Tag Archives: temperance

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temperance 16mm film

With all the adding of video and making newness on francesdath.info, I started looking at the footage of temperance again. It’s been years since then, reading my blogging on the project is a curious reminder of that time, and the process of forgetting, the certitude of thinking one remembers.

I decided then, to do some rough cutting of the film, beautiful 16mm stock that had been sitting in a fridge for decades, wondering if I could work around the limitations of some of my decisions in the filming. A good deal had already been done. Paul had synced the cameras and also done a first cut – though what I have done, while retaining some of this, is far from it, and also conditional, preliminary.

A thought early on, a week or so ago, was what to do about music. For the rehearsals, we’d been using a track from the Boredoms, which fitted well the mood of the rehearsal as well as of that time. It didn’t fit now, or rather it did but didn’t say or add anything I particularly cared about.

In addition to the film, there was also all of Bart’s sound recordings, including boom from the floor – also all synced. I wanted to leave this in place, as the sound of feet, breathing, scraping, knocking the floor, the hum of the cameras, was all things I felt belonged.

So to music. I thought perhaps something Cello or otherwise, but then was listening to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and one track, the 15th, somehow suited. Perhaps it is a bit long, perhaps one that was four minutes would have been better, but strangely the rhythm of Bonnie and Gala matches that of the piano.

This then, is a first cut. I am really not a film editor, though I can stumble and thrash my way through Final Cut enough. I decided to stop here as the only real option is to spend weeks on familiarising myself with all the footage, and carefully assembling it, for which I don’t have the luxury of such time, nor do I think I am capable; and I also know if I don’t at least call something ‘finished’ now, it will remain in the darkness of my hard drive forever.

There are a couple of edits I’m a bit cringy about, where the continuity is very off, and other places where more tightening and timetimetime would make me smile more, but there is also much in here I like. The dancing and attentiveness of Bonnie and Gala, the camerawork of Paul, the sound of Bart, the Temperance Hall, those two weeks when we made this.

You can watch temperance on francesdath.info/video

temperance 16mm film temperance 16mm film

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goat snake witch dance theatre blackness

The last couple of days I’ve been working on a side-project, cleaning up my dance/performance/choreography website, francesdath.info. I decided a while ago I wanted to move it into WordPress, change the font to Anonymous Pro, and try and make everything I would do by hand-coding possible through the WordPress browser editor.

Success! (Mostly). The design hasn’t changed, except it’s been cleaned up a bit, and a more structured layout used. The video took the longest and was a rather intense learning process, which is going to fall over into some other projects I’m working on at the moment. The words I edited a bit, but mostly left alone. Some time I’ll clean that up also.

As for ‘goat snake witch dance theatre blackness’, I couldn’t decide which word I liked the least and somehow they all sit together quite nicely, like an excess of baroque.

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temperance – photos from rhys

Lucky that almost a gig of photos that Rhys took during the filming on Sunday turned up this morning, or I’d have nothing interesting to blog about.

gala and bonnie warming up gala and bonnie warming up

gala and bonnie - first run of temperance gala and bonnie – first run of temperance

gala and bonnie - first run of temperance gala and bonnie – first run of temperance

bonnie - temperance bonnie – temperance

gala and bonnie - second run of temperance gala and bonnie – second run of temperance

gala and bonnie - second run of temperance gala and bonnie – second run of temperance

temperance choreographer - frances d'ath temperance choreographer – frances d’ath

temperance filmmaker - paul williams temperance filmmaker – paul williams

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temperance – 16mm anamorphic zeiss porn

Sunday was a smooth rush through six minutes of dancing bookended by a 7am stagger out of bed and a 6pm return to the Chesterfield sofas, and containing some 30,000 watts of white light, a pea-soup of undulating smoke, a salacious box of Zeiss lenses, two 16mm cameras shooting black & white anamorphic and a glistening frittata seeping golden olive oil.

This is the third film I’ve made with Paul Williams, and once again Marcus joined in operating one camera, along with Tim doing gaffer/grip/everything, Rhys taking stills, Bart recording every sweaty breath and footfall, Yvonne painting Gala and Bonnie’s faces, and a truckload of gear.

