animating architecture: FOLIAGE CHORUS [ on dvd ]
~ artificial elements – sea / birds / insects / nature
~ otherworldly – projections of branches
~ transposing nature onto/into geometric hard-edged architecture – in which it wouldn’t grow
~ projecting something onto surfaces and occupying its space in ways that compensate for its exteriorly cold functionality and aesthetically death-like surface visage
~ giving it artistic translucency and life to provide/replace what it’s not
~ the journey of the digitised subconscious featuring futuristic skull-caped androgynes
~ organicising and biologising inanimate environments that are now the ‘natural’ in which we live
~ romanticising steel – fish bodies swimming in translucent blue-lit balconies – all fakery with digital bubbles and weed – space and ocean – sub- and ‘over-’ conscious – caught midlevel between 2 heights – super-ego and unconscious – outer and inner spaces
~ dancers connected in linear relationship with fronts dominantly facing audience
~ travelling sequence as a group keep tight proximity, establishing connection and sameness
~ common twining snaky movement mimicking tendrils of vegetative growth
~ extending out along space exploratively, then opening and spreading across space, inhabiting its nooks and crannies, with the aid of projection, which matches the growth and expansion (proliferation) of the expanding dance tree
~ emphasis on slithering and climbing onto, into, and against the spaces boundaries and ledges
~ a breaking of the 4-unit at the point of arrival in the centre of the balcony, individuals work in unison facing the audience with equidistant space between them – establishing themselves now as independent offshoots from the earlier rhizome – fledgling trees that grow, assisted by the projection, into thick enveloping vegetation
~ the process of arrival and growth is then reversed at the end to signal exit and the decline or retracting process of death, decay, decline, or the seasonal withdrawal and disappearance of vegetative growth
~ humans imitating vegetation in an architectural space made purposely barren and screen-like in order to artificially control the life it allows in – the backdrop (building) may be well-meaning in its desire to make its organic mobile occupants more prominent and visible – but the danger to me is that its neutrality has a kind of quarantining effect – by removing anything from its design that might distract, it sanitises whatever occupies it and challenges/imposes the cult of the modernist white canvas as the dominant universalising medium for art – this is also the order and soft tyranny of the pristine – it is like the radiation chamber in which the dangerous messiness that art sometimes is, is placed to be made safe (one of the unfortunate aspects of bureaucratisation which in every other regards is a benefit maximiser)
~ the 2nd section used 2 big round columns, a wall, and open space - this section was energetic and had a different theme from the balcony section – the dancers embraced their bodies around the pillars at the start (vegetation growing up them – perhaps this is the linking idea to the balcony) and then used them as supports to launch from, lean against, flow around, erase and rebirth themselves – a place for coming and going and echoing, through much use of matching pair work and synchronised 4 work, the repetitive regularity of the columns
~ this section with the assertive columns and the bigger than necessary open space, which was cropped down to a smaller size by a red rectangular light that defined and established the performing area, produced more dynamic, fast-paced movement, accented, occasionally air-borne, energetic – in contrast to the narrow balcony in which the movement was cautious and slow-paced - greater physical abandon and risk in the open space, and greater care and deliberation in the more confined space
~ as with Akram Khan, the dancers moved in synchronised unison that was not as tight as the choreography looked like it might have wished it to be – they were more confident in solo work, but in the unison work it was apparent that 2 were secure with the timing and phrasing (and form) and the other 2 were following them and not producing the same clarity or exactness of movement design
~ dwarfed by the pillars, the dance was lopsided, and lived under the overhang that the pillars supported, like little animals coming in and out of their holes, but a bit timid of full exposure and freedom – as though, like animals on leads, the pillars were not going to let them get too far away
~ in the end it looked like an excuse to decorate a bit of building with some available dance art, which is fine if it is a love and thanks transaction towards an environment effectively and responsively (responsibly) devoted to reciprocate as a replenishing, servicing, housing, and vitalising resource for artistic activity, well-being, and growth
~ so – there are 2 sections in this work and 2 environmental metaphors:– the first: the building has lots of open space, cut out spaces, and glass – so the metaphor created by the dance is about fish and fish tanks – referring to the fact that people in the building are connected most of the time to 2-way vision – they can see out and the out can see in
- the second: the dancers hug the 2 big pillars and live in, out, and around them and the sheltered space they hold up – the nurturing and sheltering provided by the pillars, the cold mothering pillars, represent or symbolise the support that the building has been designed to provide the arts and young fledgling artists who, like infants growing, need protection and sustenance to help them mature and venture out into the wide spaces of the world (towards the sea of faces of the audience, the representatives in the symbolic drama of the horizons of the world) to become pillar-like elsewhere (in the partnering sections in the open space, the dancers repeated movements on each others’ bodies that they did at the start against the pillars)
~ the architect in his interview says the rounded shapes of the pillars create more flow and that as people are organic, they make a ‘foil’ for the geometry of the building, he said that if the building was more organic, then people would be camouflaged
