Gabri Christa & Cynthia Pepper win DFA’s 2008 Finishing Funds Awards New York City/Caribbean-born choreographer and director Gabri Christa, and Californian choreographer and filmmaker Cynthia Pepper won Dance Films Association’s (DFA) 2008 Finishing Funds Award. Gabri Christa will use the award to finish her new short narrative dance film, SAVONETA (shown above), the second in a trilogy. The award will support editing costs, including musical editing. Grammy Award-winning composer and guitarist, Vernon Reid, will collaborate with Christa to develop the sound score. SAVONETA was shot at a plantation house, the Savonet, located in Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles and follows the story of a couple. Incorporated into the film as flashbacks, the final project includes original imagery of the building’s historical involvement with slavery. As Christa explains her vision, “I strive to tell a story, without the urge to explain the plot, or the need for the audience to ‘get it.” SAVONETA will be part of a permanent installation entitled ANOTHER BUILDING dancing that will be housed at the Museum Savonet in Curacao. Cynthia Pepper will use the DFA finishing funds to assist in the purchase of a WACOM board, which will be utilized to create a painted background for her dance film, CUBE. Involving three dancers and a collection of cubes, Pepper’s choreography “incorporates the fears of growing old […] using nests and eggs as a way of building on the themes of death, life and birth.”      

  7th Certamen Internacional de Coreografía Burgos-NY takes to the streets (and walls)! by Deirdre Towers The Indian Culture traditionally has displayed their art outside for all to see, to ponder, to quietly absorb into their consciousness. The idea of bringing art inside is a Western one. Gradually though, more and more sculpture, murals and performing arts are now being commissioned for public spaces. In the last three years, dance on camera has been projected outside in various parts of the world. What messages does that send? The 7th Certamen Internacional de Coreografía Burgos-New York presented video dance for the first time in Burgos, a small city in the north central of Spain, beginning with a lecture and clips by Deirdre Towers in the auditorium of the Caja de Burgos, the sponsor of the event, followed up by four nights of dance on camera projected on a large outdoor screen in the center of town. The image and sound quality of the projections were exquisite due to the collaborative team of A. Beatriz Rodriquez Unamuno from Caja de Burgos, the sponsor, working with Carlos D. Herera Sanchez, who shot the entire competition events and Luis E. Heras Lopez of Seltron, which provided the equipment and expertise. The chosen site was the fourth floor of the Caja de Burgos building in the Plaza de Santo Domingo de Guzman. Over the top floor of the seven story building was a digital clock. To the right of the screen was the sign “Casa Babylon,” appropriately suggesting the multiple tongues behind the eclectic sampling of dance on camera. Painted green, the Casa Babylon has a scraggly, hanging garden and the occasional tenant who stuck out her head to shake out her laundry. The screening was visible to anyone going to or from the Teatro Real, the 800 seat four ring theatre where the Choreography Competition was held at the same hours as the screening. Anyone stopped in traffic on the road that curves by the Plaza de Santa Domingo would also no doubt look up to the screening. For those who chose, they could sit outside the tavern right in the square, the benches scattered here and there, or dance. Images that linger with me are the two large businessmen who stopped their stroll to watch, started to leave, and then stopped again obviously stunned and fascinated. The old woman pressing up on her cane to twist her head up to the screen. A middle aged lady breaking into a mad dance to the hysterical approval of her girlfriends. A father twirling his daughter and throwing her up in the air. One of the sweetest images was a near empty square with the street cleaner pushing the last of the debris exactly on the closing of THE FLOWER SHOP, the animated short produced by Pawel Partyka. These reactions to dance on camera you never can enjoy if your audience is sitting inside a theatre. As the director of DFA, I was thrilled to be invited to this choreography competition, which in itself is an important step in recognition for dance on camera. Coming from New York where we are barraged constantly by neon signs and video advertisements pleading for our attention, I was aghast initially at the idea of dance on camera being presented in the center of town. I worried that no one would stay to see an entire video. How could the resolution of low budget independent films and low budget dvd compilations stand up to huge projection? Would this presentation demean dance on camera as mere kinetic wall paper? Two cases in which public screenings of dance films brought enormously positive