Monday, December 5, 2011

Environmental Performance, The Gaze

Look at my Channel on Youtube for....

Artefacts Dance; The Gaze:

Dancers at the Window
Dancers beyond Art Objects

Jacques Lacan in Book XI takes a twist and a turn veering away from Sartre in his theory of the gaze. Sartre looks at the "Other" as opposed to dolls, mannaquins, and puppets as distinct.

Lacan diverges and investigates solitude and the intrusion of the the human gaze within the field of conciousness.

I am aware of the feminine legacy in dance and seek to challenge the space that dancers take up in the art world. This brings into question the history of power relations in the art world.

Do dancers have the right to be acknowledged as art?
Is the pedastool an elevation and a very small space of control?
Do we look at the gallery and acceptance within the art world longingly or do the arts patron look at dancers through the glass never truly humanizing us?
Are we one step away from exile or are we embraced within the cannon of art history as action artists?
Is the nature of dance as a female pyramid with the few men at the point ready to toppel?
Are we still just pressed against the glass or elevated in the end?


As the leaves fall I ask myself about the nature of the Gaze in a dancers life.

Much love,
Heather

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Choreography Project

http://www.youtube.com/user/dancerHEP

Hello everyone,

Please watch my choreographic project "Strange Angels" here looking at the spine as a source of stability and fluidity both anchoring and transforming our basic movements into lush liquid dance. I am looking at natural forms like fall leaves for inspiration and ripe golden hours in our lives where we transcend our blind spots in love and life and the shy opens within.

Enjoy
Heather

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Choreography Final Performance

All are welcome to some view the latest dance creation by Artefacts Dance. "Melodies and Desires" at Lisner Auditorium November 22 at 1:30 pm as part of a celebration of the arts for the Thanksgiving season, dare to connect with artists, students, and instructors in this annual GWU/Walls arts event.

Upcoming Artefacts Dance performances

All please feel free to come by The Smith Gallery of Art on November 15 from 6-8 for a gallery opening of Obstruction which explores the perception of blocks and blindspots in perception and arts ability to remove them within. ArtefactsDancers will perform at 7 surrounding the Gallery, on the Bridge suspend in the Sky and into the gallery space. The exhibit runs through December 2 and an Artefacts DanceFilm will be the media installation within the exhibit. Come out and celebrate art in all of it's forms!

Nov. 7 Environmental Performance Assignment

All check out you tube video, just got the IPad and videoed on it but uploading to vimeo from it requires an expensive app. !!! So just google you tube then enter: ArtefactsDance Environmental Performance out of the box, that's it. I challenged myself to do improv in public, something I never do, also I used the concept of speed, spins, and aggression and connectivity to the architecture again all foreign moves for me on an external bridge, maybe the program is moving me quickly across this bridge into a divergent performance space.

Monday, October 24, 2011

October 24th Melodies and Desires

"Love and the Body"

The Backbone Project

Script: create an eight movement phrase with gesture and physical challenge that you enjoy

Directions: choose your word from the 3rd through the 5th poem below to enter into your phrase

2nd Directive: Stand and gesture to the audience from the word that you chose above to bring the audience into the emotion of the theme once accomplished fall out of that state onto the ground, slowly recover

3rd Directive: Join another dancers dance and accumulate falling directive
During I'll be the rhythm and you'll be the beat

End

Melodies and Desires

Follow these instructions
Do exactly as I do
Lean your shoulders forward
Let your hands slide over to my side
Move your body closer
Let your heart meet mine

Love is the harmony
Desire is the key
Love is the melody
Now sing it with me

Come a little closer
Take a look at me
This light is so obvious
I want you to see
Come a little closer
Look me in the eye
Then repeat with me one more time

Love is the harmony
Desire is the key
Love is a symphony
Now play it with me

Love is the harmony
Desire is the key
Love is a symphony
Now play it with me

You'll be the rythm and I'll be the beat
You'll be the rythm and I'll be the beat
Then I'll be the rythm and you'll be the beat
And love, the shoreline, where you and I meet

Love is the harmony
Desire is the key
Love is a symphony
Come sing some with me

Monday, October 17, 2011

Dancer Rehearsal 1 & 2

"http://vimeo.com/3064710"
"http://vimeo.com/30639753"

October 17th

Festival Artist Roster
October 17th

Thomas Quirk- Directs the action and curates the artists. Intersects include the interface of audience and performer.


