Posts in Category: Dance

The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

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I think “The Hollow Men” has just found its ideal multimedia interpretation. I remember being utterly enthralled with Eliot’s poem at age 13, and this projection performance video from the artist duo Decomposing PianosJulia Krolik and Owen Fernley—brings it all back. Here’s the description:

T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem The Hollow Men is spoken in unison by a trio of computer generated voices. Photography, code-generated video, original music and choreography are combined for performance. This work was part of Chipped Off’s wasteAWAY.

Performed: June 4th to 6th, 2015 at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, Kingston ON.
Dancers: Meredith Dault, Tracey Guptill & Helena Marks
Chipped Off: Kim Renders, Robin McDonald and Dan Vena

See Facebook for more on the Chipped Off Performance Collective.

Sun/Moon Diglossia (Dancepoem) by Eleni Cay

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Eleni Cay is poet, filmmaker and dancer here. Her dance partner, Chris Bradley, is the choreographer. Music is by David Garrett, and Sarah Jane Mukherjee and Christian Payne provided the voiceovers. To read the text of the poem, click through to YouTube.

Cay is a researcher originally from Slovakia, and is currently poet-in-residence at Westbury Arts Centre in Milton Keynes, UK. She has an essay up at Poetryfilmkanal, “Poetryfilms: when poetry and film have a flirt.”

Halloween by Hugo Claus

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UPDATE (3 Oct. 2015): Swoon has re-edited the English version, replacing the Jovan Todorovic film clip with footage by Jan Eerala.

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Belgian artist Marc Neys A.K.A. Swoon recently released two entirely different films for a poem by his great countryman Hugo Claus: “a ‘European Dance-version’ (using Hugo’s reading from Lyrikline) and an ‘American Road movie version’ using a fantastic reading Michael Dickes made from the English translation by John Irons,” as he put it in a blog post.

The visual idea for the Dutch version came to me watching a great series of short videos by dancer/artist Nadia Vadori-Gauthier: One Minute of Dance a Day:

‘since January 14, 2015, I’ve been posting one minute of dance to this blog every day, simply, without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there.’

I asked if I could use one of her ‘minutes’ (2 février 2015 – 20e danse) for this videopoem. I could.
I simply adore this combination of Hugo’s poem, his voice and her dancing in the snow.
Enjoy! (There’s also a version with French subtitles: https://vimeo.com/118980966)

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The source of the ‘road movie’ version is a music video by the collective ESNAF
Their video for ‘The Long Haul’ by NO (cinematography by Jovan Todorović) had all the ingredients I needed for the English version of the poem. I believe the little storyline is the perfect match for the poem and Michael Dickes’ reading.

Death Meditation by A.M. Thompson

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This is the second of two films by Marie Craven using Poetry Storehouse poems by A.M. Thompson. (I also liked the first, Unavoidable Alchemy, but felt that it ended too abruptly.) Here she has used footage by Mollie Mills, guitar music by Josh Woodward and a voiceover by Nic S. to create a surprisingly upbeat video remix. I’ll let viewers decide whether it succeeds, but I salute its boldness as an experiment in confounding expectations. (Read the text.)

شاعروں سے ڈرو / Be afraid of poets by Zeeshan Sahil

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Be afraid of poets –
they have a hand-grenade
made of dreams…

The late Pakistani poet Zeeshan Sahil “has often been praised for writing in a simple yet profound manner”—a simplicity admirably captured in this short film from Umang, directed by Fahad Naveed and narrated by Mahvash Faruqi with a performance by dancer Suhaee Abro.

Be sure to click on the CC icon for the English subtitles, translated by Nauman Naqvi, or click through to the Umang website to read the full text in English and Urdu.

Poem No. 6 by Jessie Kleemann

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Greenland poet Jessie Kleemann‘s text is voiced by Claire Wilkinson in a film by Diego Barraza (Chinoix) called Dolor ártico / Arctic Ache.

‘Arctic Ache’ is a video derived from ‘Poem Nº 6’, which is part of a series about climate change and its effects on the Arctic written by Greenlandic artist and poet Jessie Kleemann. In ‘Poem Nº 6’, the self appeals to reminiscences in search of wisdom to overcome a bleak and gloomy future; it is a voice that comes not from the hegemonic centre, but from the margins, proving that in those margins knowledge is also recreated and reflections are articulated by means of other imagery, that of the Greenlandic people. As glaciers melt and mundane desires shape politics, the poetic-self wonders if this is really her land. The video itself contrasts the present-day reality with a sense of place nestled in the memory of the poet. Images lead the mind to different places away from the spoken word and that combination conjures and evokes new meanings and creates another level of suggestion and interpretation.

The dancer is Alison Brewerton.

