Ballerina Misty Copeland Recreates the Poses of Edgar Degas’ Ballet Dancers

in Art, Dance, Photography | August 12th, 2020

#Repost @nycdanceproject ・・・ We are remem­ber­ing the Misty Copeland Degas inspired pho­to shoot we did for Harper’s Bazaar in March. The Degas exhib­it that inspired this at @themuseumofmodernart is clos­ing this Sun­day — try to see it if you get a chance! Dress by @maisonvalentino @harpersbazaarus @mistyonpointe #theartof­move­ment #nyc­dan­ce­pro­ject #degas #misty­copeland #misty #harpers­bazaar #moma

“I am a man of motion,” trag­ic mod­ernist bal­let dancer Vaslav Nijin­sky wrote in his famous Diary, “I am feel­ing through flesh…. I am God in a body.” Nijin­sky suf­fered the unfor­tu­nate onset of schiz­o­phre­nia after his career end­ed, but in his lucid moments, he writes of the great­est pain of his illness—to nev­er dance again. A degree of his obses­sive devo­tion seems intrin­sic to bal­let.

Misty Copeland, who titled her auto­bi­og­ra­phy Life in Motion, thinks so. “All dancers are con­trol freaks a bit,” she says. “We just want to be in con­trol of our­selves and our bod­ies. That’s just what the bal­let struc­ture, I think, kind of puts inside of you. If I’m put in a sit­u­a­tion where I am not real­ly sure what’s going to hap­pen, it can be over­whelm­ing. I get a bit anx­ious.” As Nijin­sky did, Copeland is also “forc­ing peo­ple to look at bal­let through a more con­tem­po­rary lens,” writes Stephen Mooallem in Harper’s Bazaar.

@harpersbazaarus she channels artist #EdgarDegas’s most famous ballet works ahead of a new exhibition at #MOMA, dancer @MistyOnPointe opens up about what it feels like to make history. Go to the link in our bio to read her interview from the March 2016 issue and see the full fashion shoot by Ken Browar and Deborah Ory of @NYCDanceProject, styled by @Michelle_Jank.

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Copeland has been can­did about her strug­gles on the way to becom­ing the first African Amer­i­can woman named a prin­ci­pal dancer at the Amer­i­can Bal­let The­atre, includ­ing cop­ing with depres­sion, a leg-injury, body-image issues, and child­hood pover­ty. She is also “in the midst of the most illu­mi­nat­ing pas de deux with pop cul­ture for a clas­si­cal dancer since Mikhail Barysh­nikov went toe-to-toe with Gre­go­ry Hines in White Nights” (a ref­er­ence that may be lost on younger read­ers, but trust me, this was huge).

Like anoth­er mod­ernist artist, Edgar Degas, Copeland has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the image of the bal­let dancer. Degas’ bal­let paint­ings, “which the artist began cre­at­ing in the late 1860s and con­tin­ued mak­ing until the years before his death, in 1917, were infused with a very mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ty. Instead of ide­al­ized visions of del­i­cate crea­tures pirou­et­ting onstage, he offered images of young girls con­gre­gat­ing, prac­tic­ing, labor­ing, danc­ing, train­ing….” He showed the unglam­orous life and work behind the cos­tumed pageantry, that is.

#Repost @dancenthusiast ・・・ ​“I feel like I rep­re­sent every young dancer, and even non-dancer, who felt they were not accept­ed by the bal­let world. I’d like to think that they can see them­selves in me.” ~ Misty Copeland 👑 [Image: Misty Copeland recre­at­ing ‘The Lit­tle Four­teen-Year-Old Dancer,’ a sculp­ture by Edgar Degas] ____________________________________ pho­to by @nycdanceproject

Pho­tog­ra­phers Ken Browar and Deb­o­rah Ory envi­sioned Copeland as sev­er­al of Degas’ dancers, pos­ing her in cou­ture dress­es in recre­ations of some of his famous paint­ings and sculp­tures. The pho­tographs are part of their NYC Dance Project, in part­ner­ship with Harper’s Bazaar. As Kot­tke points out, con­flat­ing the his­to­ries of Copeland and Degas’ dancers rais­es some ques­tions. Degas had con­tempt for women, espe­cial­ly his Parisian sub­jects, who danced in a sor­did world in which “sex work” between teenage dancers and old­er men “was a part of a ballerina’s real­i­ty,” writes author Julia Fiore (as it was too in Nijinsky’s day).

