Posts Tagged ‘dance’
“Yes, but does Maine have anything to SAY to Florida?”*…
The Rite of Spring: dancers in Nicholas Roerich’s original costumes
Art takes time, both to be created and to be understood. On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a ballet, premiered in Paris and promptly saw its audience descend into chaos. What was this new noise calling itself orchestral music? Did they hate it? Did they like it? Were they supposed to like it? Now the ballet and score are classics, but for some critics, this new style was simply another nail in the coffin of true artistry…
From Henry T. Fink’s The Noble Contempt for Melody (1914):
Are melodies out of fashion? Not with the public, which enjoys them more than ever. But the tailless foxes known as Futurists or cacophonists are doing their darnedest to create the impression that they are building up a new musical art, far nobler than the music of the past, into which so puerile a thing as melody cannot be allowed to enter.
Not content with boycotting melody, these cubists also make war on concord. Not for them is what Shakespeare called the “sweet concord of sounds.” Their music is an endless chain of premeditated discords—shrill, harsh, ear piercing. Concord, they tell us in word and deed, is for the old fogeys who like melodies and other sweets. The musical dishes of the future, according to their recipes, will be made up entirely of mustard, horseradish, vinegar, red pepper, curry, and asafetida. Guten appetit, kinder!
Scriabin, Stravinsky, Ferruccio Busoni, Leo Ornstein, Erik Satie, and a dozen others have thrown their hats in the ring, and each one tries to go the others one better in the cult of cacophony and general lawlessness. They remind one of the sportsmen who vie with each other in breeding ugliness into bulldogs.
From the ever-illuminating Lapham’s Quarterly.
* (Our old friend) Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As we trip the light fantastic, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that President Ronald Reagan signed the unanimously-passed Resolution of the Joint Houses of Congress, declaring square dancing the national folk dance of the United States.
Bent Creek Ranch Square Dance Team dancing at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina (c. 1940)
“I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial”*…
In the summer of 1937, stories started appearing in the local papers on and around Nantucket illustrated by photographs of giant footprints found on a local beach. Given the region’s long history of sea-serpent sightings, rumors quickly spread suggesting that, at last, one of the elusive creatures had come ashore.
Soon, indeed, a gigantic creature was spotted on Nantucket’s South Beach. People came flocking to investigate; but instead of the long awaited New England Sea Serpent, they found something quite different – a serpent of the inflatable balloon variety.
The whole thing had been an elaborate publicity stunt staged by the puppeteer Tony Sarg (pictured, smiling, in the center of the picture below). Over the preceding decade, Sarg (working with his protege Bil Baird) had pioneered inflatable puppets for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair– as a result of which he was widely known as “the father of modern puppetry” and as “America’s Puppet Master.” His sea-serpent was an attempt to get Nantucket in the news (and, no doubt, drum up a bit of business for Tony Sarg’s Curiosity Shop). In the event, it worked. After several weeks drawing crowds to Nantucket’s beaches, the installation made its way to New York City, where it starred in that year’s Macy’s Parade.
More at “The Nantucket Sea-Serpent Hoax.”
* Charles Baudelaire
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As we decide that it’s finally safe to go back into the water, we might recall that this date is Saint Vitus’ Day. Vitus was a martyr in the very early 4th century, who became the patron saint of actors, comedians, dancers, and epileptics, and is said to protect against lightning strikes, animal attacks, and oversleeping.
Given his attachment to both terpsichore and tremors, it’s no surprise that he’s the namesake of a phenomenon– St. Vitus’ Dance (AKA Dancing Mania)– that affected thousands in Europe for centuries. The condition involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time– a mania that affected men, women, and children, who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. While the first recorded outbreak was in the 7th century, the first major event was in 1374, in Aachen, Germany, from which it quickly spread throughout Europe; and perhaps the most notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518. St Vitus’ Dance appears to have completely died out by the mid-17th century.
Engraving by Hendrik Hondius portrays three women affected by the mania. The work is based on an original drawing by Peter Brueghel, who reportedly witnessed an outbreak of St Vitus’ Dance in 1564 in Flanders.
“A laborer over the course of an 8-hour day can sustain an average output of 75 watts”*…
In 75 Watt, a new project by London-based studio Cohen Van Balen, workers on a nondescript Far East assembly line are shown assembling an existential MacGuffin of a gadget: a nonsensical object that does absolutely nothing. But that is not to say it is purposeless; as Tuur Van Balen explains, “the only function of the object being built is to choreograph its own assembly. All of its dimensions, components, and materials are designed to create specific movements when they are put together.”
Read more about this exercise in industrial design as choreography at “A Gadget Designed To Make Assembly Line Workers Dance.”
