Monday, September 19, 2011


Mikhail Baryshnikov and Merce Cunningham Talk Dance Photography

Photo: Everett Bogue
Photo: Everett Bogue
He may not be gracing the stage quite so often these days, but ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov has remained an ever-present artistic force; look around town, and you’ll see his mark on everything from cultural venues (the impressive Baryshnikov Arts Center) to new modern dance (his young Hell’s Kitchen Dance troupe) to theater (in last year’s acclaimed Beckett Shorts) to worshipful artistic homages — his mostly naked body is depicted, Apollo-like, by Robert Wilson, in the lobby of BAM. His latest project, a photo exhibition at Mark Seliger’s 401 Projects, showcases the results of two years of following around the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and capturing their movements on digital film. Misha (and, to our delight and surprise, Cunningham himself!) took a break from the opening-night festivities to talk to Vulture.
You’ve been photographing for decades, but never dancers. Why this, now?
I was experimenting. I wanted to really take certain moments that the audience during the performance may not necessarily appreciate, maybe some emotional moments, some romantic moments that I see, and sometimes I feel the audience doesn’t. I know that sometimes they feel, “He [Merce] is so formal and so detached and not emotional,” but I think it’s actually quite the opposite. That’s what I was trying to show in my work.
Why had you never focused on dance photography before?
I never liked dance photography; it’s very flat, and dance photography in the studio looks very contrived. Very few photographers really know how to … it’s just a page in the book. It was not that I hated it, but I didn’t feel it was necessary compared with the real thing. But there were a few photographers — Brodovitch, Himmel, Ilse Bing, Irving Penn — who made me feel it was possible. I wanted the audience to see, to be able to imagine, the movement before and after, not just the frozen moment.
So was it strange to now see dance from the photographer’s perspective?
I was just worried that I was a distraction for the dancers! But since I was always there two hours before the premiere, they were nervous anyway.
Your friendship with Merce is a long-standing one — do you relate to his choreographic style especially well?
When I arrived in this country almost 35 years ago, I started slowly to see … it took me a few years to get hooked! Some things for me, being a classical dancer at that time, were oddly familiar but also kind of far. But then I understood more and more the way he works and challenges his imagination and his dancers, and I became a Merce junkie. And of course I’ve had the luck and privilege to work with him and dance in his pieces and dance with him together, and I’m a big fan of his. I’m very honored to be his friend. I really admire him with all my heart.
So do you feel he really opened the window to modern dance for you?
Yes, yes. Though this is not really modern dance — it is in history books that are not written yet, because it is so far ahead of its time — much more than even George Balanchine. This is art that transfigures our present time into the future.
You’ve moved far beyond dance in recent years…
I’ve always rejected the notion that I’m just a dancer. I was always interested in photography and other forms of art. First of all it takes your mind from the kind of annoying moments in your professional life and opens different ones, and then you come back and through this I actually understand my own work in much more detail. You know, maybe it’s a bit too late in my career [laughs]. I wish I could start this again. It would have been something different.
Really? Would you do something other than ballet if you were starting over?
Absolutely. I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t dance at all.
Photo: Everett Bogue
[At this point, who should roll into the gallery but Merce Cunningham himself! The 88-year-old choreographic legend did us the honor of having a brief chat as he surveyed the photos.]
So what do you think?
It’s great! One person is almost static, and the other one is moving. The static position of the body we know, but the moving position is different — it looks as if you got bigger. You see a kind of blur, and on top it’s the head moving! It’s like double, triple images. And in this one, there’s an arm that looks like a bird — it has feathers, and wings at the end of it!
What do you especially like about Misha’s work?
He has a great interest in what’s happening now, and this kind of work would not be possible without that which wasn’t around, let’s say, a few weeks ago. I saw him in the Beckett plays, and particularly in the first one, he was wonderful. It was quite striking.
And are you seeing your own work in a new way?
It’ such a different way of thinking about photographing; ordinarily it’s more static. It’s a great difference from dance photographs twenty years ago, which were just a picture. If you wanted to capture jumping, it was recorded in that position — and if it was a marvelous jump, everyone wondered how you got there! Here you see the movement — that’s something he sees.
Was it strange knowing throughout this project that Baryshnikov was constantly watching your work?
We would rehearse, and he came with his camera and stood quite close to the stage, and because he has a dancer’s eye, he knew where to look or move. You could see, he would hold the camera still, and then he’d move it, so he caught both things. I had no idea what these would look like, but it was fascinating to watch. He was like a sprite moving around in front of the stage. —Rebecca Milzoff




http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/03/mikhail_baryshnikov_and_merce.html