This con­text may unset­tle our view­ing, but the images also show Copeland in full con­trol of Degas’ scenes, though that’s not the way it felt, she says. “It was inter­est­ing to be on shoot and to not have the free­dom to just cre­ate like in nor­mal­ly do with my body. Try­ing to re-cre­ate what Degas did was real­ly dif­fi­cult.” Instead, she embod­ied his fig­ures as her­self. “I see a great affin­i­ty between Degas’s dancers and Misty,” says Thel­ma Gold­en, direc­tor of the Stu­dio Muse­um in Harlem. “She has knocked aside a long-stand­ing music-box stereo­type of the bal­le­ri­na and replaced it with a thor­ough­ly mod­ern, mul­ti­cul­tur­al image of pres­ence and pow­er.”

@popsugarfitness continues to take our breath away as she recreates paintings and sculptures by artist Edgar Degas for @harpersbazaarus. 😍(📷 @nycdanceproject) #mistycopeland #ballet

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See more of Copeland’s Degas recre­ations at Harper’s Bazaar.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Impres­sion­ist Painter Edgar Degas Takes a Stroll in Paris, 1915

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

Watch the Ser­pen­tine Dance, Cre­at­ed by the Pio­neer­ing Dancer Loie Fuller, Per­formed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Broth­ers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When IBM Created a Typewriter to Record Dance Movements (1973)

in Dance, History, Technology | April 28th, 2020

Increas­ing­ly many of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry have nev­er used a type­writer — indeed, have nev­er seen one in real life. But despite being deep into its obso­les­cence, the machine has a long cul­tur­al half-life. See­ing type­writ­ers in clas­sic and peri­od films, for exam­ple, keeps an idea of their look and feel in our minds. Nat­u­ral­ly it gets entan­gled with the romance of the writer, or rather the Writer, whom we imag­ine pound­ing away on a cul­tur­al­ly icon­ic mod­el: an Under­wood, an Olvetti. “If Olivet­tis could talk, you’d get the nov­el­ist naked,” writes Philip Roth in The Anato­my Les­son. From the then-new elec­tric IBM type­writ­ers, how­ev­er, you’d hear “only the smug, puri­tan­i­cal work­man­like hum telling of itself and all its virtues: I am a Cor­rect­ing Selec­tric II. I nev­er do any­thing wrong.”

Yet we under­es­ti­mate the influ­ence of the IBM Selec­tric, on not just writ­ing but late-20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can life in gen­er­al, at our per­il. Intro­duced in 1961, this tech­no­log­i­cal­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary type­writer replaced the old “type­bars” — those thin met­al arms that whack a let­ter onto the page with each key­stroke — with a “type­ball,” a “com­pact unit con­tain­ing all the let­ters and sym­bols of a key­board, rotat­ed and piv­ot­ed to the cor­rect posi­tion before strik­ing.”

So writes IBM’s Jus­tine Jablon­s­ka in an essay on the ver­sa­til­i­ty of the type­ball, which could be swapped out and mod­i­fied accord­ing to the needs of the user. In 1973, IBM could say even to those users who need­ed to type out not words, sen­tences, and para­graphs but dances that, yes, there’s a type­ball for that.

Devel­oped in col­lab­o­ra­tion with New York City’s Dance Nota­tion Bureau, this unusu­al type­ball “had spe­cial Laban­o­ta­tion sym­bols, devel­oped in the 1920s by Hun­gar­i­an dancer/choreographer Rudolf Laban to ana­lyze and record move­ment and dance.” Each sym­bol­’s loca­tion “showed which part of the body — arm, leg, tor­so — was to be used. The symbol’s shape indi­cat­ed direc­tion. The symbol’s shad­ing showed the lev­el of an arm or leg. And its length con­trolled the time val­ue of a move­ment.” In total, writes Karen Hill at Zip­py Facts, Laban­o­ta­tion had “88 dif­fer­ent sym­bols, which could be arranged to form a com­plete vocab­u­lary for record­ing move­ment of any kind, from bal­let and mod­ern to eth­nic, even folk.” Beyond dance, the sys­tem could also record “move­ments in areas like sports, behav­ioral sci­ences, phys­i­cal ther­a­py, and even indus­tri­al oper­a­tions.”

