Tag Archives: Dance Theory

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LADA — All The Books I Looked At

I’m doing this as a memory. I went to LADA, spent the afternoon in their Study Room, trawled hundreds of books and pulled out a few, spent minutes or tens of looking and reading. Also a memory. I am reminded of my own history in biographies or documents of people and groups I think of only infrequently, which at one time were all I thought of. Or others I know about and have never read, or have circulated around me, or are entirely new. The books are arranged chronologically, in the order they were purchased in. Of all the possible arrangements, this is my favourite. It tells you something about the book that it doesn’t and can’t tell you itself.

These are the books I looked at and read a little of. In chronological order — mine going from first to last, and LADA’s going backwards in time from most recently acquired to about halfway through their collection. Some I like; others I don’t. I am still wondering what they tell me about me.

  • Pina Bausch — The Biography, Marion Meyer (trans: Penny Black)
  • my body, the buddhist, Deborah Hay
  • Precarious Lives — Waiting and Hope in Iran, Shahram Khosravi
  • A Field Guide for Female Interrogators, Coco Fusco
  • Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, Pamela Allara and Manuela Bojadzijev
  • Guerilla Aspies — A Neurotypical Society Infiltration Manual, Paul Wady
  • Leigh Bowery — The Life And Times Of An Icon, Sue Tilley
  • Black Artists In British Art, A History Since The 1950s, Eddie Chambers
  • Test Dept: Total State Machine, eds. Alexei Monroe and Peter Webb
  • Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Gerardo Mosquera, Helaine Posner
  • Thee Psychick Bible : Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orrige and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
  • Jan Fabre: Stigmata. Actions & Performances 1976-2013, Germano Celant
  • Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, eds. Patrick Keilty and Rebecca Dean
  • Femininity, Time and Feminist Art, Clare Johnson
  • The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, Sue Scott
  • The Shit of God: Diamanda Galás, Diamanda Galás and Clive Barker
  • Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake. seven works for the theatre, ed. Frank Hentschker
  • Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam
  • Trans(per)forming Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Body of Work, ed. Judith Rudakoff
  • That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
  • Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s, Lydia Yee and Philip Ursprung
  • Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, Imogen Tyler
  • Are We There Yet? Study Room Guide on Live Art and Feminism, Live Art Development Agency
  • The Incorrigibles, Perspectives on Disability Visual Arts in the 20th and 21st Centuries, eds. Adrian Plant and Tanya Raabe-Webber
  • Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, eds. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier
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dance.psd – corporeal archives

A couple of things from the world of dance that isn’t performed. One is an essay from The Chronicle Review, Dancers as Living Archives. It’s slightly New York focussed – Martha “satan” Graham (not even deserving of an upper-case ‘s’-satan), Balanchine, Yvonne Rainer and Trio A. I was hoping for something a little more intellectual or scientific in respect to dancers’ formidable ability to corporeally recall movement, especially when the conscious mind doesn’t. To watch a dancer’s body remember the movement, and to see that recollection permeate their conscious mind, or to experience it, your own body moving as if following an unseen map is perhaps the single most profound cognitive aspect of dancing.

Other kinds of memory, like my laptop harddrive, which is certainly a part of me as are my own internal memories (haha). From the newly discovered and instantly rss-ed splines in space is an scribbling on top of dance video. Kinda like a Photoshop plugin for video, and probably something you could do through Final Cut Pro/Motion/Shake if you were prepared to go through the pain of learning these applications well. Zach Lieberman‘s Rotosketch makes it easy.

Rotosketch is quite simply an intuitive tool for sketching, doodling and notating on top of video,such that the marks that are made are linked in time with the video. This allows theuser to draw strokes along the the axis of time, as well as the normal x and y axes,and for those strokes to augment, analyze, interpret, or even obliterate a video sequence.

— thesystemis

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