Sunday, September 18, 2011

So the goal for The Bell House is to be more present. We're going to start with more blogging and more posts and more specifically, more substance, beginning with a new Pinterest account:

http://pinterest.com/johnsonrac/

This is where folks can pin favorite interests related to our pinboards. It should be fun!

~Rachel

Friday, June 03, 2011

Very generous review by Alicia Chesser:


Quite a Sight
Living Water Dance Company's VISTA program was a panorama of movement
By ALICIA CHESSER
Dance is about the body, but it's also about the soul. The Living Water Dance Company, a Tulsa-based contemporary troupe led by Amy Roark-McIntosh, the founding director of dance at Oral Roberts University, explored the connection between the two in a thoughtful, varied, and moving performance of 11 original works at Camp Loughridge on May 15.
The program, entitled VISTA: sight, vision, perspective, field of vision, glimpse, landscape ... engaged viewers with those ideas as soon as they entered the campground, with dancers scattered around the Temple Conference Center, moving in silence. Robbee Stafford floated with the wind, from a boulder up onto a stone path; Rachel Bruce Johnson wrestled with a trio of pine trees; others played with the building's panoramic windows.


photo by Rachel Bruce Johnson | The Bell House
"Part of the vision I have for Living Water," Roark-McIntosh said, "is to share dance and improvisation in both traditional and creative venues, and Loughridge gives us the opportunity to creatively explore both indoor and outdoor space in a beautiful, natural setting."
The dancers moved inside, and the program opened with "Tension y escape," a flamenco solo by Lexi Allen (accompanied by guitarist Johnny Beard and percussionist Dylan Allen), which formed a striking contrast to the outdoor improvisation. In a stark black and white dress, her agile hands twining through the air as her feet stamped the floor, Allen was both structured and luxuriant, her steady gaze holding the focal point between groundedness and freedom.
L. Brooke Schlecte's "Shifting Parables" had the mesmerizing Johnson (also an ORU dance professor and the executive director of Bell House Arts) working at her edges. Seeming lost in space, she pushed a hand against her shoulder, her elbow, and her cheek to see when and where she'd fall. She looked up uncertainly, as if consulting a higher power, then looked back to her own body to try out the message. Her hands gestured haphazardly, then took on the movements of writing. Johnson's costume was all stripes and lines, telegraphing the solo's story of how we tell the story of who we are.
Anchoring VISTA were two long pieces, both by Roark-McIntosh, both rich with spiritual symbolism and ideas about community and communion. "Eucharistia," set to haunting music by Olafur Arnalds, took viewers through stages of preparing for a literal communion -- bread and wine -- and for its metaphoric counterpart, the transformation of a person through grace. Eight dancers entered in a line, then broke off in charged gestures (a finger to a palm, hands cupping mouths, fists clenched against the womb). Johnson crumpled to the floor apart from the group and was guided by a riveting Jessica Vokoun (assistant professor of dance at the University of Tulsa) through a sort of conversion experience, at the end of which Johnson's arms subtly traced the axes of a cross. She lay prostrate at the back of the room (bright and high-ceilinged like a cabin-cathedral) as Vokoun came forward, offering bread and wine to everyone in attendance who wished to partake. "Eucharistia" was a powerful meditation on the ways in which the support of a community allows "outsideness" to be revealed, broken down, and transformed.
For "Untamed," first seen as part of the Living Arts Contemporary Dance New Genre festival, the company brought the audience outside and performed the first half of the piece in a stand of trees and on a grassy hill. This work -- exploring "the mystery of the spirit of God" through sensory experience -- benefited from this natural setting, as Roark-McIntosh's expansive, flowing choreography merged with rustling trees and gleaming water. Incense, oil, candle flame, dark robes, baptism and anointing -- the piece was full of ancient religious imagery, made new by its expression in a contemporary dance for women.
As the dancers moved indoors, they brought the audience with them, continuing the piece in front of a dance film by Johnson, projected onto a screen between the stage and those awe-inspiring windows. At one point, the women on the stage, in black, did the same gestures as the women in the film, in white, who looked like angels moving in mirror image to the women on earth.
The strongest piece of the afternoon was Johnson's "Avelut," set to music by Philip Glass and based on Jewish mourning rituals. In her choreography, Johnson is often interested in the lightness and weight of the body; here those qualities take on an overtly spiritual dimension. She notices that the grieving body feels different, disengaged, out of place in the world. With Roark-McIntosh and Stafford beside her, all three sitting on low stools, Johnson watched her right arm fall and dangle; she walked heavily on all fours and sliced the air with her elbow, her movement just slightly out of time with the others. In her grief she literally fell off her chair, over and over, and what could have been an overwrought gesture was in Johnson's hands a masterpiece of subtle anguish. Her friends supported her with the simplest movements of compassion -- grounding, lifting, protecting. It was a brief, spare dance that spoke a hard truth gently.
VISTA also included several short pieces, including a solo on the idea of blindness, passionately danced by Stafford; a charming tap duet by McIntosh and Heather Fick, to the song "Me and My Shadow"; and Johnson's "Red," featuring Brie Matlach as a woman discovering mischievousness and surprise in a lonely situation. To conclude the program, local musician Dave Paulec played and McIntosh sang the 19th-century hymn "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," while four dancers improvised a joyful ending to an afternoon of searching and finding, and attending to what one finds along the way.

