Dancing Inspiration

On the invitation of my friend, Sabine, I last night visited the 'Dance For Camera' event in Manchester, which is part of the 'moves08' festival.

Now I love dancing in the 'regular' sense, I'm even learning 3 different styles at the moment, but dance for art and performance art is something I've never managed to fully get my head around.  The world in which it revolves seemed to me to be quite elitist and less accessible than the genres in which I usually work.  A world where you had to know about and understand the whole history of where a performance has developed from.

However, this brief event has been somewhat of a revelation to me, and today I have found myself listening intently to the sounds I make as I wander round the house, opening and closing doors, tapping away on this keyboard, and its like the quiet but powerful rhythm that we all move to.

During the evening we were able to see snippets of some finished work by a couple of artists, Simon Ellis and Rachel Davies, and be part of a discussion about their work and how it was viewed.  This got me to thinking about my own work, particularly our early film, 'The Lonely Walk', and the way some people loved it but others were quickly bored, which I had always understood but found slightly frustrating.

What really interested me though, was the second half of the event, when things became much more heated and debate ensued.  Andy Wood was showing some rough cuts of a dance piece he had filmed a year previous and wanted to get feedback from the audience on how they viewed it.

These short sections of film brought strong debate on factors that had completely passed me by a first viewing...  How the characters interact with the camera and with each other, whether they even acknowledged it existence, the clothes that they wore, the style of the dance (which was compared to a style from the 70's that hadn't progressed), the views of the author and his methodology of working, and his ideological stance (or lack thereof).

This stuff surprised me and yet I could value all of the points that were being made.  It just goes to prove that in our creative fields there is always so much that can be read into an image or a piece, whether it was consciously injected by the author or not.

I would also like to present a beautiful piece of work by my friend, Sabine Klaus, and invite you to view more of her work at www.creationeditor.co.uk