DENIZEN a fiscal sponsored project of DFA by Alla Kovgan In 2001, I discovered several poetic films SEASONS, INHABITANTS, and WE by post-WWII Soviet Armenian avant-garde filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian. SEASONS struck me the most. Without a single word, but through observations of human gestures in people’s daily activities, this film explores the everyday mythology of a rugged Armenian countryside and its people. Thanks to Peleshian’s editing techniques that he calls “distance montage,” SEASONS evokes a sense of ritual, of the cyclical nature of life, of perpetual, dynamic movement. Peleshian’s theory of “distance montage” suggests that one of the ways to create meaning in cinema is to identify the key images or sounds and continually re-define them by placing them in different contexts over the course of the film. Similarly, a composer would re-shape the main musical theme in a symphony. SEASONS is a film with a strong choreographic spirit. Peleshian creates movement within images and through editing – loose rocks are tumbling down steep slopes; countrymen are running and dragging tremendous piles of hay from the hills down into the valley; montage of close-ups with woman’s hands baking bread evokes a dance-like feeling… I set out to create a film, referred to as “Denizen” that differs from Peleshian’s films in content but not in principle. While in SEASONS there is no explicit, stylized or literal dancing, “Denizen” intentionally uses choreography and dancers. For years, as a maker, editor and curator of dance film, I have developed a strong sense of the possibilities inherent in using choreographic principles to structure ideas in cinema. In the context of “Denizen,” working with dance/movement on film I was able to generate a great variety of material in which to apply Peleshian’s theories and techniques. “Denizen” juxtaposes and intertwines movements, gestures and textures from the land and people captured on film with choreographed movement, easily adapted and repeated in different contexts, to create a new experience of “distance montage”. I collaborated with choreographers/dancers Alissa Cardone and Ingrid Schatz to develop choreography based on people’s gestures and feelings evoked in SEASONS. Before leaving for Armenia to shoot “Denizen,” we came up with seven types of movement – ritualistic/meditative (repetitive but slow-paced), ecstatic (active, fast-paced), intoxicated (out of control, out of balance), wandering/kinetic (discovering), alienating (shifting, adjusting), objectified/isolated, and neutral/familiar (still, organic). We called each movement “a state.” We corresponded with a line-producer (Harut Kbeyan) in Armenia, who scouted locations where SEASONS was shot and sent us photos and videos of them. We then rehearsed the created choreography in similar locations around New England and practiced filming the movement and the environments. In September 2006, we (two dancers, sound artist, project assistant and myself) traveled to Armenia for a four-week residency. We hired an Armenian cinematographer (Mko Malxasyan), a project assistant (Ashot Sarkisyan) as our driver, who had worked with Peleshian in the 1970s, and a musician (Armen Zakharyan). For 10 days, we had an intense shooting period. We filmed in seven locations. Four locations were the ones that appeared in SEASONS (a 300-year old tunnel, hay slopes, shepherd’s fields and countrymen’s houses, mountain rocky slopes) while three others (Hagapat monastery, abandoned church at Khob, and “lonely tree” valley) were inspired by our created choreography derived from Peleshian’s films as well as our research on Armenia. We adapted and filmed at least three types of movement for each location. In each location, we also identified the key choreographic phrase – that could transcend the sense and spirit of the site the best. In addition, in each location, we captured images with no dancers, portraying the environments as well as working people’s labor. We have collected 9 hours of choreographed High Definition (HD) footage and 6 hours of documentary HD footage. All the sound was recorded on DAT. There are additional 6 hours of sound material recorded independent of the filming. While in Armenia, we tried hard to resist the spell of this exotic, ancient land and to keep focused, guided by Peleshian’s formal ideas. However, a thousand year old forest, 4th century churches carved out of mountains and their celestial acoustics, our exposure to long lasting family traditions, and most importantly a sense of true belonging to the land that people there exhibited, affected us deeply. In Armenia, “Denizen” acquired a new layer of meaning. Besides being a tribute to Peleshian, “Denizen” came to be a portrayal of the Armenian land. It became a film–ritual that celebrates movement in humans and nature in the tradition of films that create city-symphonies such as D.A. Pennebaker’s DAYBREAK EXPRESS and Dziga Vertov’s THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. However, formally the film has not changed. Like SEASONS, the film has a cyclical structure. The seven movement–states are introduced through a sequence of montages (30-40 seconds long). These first montages are more like brief snapshots – a mixture of movements of dancers and workingmen in close-up. The seven montages (6 minutes long total) are followed by prolonged