find, and that can be beautiful and it can be art. Still, the focus is not on the cultural context of "dancer." That's why I wanted to be the Movement Artists! It doesn't conjure up that huge category of what "a dancer" is supposed to be and do. 

Each member of our ensemble brings her unique style, her unique personal myths and rituals to the movement mix.I want to abstract us out of the "dance" expectations, and put us into the realm of myth/imagery/ even archetypes. Aren't archetypes an abstraction of all the concrete forms of a thing? 

I think also sometimes I'm treating us like dream images, as though we are dancing a joint dream each time, & when I get us edited on film, I'm putting us into that dream, making it visible. And ea film represents only one possible dream of hundreds of dreams that were possible out of that one improvisation experience. It's such a gift that my fellow MAE's let me do this with their movements-- such a personal part of themselves that they open up to the world each time we meet and move together!!

 Have a good wkend, All... healing & life-ward...

My Film Screening...

I have a film screening next Friday night! Yaaaay!
Please come and help give a voice to local film makers!

June 4th, 2010 - 8:00 PM
Escondido Municipal Gallery
210 E. Grand
Escondido, CA