results were set in the relatively small city of Troy and New York City. Helene Lesterlin wooed an uninitiated crowd in Troy, New York with dance on camera shorts projected on a large screen in the football field of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Her series charmed her circle to the point that RPI’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) convinced an alum to direct his million dollar donation towards the commissioning of dance video. David Michalek stopped people in their tracks to consider his SLOW DANCING project which was projected on four giant screens on the facade of the New York State Theatre, and subsequently in Los Angeles and London. Michalek’s project dared people to slow down and wonder what had they missed by living so fast. In Burgos, population 175,000, the mood is already tranquil, the pace is leisurely, and the evening pastime is the “paseo,” in which couples dress for the stroll. These strollers seemed more than happy to pause and witness the hip hop competition in a square or giggle at the screen image of blue-garbed Butoh dancers hoppling through a garbage dump, as they do in SCRAP LIFE. The founder of this competition, Alberto Estébanez Rodriguez who was brought up in Burgos, declared that he would change the site for next year’s projections. One suggestion was to show dance on camera on to the same wall as the one used for the performances of “Danza Vertical,” which brought the most buzz for this year’s competition. In addition to the categories of modern dance, new tendencies in contemporary modern dance, duos and solos, and hip hop, Danza Vertical (Vertical Dance) was added this year to the Burgos competition which awarded 51.500 € en prize money. See a video of vertical dance. The first prize in the category of Danza Vertical was given to David Gutiérrez for his mesmerizing duet TODO CONCUERDA. Accompanied by a cello/violin trio who dangled their legs over the roof of the Caja Círculo building, at the Plaza Virgen del Manzano, the duet was quite touching and stunning for its musicality, liberating in fact. David Gutierrez has been working in this art since 1999 in Sevilla, Spain and has clearly discovered a way to blend grace and daring in a way I have never seen. A reckless art like parkour developed by a generation or artists who are embracing the hard surfaces of an urban environment as though they were trampolines, Danza Vertical is a fascinating addition to the dance world. Terms and conditions of the Vertical Dance category/The Caja Círculo Prize were as follows. “A maximum of three choreographic acts will be selected, one being held on each day of the contest. The competition area will be in front of the Caja Círculo building, at the Plaza Virgen del Manzano, a clean, white surface six-metres wide and 27-metres from the ground to the flat roof, situated next to the Contest Marquee. The competition will begin when the Modern Dance, New Trends, and Solo and Duo competitions come to an end in the Contest Marquee, at approximately 23:45 h. Works under the heading of Vertical or Aerial Dance or those that use vertical surfaces as a means of presenting the dance may participate in this category. There will be a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 6 competitors. The duration of the works must be between 6 and 15 minutes. The choreographer will have to detail the apparatus and present a video recording of the act. Choreographers will bring their own materials, technicians and accident insurance cover. The apparatus and rehearsals will take place on the same day of the contest. There will be three days for the contest (one day for each competitor).” This seventh edition of the Certamen Internacional de Coreografía Burgos-NY clearly was embraced by the town, the media, and the participants. With the hip hip and salsa classes in the open plazas, the vertical dance and dance on camera on the walls, the lectures in the building where the Catholic Kings of Spain once greeted Christopher Columbus (financing his second trip to the Americas), and the performances in the grand old theatre, the competition brought a gush of creative vigor and an air of spontaneity to Burgos. Presiding over the competition was Kazuko Hirabayashi, the prestigious teacher of Martha Graham technique and choreography who has brought a group of dance students to Burgos for a summer intensive from State University of New York at Purchase and Juilliard School annually since 1999. The hardworking team behind the success of the competition, Alberto Estébanez Rodriguez, Sara Saiz Oyarbide, and Carlota de Luis Mazagatos, who also all perform and direct together their own Ballet Contemporaneo de Burgos, are to be congratulated. The sponsors: I.M.C. del Excmo. Ayuntamiento de Burgos, Fundacion Siglo para las Artes en Castilla y Leon, Junta de Castilla-Leon with the collaboration of I.N.A.E.M., Fundacion Autor -S.G.A.E., Caja Circulo, Caja Burgos, R.C.H. are to be applauded for their support of the art of choreography. For