scenes of each location. In each scene (1-1.5 minute long), movement of the dancers, people and environments allow the viewer to discover different aspects of the site and also generate a certain state. By the end of the film, the viewer would have a sense of all seven sites and would live through all seven states. Overall, the intertwined and inter-cut world on screen would create an experience of “Denizen” as a living organism of complex interactions and inner connections. Montage sequences are rhythmically constructed not only visually but also through the sound score. Five types of sounds are layered to either complement or counterpoint the images. Among the sound elements are sounds of workingmen performing certain activities, sounds of the performers moving and breathing, sounds of the environment, bits of music performed by musicians either on or off camera, and finally bits of voices telling stories. One of the storytellers was our driver Ashot Sarkisyan who shared quite a few impressions about working with Peleshian. The soundtrack of the film is quite opposite to the one in Peleshian’s films, who often fancied grandiose classical music scores. In “Denizen,” the soundscape heightens the visceral experience of the environments by integrating its naturalistic sounds of people and places. Different experiences of the environments are also created through the evocation of varying near and distant sound proximities. The musical tunes off camera are quite minimal. Single prolonged notes and musical accords are intertwined with melodic composition to intensify or deplete the emotion of sequences, to violate the rhythm, or to accelerate the pace. I am working with the Russian composer Anton Batagov and Armenian zurna player Vardan Grigoryan to create a soundscape for the film. Batagov is a contemporary classical music composer who has been also incorporating traditional music from around the world in his compositions. Grigoryan (as a member of Armenian Navy Band), on the opposite, uses traditional instruments to compose contemporary compositions. Batagov will also supervise the overall sound design of the film. How can I explain the significance of this “poem” other than saying I was deeply moved to “write” it – moved enough to orchestrate months of choreographing, pre-production, fundraising and venturing into the unknown. All this thrill and trouble resulted from my strong belief in the power of the filmmaking of an Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian and of his editing techniques. By re-contextualizing Peleshian’s artistic approaches in “Denizen,” I attempt to generate this artist’s world rather than depict it. I needed to make my own film to re-discover mythical and ritualistic qualities of the images in Peleshian’s films and apply his ideas. As a result, “Denizen” is not only homage to the great filmmaker but also an art film in itself – a country-symphony that glimpses into the life of Armenian countrymen at a certain moment in time. While in Armenia, we met with ARTE Television (France) who is interested in acquiring ”Denizen” for broadcast, since 2007 is the year of Armenia in France. “Denizen,” as the first art-house dance film made in Armenia (after its independence from the Soviet Union), will also contribute to the development of the art film tradition in that part of the world.• Financial support for this project is welcomed. Please direct any questions on this project, contact Alla Kovgan at: akovgan@rcn.com Obtaining music rights and how to do it yourself with guidance from Trilby Schreiber This article by a DFA intern, Abby Stopper, is based on an informative workshop given by Trilby Schreiber, faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, at Dance NYC on January 9, a special program of Dance on Camera Festival 2007. It is intended as a guideline, not as legal advice. Plan Ahead There is nothing worse than filming beautiful choreography only to realize that the perfect music is legally or financially unobtainable. To avoid this catastrophe begin clearing music rights as soon as the seeds of your project materialize. Remember: it is better to know all of your resources from the get go. Etiquette Remember, the people you are contacting may be artists too, and may be glad that someone has taken enough interest in their music to use it in collaboration. So indulge yourself and explain your project. Though most artists are well aware of how much their song is worth, they may be sympathetic towards a small budget, independent project and charge you a smaller or non-existent fee. Do not be shy! Remember, this is business and negotiation is always an option. Paperwork Keep records of everything. All email correspondence can end up highly useful if there is a dispute. Always have agreements on paper, even if it is only an email. Phone agreements do not cut it but a lawyer is not necessary. A simple statement with a signature will suffice. This is particularly important when working with friends; keep your business life straightforward and on paper and your friendship will remain successful. It is also a good idea to discuss division of royalties should your work end up making money. Many record labels have forms you must fill out to obtain rights to their music. Common questions on the forms include information about the project, length of the project, what scene the music will be used for. (Licenses for music in opening and closing credits are more expensive.) There will also be technical questions like what type of license you are hoping to obtain (ex.: a two year license in North America). The Basic Rights There are two different types of rights you must obtain. 