modern dance monday with velocity dance center seattle

     Since moving to Seattle, Under The Root and myself, the main course of action is to return to the modern dance, body movement, and the art of dance.  The Spring classes begin today and so this journal entry is to focus on the place of my new classes, Velocity Dance Center.  Seattle is swarming with many concepts of dance, dance cinema, dance festivals, and body movement workshops.
   
     “It’ll be cool to see what these dancers . . . accomplish in the coming year under the guidance and protection of Velocity, an organization that is less a dance company and more like a hotbed of creativity that nurtures and supports dancers as they explore performing art to sometimes extraordinary limits.”
— Melody Datz, The Stranger Slog
      “How did [Velocity] and its support of local dancers contribute to your career?
In every way possible.”
— Corrie Befort of Salt Horse, Seattle Dance Examiner
      “Again and again, Velocity proves itself as both supporter and tastemaker for dance in Seattle. . .”
— SeattleDances

      "Mayor’s Arts Award and Genius Award winner Velocity Dance Center is Seattle’s premier art center dedicated to contemporary dance and performance.  A recognized leader as an artist-driven, community-centered dance incubator, Velocity fosters the creative explorations of artists and adventurous audiences through an invested commitment to education, creation, performance, inquiry, community participation, and inter/national exchange.  Velocity fulfills an unduplicated role as the epicenter for contemporary dance in the Pacific Northwest operating three studios, a dance resource room, an online journal and the only theater in the region especially developed for dance performances.  The primary art center supporting contemporary dance in Seattle since 1996, Velocity is instrumental in making Seattle a destination city with one of the most active dance communities in the nation.  In 2012 alone, Velocity served nearly 18,000 individuals; offered 2,000+ dance classes; provided low cost space to over 450 artists; activated a growing audience of thousands of dance enthusiasts; commissioned and developed 27 new works, and introduced more than 89 works of performance, film, installation and hybrid forms into the local and national dance ecology."

     

A core mission and value to the art of our bodies.  From hosting Next Fest NW to daily classes, workshops to performance venues and speakeasy.  There is a universe open enough to share.

Green Chair Dance Group image Adam Sekuler

Fire and Ice image Michelle Smith-Lewis

The Pendleton House image Tim Summers

Alana O Rogers image Tim Summers

Paige Barnes image Laurent Ziegler

modern dance monday with gret palucca

Gret Palucca was a Dresden dancer of the early 1900s whom was recognized for airborne springs, deep lunges, and high leg extensions.  One of Mary Wigman's first students, Palucca performed in numerous group choreographies created by the modern dance pioneer in the early 1920s.  She branched out from her mentor in 1924 to found her own studio in Dresden.  The core of movements were strength and softness, pushing out and pulling in, innocence and seriousness.  Her dances tended to be based on contrasts of movement rather than psychological probings and carried such titles as "Light Beginning," "Broad Shimmering" and "Two Fragments: Quiet Song, Driving Rhythm."

The art historian Rudolf Arnheim particularly admired a 1927 solo inspired by Palucca's daily studio exercises.  Beginning with a wriggling of the toes, she would methodically set her body into motion, working gradually upward to the neck.  Onstage, she accomplished this with such an unexpected and incongruous variety of shaking, pushing and stretching movements that, for Arnheim, the result was "a merry confusion of states of mind held together only by the systematic exploration of the anatomy."
 
Palucca served as a model of the New Woman, the media icon of the fashionably emancipated woman, whose liberation was signified, in large part, through modern movement.  At the same time, Palucca cultivated connections with the avant-garde, especially with artists.  She offered her dancing style, popular culture fame, and art world connections to the interactions with artists at the Bauhaus,   
an innovative school for art and design in Weimar Germany.  Wassily Kandinsky, widely recognized as one of the first abstract painters, taught abstract art and theory to students and wrote theoretical treatises about abstract art during his tenure at the Bauhaus.  "Dance Curves," an essay Kandinsky published in 1926 in which the artist created four abstract drawings influenced by four photographs of Gret Palucca by Charlotte Rudolph, embodies the very issues of modernism promoted by the Bauhaus in the 1920s.  She was a lover of logic, clarity and rigor.  Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, proclaimed her "the most lucid of today's dancers," adding, "She is for us the newly found law of motion."