a complete list of the 2008 winners of the competition, please see ciudaddeladanza.com/certamen/ganadores/ganadores.html. Get ready to apply for next year’s competition. No U.S. performers applied this year! The open process in dance film by Daniel Conrad Jia Wu, a graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA) and UCLA, is developing a curriculum and touring program in China with the help of DFA. She plans to start this project in May, 2009, with director Daniel Conrad as the artist-in-residence/professor. Daniel Conrad wrote the article below as part of the preparation for teaching in a society that currently relies on highly standardized methods of instruction in the arts. Openness refers to artwork which is left undefined, contingent, to be completed by chance events or by the audience. In Chinese art, it goes at least as far back as Zhou dynasty Taoism, whose idea of wu wei (non-initiation) was central in improvisational art long before openness prevailed in Europe. Western openness starts (arguably) with the idea that experience is irretrievable, so instead of representing it directly, artists should turn inward: to themselves, to the medium, or to the mind of the audience. Whether this starts with Turner or Baudelaire is debatable, but it is full-grown by Mallarmé’s time. Calvino calls it “openness.” Umberto Eco calls it “open work.” Borges does not call it anything, but he continually reinvents it as, e.g., a book that changes meaning, an endless lottery, a book of sand, an infinite library, etc. Yasunari Kawabata, whose stories are often left unfinished, speaks of “emptiness,” by which he does not mean nihilism, but something more evocative, full of “sensuous fantasy.” In one approach to openness, semantic openness, the artwork offers multiple layers of possible interpretation without a fixed meaning or message. The audience completes the work when they interpret it. Some films work this way. In another approach, the structure itself is left open. Certain key elements are left to chance. Jazz, some dance, improvisatory theater, and interactive art work in this way. A film’s structure is fixed before it screens; however, in film (as in some painting), we may have a period of “temporary openness” during production, if chance events or unscripted improvisations are allowed to play major roles prior to editing. Are either of these approaches useful in making dance film? Let us start with temporary openness. In this approach, the filming process is deliberately unscripted, so accidents can be gifts. They give you combinations you could not invent; so the artist in this way escapes the confines of prior experience. This is not arbitrary work. Though some elements arrive randomly, these are selected for inclusion or exclusion by the director. And the role of chance disappears when the film is cut. The process requires more work from the director, not less. In addition to after-the-fact selection, it demands rapid choices as to when and how to impose restrictions. When there is no script to rely on, you are continually re-visualizing the film, as possibilities open, and adjusting the amount of random in the system. Perfect random is not interesting, because if anything can happen, then nothing is surprising. When using improvisation in dance film, the dancers’ freedom of action is a variable. Too much freedom can lead to superficiality, so the director modulates it, imposes rules, themes, or motivations. This is a balancing act; you open some elements and restrict others. Along these lines, I have found several principles to be useful. The first principle is non-initiation. If improvisors respond to action rather than initiating it, this allows them to work with the moment rather than a static script. When partnering, therefore, dancers must act as if their partner is always right. Of course, your partner is not always a person. I was recently filming in a moving streetcar in Prague. The natural daylight from outside was fluctuating wildly. The car itself was starting, stopping, lurching. I asked the dancers to respond to spontaneous changes in the lighting and momentum. This was not a purely improvisatory process, since they had some fixed choreography; still, the stresses and beats of the performances were driven by unpredictable environmental moments, and this brought the scene to life. The camera, if it is moving, is a partner, which is why the best dance cinematographers take dance classes. In stochastic locations (e.g., moving streetcars), there are at least three partners: the location initiates action, the dancers follow, and the cinematographer follows both the location and the dancers. The next principle is selection: omit inessentials and take advantage of mistakes. Improvisation generates much garbage and a few happy accidents. As in biological evolution, selection is essential to the process. In dance, one can cling to dull phrases for personal reasons. The sooner you leave them, the better. Editors say, “Kill your darlings.” Don’t