modern dance monday with sidi larbi cherkaoui

Valtari

Valtari

Apocrifu

Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui in Zero Degrees

Rein

Rein

The found images above are a tiny selection from various works of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.  After delving into the facts circling a background of this Moroccan Flemish choreographer, there appears to be no stopping this incredibly endearing hearth of body movement.  The production site is swarming with magik unleashed on our universe in performance.  

Faun

Puz/zle

Puz/zle

An informative biography from the debut of his choreography and works throughout the continuing years, plus some media interviews, they all offer a peek into the person behind the work.  The work is extraordinary, bodies as liquid and seamless as our dreamworlds.  He has connected the invisible cord between cultures with performance, shined a moon on gender integrity, and sweeping the cobwebs out of our past.. all for the sake of evolution into our next steps.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Kazutomi Kozuki

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui by Koenbroos

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui by Damian Siqueiros

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.

margaret morris and the nature winds

Margaret Morris

This body mover was a British dancer, choreographer, and teacher. 
It seems that every moment of this womyn's life was centered
around sharing the arts of dance.  Margaret had been dancing 
from a very young age and by the precocious age of twelve had 
begun to reject the strict nature of classical ballet.  In 1909 she met 
Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora Duncan, who taught her the 
six Greek positions, adapted from images on ancient Greek vases. 
She elaborated on these to produce her own dance system aiming at 
naturalism and freedom. 
In 1922 is when she started the first educational school in England 
to combine educational subjects with educational training in 
dancing and acting.  John Fergusson Duncan became the 
art director of all her schools.  The students' curriculum included 
acting, dance composition and improvisation, Dance Notation,
design, and painting.
She was the first proponent of the Isadora Duncan technique 
in Great Britain.  She founded the Margaret Morris Movement, 
Celtic Ballet, and two Scottish National Ballets in Glasgow (1947) 
and in Pitlochry (1960).
I am in awe of her curriculum for the educational school.
As of 1925, the syllabus included all of the following:

1. The Margaret Morris method of physical culture and dancing
2. Dance composition
3. Theory of movement : Breathing
4. Theory of practice of teaching
5. Paining, design and sculpture
6. Notation of movement
7. Property and mask making
8. Dressmaking
9. Music training
10. Class singing
11. Musical composition
12. Literature; study of words; writing of plays and poems; essays
13. Diction and acting
14. Lecturing and discussion
15. Stage management, including lighting
16. Production of play and ballets
17. General organisation and business management
18. Swimming
19. Ballroom dancing

mary wigman is more than a witch

Lake Maggiore 1913

Lake Maggiore 1913

Traumgestalt 1927

Edmund Kesting 1935

Mary Wigman
Interested in the relationship between human being and 
cosmic forces, she describes her creative experience as the 
transformation into movement of the invisible forces 
that give her life.  The dancer is a medium for her; 
dance functions as a trance, accomplishing its cathartic 
function recognized by archaic societies; dance is first of all 
an expression of ecstasy (or emotional impulses) that creates 
forms of movement as a consequence.

Following these ideas, Mary Wigman gives the first steps 
and opens the doors of a trend that influences many generations 
of choreographic artists in the search for new expressive means. 
Her way of dancing is given the name of Ausdruckstanz 
(dance of expression or expressionist dance), and states that no 
movement is considered as ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ as far as it is executed 
from a true feeling or is evocative.
In consequence, Wigman aesthetics are made up of very 
different elements compared to ballet.  She dances without music, 
uses non attractive costumes, works over subjects like death, 
desperation, the war or social riots, and experiments with masks, 
among other things.  She also opposes to the notion of 
‘representing’ something while dancing, in a search for a truthful 
experience: dance should not represent; dance should be. 
“We don’t dance histories, we dance feelings”, she says.

A great example of this is a document that consists of more than 
70 pages of labanotation scores of exercises of her method. 
The title of the text is Die Frankfurter Seminarreihe in 
Wigman-Technique mit Prof. Gundel Eplinius (Frankfurt, 1990) 
by notator Anja Hirvikallio.
M. Hirvikallio explains that M. Eplinius divides Wigman’s 
technique in five main groups, like this:
- Striding and sliding
- Springs, vibrations and bouncing
- Momentums and oscillations
- Falling and dropping (floor technique)
- Tensions: relaxed, sustained and motor tensions

 excerpt taken from www.contemporary-dance.org

TanzMarchen 1926

Mary Wigman Troupe

Mary Wigman Troupe

Laban and Mary Wigman

Mary Wigman Troupe