Asset 104959
© Kampnagel
Asset 104959
© Kampnagel

Trisha Brown / Lucinda Childs / Claire Cunningham / Sonya Lindfors / William Forsythe / Adam Linder

Hall of Videodances Part 2: No Camera Trick

Info

Die jeweiligen Video-Tänze werden hier kostenlos verfügbar und bis 07. März abrufbar sein. Mit dem Ticketlink können Sie ein freiwilliges Festival-Ticket für 5, 10, 20 oder 30 Euro kaufen.

Past dates

The term video dance became established in Western contemporary dance in the 1980s to describe works that were not made for the stage, but were produced explicitly for the camera using the new video technology of the time. Numerous choreographers had already dared to experiment with the camera, such as Maya Deren, for example. Later, the American choreographer Merce Cunningham became one of the defining choreographers of this newly emerging genre. Common techniques of film and dance, such as montage, rhythm and tempo, form the basis for forms of video dance that open up other perspectives on dance and also redefine where it takes place and how it is mediated. Against the backdrop of general democratization through digital and social media, and ultimately in Corona times when choreographer:s are looking for new hybrid formats for dance, video dance has evolved aesthetically as well as politically through CGI technology or means of augmented reality that are not available on stage. From the first experimental films to the present day, the synthesis of dance and film has found expression in a variety of different formats, not the least of which has helped contemporary dance gain popularity. Dance existing as video also raises questions about reproduction, authorship, ownership of choreography, cultural appropriation, and the politicization of dance. FOKUS TANZ #7 juxtaposes existing video dances with new ones produced for the festival and makes them resonate with each other.

No Camera Trick

Whether stretching and accelerating time, close-up, sophisticated editing, split screen, VFX or bird's-eye view - the medium of film has many tricks at the ready that expand dance as part of the choreography, opening up possibilities for it that the stage cannot offer. The interplay of this aesthetic dialogue also opens up other possibilities of communication with the audience.

Trisha Brown/ Babette Mangolte: Water Motor (1978)

WATER MOTOR is a silent black and white film by Babette Mangolte shot in 1978 year when the choreography was developed by Trisha Brown. It shows two shots of the solo performance of the same name by dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown - an iconic dance piece from her early work.Both artists had known each other for several years. Babette Mangolte rented the Merce Cunningham Studio to shoot Trisha Brown dancing WATER MOTOR in 1978. Each takes of the dance was started with a long pause before the dance started and a long pause after the dance was over, so Trisha was totally still before she started to move and still after ending the movement, permitting a fade in from black and a fade out to black. The film it is more than two takes of the two-and-a-half-minute choreography – as the second take was filmed in slow motion, at 48 frames per second, in an intuition about the intricacy of the movements. Thanks to the cinematic trick, the energetic, flowing choreography becomes recognizable in all its complexity, simultaneously gaining lyricism and entering into dialogue with itself.

Lucinda Childs: CALICO MINGLING (1973)

In CALICO MINGLING, two artistic handwritings combine to create a mesmerizing ten-minute video artwork: Lucinda Childs, after her solo works of the 60s as well as her preoccupation with objects of everyday life, now, at the beginning of the 70s, turned to working with group formations, with complex geometric sequences in seemingly simple choreographic patterns - even before she finally inscribed herself in dance history with the minimalist piece DANCE in 1979. French filmmaker Babette Mangolte hit New York in the early 1970s, frustrated with the male-dominated French film scene and fascinated by the tension between movement and motionlessness. Figures from the experimental New York performance milieu and Mangolte quickly found an artistic symbiosis. CALICO MINGLING, filmed in Fordham University's Robert Moses Plaza, shows four dancers in ceaseless step-motion. Filmed sometimes from a distance, sometimes from a bird's eye view, the »hard-edged concentrated insensitivity« (Jill Johnston) unfolds its own urgency.

Sonya Lindfors / Esete Sutinen: Journey (2020)

Journey is a dream of a path. A contemplation into the multiple diasporic trajectories, pathways both lost and found. In the shortfilm dancer Esete Sutinen travels through different states, balancing between the past and the future. After uncertainty and letting go, a new direction opens up.

Sonya Lindfors is a choreographer who also works processes of community organizing and education. She graduated with a Master in Choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2013, is co-founder and artistic director of UrbanApa, a community of interdisciplinary and counter-hegemonic art practice that provides a platform for new discourses and feminist artistic practice. Esete Sutinen graduated with a master's degree in dance from the Theatre Academy of Helsinki in 2005. She has worked with numerous renowned Finnish choreographers such as Alpo Aaltokoski, Sonya Lindfors, Virva Talonen, Marjo Kuusela, Ervi Sirén, Tommi Kitti and Petri Kekoni.

Claire Cunningham: Resemblance

A person in a bedraggled building assembling and disassembling a crutch with the routine, precision and dexterity of a soldier. British choreographer Claire Cunningham invites us to consider the constructive as well as destructive potential of innovative tools we humans have invented. Eerie and impactful, the scene evokes associations of contemporary conflict, but also points to struggles that lie ahead. Claire Cunningham was last seen live at Kampnagel in February 2020 with her lecture-performance 4 LEGS GOOD.

William Forsythe: Bookmaking (2008)

William Forsythe is one of the most important choreographers of our time. He revolutionized ballet in its understanding of self and form, broke through aesthetic boundaries with unforgettable contemporary choreographies, and continues to question basic organizational principles of dance in installation, film, and internet-based knowledge development. It shows the choreographer attempting to print a book with his own body. In a grid of 12 contrapuntally edited frames, Forsythe is seen performing this rudimentary and material-based act.

Adam Linder: Prélude To Descend Festival Premiere (2021)

The choreographer Adam Linder plans a new project, with five exceptional dancers, that focuses on the vocabulary of ballet and rethinks its place in dance culture. Retaining the articulation, precision and coordination of this traditional dance technology but letting go of the Eurocentricity and heternormative agendas. Prélude to Descend is a video study that Adam Linder has produced as a precursor to his next major work for the stage. This video riffs on the currents of de-stablization and rupture that permeate our Western cultural present. In 6 minutes and 16 seconds Linder deploys the full use of steady cam, vfx, dynamic editing and a virtuosic post-industrial sound score to mediate on which hybridized bodies may emerge from the rubble of this timely overturning of former ideals.