dance video of the day - on buildings

Submitted by Susan Miller on Wed, 09/24/2008 - 06:59.

Noémie Lafrance launches a collaboration with Frank Gehry's buildings at Bard College - Annanadale on Hudson.

Read more aboout  Noémie Lafrance and her company Sens.

In this interview in the Gothamist she describes her working process and why she thinks of her work as an eco-system.

On why she is interested in site-specific works, "Ever since I started dancing, I’ve been interested in site-specific choreography. And I’ve always asked myself why is it that I have to sit in the dark to watch this exciting juicy amazing luscious dance that makes me want to jump off my seat."

She's not the first to engage in high risk dancing but I'm glad to see her going there. It has been a fascination for me always - the interaction of dance and architecture.

 

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"fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity"

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

--Elvis Costello, in an interview by Timothy White entitled "A Man out of Time Beats the Clock." Musician magazine No. 60 (October 1983), p. 52.

(his words not mine.)

To say words is to eat them.

(mine.)

(burp.)

what to make of stupid quotes

I don't know what this means. Do you mean dancing on/with buildings is stupid? Do you use a quote attributed to Elvis Costello to illustrate your own view on the matter? Just putting it out there because googleing dance and architecture brings it up in the search results. Please explain.

Two things:

Apparently the quote's provenance is in question. (but in my humble opinion, who cares?)

 Since I didn't know much about Elvis Costello, I googled him and learned this, "...during Costello's 1979 tour of the U.S., when one night in a bar in Columbus, Ohio, at odds with the Stephen Stills Band, Costello suddenly denounced Ray Charles as "a blind , arrogant, nigger," he said much the same about James Brown, and attacked the stupidity of American black music in general. Bramlett decked him; the incident quickly made the papers, then "People" magazine, and the resulting scandal forced a New York press conference - Costello's first real face-to-face encounter with journalists since the Fall of 1977 - where he tried to explain himself, and , according to both Costello and those who questioned him, failed.

EC: It's become a terrible thing, hanging over my head - it's horrible to work hard for a long time and find that what you're best known for is something as idiotic as... this."

Now that's stupid!I won't judge him based on this brief encounter though. It seems that for some he's been all the rage.

As to the use of the word "about" when applied to art of any sort, it is always a word that makes artists uneasy. The journey of creation is it's own "thing in itself". I have never met an artist who set out to make their art "about" something. So when a viewer, listener asks an artist "what's the work about?" it usually pisses them off - they have learned to take this high brow snotty attitude from their high brow snotty art school (often well paid, tenured, pensioned, safe in their ivory towers) professors. Well get a grip, I'd say to these sniveling SOBs because not everyone is trained to see what you see and fewer and fewer care.

Critics and authors write about art because people need a handle - a way in (and often a way out) of art. If I dance alone with no one watching is it like a tree falling in a forest that no one hears? Did the tree fall? Did I dance? Does my writing these questions make it more or less a possibility? 

When art stops being above the populace maybe it can get off its high horse and have a meal or a conversation with a nontrained potential appreciator.

Fell trees like no one's listening.

I've been wanting to use that quote forever; think it's funny, nothing more. I had originally heard it attributed to F. Zappa; only when I searched to post here did I find more credible credit to Costello.

I agree about about.

And I agree about high horses.

Ms. LaFrance says:

And I’ve always asked myself why is it that I have to sit in the dark to watch this exciting juicy amazing luscious dance that makes me want to jump off my seat.

So they're not in the dark anymore, but isn't the populace still looking above at the building, and still stuck in their seats?

...

It's hard for you to dance without yourself watching, no? And trees have ears. And butterflies start hurricanes.

parkour

Have you seen Parkour?

Goals less {lofty and artistic,}
and possibly more street- than site-specific,
yet still inventive and dexterrific.

David Belle's Parkour is a decent starting point.