cited writings by Jack Anderson of the NY Times and Susan Laikin Funkerstein

Gret Palucca passed into the etherworld in 1993 at the age of 91.  She continues to inspire the bodies in our exploration of movement depth.

modern dance hits the heights

Chunky Move is an Australian based dance company which began in some of the earliest 1990's with Gideon Obarzaneks at the front of intermedia discovery.  While Gideon has moved on, the company remains.  I am in awe of the entire process, fundamental liberation, and whole being.. gentle, warm, tears of respect.

body movement tuesday :: sidra bell dance NY

HOUSE UNREST from Sidra Bell Dance New York on Vimeo

Sometimes the words are not necessary.. to express the intermingling and cosmic universe code.  New work is available from this company and landing in a place near you.  Please catch a peek, your soul is hungry.  Sidra Bell Dance NY

body movement tuesday :: viceral dance company

Visceral Dance Chicago will bring dance to an extensive population, challenging audiences to examine their perception of the dance experience. By providing thought provoking and innovative performances, VDC will push itself to bring new explorations of movement and theater without limitation of specific styles.  It is a goal of Visceral Dance Chicago to reach wider audiences, obtain great arts support, and form a universal dance audience.  Audiences should be taken to a different place and be exposed to something extraordinary, something that makes them think and ask why.  VDC intends to reach to a deeper place to help the audience
experience something that is not easy or simple but that cultivates conversation both for the individual and the audience as a whole.  Visceral Dance Chicago wants to change the way the audience thinks and views dance.  By driving dance in a different direction, VDC hopes to make the art form accessible to everyone, providing an avenue for deeper thought, understanding, and appreciation.

body movement tuesday :: the seldoms

Dan Merlo




The Seldoms
"The Seldoms make contemporary dance that translates inquiry into 
movement and amplifies its impact through collaboration with image, 
sound, text and location, providing an avenue for audiences to 
experience relevant and engaging dance.  We are a Chicago based 
dance performance company that values making intelligent, visual 
dance theater driven by inquiry.  We ground our inquiry in the history 
of ideas, art history, and our personal experience to find complex and
faceted ways to describe the nature of our question."

"The center of our work is dance, however, our vision extends to the 
whole of action and environment on stage."

body movement tuesday :: empire of ecstasy

Empire of Ecstasy
Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935
Karl Toepfer
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1997 The Regents of the University of California

Empire of Ecstasy offers an interpretation of the explosion
in German body culture between nudism and nude dancing,
gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism,
and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs.
Karl Toepfer presented a dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of modern identity.

The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists
and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy,
as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious
inner conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body
sought to extend the aesthetic experience beyond the boundaries imposed by rationalized life and to transcend these limits in search of ecstasy.
With the help of much unpublished or forgotten archival material
(including many little known photographs), he investigates the process
of constructing an empire of appropriate impulses toward ecstasy.

Karl Toepfer presents the work of such well known figures as Rudolf Laban,
Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, along with lesser known
but equally fascinating body culture practitioners.

body movement tuesday :: league of extraordinary dancers

LXD
League of Extraordinary Dancers
no special effects. no wires. real people, real powers.
series begins July 7, 2010

body movement tuesday :: capacitor

Capacitor
Performance. Art. Science.
A San Franciso, California group of interdisciplinary movement artists 
that accumulate energy from our technologically impacted culture and 
release it through.  From the movement of the human diaphragm to 
the story of evolution, from the behavior of electricity to genetic 
manipulation, from the birth of the moon to the cycles of digestion -
natural and synthetic processes form the basis for Capacitor’s study 
of performance. Obsessed with the mechanics of the human body as 
well as machines that propel the body through space, Capacitor 
artists have become masters of rigging systems, coutures of wearable 
sculpture, and engineers of large scale props designed to stretch the 
limits of physical poetry.

body movements tuesday :: performance research

FROST



loopdiver 2009



Atelic


Performance Research
Contemporary Body Movement, Sound Aesthetics, and Other Performance Research
compiled by Robert Alexander