This par­tic­u­lar type­ball show­cased the Selec­tric’s ver­sa­til­i­ty, but some had high­er hopes. In a 1975 paper, dance schol­ar Drid Williams com­pares its poten­tial impact to that of “Guten­berg’s inven­tion sev­er­al cen­turies ago,” sig­nal­ing that “the graph­ic lin­guis­tic sign can now be joined by its obvi­ous coun­ter­part, the print­ed human action sign.” But she also express­es regret that “ ‘the ball’ is being looked on by many as a mere prac­ti­cal aid to record­ing human move­ment and it is being asso­ci­at­ed with spe­cial­ist fields like dance. As usu­al, con­cern with the syn­tag­ma­ta obscures the real issues of the par­a­digms.” Indeed. A more prac­ti­cal-mind­ed assess­ment comes from Charles Ditchen­dorf, employed at the time at IBM’s Office Prod­ucts Divi­sion. “To the best of my knowl­edge,” Jablon­s­ka quotes him as say­ing, I didn’t sell one.” But then, when has dance ever been enslaved to the mar­ket?

via Ted Gioia on Twit­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Inge­nious Type­writer That Prints Musi­cal Nota­tion: The Keaton Music Type­writer Patent­ed in 1936

Nota­tions: John Cage Pub­lish­es a Book of Graph­ic Musi­cal Scores, Fea­tur­ing Visu­al­iza­tions of Works by Leonard Bern­stein, Igor Stravin­sky, The Bea­t­les & More (1969)

Arnold Schoen­berg, Avant-Garde Com­pos­er, Cre­ates a Sys­tem of Sym­bols for Notat­ing Ten­nis Match­es

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

Dis­cov­er Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball” (Cir­ca 1881)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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How Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring Incited a Riot? An Animated Introduction

in Dance, History, Music | January 16th, 2020

There was a time when a bal­let could start a riot — specif­i­cal­ly, the night of May 29th, 1913. The place was Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the bal­let was The Rite of Spring, com­posed by Igor Stravin­sky for the Bal­lets Rus­es com­pa­ny. Pop­u­lar his­to­ry has remem­bered this debut per­for­mance as too bold, too dar­ing, too avant-garde for its gen­teel audi­ence to han­dle — and so, with the bour­geois duly épaté, we can freely appre­ci­ate Stravin­sky’s rad­i­cal work from our posi­tion of 21st-cen­tu­ry sophis­ti­ca­tion. But whether The Rite of Spring incit­ed a riot, a “near-riot” (as some source describe it), or mere­ly a wave of dis­sat­is­fac­tion, what aspects of its art were respon­si­ble?

May 29th, 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées comes alive again in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above, which exam­ines all the ways The Rite of Spring broke vio­lent­ly with the bal­let form as it had estab­lished itself in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Les­son cre­ator Iseult Gille­spie (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for her explana­to­ry work on every­thing from Shake­speare and Guer­ni­ca to Fri­da Kahlo and Haru­ki Muraka­mi) writes of its “harsh music, jerky danc­ing, and uncan­ny stag­ing,” all in ser­vice of a high­ly un-gen­teel Pagan premise that “set audi­ences on edge and shat­tered the con­ven­tions of clas­si­cal music.”

Among Stravin­sky’s musi­cal provo­ca­tions — or rather, “for­mal exper­i­ments,” — Gille­spie names “syn­co­pa­tion, or irreg­u­lar rhythm,” “atonal­i­ty, or the lack of a sin­gle key,” and “the pres­ence of mul­ti­ple time sig­na­tures,” as well as the inclu­sion of aspects of the Russ­ian folk music that was Stravin­sky’s cul­tur­al inher­i­tance. Along with the music, already star­tling enough, came visu­al design by Nicholas Roerich, a painter-philoso­pher “obsessed with pre­his­toric times” and pro­fes­sion­al­ly con­cerned with human sac­ri­fice and ancient tomb exca­va­tion.

Wear­ing Roerich’s awk­ward­ly-hang­ing peas­ant gar­ments in front of his “vivid back­drops of primeval nature full of jagged rocks, loom­ing trees, and night­mar­ish col­ors,” the bal­let’s dancers per­formed steps by Vaslav Nijin­sky, whose sense of rig­or brought him to cre­ate dances “to rethink the roots of move­ment itself.” His chore­og­ra­phy “con­tort­ed tra­di­tion­al bal­let, to both the awe and hor­ror of his audi­ence” — but then, that pos­si­bly overde­ter­mined awe and hor­ror could have arisen from sev­er­al num­ber of artis­tic sources at once. The Rite of Spring’s ten­sion and urgency still today reflects the his­tor­i­cal moment of its com­po­si­tion, “the cusp of both the first world war and the Russ­ian rev­o­lu­tion,” and we could also take the ear­ly reac­tion to its inno­va­tions as a reflec­tion of its cre­ators’ genius — or per­haps those first view­ers, as Stravin­sky him­self put it, were sim­ply “naïve and stu­pid peo­ple.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Igor Stravin­sky Remem­bers the “Riotous” Pre­miere of His Rite of Spring in 1913: “They Were Very Shocked. They Were Naive and Stu­pid Peo­ple”