wait for the editor. Conversely, when dancers make mistakes, even stupid mistakes, they may have discovered something brilliant. Mistakes can be hidden revelations or just chance events. If it works, you do not absolutely need to know why it works, but you do need to be open enough to see it working. If it works, try to keep it. Another principle is rhythm. Setting rhythms with counts or music creates unity not only between dancers, but also between shots, enhancing the potential of what Eisenstein called “rhythmic montage,” where cuts form loose rhythms without always falling directly on the beats. This unifies diverse elements and sets up expectations which can then be paid off in unexpected ways. Just gluing the best takes together can make a scene feel episodic. You are fighting the fact that improvisation allows dancers to do different choreography in each take. Rhythm helps the shots cohere, opening up a wealth of montage options. This is vital when using pseudo-matching action to simulate continuity across unmatched shots. In pseudo-matching action, you match the kinetics without matching the action; e.g., you cut from the rising leg of one dancer to the rising torso of a different dancer, and the conserved trajectory and momentum sell the cut. Larger-scale rhythms enable larger unities. E.g., try punctuating structured improvisation with moments of pre-set choreography in unison, triggered by set counts. Cuts falling near these counts gain power from the sudden coherence. Performance rhythms can be set by music or by oral counts. When choosing music to drive improvisation, pick what best inspires the dancers, which is not necessarily ideal for the finished film. Choose the sound-track music in post production. Motivation is the next principle. Any chance elements can start the flow of initiation, but you can strengthen this flow by attaching motivations. In Prague, one of the dancers imagined the streetcar was a difficult ex-lover, and this gave each lurch of the moving car an emotional resonance. The final principle is to make “sticky ends.” Think about how the shots can be cut together while you are filming. Start and stop all shots with sticky ends: i.e., the heads and tails should contain visual motifs that cut together easily. You can pan or tilt off into black, begin and end on rising action (upward movement), have dancers enter and exit the frame, or match the body positions and screen direction between the tail of one shot and the head of the next. If you plan to be cutting across the 180 degree axis for dynamic reasons, make sure your sticky ends have qualities that make the axis-cross convincing. These may include rising action (e.g., leaps), turns (e.g., pirouettes), collisions or crashes that fall on a natural downbeat, or dolly shots where the camera itself touches or crosses the axis. Now consider the other open-process approach: semantic openness. Critics often ask what a film is about or what it means. It may be more useful to ask what it does – what its function is. Artists try to convey an artistic intent or vision, to have an effect on the audience, which is not always the same as a meaning. Meaning, in the usual sense, is not always there; and when it is, it is not always vital to the effect. Renaissance paintings of the Madonna do not usually affect us through their theology. Bach’s fugues do not sound Protestant as opposed to Catholic. By contrast, we cannot ignore the politics of Goya’s “May 3rd”; and in Orson Welles’s CITIZEN KANE, the meaning of Kane’s dying word, “rosebud,” is central to the film. How can meaning be vital in one work of art and not in another? All art, whether music, painting, literature, or film, displays provocative structure. And with that structure, the artist intends to provoke us to perceive in certain ways. That is the intent, the effect, and the vision. Meaning is vital only when it plays a role in that provocation. Even when meaning is vital to the effect, it is rarely the whole story. If Kane’s “rosebud” is reduced to pure narrative meaning, it becomes only a tired parable with a moral. The slow discovery of this meaning, however, which includes “rosebud” as a climax, is deeply aesthetic. The process of discovery carries the artistic intent. Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON also involves a search for meaning, but the final interpretation is deliberately left open. This is semantic openness, and it is a powerful way to work. When we use semantic openness, we deliberately evoke multiple layers of possible interpretation without a single fixed meaning. There can be many overlapping layers of resonant meaning or just a few. The intent is to provoke the audience to make their own interpretations, thereby collaborating in the final stage of creation. Consider other art forms: late Monet paintings oscillate between modes of perception as you watch. Mallarmé said that to define is to destroy; to suggest is to create. Kafka’s “The Castle” and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” allow