Monday, March 07, 2011

Check out this review on upcoming EXCHANGE adjudicator, Amy Querin, artistic director of Fresno Dance Collective:

http://fresnobeehive.com/2011/03/rogue_review_fr_1.html

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Well, the new website if finally ready for launch! We kept the old domain, of course, but it has a new, beautiful look and feel! Thank you Maranda Blumenthal for all your work on the new website!

www.bellhousearts.org

We also (by necessity) had to launch a new site to house the Exchange festival pages.

www.exchangefestival.org

I think it's comprehensive and concise and still looks great!
It's not easy finding your way around technology. There are some days I really hate it. I've been ready to hire more than my share of professionals to make us look swanky. In some ways, I almost think that is a smarter business plan. But for now, we are mucking around still a bit here and there on our own....except when we're not.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Well, Christmas is almost here and the launch of our new website is, as expected, behind. However, it should premiere just in good timing with the unveiling of our new commercial video for Exchange Festival that will be in Tulsa, OK August 5-7, 2011. We are so excited about this. Andrea and Robert Jobe with Pivot Films did a fabulous job with the video and it highlights some amazing dance artists in Tulsa.

Here's a production shot from the filming day.













Now, to get back to work on our beautiful website. Maranda Blumenthal of Black Star Photographica has been laying out our information and photos in our new BluDomain flash template and I have to say, it's gorgeous!! I'm sure she's frustrated, though, waiting for new pictures! Gaaaaa, I wish the Executive Director would get her act together and send them ASAP! (sowy, Maranda!!)

We can't WAIT to show you!!

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

MEDIA OVERHAUL


There seems to be so much to do and never enough time to do it all. I did, however, accomplish one thing so far this week - updating the portfolio on the design gallery page of The Bell House website.

I put together one digital image in order to showpiece a program I did for Out On a Limb Dance Company for the Out of the Loop Festival in 2009. I didn't want to upload all the pages individually, so I created one document to show the layout and uploaded that. Turned out pretty good.

We'll be auditioning for a photoshoot to create new images for Bell House mid-September. I'll be inviting area artists to participate in exchange for free images that they can use for their own purposes. The ideas that the BHA creative team have come up with for this shoot are amazing and will be exciting and challenging to capture. I'm finding a lot of inspiration from Laurent Ziegler, a brilliant photographer/video artist with an impressively abundant resumé. Under the collective name of un|still, Laurent's work ranges from dance, portraits, documentary, and art projects. And she simply signs her eNewletter with:

laurent ziegler
photographer

© copyright 2010 by laurent ziegler

There are many changes to the look and feel of our media coming. Just plugging away one thing at a time, which is all I can do these days and still not miss out on my two boys.

photo by Maranda Blumenthal

~Rachel