Hear The Rite of Spring Con­duct­ed by Igor Stravin­sky Him­self: A Vin­tage Record­ing from 1929

Hear 46 Ver­sions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Min­utes: A Clas­sic Mashup

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct the Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece that First Made Him Famous (1965)

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch the Serpentine Dance, Created by the Pioneering Dancer Loie Fuller, Performed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Brothers

in Dance, Film | November 13th, 2019

What­ev­er their views on copy­right, artists and inven­tors of all kinds can agree on one thing: all dread hav­ing their ideas stolen with­out so much as a foot­note of cred­it. Such thefts have led to tanked careers, life­long resent­ments, homi­ci­dal rival­ries, and law­suits to fill libraries. They have allowed many a thief to pros­per and many an injured par­ty to sur­ren­der.

But not leg­endary mod­ern dance pio­neer Loie Fuller.

“Short, plump, and thir­ty years old,” the dancer from Illi­nois arrived in Paris in 1892, fresh off the “mid-lev­el vaude­ville” cir­cuit, writes Rhon­da K. Gare­lick at Pub­lic Domain Review, and bent on prov­ing her­self to Édouard Marc­hand, direc­tor of the Folies-Bergère. She scored an inter­view with­in days of her arrival.

Alight­ing from her car­riage in front of the the­ater, she stopped short at the sight of the large plac­ard depict­ing the Folies’ cur­rent dance attrac­tion: a young woman wav­ing enor­mous veils over her head, billed as the “ser­pen­tine dancer.” “Here was the cat­a­clysm, my utter anni­hi­la­tion,” Fuller would lat­er write, for she had come to the Folies that day pre­cise­ly to audi­tion her own, new “ser­pen­tine dance,” an art form she had invent­ed in the Unit­ed States.

The imposter, an Amer­i­can named May­belle Stew­art, had seen Fuller per­form in New York and had lift­ed her act and tak­en it to Paris. Rather than suc­cumb to rage or despair, Fuller sat through the mati­nee per­for­mance and was moved from a cold sweat to renewed con­fi­dence. “The longer she danced,” she wrote, “the calmer I became.” After Stew­art left the stage, Fuller ascend­ed in her ser­pen­tine cos­tume and audi­tioned for Marc­hand, who agreed to take her on and fire Stew­art.

The sto­ry gets stranger. The show had been pro­mot­ed with Stewart’s name, and so, to avoid bad pub­lic­i­ty, Fuller agreed to per­form the first two nights as Stew­art, “danc­ing her own imi­ta­tion of Stewart’s imi­ta­tion of the ser­pen­tine dance,” a “triple-lay­er sim­u­la­tion,” Gare­lick writes, “wor­thy of an essay by Jean Baudrillard”—and emblem­at­ic of a career in dance marked by “self-repli­ca­tion, mir­rored images, and iden­ti­ty play.”

Thus did the woman named Loie Fuller (born Mary-Louise Fuller), begin “what was to become an unbro­ken thir­ty-year reign as one of Europe’s most wild­ly cel­e­brat­ed dancers.” Fuller was “the only female enter­tain­er to have her own pavil­ion” at the 1900 Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle, writes Natal­ie Lemie at Art­sy. “Hen­ri de Toulouse-Lautrec fea­tured her in a num­ber of prints; Auguste Rodin com­mis­sioned a series of pho­tographs of the dancer with plans to sculpt her; and the Lumière broth­ers released a film about her in 1897.”

Fuller’s dance per­son­i­fied Art Nou­veau, express­ing its ele­gant, flow­ing lines in her bil­low­ing silk gowns, which she moved by means of bam­boo sewn into her sleeves. As she danced “col­ored lights were pro­ject­ed onto the flow­ing fab­ric, and as she twirled, she seemed to meta­mor­phose into ele­ments from the nat­ur­al world: a flower, a but­ter­fly, a tongue of flame.” Every­one came to see her. The Folies, which “typ­i­cal­ly attract­ed work­ing class patrons,” now had aris­to­crat­ic new­com­ers lin­ing up out­side.

