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.
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 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.
Helioscape is set for release on iTunes as part of TenduTV’s first ‘Essential Dance Films’ compilation. Below is a trailer for the film.
Epitaph for Paul Harvey is a solo for dancer set to a heavily edited speech by Paul Harvey (the American syndicated radio host) and a video projection. The speech was tagged and edited using a custom text engine programmed in Processing. The solo is a component of a planned larger work, Variations on a Theme by Adam Smith.
The piece was shown as a work-in-progress at the Drake Hotel Underground in January 2009 with Luke Garwood performing.
Fragments of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel has a long and recondite title but comes by it honestly. The piece was inspired by a chance connection between two works: Shostakovich’s Five Fragments for Orchestra, a short suite of sparse, enigmatic works written as preparation for his Fourth Symphony; and five fragments of writing dating to around the life of Christ that may have been part of a book apocryphally attributed to the biblical prophet Ezekiel. It’s hard to go into more detail about the provenance of the fragments without descending into even more Pynchon-esque levels of uncertainty; essentially, there is no evidence of the primary source (the Apocryphon itself) and the fragments survive only as quotations in other works.
The ballet consists of five movements, each pairing a musical and literary fragment. Two excerpts of the ballet were presented at the National Ballet of Canada’s Choreographic Showcase in September 2008.
The first and longest fragment is a parable, in which a king invites everyone in his kingdom to his daughter’s wedding feast, save two men: one blind, and one lame. They decide to avenge the slight by vandalizing the king’s garden, acting as each other’s eyes and legs. When the damage is discovered, they protest their innocence: their disabilities make it impossible for them to be the perpetrators. The king realizes they worked together and has them both flogged. The parable is that the soul is accountable for the actions of the body and vice versa.
The second performed fragment is in the voice of God, and translates as “As I find thee, so will I judge thee”; meaning, on judgment day, it is your present state of sin or grace that matters and not any of your life prior to the day.
Archival video of the work exists, but is not available online due to the terms of the collective agreement between Actor’s Equity and the National Ballet.
The excerpts were performed by Catherine Maitland, Joe Welbes, and Aarik Wells.
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.