They will stick to maaroing pockets,and snatching purses,but will not kidnap. This leads to a Delhi-style jhadap (tussle) between two gangs,a botched kidnap attempt,and a preposterous TV reality show,peppered with the standard Jat Dilli lingo,scattered between these chors (thieves) and the police.
A series of links lead me to another screendance work based on dance made for live performance. This time, it is the short 10 Men, which features choreography by the UK dance artist Nigel Charnock, captured in rehearsal by filmmaker Graham Clayton-Chance. Here, largely observational monochrome images are presented to create a raw, yet unified aesthetic, edited to a poppy bossa nova music track.
What speaks so eloquently are the performances: Clayton-Chance's handheld lens captures the infectious, sweaty exuberance of the ten men as they rehearse Nigel Charnock's quick-footed, witty choreography. It's quite an ensemble, each performer is distinctly individual, yet all come across as ordinary blokes, and fun-looking ones at that. Viewers familiar with Nigel Charnock's memorable on-screen roles, most notably in David Hinton's DV8 films, can perhaps detect echoes of his performances in the choreography, as embodied in this eclectic group of dancers. That Charnock is no longer living makes these men's lively and committed dancing all the more poignant.
The Internet is increasingly providing us with the opportunity to watch dance films from across the last century, as more archival work is made available. I am very happy to re-discover Shirley Clarke's Bridges Go Round on YouTube, a film which is often programmed within the screendance canon, and rightly so. Part of an avant-garde of independent film-making in America in the 1950s, Shirley Clark's background was as a dancer and choreographer before studying film and she brings a kinaesthetic sensibility to her short films. A number of Clarke's early films featured modern dance-makers such as Daniel Nagrin (Dance In the Sun, 1953) and Anna Sokolow (Bullfight, 1955). At present, I can't find either of these films to view on the Internet, however Bridges Go Round offers us an important insight into Clarke's contribution to the evolution of screendance, as camera movement, montage, and super-imposition fuse to create an exquisite cine-choreography of the inanimate and iconic Brooklyn Bridge. The film exists with two different soundtracks, added at the time of production, to be seen one after another. Teo Macero's evocative jazz sound score contrasts Louis & Bebe Barron's haunting electronic score and it is both enlightening and educational to compare the effect of the different soundtracks on the experience of watching the film.
Also filmed in high definition, and slowed right down, in SAMBA #2 (password: samba) the collaborative team chameckilerner (choreographers and filmmakers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner) present a single silent shot that frames the hips of a female samba dancer. As the artists themselves point out, this is a copy of a shot frequently used in the filming of samba for Brazilian television and, by presenting it in this heightened way, they encourage a rare scrutiny of the image.
Rewind 25 years and screendance artists were using comparable techniques to enhance the impact of filmed dance movement. L'Entreinte is the ultimate romantic screendance love duet in which the physical interaction between the couple is played out in slow motion. Made in 1988 by the influential and innovative French choreographers Joelle Bouvier and Regis Obadia, this exquisite dance film is one of three films that they made around that time with their company L'Esquisse.
Also presented in monochrome and featuring a couple repeatedly falling and getting up again, Montreal screendance dance artists Priscilla Guy and Catherine Lavoie Marcus's Singeries presents a refreshingly simple concept that is packed with knowing. Two women stand opposite each other in a neutral space. They are wearing professional, everyday office clothes and they appear to be interacting, when suddenly they fall to the ground, as though shot, or felled, or simply unable to stand any more. The image cuts to the women standing again, then they fall again and so begins a series of rhythmic, repetitive edits, the choreographic structure of the work enhanced by the use of the echoing synch sound. The neutral gaze of the camera as witness to the quotidian movement brings to mind the Yvonne Rainer films, whereas the filmic treatment of monochrome and the use of slowed down sound recall L'Entreinte. In this short excerpt here, Guy and Marcus offer a contemporary reflection of female relationship and failing to remain upright in the world.
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