The last two weeks have been a strange, fast ride, from conceiving the film to rehearsing and shooting, all fortuitous because Gala was in Melbourne and had spare evenings, the Temperance Hall was empty of rehearsals these two weeks, Paul had a fridge stacked with film stock and everyone seemed to be around.

Shooting on black and white, on a stock that Paul thinks is a couple of decades old and has an unbelievable amount of contrast and lack of grain in a black hall, even setting up there was a dreamy lack of colour, a monochromatic palette of flesh tones in-between the lightless matte black of the interior and over-exposed glare of the smoke haze.

Mostly I got to sit and eat, and take photos, occasionally give some notes and look busy with a pen and paper. Actually I was just doodling. For me it’s finished, now the four rolls of film – some 45 minutes – are off to the States to be developed, then the editing begins.

tim, paul, marcus and bart tim, paul, marcus and bart

gala and bonnie and smoke gala and bonnie and smoke

gala and bonnie rehearsing gala and bonnie rehearsing

close-ups on gala and bonnie close-ups on gala and bonnie

filming temperance filming temperance

i'm pretending to be busy i’m pretending to be busy

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temperance – a stranger knocks at his door; fang decides to kill him

When I was using Life Forms as my main tool for choreography, one of the best things about it was not having to worry about dancers or being in a studio. Which sounds a little cruel. Mostly, if I go into a studio on my own to ‘make dance’, I end up lying on the floor lost in an existential funk. If I go in with dancers and don’t have some really solid ideas about what I’m going to do – not just a general and vague conception of the work, but exactly what I will do from 1 till 2pm and so on – then again it’s wasted time. So having an animation programme that let me make a whole bunch of movement phrases – movement that I would not come up with on my own, then learn them and do things with them removed that often yawning chasm between ‘vague idea’ and ‘real dance steps’.

I haven’t used Life Forms since carnivore, but my well-battered PowerBook has always been the centre of my choreographing universe. Temperance has ended up being a work (and a film) made in Final Cut Pro. To video rehearsals, edit the results until there remains a series of short clips that might be usable and assemble them in something like a coherent order in Final Cut is the dance equivalent of story-boarding a movie using scenes cut from old movies or generating the whole thing inside a gaming engine. The alternative is to imagine it inside my head and on scraps of paper (hard to do and even harder to interpret my notes once in rehearsal again) or do it during rehearsals.

In a completely different same part of my brain, I’ve been reading the chapter “Incompossibility, Individuality, Liberty” in Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, especially the reference to Jean-Luis Borges’ Le jardin aux sentiers qui bifurquent in Fictions:

Borges, one of Leibniz’s disciples, invoked the Chinese philosopher-architect T’sui Pên, the inventor of the “garden with bifurcating paths,” a baroque labyrinth whose infinite series converge or diverge, forming a webbing of time embracing all possibilities. “Fang, for example, keeps a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, several outcomes are possible: Fang can kill the intruder; the intruder can kill Fang; both of them can escape from their peril; both can die, etc. In T’sui Pên’s work, all outcomes are produced, each being the point of departure for other bifurcations”.

— The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

temperance - gala & bonnie temperance – gala & bonnie

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temperance – monster curves

When I was a student at VCA, I somehow blagged a copy of William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies which was largely responsible for the theoretical basis of the actual dancing in my work up until extermination when I was coerced into a satanic black metal cult. I was surprised to find I’d kept it not buried in some ready-for-the-garbage archive, but on a dvd that has travelled around with me for the last four years. The practical development of movement for temperance depends heavily on this stuff.

On its own, many of the approaches to analysing space and movement fall into fairly narrow Euclidean and Cartesian geometry. It gets interesting for me when momentum, residual motion and instability generate stochastic iterations that spread across a moving body in ways that can’t be predicted and are almost painfully complex to repeat.

I was talking about fractals and chaotic dynamics on Friday night, and how while both can be used as a somewhat facile metaphor for developing complexity in improvisation, there is a literal exactness, for example in which the flow of motion is sensitive to the initial conditions (the boundaries imposed by the very precise improvisation techniques). Unlike a mathematical or geological fractal though (eg the Mandelbrot set or the coastline of Australia) which are genuinely fractal at any scale, the fine structure on the scale of a body stops at the smallest joints.

