Arnold Layne v David Noonan?

Is anyone else seeing this connection?

© David Noonan/Photographer: Unknown.

The Trial | Shuji Terayama

As part of my research for the Vietnam & Rethink projects,  I went to the ‘I Am a Terayama Shuji‘ symposium at Tate Modern yesterday.  It ended in a presentation of two of Terayama’s live action works bridging cinema and performance with the participation of Terayama’s original collaborator Henrikku Morisaki.  The Trial (1975) begins with a man hammering nails into a city street before normal social order collapses and the ‘disturbance’ spreads to an act of violent audience participation.  Terayama made this work for projection on a specially constructed screen and provides white leader at the end as an invitation for audience members to abandon their position as spectators and take possession of their own energies, hammering nails into the surface of the image (see images above).

Questions were an important part of the work of Shūji Terayama(1935–1983) whose striking creative work exists in a liminal space between fact and imagination. Terayama’s career recalls an eerie tale of Japanese folklore in which a face shifts to become a different face. An acclaimed filmmaker, poet, radio and stage dramatist, essayist, photographer and horseracing tipster (with no less than eight volumes of commentary to his name) Terayama was, in the words of theatre critic Akihiko Senda, ‘the eternal avant-garde’.

In an era when Japan’s underground was reaching a fever pitch, Terayama was a crucial player in a complex network of creative expression, encompassing such counter-cultural legends as singer Akihiro Miwa, photographer Daido Moriyama and graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo.

As a tribute to this ‘many-headed’ artist, Tate have curated an astonishing film and video programme of his trailblazing shifts through varied media and performance; Terayama always made work that was interrelated, often producing visionary and unexpected outcomes in whatever his chosen form.  You can find out more here.

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A different kind of performance: Tacita Dean

This is a quick test, messing around trying to get to grips with iMovie……still a lot to learn!

FILM is an 11-minute silent 35mm film by Tacita Dean, projected onto a gigantic white monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall. It is the first work in The Unilever Series devoted to the moving image, and celebrates the masterful techniques of analogue film-making as opposed to digital. The work evokes the monumental mysterious black monolith from the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film feels like a surreal visual poem, including images from the natural world among others, with the epic wall of the Turbine Hall showing through, in a montage of black and white, colour, and hand-tinted film.

Tacita Dean is a British artist now based in Berlin, best known for her use of film. Dean’s films act as portraits or depictions rather than conventional cinematic storytelling, capturing fleeting natural light or subtle shifts in movement. Her static camera positions and long takes allow events to unfold unhurriedly. Other works have attempted to reconstruct events from memory, such as an infamous thwarted attempt to circumnavigate the world.

Many of Dean’s works show the ways in which architecture can be transformed by the camera’s lens. Craneway Event 2009 follows the choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and his dance company rehearsing in a former Ford assembly plant, built of glass and steel and overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Dean’s film allows the ever-changing light of this environment to fall in rhythm with the dancers’ movements.

Read more here.

Related articles

• Exhibition in focus: The Unilever Series, Tacita Dean at Tate Modern (telegraph.co.uk)
• Tacita Dean, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall (independent.co.uk)
• Tacita Dean’s Turbine Hall Film pays homage to a dying medium (guardian.co.uk)
• Tacita Dean, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (independent.co.uk)
• Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall transformed into stretched cinema (telegraph.co.uk)

Lucinda Childs

Just got back from seeing the 1979 revival of DANCE by Lucinda Childs and the movie Lucinda Childs by French director Patrick Bensard at the Barbican which were both AMAZING!

Influential choreographer, dancer and opera director Lucinda Childs was an original member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York. During the early 1960′s, most independent modern dancers struggled to have their work showcased. However, as Sally Banes suggests in her book Greenwich Village 1963, the world of dance dramatically changed with the formation of the Judson Dance Theater. In her opinion, the theater was a “vital and highly visible collective that made its impact, not only on the dance world, but on the village art scene,” as well.

