MAE Makes a Vampire Flick!

Link to view "RETURN" --http://youtu.be/lRv0u3sfsy8

Ok, we didn't set out to make a vampire film. It's just that some images in our latest video effort, RETURN, seem to echo images in the silent classic film "Nosferatu" by F.W. Murnau, 1922.

http://www.google.com/search?q=images+for+nosferatu&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS325&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=R-IMTunnMKK30AH1u_yrDg&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=815&bih=385 [Notice in particular the elongated fingers of the vampire and the gothic, box-like doorways and coffins that often surround his image.]

The art center, which houses the studio where MAE usually films, was designed by the eminent architect Charles W. Moore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Willard_Moore Moore was the winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1994, an honor he shares with such icons as Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller.

Moore believed that architecture must elicit responses from all the senses, not just the visual. He therefore created buildings and spaces that engaged history, myth and creativity. His work generates environments that stimulate the user. In much the same way, MAE creates films that aim to engage the viewer interactively by stimulating his or her senses of memory and imagination, the psyche, dream fragments, along with all the accompanying emotions.

The art center complex of buildings-- and especially the Studio itself, with its high windows and incredible light-- holds an invisible but palpable magic. Its magic seems to be about the freedom to explore the border spaces between the mundane world, and other dimensions... those of timelessness, imagination, and the creative force which Art reveals when circumstances favorably conjoin.

I have long found the many nooks and niches, cubby holes and crannies of the building's architecture intriguing. What kinds of movement and expression might be possible from within those spaces? And what might film reveal about them?

Even though some of the spaces we wanted to use on the day of filming were not easily accessible from ground level, Yulia took to them like the seasoned rock climber she is. Her improvisational movements within those spaces, although she was greatly cramped, restricted, and confined, are amazingly creative and evocative. Her movements allowed the film's final result-- the scary jerkiness of some scenes in the film, Nosferatu, and the dark, expressionist images of many early, classic horror films.

 MAE's films beg human interaction. They are an invitation for the Viewer to participate with the world conjured by the film. The Viewer can pull that world inside of him or herself and allow it to stimulate-- "call upon" if you will-- what ever is waiting in his/her inner landscapes of memory, dreams, emotions, and response.

If you watch RETURN, we hope you participate. We hope those of your  parts that are cramped will be freed to find grander spaces.

MAE returns to the Studio...

We've been back in the Studio, improvising, playing and discovering more phantastical worlds to bring into the mundane one by creating more moving image video poems. It's Yulia & I this time, joined for one session by two small friends (See earlier video posts, below, of Dancing with the Grandmothers and Phantazein). We were also treated to a surprise visit for our final Spring session, by pioneer dance therapist and expressive artist, Betty Backus. Stills & video from that amazing session coming soon! More sessions with Betty are in the works.

Each time I approach the Studio, lugging boom box, music cd's, tripods, cameras, and assorted props, I wonder, what's going to happen this time? It feels like we've taxed our brains and wrung them dry of ideas; that we've explored every inch of the Studio's dance floor, walls, mirrors, windows, barres, nooks, and crannies, even built some of our own environments to move within. Surely there's nothing more to gain from this place, nothing left to explore & to inspire us here. But more always comes.

I am not really sure why we do this, but it is clear that we have discovered a path with a mind of its own; one which is leading us-- perhaps to some unknown end, perhaps simply for the sake of the journey. But the Way has called us, and in this lovely spring of 2011, we are answering.

For the next few weeks, as I work on editing footage, giving form to what we've done, I will be posting the videos on this blog. I hope many of you will be intrigued by what we have made.

If you can find something in our work that speaks to you, or inspires you, or touches you, or resonates with you... we invite you to leave a comment, a poem, a photo, a drawing, a slip of music... or whatever way you'd like to convey it to us!

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.