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

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I can’t believe I’d never run across this terrific poetry-dance film before today, when a Google video search for Gwendolyn Brooks’ most famous poem turned it up. The YouTube description reads:

National Dance Institute’s Celebration Team performs “We Real Cool” in an NDI original movie short. Scenery by Red Grooms. Poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. Choreography by Amy Lehman. (movie contains full credits)

There’s a more populist aesthetic at work here than in most of the dance videos I’ve shared, and it’s also a proper film, not merely a documentary video of a dance performance. And no wonder: it was the work of Emile Ardolino, “a dance-film maker of exceptional sensitivity” according to his 1993 obituary in the New York Times. He was best known as the director of Dirty Dancing and Sister Act. The obituary continued: “He had an eye and an imagination that seemed to understand intuitively how to lend the immediacy of film to an art that often requires the distance and framing of a stage.”

The overhead shot of the kids imitating a pool game was my favorite part, but the device of having them emerge from a painting was brilliant, too. You might be wondering, as I was, how Ardolino and these celebratory dancers are going to deal with the poem’s morbid last line without resorting to melodrama. I think they pulled it off.

National Dance Institute (NDI) is

a non-profit arts education organization founded in 1976 by ballet star Jacques d’Amboise.

Through in-school partnerships, workshops, and public performances, NDI uses dance as a catalyst to engage children and motivate them towards excellence.

It sounds as if the NDI had a lot to do with Ardolino’s subsequent box-office success, judging from the Times obituary.

It was Jacques d’Amboise, a principal dancer with the City Ballet, who set Mr. Ardolino on his Hollywood career with an invitation to direct “He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’.” An account of Mr. d’Amboise’s work with children, which won Mr. Ardolino the 1983 Academy Award for best documentary feature, two Emmys, a Peabody Award and other honors.

We Real Cool was made the very same year as Dirty Dancing, according to a timeline on the NDI site.

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  • A Celebration of Literature unites important American writers, composers, visual artists and choreographers to create short, theatrical ballets for children. “We Real Cool” is created from the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, and is filmed in a vacant lot in New York City’s Lower East side, with a backdrop mural designed by Red Grooms.

Elephant by Sina Seiler

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Sina Seiler of sinasan Film und Medienkunst (sinasan Film & Mediaart) is both filmmaker and author here. According to her description on Vimeo,

The Poetry Film is based on the poem “Elephant” by Sina Seiler and visualizing inner rooms, what the poem is expressing by words metaphorically. “Elephant” expresses an inner transformation of the protagonist caused by the encounter of love. The self as a house, every room representing feelings and moods of subconsciousness.

The protagonist is dancing through inner rooms, illustrating sequences of dream, expressing feelings and moods.

It was screened at ZEBRA last month (among other screenings, listed on the sinasan website) as part of the Dreiklang Dimensionen/Triadic Dimensions program of poetry films that incorporate dance and music, and it fits nicely into the Dance category here. I didn’t get to meet Seiler in person, but her bio is an interesting one:

Sina Seiler studied Media and Journalism with focus on documentary filmmaking & TV at international University of Tuebingen, Germany with a stipend in Film at DAMS / University of the Arts, Theatre and Film at Bologna, Italy. She graduated with a Diploma/Master and a Oral History Documentary about the Saxons in Romania.

She works as a writer, filmmaker, lecturer and artist.

The dancer is Soraya Schulthess.

Rolling Frames by Ella Jane Chappell

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This well-filmed dance interpretation of a poem by Ella Jane Chappell is one of ten shortlisted films for the Southbank Centre’s inaugural Shot Through the Heart Poetry Film competition. Katie Garrett of Garrett and Garrett Videography directs, with choreography by Anna-Lise Marie Hearn. The dance company, AniCo., has a webpage about the film. The text is worth quoting at length for the insight it gives into dance-focused poetry videos, an important subset of poetry video generally:

Rolling Frames is an intimate and personal look into the scenarios of three very different relationships that are affected and manipulated by dependency.

At the heart of Rolling Frames are a series of shifting voices and characters that inhabit three very different relationships. These relationships are linked by the role that dependency plays in each. To some extent, every relationship involves a yielding of independence. The poem dissects this manner of yielding: the manifestation of greed in desire, the vulnerability in love, the loneliness in lust.

The physicality and inner rhythms of the words are translated once over by the expressive movements of dance, and once again through the gaze of the camera’s eyes.

All American by David Hernandez

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If the films released so far on their website are any indication, Motionpoems‘ 2014 season is their most stylistically diverse collection of poetry films to date. This film, released just before Independence Day in the U.S., builds on the poem’s challenge to any easy assumptions about American identity. (It’s also slightly NSFW, with glimpses of female nudity.) Here’s the description from the website:

Filmed near Lake Geneva Switzerland (and at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern), British filmmaker Richard Johnson and dancer Jasmine Morand present this francoperspective on California poet David Hernandez’s all-inclusive poem, “All American.”

Click through and scroll down for the text.

For more on Richard Johnson, see his pages on Cinely and IMDb. For more on the poet, visit DavidHernandez.com.