The theatre grew out of a dance composition class taught by Robert Dunn, a musician who had studied with John Cage. Unlike most dance troupes, the members of the Judson Dance Theater were both trained dancers, as well as, untrained visual artists, musicians, poets, and even filmmakers. On July 6, 1962 the theatre company gave its first performance, Concert of Dance #1, at the Judson Church. For the next twenty years, the Judson Dance Theater would dominate postmodern dance.

Part of the success of the theatre was due to the conscious effort of its artists to work collectively.  DANCE is a collaboration between Childs, composer Philip Glass and artist Sol LeWitt.

Related articles

• Step-by-step guide to dance: Lucinda Childs (guardian.co.uk)
• Lucinda Childs Dance Company: DANCE – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Lucinda Childs: top five dance clips (guardian.co.uk)
• How Einstein helped dancer Lucinda Childs (guardian.co.uk)
• Lucinda Childs, Barbican Theatre, London Richard Alston, Robin Howard Dance Theatre, London (independent.co.uk)

Unfashion by Mariana Lucia Marquez

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Fashion design, in its avant-garde form, has a disposition to become (fashionably) unfashion. In Mariana’s work, she interprets a recent show of Hussein Chalayan to explore how a performance may “succeed” by failing to live up to its idiom. Her thesis takes its cue from Jérôme Bel’s notion that symbolic failure on stage, far from undermining the performance, produces a palpable artistic surplus. Find out more at www.marianaluciamarquez.com

Title: Unfashion – Bonnie Bird Theatre, Trinity Laban

Choreography: Mariana Lucia Marquez

Performers:  Diina Bukareva, Alenka Herman, Emma Zangs

Sound:  Soundtrack from Hussein Chalayan’s “S/S 2003 Manifest Destiny” Show

Lighting:  Andy Hammond, Ashley Bolitho

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Dave, Michael, Tracy, John, Sofie, Fred and the others

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Title: Dave, Michael, Tracy, John, Sofie, Fred and the others – Bonnie Bird Theatre, Trinity Laban.
Choreography: Emma Zangs
Performers: Diina Bukareva, Danell Nelson, Marta Ucinska, Mariana Lucia Marquez, Natasha Cesco G., Runa Kaiser, Apostolos Gkoumas.

This dance piece is asking the question of: ‘What is an original piece?’.
Using previously created movements, the piece enhances the fact that creating a choreography does not start necessarily with the creation of movement but with the act of editing.  Beg, borrow or steal.

emmazangs.com

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ReBodied by Diina Bukareva

Title: ReBodied (at Studio Theatre)
Choreography: Diina Bukareva
Performer: Runa Larsen
Lights: Gregor Knüppel

The memory is shared; it is not personal, neither objective. It is re-lived, not re-done. Perceptional recollection is not necessarily truthful. Everything can be imagined. If it is not true to me, it could still be true to you.

C’est chouette (That’s nice) by Claire Piquemal

Title: C’est chouette (That’s nice) – by Claire Piquemal.
Lighting: Gregor Knüppel.

These images were taken at Claire Piquemal‘s dance performance at Studio Theatre, Trinity Laban last month.  You can watch Claire dancing the piece here.

Aomori Project: Of Landscapes Remembered

These photographs were taken at the dress rehearsal of Sioned Huws Aomori Project at Greenwich Dance Agency last Thursday evening.  The performance brings together local people from Greenwich and professional artists from Japan in a new dance work, especially created for the Borough Hall. Three shamisen musicians, one minyo singer and two Tsugaru dancers join a group of 5-70 year olds in a work  continued since 2008 from Sioned’s first experience of harsh winter conditions in  Aomori, a region of Northern Japan.

You can keep up to date with Sioned as she continues to explore Japan and gather material for Aomori Project: Of Landscapes Remembered at her new Greenwich Dance Blog.

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