_______________________________
~ artificial elements – sea / birds / insects / nature
~ otherworldly – projections of branches
~ transposing nature onto/into geometric hard-edged architecture – in which it wouldn’t grow
~ projecting something onto surfaces and occupying its space in ways that compensate for its exteriorly cold functionality and aesthetically death-like surface visage
~ giving it artistic translucency and life to provide/replace what it’s not
~ the journey of the digitised subconscious featuring futuristic skull-caped androgynes
~ organicising and biologising inanimate environments that are now the ‘natural’ in which we live
~ romanticising steel – fish bodies swimming in translucent blue-lit balconies – all fakery with digital bubbles and weed – space and ocean – sub- and ‘over-’ conscious – caught midlevel between 2 heights – super-ego and unconscious – outer and inner spaces
~ dancers connected in linear relationship with fronts dominantly facing audience
~ travelling sequence as a group keep tight proximity, establishing connection and sameness
~ common twining snaky movement mimicking tendrils of vegetative growth
~ extending out along space exploratively, then opening and spreading across space, inhabiting its nooks and crannies, with the aid of projection, which matches the growth and expansion (proliferation) of the expanding dance tree
~ emphasis on slithering and climbing onto, into, and against the spaces boundaries and ledges
~ a breaking of the 4-unit at the point of arrival in the centre of the balcony, individuals work in unison facing the audience with equidistant space between them – establishing themselves now as independent offshoots from the earlier rhizome – fledgling trees that grow, assisted by the projection, into thick enveloping vegetation
~ the process of arrival and growth is then reversed at the end to signal exit and the decline or retracting process of death, decay, decline, or the seasonal withdrawal and disappearance of vegetative growth
~ humans imitating vegetation in an architectural space made purposely barren and screen-like in order to artificially control the life it allows in – the backdrop (building) may be well-meaning in its desire to make its organic mobile occupants more prominent and visible – but the danger to me is that its neutrality has a kind of quarantining effect – by removing anything from its design that might distract, it sanitises whatever occupies it and challenges/imposes the cult of the modernist white canvas as the dominant universalising medium for art – this is also the order and soft tyranny of the pristine – it is like the radiation chamber in which the dangerous messiness that art sometimes is, is placed to be made safe (one of the unfortunate aspects of bureaucratisation which in every other regards is a benefit maximiser)
~ the 2nd section used 2 big round columns, a wall, and open space - this section was energetic and had a different theme from the balcony section – the dancers embraced their bodies around the pillars at the start (vegetation growing up them – perhaps this is the linking idea to the balcony) and then used them as supports to launch from, lean against, flow around, erase and rebirth themselves – a place for coming and going and echoing, through much use of matching pair work and synchronised 4 work, the repetitive regularity of the columns
~ this section with the assertive columns and the bigger than necessary open space, which was cropped down to a smaller size by a red rectangular light that defined and established the performing area, produced more dynamic, fast-paced movement, accented, occasionally air-borne, energetic – in contrast to the narrow balcony in which the movement was cautious and slow-paced - greater physical abandon and risk in the open space, and greater care and deliberation in the more confined space
~ as with Akram Khan, the dancers moved in synchronised unison that was not as tight as the choreography looked like it might have wished it to be – they were more confident in solo work, but in the unison work it was apparent that 2 were secure with the timing and phrasing (and form) and the other 2 were following them and not producing the same clarity or exactness of movement design
~ dwarfed by the pillars, the dance was lopsided, and lived under the overhang that the pillars supported, like little animals coming in and out of their holes, but a bit timid of full exposure and freedom – as though, like animals on leads, the pillars were not going to let them get too far away
~ in the end it looked like an excuse to decorate a bit of building with some available dance art, which is fine if it is a love and thanks transaction towards an environment effectively and responsively (responsibly) devoted to reciprocate as a replenishing, servicing, housing, and vitalising resource for artistic activity, well-being, and growth
~ so – there are 2 sections in this work and 2 environmental metaphors:– the first: the building has lots of open space, cut out spaces, and glass – so the metaphor created by the dance is about fish and fish tanks – referring to the fact that people in the building are connected most of the time to 2-way vision – they can see out and the out can see in
- the second: the dancers hug the 2 big pillars and live in, out, and around them and the sheltered space they hold up – the nurturing and sheltering provided by the pillars, the cold mothering pillars, represent or symbolise the support that the building has been designed to provide the arts and young fledgling artists who, like infants growing, need protection and sustenance to help them mature and venture out into the wide spaces of the world (towards the sea of faces of the audience, the representatives in the symbolic drama of the horizons of the world) to become pillar-like elsewhere (in the partnering sections in the open space, the dancers repeated movements on each others’ bodies that they did at the start against the pillars)
~ the architect in his interview says the rounded shapes of the pillars create more flow and that as people are organic, they make a ‘foil’ for the geometry of the building, he said that if the building was more organic, then people would be camouflaged
_______________________________
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