Bastard Fugue features Naoya Ebe of the National Ballet of Canada, and live camerawork by yours truly. It premiered at Fresh Blood, a group show of work by young choreographers hosted by The Chimera Project, on October 29th at the Enwave Theatre in Toronto. The piece is set to a Bach fugue for organ, arranged instead for mixed percussion, and uses live projection to explore fugue structure with a single dancer. Special thanks to Naishi (Kamen) Wang for his valuable participation in the creation process. More credits and special thanks after the jump.
I’ll be premiering a new work at The Chimera Project’s Fresh Blood at 8pm on October 29th, at the Enwave Theatre. Bastard Fugue features the National Ballet of Canada’s Naoya Ebe (at right) and is set to the Fugue from Bach’s Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major, arranged for mixed percussion. Including cowbell. Bach + cowbell is like chocolate + bacon: two great tastes that go great together! You can buy tickets here.
Bastard Fugue fuses live performance and projection to explore fugal composition with a single dancer. The Bach fugue, originally composed for organ, is stripped of melody and becomes a propulsive rhythmic fundament for a powerful performance. Some preliminary special thanks:
- Naishi (Kamen) Wang of Toronto Dance Theatre for his valuable participation in the creation process;
- The National Ballet School and the National Ballet of Canada for donating rehearsal space;
- Malgorzata Nowacka for the opportunity to show this work;
- Jeff Morris and Robert Stephen for participating in the technical workshop which spawned some of the ideas explored in this work.
The UK website Eye For Film offers a review of Helioscape’s premiere at DANCE:FILM 09 in Edinburgh.
This is a beautifully composed work. Beautifully danced. Beautifully photographed. But what I particularly liked was there was neither an absence of cinematic technical innovation nor an excess of it.
Thanks to Chris for the thoughtful review.
Update: blogTO highlighted TIFF Bingo in their annual TIFF Film Schedule post.
Instructions: use with your film festival program guide’s film synopses or descriptions. Click for high-res print version. Inspired by yesterday’s release of the Toronto International Film Festival program book. Designed (hastily) by me, written by Pam Steele, Margie Niedzwiecki, and me. I’m going to see if the boys at TIFF will offer any prizes…
Entry for the Dance Films Association “What Moves You” 48-Hour Challenge. Link changed to higher-quality version uploaded Sunday morning; the original is here.
Cast: Robert Stephen and Cristina Tucciarone. Special thanks to Pat and Cathie Dwyer, Aryon Elmers, Barbara Lane, Simon MacIntyre, Bev Peat, Jenn Stephen, John and Jane Stephen, Teri Worthington, and all our other donors.
“The most reliable lesson I learn from a success is that it's time to do something different.”
I can’t count the number of times that a lousy piece of choreography or film has inspired me. Part of this is Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. The corollary: 90% of what’s left is middling. Only one in a hundred things is any good at all. So it’s not really surprising that I’m inspired more often by works that fail, because there are just so damned many of them.
But there’s more to it than that. The inspiration provided by another artists’ failure is more specific and more useful than that provided by a success. I’m not saying that I prefer watching bad works to good; I am always, always, always on the side of the artist in their attempt to create good work. But where a masterpiece leaves me with a happy and excited, but also very general, belief in the worth of creative endeavour, a misbegot (yes, I’m nouning that adjective) leaves me with two specific things:
- A motivating anger at the waste, not of my time and attention (I gave it freely, or paid for the privilege of giving it), but of whatever was good in the work, whether it was the performers, the music, the technical crew, &c. I hate to see good work wasted, and seeing it done is an excellent prophylactic against doing it oneself.
- An understanding of exactly why the work failed. This sort of autopsy report is often very useful, because the secret of creating work is not to avoid mistakes, but to make novel and original ones.
A work that succeeds does so as a complete thing, as a gestalt, and is therefore very difficult to analyze: as Douglas Adams says, try to take a cat apart to see how it works, and what you’ve got is a non-working cat. That’s not to say that taking things apart is the only way to understand them, but I’m a hopelessly analytical thinker. A bad work, in contrast, is inherently an incomplete thing, less than the sum of its parts, which makes it much easier to see the joins.
More concisely, a work succeeds as a whole but fails in pieces. Watching those pieces—how they fall, what they’re made of, how someone tried to make them fit together—is a sometimes-depressing but always educational process. Learning from my own failures is a special, especially-depressing case of the above. The most reliable lesson I learn from a success is that it’s time to do something different.
Profanity only really exists in spoken language, but it’s rare to find someone who uses it well. Most people use it for emphasis. This is incorrect. Your words are their own emphasis. The proper use of profanity in spoken English is for rhythm. For a serious (if somewhat limited) practitioner, we need look no farther than the man himself:
“English, motherfucker, do you speak it?”
Perfect iambic pentameter. That’s how it’s done.
Love in Vain: The Exclusive Making-Of Post
So my entry for the Dance Films Association’s 48 Hour Challenge got in on time and on budget. I owe a huge thank-you to everybody who contributed to said budget; I will be contacting everyone who made a donation to check if I can include their name in this post.
The film was made possible by the incredible team of people who jumped onboard this particular crazy train. Robert Stephen and Cristina Tucciarone were fantastic in the studio and in performance; I have to thank Robert—who has just been deservedly promoted to second soloist at the National Ballet of Canada—especially for putting attractive flesh on the bones of a very quickly-set piece of choreography. Elena Lobsanova (also now a second soloist) acted as rehearsal director and did wonders clarifying character in the choreography as the paint dried. Jeff Morris acted as my technical Yoda, and managed to remind me of various applicable laws of physics in time for me to figure out how to bend rather than break them. Pam Steele combined Stalin’s logistical talents with the grace and kindness of…well, not Josef Stalin. The miraculous John Webster got me thinking about the blues and shared much of his incredible collection of music. None of my work would be possible without Ryan Fontaine.
Two days is forty-eight hours. That’s a six-day work week, if you don’t sleep. And I didn’t, much. Friday night from midnight to three I bought and read newspapers, blogs, and tabloids; I came across the Sheela Ward Friendship Club, a syndicated classified column, in the Sun and the Globe and it hooked me immediately.
The connection to the blues and specifically to Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” (the recording of which is in the public domain) happened almost automatically when I read the above ads. I slept for two hours and then literally shot from dawn to midnight (with some rehearsal time in the middle in a studio donated by the National Ballet of Canada). Saturday, I got a couple hours sleep and then hunkered down and edited.
The one disappointing part of the experience was the upload near midnight Saturday to dancemedia.com. I don’t know if their site was getting hammered with other entries, but it was sluggish and kept dropping the upstream connection. I’m sure there are promotional considerations involved, but I would suggest that the DFA use proven infrastructure like YouTube in future events.
I’m very happy with the finished film. Good music goes a long way, and this was: as Robert said, none of us got even remotely tired of it despite it playing on repeat for about twelve hours. Much of the tone emerged during editing as I watched Robert’s performance. I storyboarded the piece pretty carefully (if illegibly) and ended up sticking pretty closely to the plan in the editing.
This is one of the many lists I scrawled before the shoot. You might think I was heading out to crucify someone; if you can’t read the chicken-scratch, it reads, “BRING: staple gun, hammer/driver, screws, dance stuff, advil, hacksaw, cell numbers, MUSIC.” I think that says it all.