The French-German tv channel arte has shown a really beautiful dance short film by choreographer and director Hans Beenhakker yesterday. Bennhakker who used to be a member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble. “Shake Off” premiered in 2007, it was recorded in one shot and shows dancer Prince Credell moving through different times and spaces. You can stream it for free within the next 7 days, I hope the video works outside of France and Germany. It can also be found on the “Essential Dance Film” collection, a selection of award-winning dance movies that can be streamed and bought on Amazon (US only).
“Choreographer Mehmet Sander is captured on 16 mm film performing “Single Space” in Los Angeles, CA 1994. Choreographed and performed by Mehmet Sander. Produced and directed by Peter Etnoyer. Cinematography by Dana Gonzales. Special thanks to the Zanuck Company for lights and equipment.”
+++ Lemonade are currently working on a follow-up to their “Pure Moods”-EP and have just released a nice new free track called “The Place Where You Belong”. The song is a cover of an R’n B tune by Shai released in 1994. You can download it right here, for more info check out Lemonade’s tumblr. The Place Where You Belong by LemonadeMusic
+++ Stream Magnetic Fields singer Stephin Merritt‘s new album “Obscurities” on Paste Magazine. The album was released last week via Merge Records. +++
+++ Oakland’s Brontez Purnell has not only just released a new video with two new songs of the upcoming The Younger Lovers album “Rock Flawless”, but also this gorgeous short film of a performance of his very own Brontez Purnell Dance Company. The piece is called “Free Jazz” and premiered at the Berkeley Art Museum in February, read more about it here.
Calling all artists, music lovers, creative-straights and art-fags, dadaists, people who love to dance, and funky peeps.
This Saturday night 4 June, DADATEK, a creative initiative for the curation of bizarre art parties, presents KITA – aka Kunst für Irrationale Tugend und Ablichtung – in other words, the art of play!
After their smashing celebration of yellowism (really, they did over-the-top yellow) in last month’s YOLK!, the Dadatek crew returns with another playful art avant-extravaganza. They have pulled together twelve internationally-renowned artists to present (inside and outside) site-specific and specially-commissioned pieces for KITA; all focused around notions of PLAY, experimentation, the naive and visionary. From sculpture and installation to collage, video and bizarre sound art, KITA will take over the 200 square metre space of Panke and transform it into a huge playground.
“Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men” is a DV8 Physical Theatre piece from 1988 writen by the Australian choreographer Lloyd Newson. DV8 is a londonian theater, directed by Newson himself, and notorious for dance performances since the mid 1980s.
Based on a true story, the 80 min-long performance is a somber narrative about serial killer Dennis Nilsen, the man responsible for 16 murders in London in the 80’s.
The show depicts, as the killer himself called it, a « vain search for inner peace ». It presents Nilsen’s willingness to kill as a result of a societal homophobia when, seeking for compagny, he’s only able to get ride himself of his intimate struggles in a tragical way.
In the performance, the violence is translated into a sensual dance between the 4 protagonists, a very physical choreography in which, even if gays are mainly depicted as lonely men torn between their desires and anxieties, one-night stands and murders are still presented in a strangely romantic way.
The stage production was adapted in 1989 by David Hinton for the British television: the 10 parts of the piece are filmed in black and white in dark crusing areas, SM bars and other playgrounds for games of seduction and death. With at the end, a nice song from Dusty Springfield.
I personally recommend the part 4, “I just want to be with you – Alone”, one of the most convincing scene of the show.
with Nigel Charnock, Russell Maliphant, Douglas Wrigh and Lloyd Newson.
DVD : DV8 Physical Theatre (“Dead dreams of monochrome men” + “Strange fish” + “Enter achilles”), 158 min, 2007, Arthaus.
It seems obligatory to say that these ones are not created by the musician Nick Cave but by a sculptor and performance artist with the same name from Chicago. More about the suits in the little video at the end of this post and in this NY Times article. Via skeetshot/pull.
Olof Dreijer of The Knife, Matthew Sims aka Mt. Sims and Janine Rostron aka Planningtorock have worked together on the soundtrack of “Tomorrow, In A Year”, an opera about Charles Darwin and his evolution theory which was brought on stage by the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma (I already posted a clip of the piece here). As far as I know the soundtrack is going to be released tomorrow and can be prelistened to on The Knife’s webpage.
You wanted all journalists that are going to interview today to read the transcript of your roundtable conversation about the way this whole project started and on what ideas your soundtrack to Hotel Pro Forma’s Darwin opera is based. But something that still isn’t really clear to me is how you actually interacted with the other ones involved in the project. For example: At what stage was the stage performance when they asked you to make the music?
Olof Dreijer: It started the same for all people involved in the project. In the beginning Hotel Pro Forma gave us a loose framework for the piece. It was a long list of literature and they also told us that the play was supposed to feature three singers, six dancers and that it should focuse on biology and geology. We also did some research by going to museums wit them, we went to the Nature history museum and the geology museum for example.
The italian guy in the first video stops talking at 0:30. Thanks Todd & Martin for introducing me to Mr Berkeley! Another one of his stunning choreographies here.
The gorgeous video to the new Junior Boys song “Bits and Pieces” features Twista, Vixen and Snoopy, three dancers of the Canadian Voguing collective “House Of Monroe”. That group was formend in 2006 and since then seems to have a huge influence on the ballroom scene in Toronto (I think they even may have been the ones who have established it). You find a lot of other videos featuring their dancers if you search for House of Monroe on Youtube. (via produzentin)
The following video delivers some nice insights into “Tomorrow, in one year”, an electro-opera that’s supposed to show the world seen through the eyes of Charles Darwin. The “play” or whatever you want to call it is a co-production between a really good Danish dance/performance group called Hotel From Forma (which brought it onstage) and pop-duo The Knife (who wrote the music for it), and it looks as weird and exciting as I thought. It’s a pity they’re going to only show it a few times in the next few months. You can check out the tour dates here.