As usual, everything currently refers back to Leibniz, and the idea of recursive self-similarity is as much in his scientific theories in topology as it is in his philosophical theories of optimism. So in this I think the current interest for me is how to define a system of improvising which is as clear in its understanding and quantifying of chaotic dynamics and fractal geometry as it is about Euclidean and Cartesian analysis of space.

Coming back to the practicalities of making temperance, we spent Friday night compressing all the techniques we’d been working with earlier in the week down onto our fingers, hands and upper body, then watching video of stuff from earlier in the week and beginning to learn it. There is a haunting, alien atmosphere that comes from watching these improvisations in the black box of the Temperance Hall under a de-saturating florescent light almost like Macbeth’s witches. It is something to do with the obvious thinking that goes on while the possessed bodies describe fiendishly intricate baroque designs.

temperance 4 - gala and bonnie temperance 4 – gala and bonnie

temperance 5 - gala and bonnie temperance 5 – gala and bonnie

temperance 6 - gala and bonnie temperance 6 – gala and bonnie

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temperance – Théodicée

In The System of the World, demented Jesuit fanatic Édouard de Gex is meditating on Satanists, and to paraphrase says there are two kinds, one far worse than the other. The Satanist who believes in and genuinely worships the Devil, while depraved is nonetheless of a different order of heathen to the Satanist who affects and performs belief out of an atheistic desire to annoy Christians. The former no matter how deep they have sunk is redeemable because they still believe that God exists; the latter is forever damned and is the most reprehensible beast of all humanity, because at their heart, they believe in nothing. Of course I’m one of the latter.

I’ve been watching the video of the first two rehearsals, and editing out short cuts that will very soon form the core of the eventual performance and film. It’s sort of a continuation of a method of making complex movement that I left off with carnivore, but instead on using computer-generated animation to make the base movement and then operating on it with a variety of spatial and temporal tools, this is being made initially with the tools, and then we video the improvisation (which is often a dirty word). I’d been wanting to work this way for a while, as a means of not making the kind of movement I know I would normally make, but as to how it will work, I’m not sure.

The reference to Satanism in such a piece of apparently ‘pure’ dance is a result of Leibniz who in no small way was concerned with God, and his Théodicée, where the dream of Sextus Tarquin is a model for an infinity of possible worlds, which comes back to Monads and the black box of the Temperance Hall.

temperance - gala and bonnie temperance – gala and bonnie

temperance - bonnie and gala temperance – bonnie and gala

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temperance

The last couple of days have been intensely busy, usually to the degree that dinner doesn’t happen, and even climbing has taken a pause. Last week, after some weeks of talking, amazing dancers Bonnie Paskas and Gala Moody and filmmaker/tyrannical Bastardo-swilling pirate Paul Williams and I got together realised we would be making a short performance and dance film over the next two weeks.

We are rehearsing in the Temperance Hall in South Melbourne, that for some years has been a rehearsal venue and is one of the last remaining spaces in inner-city Melbourne for such a thing. It’s a black-box with a small proscenium arch stage at one end and heaters to prevent spring frostbite while we make dance.

I’m currently either rehearsing or researching for three separate works that have some kind of crossover but are also thematically distinct. Some of my time lately has been spent in the absolute boudoir of the State Library, reading delightful gems like Bubonic plague in nineteenth-century China, and some of it has been a return to Leibniz, who has lurked behind much of what I read in the past year anyway, and has surfaced again through Gilles Deleuze’s monograph, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Temperance then is something of a return to pure dance, that I last left off four years ago with 吃肉的人 carnivore at the Guangdong Modern Dance Company. As usual when I’m making a new performance I’ll try and blog about it after every rehearsal, though I’ve been remiss so far.

As an individual unit, each monad includes the whole series; hence it conveys the entire world, but it does not express it without expressing more clearly a small region of the world, a “subdivision,” a borough of the city, a finite sequence.

[snip]

The condition of closure holds for the infinite opening of the finite: it “finitely represents infinity”. It gives the world the possibility of beginning over again in each monad.

— The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

temperance hall temperance hall

sunset over armadale baptist church

sunset along high street