multiple interpretations. Expressionist paintings often omit facial details; the viewer supplies them. In Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamozov,” Father Zossima tells his acolyte to go into the world and practice love. Then he dies. Zossima is a saint, and saints’ bodies do not putrefy. Remarkably, Zossima’s body rots hideously. Dostoevsky withholds explanation. Borges tells of the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang who built the first Great Wall and burned all the books. Borges asks what these two acts have in common, then surmises that the aesthetic experience is only the imminence of a revelation which never actually arrives. Semantic openness is common in film. Films like RASHOMON find ambiguity and contingency in the plot. In Howard Hawks’s THE BIG SLEEP, the identity of one of the murderers is never revealed. In David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE and George Clooney’s SYRIANA, the plots are deliberately obscured by complexity. The ambiguity in these films is part of their effect. Not all films have plots, however, and more extreme examples of openness can be found in non-narrative films, or non-narrative scenes within narrative films. Sergei Paradjanov’s THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES comes to mind, as does Ron Fricke’s BARAKA, Akira Kurosawa’s DREAMS, and the ending of Kubrick’s 2001. Dance is well-suited to openness, since its substance is movement, not dialogue or plot. This is especially true of Modern dance; but even storybook ballet values movement over plot. Semantically open dance films include: PAS DE DEUX (Norman McLaren), AMELIA (Édouard Lock), and L’ETREINTE (Joëlle Bouvier & Régis Obadia). These films do not set fixed meanings, messages, morals. They are not meaningless; rather, they evoke multiple layers of meaning which the audience uses to construct their own interpretations. Filmmakers sometimes even try to defeat easy readings, to prevent the waves of possibility from collapsing around a frozen point. For example, in ONE FLAT THING, REPRODUCED (Thierry De Mey, Chor: William Forsythe), there are motifs of biological self-assembly and the emergent properties of self-organizing systems. There are many ways to read these motifs, each with different emotional and social resonances. The title does not prescribe a fixed interpretation; Forsythe’s titles rarely do. And director Thierry De Mey brilliantly expands the range of possible interpretations with his camera angles. Tight angles on dancers’ faces suggest individual emotions, while the high crane shots objectify the group, as if they formed a single composite organism. Lacking any pre-set interpretation, the viewer’s mind is set free to assemble its own interpretations. Why use openness? We humans cannot see what is happening to us if we are submerged in it. Artists make the normal strange and therefore visible. They provoke us to interpret the contradictory soup of life. Openness enhances this process; artists who use it are not making “art for arts sake,” but engaging the audience’s interpretive abilities, making them more agile, more adaptable. Faced with cognitive dissonance, we look for ways to look. Hamlet famously says that art holds a mirror to nature. This is a rich metaphor, not a plug for realism. When you hold a book to a mirror, it reverses the text left to right. Why left to right and not upside-down? Do mirrors sense gravity? Actually, we choose the axis of reversal when we turn the book to the mirror. If we turn it left to right, the text reverses left to right. If we turn it upside-down, the text reverses upside down, leaving the left-right axis unchanged. This act of turning a thing toward a mirror and then teaching the viewer how to turn it in that special way is what makes open work powerful. Because when there is no fixed interpretation, then the artist’s (and viewer’s) act of turning becomes far more significant. But the mirror metaphor offers more: holding a mirror to nature can mean copying its details, but it can also mean copying its methods. When we let chance events drive the lighting, dancing, and other mise en scène elements, and then select from that pool of possibility the shots that best fit, we use nature’s methods. When an audience selects fragments of contingent meaning from a field of possibility presented by an artist, and then, in flights of perception, assembles these fragments into personal coherence, they use nature’s methods. This is how human brains develop circuitry. This is how immune systems generate specificity. This is how species evolve. Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Harvard University Press, 1988. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. (From Opera aperta, 1962.) Transl. by Anna Cancogni. Harvard University Press, 1989. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New Directions Publishing, 1964. Kawabata, Yasunari. Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. Kodansha Int’l