* Marks’ Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers
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As we tip our hats to Terpsichore, we might recall that it was on this date in 1973 that Roger English of La Jolla, California stopped dancing the Twist after a record 102 hours and 39 minutes.
“Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire”*…
Brazilian designer Niege Borges is collecting, diagramming, and sharing the most famous (and infamous) dances from film and television. She explains:
In 1518, a bunch of people from a french town called Stransbourg were affected by something called dancing mania. It began with one lady named Frau Troffea dancing in the street and end up with, more or less, 400 people dancing on for days without rest, resulting in some deaths of heart attack, stroke and exhaustion. This project is, in some sort of way, a memorial for Frau Toffea. From the silliest little dance to the most elaborate dance sequence of the history of cinema, there were a lot of dancing in the last decades (not enough to kill anyone, I hope). Here are some of these dances.
From Tom Cruise’s BVD’ed turn in Risky Business, through Monty Python’s “Fish Slapping Dance,” to Monica’s and Ross’ “TV dance” (above), readers will find a growing set of instructive pictographs at “Dancing Plague of 1518” (and more of Borges work, here).
[TotH to CoDesign]
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we measure off our rugs for cutting, we might send wondrous birthday greetings to Stevland Hardaway Judkins**; he was born on this date in 1950– prematurely. The incubator into which he was placed had an incorrectly-regulated flow of oxygen; too much flowed in, aggravating the retinopathy that was a function of his early arrival, and leaving him blind. As a young child, he turned to music, picking up the piano, harmonica, drums and bass, and singing in his church choir. At 11 he was discovered by Motown Records, where producer Clarence Paul bestowed what became the youngster’s trademark name after stating “we can’t keep calling him the eighth wonder of the world”: Little Stevie Wonder. Little Stevie released a single in 1961, two albums in 1962, but broke big in 1963 with “Fingertips (Part 2).” In the mid-60s he dropped “Little” from his name, and began to agitate for more creative control over his recordings.
In 1971, as he came of legal age, Wonder got that artistic freedom (and an unprecedented royalty rate) in a new Motown contract… and the hits began to roll. Over the next five years he released five albums– Music of My Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976)– from which come the vast majority of what most would consider to be his greatest hits, including “Superstition” (1971), “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” (1973), “Higher Ground” (1973), “Livin’ For The City” (1973), “You Haven’t Done Nothin'” (1974), “I Wish” (1977), and “Sir Duke” (1977).
He’s sold over 100 million recordings, won 22 Grammys (plus a Lifetime Achievement Grammy), earned an Oscar, and been inducted into the Songwriters and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame… among many, many other honors.
** Stevie was born in Saganaw, Michigan; his mother moved the family to Detroit when he was four, and changed the family name to Hardaway (her maiden name); later she changed Stevie’s last name to Morris– his legal surname ever since.
“Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it”*…
Psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj Žižek has become potent public intellectual. Variously called “the Borat of philosophy,” “the Elvis of cultural theory,” and “the world’s hippest philosopher,” he’s published more than 50 books, countless articles, and starred in several documentaries. Indeed, there’s already a journal, The International Journal of Žižek Studies, devoted to his works.
As cultural theorists and critics go, Zižek is among the more accessible. Still, he brings out the impenetrable in his followers; to wit, a typical quote from a book entitled (apparently un-ironically) Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed: “Žižek finds the place for Lacan in Hegel by seeing the Real as the correlate of the self-division and self-doubling within phenomena.”
Žižek himself is a little more plain-spoken, as readers can see in this Dutch documentary…
But it is as a film critic– indeed, a film fan– that (R)D invokes the Slavic Savant. Žižek writes often about movies, and hosted a the three-part documentary series, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Joseph and Ralph). The Pervert’s Guide places Zizek in original locations and replica sets of several classic films—David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, to name just a few. Zizek’s scenes of commentary are edited with scenes from the films to give the impression that he is speaking from within the films themselves… To what ends? Well, readers can see for themselves in this clip on Vertigo:
See the whole of Part One here. And read more about The Pervert’s Guide at Open Culture.
* Marshall McLuhan
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As we move closer to the screen, we might spare a thought for Virginia Katherine McMath (whom we knew better by her stage name, Ginger Rogers); she died on this date in 1995. Rogers worked in vaudeville, then on Broadway, and made over 70 films; but she is surely best remembered for the nine RKO musicals she made with Fred Astaire between 1933 and 1939. Starting with Flying Down to Rio, and including Top Hat, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance, they revolutionized the Hollywood musical. Astaire was a grateful fan; in an interview with Raymond Rohauer, curator at the New York Gallery of Modern Art, he said, “Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success.”
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