1. Synchronization rights: obtained from the song’s publisher 2. Master use rights: obtained from the record company that produced the particular recording of the song you want to use Example: If you want to use the song “Imagine” performed by John Lennon, you must obtain synchronization rights from Lennon’s publisher and master use the record company that produced the recording. A son’s sync rights are always obtained from the same publisher; master use rights are obtained from whatever record label produced the particular recording you want to use. If you want to use song “Imagine” but perform it yourself, you must still obtain synchronization rights from the publisher. How do I get general and contact information on the song’s publisher? www.ascap.com www.bmi.com www.sesac.com All have extremely detailed databases of their members and allow you to search by song title, performer, writer, etc. Virtually every songwriter belongs to one of these three databases. What about information on the record label? www.copyrightkids.org/permissioninformation.htm www.allmusic.com This site will provide record label information for a particular song but contact information could be harder to come by. To obtain contact information try google and search terms like: “rights”, “permissions” and “contact us” along with the name of the record company. Music in the Public Domain This generally means music whose copyright has expired. An example would be an artist such as Beethoven, who has been long dead long enough to cease collection of royalties. Do not assume that “classical”, “traditional” or “folklore” music is in the public domain. Also, if you are using a commercial recording of a song in the public domain, you must still obtain master use rights from the record label. To check whether a song is in the public domain, you may visit: http://www.pdinfo.com/ Sound-alikes Formally called Music Libraries, these sites offer alternatives to songs that require a license. http://www.killertracks.com http://firstcom.com Other useful links: EMG Music Clearance: excellent information on clearances and resource section; they will also guide you or do it for you for a fee. http://www.clearance.com/ Link regarding rights/publisher/etc. http://www.nmpa.org/links.html Kohn on Music Licencing; not much info but lots of links http://www.kohnmusic.com/ Sony music clearance request form Detailed article on music clearances http:/www.iaje.org/article.asp?ArticleID=233 Dance videos from DFA members LOVE & MURDER Malashock Dance’s LOVE & MURDER is an Emmy Award-winning dance film about life and lifelessness – and those who speed the process from one to the other. Set to five songs by the incomparable Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, LOVE & MURDER is a peek into the minds of those who dangerously blur the line between fantasy and reality. The protagonists are inmates at Millhaven Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In a therapy session, we travel into their deranged minds as they visually recount to the group their misdeeds depicted through song and dance at the scene of their crimes. LOVE & MURDER is a collaborative effort between choreographer John Malashock and director John Menier of University of California in San Diego-TV (USCSD-TV), both Emmy Award winners for their last collaboration – THE SOUL OF SATURDAY NIGHT. To purchase, visit: http://www.malashockdance.org/MDC_Main.swf. For questions, contact: paloma@malashockdance.org Scenarios of the Damned By Marcia B. Siegel On stage and screen, the English company DV8 Physical Theatre has floored viewers with its enraged physicality and its inquiries into the darkest workings of social behavior. Three films from the 1990s have been reissued on DVD by Art Haus Musik, with distribution here by Naxos USA. The collection offers a stimulating and disturbing home viewing experience. The practice of physical theater, like Tanztheater, arose out of a disgust for the idealism and artificiality of conventional dance. Rather than depend on dance technique as their primary physical language, the developers of Tanztheater and physical theater construct dance-like action out of everyday activity. The work looks contemporary without being tied to pre-existing aesthetic templates. DV8’s Lloyd Newson, Tanztheater’s Pina Bausch, and their followers depict a modern society that has broken down as a venue for communication. In their work the more humane instincts—compassion, generosity, friendship, courage—get treated ironically or turned inside out. The DV8 films are quite different from one another, though they’re all populated by psychologically disabled characters. Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (choreographed in 1988) is a relentlessly, gorgeously sadistic look at homosexual desire and conquest. Enter Achilles (1995) suggests how the same men might behave if they got back in the closet and took the role of straights. Strange Fish (1992) scours the conventions of courtship and its consequences—rejection, obsession, alienation—to reveal a succession of sexually ambiguous fantasies and fever-dreams. The four men on the make in Dead Dreams seem impersonal, almost robotic, yet completely immersed in desire. They’re all predators, all victims. The camera, in collaboration with the choreography, explores their dualistic seductions, caresses the men’s skin, admires their hungry faces, lovingly watches them undress each other and hurt each other. And we become complicit as its eye devours the games, and the games get meaner, rougher. One man touches another’s face; the camera moves in tenderly, avidly, on fingers digging into flesh and kneading skin like rubber. With erotic closeups, violent angles, ominous contrasts of light and shadow (the film was shot in black and white), the film induces us to share in orgiastic buildups, then deprives us of release by cutting away, like the actors’ own roving eyes. After fifty minutes, when casual sex has metastasized into violence, three men are dead—or perhaps exhausted—and the fourth slumps in a chair, grim and still unsatisfied. Enter Achilles is a cleverly observed compendium of jock behaviorisms. Seven good old boys gather in a bar for ritualistic preenings, struttings, pound-em-on-the-back greetings, power plays, challenges, and the collective ostracism of weaklings. They perform ordinary actions bigger and beefier than necessary, radiating bravado. What starts as playful roughhousing bonds them into loose dance patterns and calisthenics. Any alien move triggers the herd instinct, and the pack converges on the suspect. The crowd gets drunker, the games get more primitive, the comedy gets nasty. At the outset, Newson and Clara Van Gool, who adapted ENTER ACHILLES from the stage version, show us the chinks in this performed armor when a group of men spy on another man who’s making love to a voluptuous doll. One conspirator whispers in another’s ear, close enough to kiss. Shirtless, they swarm together, peering into the window, skin against skin. Each man has a feminine side and a susceptibility to other men. In the bar they dance with mincing impersonations, rough tangos. They juggle beer glasses with sinuous, spiraling movements. Two men lean against the bar; without looking at each other they touch, sprawl against each other, wrestle on the floor. An oddball stranger, a sissy with a Superman suit under his clothes, challenges the elaborately cultivated machismo in the room with sultry stares and a bit of ladylike cooch dancing. When the rowdy regulars carry this female surrogate outside, he makes a play for a couple of them and they submit momentarily to forbidden pleasures. Finally the mob, furious at the discovery of its own weaknesses, seizes the guy with the synthetic girlfriend. They grab the doll and toss her back and forth, stab her to death, and run away. Her wretched lover screams after them, then falls on the ground, weeping over a bloody pile of plastic. The Superman escapes the gang’s worst punishment and reappears, strolling on the roof of the bar in the morning like Petrouchka, a symbol of all they despise and can’t suppress. STRANGE FISH surveys another group of starved souls, but the film allows them some kind of transcendence. Once again the trajectory goes from social ineptitude and pretense to uncontrollable violence, but here realistic neuroticism moves into metaphor. A group of men and women inhabit a hotel or a dormitory. People duck in and out of doors, pursue each other around corners in deserted hallways. When they gather in a commons room with a bar and a phonograph, they try to pair up and dance. One pitiful character named Nigel (Nigel Charnock) dithers about, trying to be a charming host, but only works himself into a paroxysm of chatter that drives the others away. People meet furtively in corners, horn in on duets. They taunt more vulnerable companions. These frantic pursuits resolve into nightmarish images. Wendy (Wendy Houstoun) invites a man into her room. A saintly, singing woman watches them. She drops two stones on the floor, unleashing a rain of stones. Wendy and the man make love but neither one of them reaches a climax. She thrashes wildly on the stony floor. She hears strange sounds and rips up the shaking floorboards to see muddy water churning underneath. Arms and legs thrash up like fish in a frenzy. She seeks out the hapless Nigel; struggling furiously, they fall into the water together. STRANGE FISH begins and ends in a chapel. A half-naked female Christ hangs on a cross. She is the singing woman who monitors, and perhaps causes, Wendy’s afflictions. At the end Wendy re-enters the chapel,calling for Nigel. At the end Wendy re-enters the chapel,calling for Nigel. The candles have blown out, the building seems ruined. The figure on the crucifix wails a lament and looks like an El Greco. Wendy climbs onto the cross, spills wine from a chalice on the Christ-figure, and kisses her brutally on the mouth. The Christ-figure crumples in agony and falls to the floor. I don’t necessarily believe that Wendy is relieved of her sexual angst as she faces out the doorway into the daylight, but her desperation seems at least temporarily appeased. The implication is she’s undergone a religious conversion, or perhaps the death of religious belief and religious repression. These psychological casualties are brilliantly created by the DV8 casts, and expertly filmed by the production collaborators. A handy booklet that comes