Adam Gruba- Gritty and organic, nudity, fire, smoke, metalics, crushed underfoot in an impromptu sculpture and lined between trees blowing in the wind, his signature is immersive environmental intersection, conception, and revelry.

Agnes Nedregard- She assembles found objects with a sense of dilapidated off-kilter absurdity. We are placed in an unknown world part playground part social commentary.

Alyssa Lee Wilmot, Group A- If Andy Warhol and Molissa Fennly got together a performance art group this would be an approximation but with a mellow Cali. Vibe. Very curious about the “Remote Performance” Hold on to your pants this group can dance, not your typical performance slock.

Andi & Sun- Duo performers leave language and gesture subverted, deconstructed, opaque and encoded.

BBB Johannes Deimling- The living word a nightmare and a decoded message are the afterimages burnt on the retina of BBB.

Beatriz Albuquerque- Abramovic’s protégé or her little Latin worker, you decide. I say a female powerhouse on the rise, unshrouded, lady dipped in red.

Clare Dyson- We are in art school again, supper saturated in obscure imagery and street life captured in an instant. Raw, real, and steady with a beat undercurrent. Clare goes to Paris the city of lights and love and seems not to surrender.

Francis O’ Shaughnessy- Mad hatters, out of a puritan regime. An artist turns to performance to contemplate the games we human’s play.

Frans van Lent- His work is collectable and conservationist to some degree, recording the passing of time and alterations in the location of the body and the senses.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Smith Gallery

Monday October 3rd

12:40-12:50
Dance in a Box
at GWU Smith Gallery of Art
watch for it...

Sleep Deprived

Script:

Title: “Sleep Depraved”


Intention:

To explore states of consciousness and awareness, enacting the act of sleep within performance. Our dance is an improvised mystery based on a revealed score and a recored performance.


Performance score:

Performers must perform without viewing each other’s movement

Must keep eyes closed throughout

Audience must all stand around us looking down upon us

Dance phrase:

Lay down roll left and then roll right
sleep/calm
Then knock a bug off that continually crawls on us during sleep
Sleep/calm
Something shocks up jump up
Sleep/calm first
We hear a joke in our sleep we laugh
Sleep/calm
Dance in our sleep
Sleep/calm



Reflection:

Performers will view each other performance video to see how closely they interpreted the choreography.

Potential Research Areas

5 areas of research:

The question is…

Are these divergent categories?

Should they reference a singular theme?

I understand only I can answer these questions.


Passions and inspiration

Creating the world I want to join…

1 Green homes/architecture/ hauntingly beautiful spaces
Events and art locations connected to space

Souce space for art/dance evemts
Assistance from The former ambassador to Paraguay- Meridian Hill
Contat Steve at Parks and People
Contact Salon Home


2 Body-Mind medicines
Dance integrating yoga theory and practice, consciousness practiced
Intergrate my yoga certification with my dance paractice


3 Visual arts, new media, art/dance film/ art galleries
collaborations with filmmaker and photographer on visual media and dance
2 up and coming DC artists and me


4 Leading women of ancient culture and today
Grants for Wemon
Gender Equality and Genius


5 Aesthetics
fashion and integrated visual media
Bill
Documentary

Just Say No

Just Say No Project!

No to limiting the gifts



No to unequal time to articulate information

Lucinda Childs Taught High School Dance

No to disempowering timetables

Martha Graham had her first full evening of dance presentation at age 38

No to women without purpose

Isadora Duncan Created a social revolution

No to marginalization

Margaret H’Doubbler created an educational revolution

No to women empowering men and their contributions above and over other women

Grants for Women is new for me

No to women discriminating against each other
As this is discrimination against oneself

I have been embraced at least fleetingly by the Opera Ballet, The Kennedy Center, a graduate MFA, the NEA am I legitimate yet? Perhaps the question is, are you able to handle the fact that I am gifted.

No to being the choreographer with no time to be a part of the art and dance

I am making friends with a filmmaker so I will exist for all time

No to any process that takes me out of creative growth and flowering

Just like my name I am a very hardy mountain flower
Shrouded by mist when necessary

Dance View/On-Line and News

Selected Dance Viewing:
On-Line



1 “Lazy Susan Part 1”
Tatiana Baganova


This choreography contains anything but lazy aesthetics, but the technique is released and clean while circular and repetitive. Movement accumulates and is reformulated. I like the sculptural quality of the dance and the space between the joints, the space between movements as they flow into one another. The woman in the green gown has an amazing spatial sense of multi-layered spiralic dancing. There are edges of the bizarre in the duet with bouncing seated performers in the back.