with the DVD spares us having to pick their names out of the crawl, and includes a critical essay by Katja Schneider. Each piece has a different look and a different cinematic rhythm. DEAD DREAMS, adapted for the screen by Newson and David Hinton, is fixated on the bodies of the four men, and on their seductive heat. The pace is slow, deliberate, voyeuristic. The only time you’re conscious of their being in a place is when their games require it. One man climbs a ladder and throws himself off into the arms of another man, simultaneously challenging and surrendering. As he climbs higher, so do the risks. Another man crawls around the beams in an attic, scoping out the action below. Men murder each other over and over in the bathroom of a dingy hotel. ENTER ACHILLES happens in a bar, a brick-walled backyard, and a deserted waterfront. Instead of a no-space of desire, this bar is a stage set for the performance of masculinity. The action here is always enclosed and encoded by the protocols of such hangouts—uproarious contests, gladhanding and piss-off exchanges. When the fun escalates into scapegoating and mindless brutality, the play moves outside. What is overt and assertive in the jocks’ behavior encloses their secret fears of impotence. Newson and Hinton adapted STRANGE FISH for the screen with a painterly point of view. The camera often stands back to create an elegiac portrait of someone framed in a doorway, or freezes at the end of a corridor like a frightened eye-witness, as the characters chase one another. Later these architectural confinements fall away and the space dissolves into scarier dream images: the rain of stones, the misbehaving floorboards, the ruined chapel. The camera moves into the chaos, magnifying our disorientation. The soundtrack for this piece is especially evocative, with inarticulate voices, screams and shouts, and somber vocal chants. (Music is credited to Jocelyn Pool and Adrian Johnston.) All three films take a deadly turn. DEAD DREAMS winds from eroticism to homicide; Enter Achilles from burlesque to cruelty; STRANGE FISH from anxiety to hallucinatory drownings and vampirism. Of the three, STRANGE FISH is the only one that doesn’t make me slightly queasy. I think the reason is that its fantasy puts some distance between the viewer and the subject matter. These films set up and constantly manipulate a tension in the viewer between repulsion and pleasure. I’m sure they’re meant to do that, but then, are they pornography or critique? All DV8’s characters are horribly vulnerable. The weak ones permit themselves to be abused, ridiculed, destroyed. The strong ones are frail too, beneath their defenses. We’re appalled at their destructiveness, their humiliations, their failures to escape their own isolation, but at the same time we’re stirred by their beauty, their toughness and daring. We pity the victimized among them. Are we also supposed to pity the rapists, murderers, rampaging sociopaths? In staging their pathologies, is Newson sympathetic to them? Are they prisoners of their own constructed sexualities and desires? Do they have any autonomy to change or act differently? Is Lloyd Newson saying “society” is to blame for their dissidence? Is anyone to blame? Is it all to be condoned? Or is it all a reflection of our own hidden inclinations? One thing I’m sure of, these films are no mere entertainment. Lloyd Newson says DV8 aims only to show how people interact with one another. That’s carrying postmodern objectivity to extremes. “Feelings Are Facts, A Life” Yvonne Rainer 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 466 pages Book Review by James Hosking “I again find myself perilously close to the sticky terrain of confession with its attendant constraints and inevitable omissions,” writes filmmaker/dancer/author Yvonne Rainer (1934-). Enjoyment of “Feelings Are Facts” depends on one’s patience for dialogues induced by extensive and aggressive psychotherapy. The book’s intriguing mix of sexual inventory, career survey, and biting self-criticism can be both alternately entertaining and frustrating, as Rainer’s tome frequently becomes mired in the mundane and the esoteric. For those lacking in knowledge of fifties and sixties dance and performance, the text could seem obtuse- riddled with characters that are never brought to life behind their surnames. However, her exhaustive description of how one connects experience to art, and vice versa, does ultimately prove to be a very worthwhile exploration of the life of a working artist, particularly in such a period of massive change and possibility. “I can’t say “the miseries” have ever entirely disappeared.. Although I’ve looked to art to exorcise my demons, I can attest that… they eventually quieted down.” Dance is initially is a therapeutic entity to Rainer, one of the co-founders of the Judson Dance Theatre in 1962) at once “a way out of an emotional dilemma,” a means to “postpone a coming to grips with things,” and “something to do every day.” In short, it forms the framework of her identity, shaping her life after she has dropped out of college and come to New York City, the point at which the narrative galvanizes. The book is at its strongest when Rainer connects incidents in her past to their appearances in her work, particularly in dialogue or spoken word. Whether it is the illustration of a memorable confrontation with an o