2 “Oyster”
Inbal Pinto

Again I am drawn to the absurd and bizarre within this circus of moving bodies and shifting imagery. Scenes of lightly harnessed dancers cavort like toddlers on leashes while tuxedoed men keep them tethered. The floating twosome are lightly controlled again by guiding men on the ground through contact with the ladies feet as they dangle. Are these pieces about subtle control amid the seemingly playful nature of relationships?





3 “Dance”
Lucinda Childs


This collaboration between Lucinda, Phillip Glass, and video artist
is interesting because of the consistency of the aesthetic all three have committed to which has not deviated since the inception of their seminal works. Repetition and accumulation are the primary ingredients that have made the careers of all three. I am wondering about the elegance of following an impulse through its evolution over the course of decades. The simplicity and stringency is accomplished with seemingly effortless ease. This intrigues me.


4 “Rosas Rosas”
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

The repetition of movement along with the intense delivery of passionately
expressive dance are primary elements that deliver this dance. The compelling
rhythm of the score by De May mesmerize me. Is this a dance about more primal
physical need than we ever see by a post-modern choreographer? This is
the beginning of a new genre, expressionism overtakes the shell that is left of post-
modern dance, finally.








Dance News:
In search of… the sublime
ADI updates the artist roster!
Jane Comfort is on this weekend at ADI and she is the Washington Post editors pick.
What an interesting way to enter October. Pinkline is throwing a party bus
champagne and cheese event, that I will miss but the show not a chance.
All my favorites, absurdity, beauty norms examined, and altered states of
conciousness. Definitly not one to miss.
Is there a new curator of the roster at ADI, things are looking up!?!




Dana Tai Soon Burgess
Dance Place

Monday, September 12, 2011

Videos of Ono, Beuys, and Abramovic

Ono

The Cut was much more provocative
Why do we need to conceal the body?
What happens when we allow others to cut this privacy away?
Yoko almost looked vulnerable after her bra straps were cut
Yoko vulnerable
I think not
even without clothing
in the cutting away
who we are remains
we can't cover that up
just the body

Fly- like nails of sound on the chalk board with a fly buzz buzzing on and on the toes and body


Beuys
Shaman
He is a very strange and foolishly brave man
He seeks to recapture an essential relationship
to a wild animal, coyote
trickster
Creator
Joseph is making a leap into the spirit of performance
he does not want to be an art object
he is not the performer

Abramovic

The early work RestEnergy is the most intense
the drawn bow, the tension between two bodies, never resting
like having your heart pierced
through a great love
Was it Ulay?

Sunday, September 11, 2011

http://vimeo.com/28814605

Here is the vimeo link for Lab 2 then Lab 1

Personal History

Experiential:
I danced with a water bottle, in a quiet yoga studio after a long vinyasa class
I felt clean and empty
desiring a space free of my past personal history
that is impossible

Yoga is a primary language I have had a relation with since 1993
I am certified, the state I enter is one I need weekly
it anchors me physically
this came through my body and the space

Water is cleansing and healing
Regeneration
seeking blank space
quiet

The water is contained
the healing we need is often very internal
balanced in the hidden spaces

Process Outcome:
I balanced the water bottle on my head in the video, I was seeking balance
stillness amid the flow
Dancing in a yoga studio after class feels like a marathon
water kept me able to continue
I want to know how much can I minimize my contextual references while still holding firm to my intention?

Please have a look at the vimeo fro Lab1  and Lab 2

Move Pure

Experiential:
approaching a pure state
burning off the ennui
movement activation
candle lit
in me

The feeling is like approaching a room of a house that has not been opened in years
airing out and letting movement bring in flickering lights

phrases poured out and repeated
my body very much wants this dance

Process Outcome:
Can dance be approached like a casual everyday mystery?
Poetry is what takes shape from playtime in an open space
I would like to share this free space in rehearsal rather than dictate all of the movements
Can we use dance as a means of communicating our inner state,
instead of having everyone hop to the same beat?
Why do we value uniformity in dance?
I know I am more open to idiosyncrasy in the state of moving pure.