See the ser­pen­tine dance that launched her career at the top in the Lumière Broth­ers’ 1897 film and below it in a col­orized excerpt, with the bewitch­ing music of Sig­ur Ros added for effect. Oth­er films and clips here from oth­er ear­ly cin­e­ma pio­neers show the medi­um’s embrace of Fuller’s chore­og­ra­phy. Iron­i­cal­ly, none of this footage, it seems, shows Fuller her­self, but only her imi­ta­tors. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly none of the sur­viv­ing films seem to con­tain a per­for­mance by the orig­i­nal dancer/choreographer,” notes cin­e­ma his­to­ry chan­nel Mag­i­cal Motion Muse­um, “despite some of them car­ry­ing her name in the title or oth­er­wise cred­it­ing her as the dancer.”

Her name car­ried a lot of weight. Fuller was not only a cel­e­brat­ed dancer, but also a man­ag­er, pro­duc­er, and light­ing design­er with “over a dozen patents relat­ed to her cos­tumes and inno­va­tions in stage light­ing.” (She was so inter­est­ed in the “lumi­nous prop­er­ties” of radi­um that she sought out and “befriend­ed its dis­cov­er­ers, Pierre and Marie Curie.”) By 1908, how­ev­er, she had left behind some of these elab­o­rate stage effects to focus on “nat­ur­al dancing’—dance inspired by nature, which was the fore­run­ner of mod­ern dance.”

And she had tak­en on a young dancer in her com­pa­ny named Isado­ra Dun­can, often referred to as the “Moth­er of Mod­ern Dance.” Fuller deserves cred­it, too, but she didn’t seem to care about this over­much. She was, notes Ober­lin Col­lege dance pro­fes­sor Ann Coop­er Albright, “way more inter­est­ed in mak­ing things hap­pen than cre­at­ing a name for her­self.” Fame came as a byprod­uct of her cre­ativ­i­ty rather than its sought-after reward. She was still renowned after she left the stage, and giv­en a ret­ro­spec­tive at The Lou­vre in 1924.

Fuller con­tin­ued to work behind the scenes after the Art Nou­veau move­ment gave way to new mod­ernisms and sup­port­ed and inspired younger artists until her death in 1928. Her work deserves a promi­nent place in the his­to­ry of mod­ern dance, but Fuller her­self “was—and remains—elusive,” Lemie writes, “some­thing of a phan­tom.” Oth­ers might have stolen, bor­rowed, or imi­tat­ed the ser­pen­tine dance, but Lois Fuller became it, going beyond com­pe­ti­tion and into a realm of mag­ic.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let, First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

The Grace­ful Move­ments of Kung Fu & Mod­ern Dance Revealed in Stun­ning Motion Visu­al­iza­tions

Expres­sion­ist Dance Cos­tumes from the 1920s, and the Trag­ic Sto­ry of Lavinia Schulz & Wal­ter Holdt

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Expressionist Dance Costumes from the 1920s, and the Tragic Story of Lavinia Schulz & Walter Holdt

in Dance, History | September 12th, 2019

The most fruit­ful cre­ative part­ner­ships, long or short, have often been tem­pes­tu­ous. On the short­er side, and among the stormi­est, we have a hus­band-and-wife team who real­ized visions hith­er­to unseen onstage, and who very near­ly fell into total obscu­ri­ty after a mur­der-sui­cide brought their part­ner­ship to an end. But in the Ham­burg of the late 1910s and ear­ly 1920s, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, Lavinia Schulz and Wal­ter Holdt “cre­at­ed wild, Expres­sion­ist cos­tumes that looked like retro robots and Bauhaus knights,” twen­ty of them, for per­for­mances accom­pa­nied by avant-garde music. After their death in 1924, Schulz and Holdt’s work went into stor­age, nev­er to be found again until the late 1980s.

The cos­tumes had been gift­ed to the Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe, which in 1925 “staged an evening in mem­o­ry of Lavinia Schulz and Wal­ter Holdt,” writes blog­ger Jan Reet­ze.

“After this, the masks, pho­tos and draw­ings” — includ­ing dances dia­grammed in a sys­tem of Schulz’s own inven­tion — “went into a cou­ple of ‘acro­bat’s bag­gage’ box­es and fell into obliv­ion on the muse­um’s attic. They were not even inven­to­ried. Which turned out to be a stroke of luck because this way the objects did­n’t fall into the hands of the Nazis, who, with­out any doubt, would have seen these works as ‘degen­er­ate art’ and in all prob­a­bil­i­ty would have destroyed them.”

You can see the cos­tumes in action in the video at the top of the post, and more of the pho­tos tak­en by Minya Diez-Dührkoop in the last year of Schulz and Holdt’s lives at Hyper­al­ler­gic. Their per­for­mances began in the expres­sion­ism with which the Berlin-edu­cat­ed Schultz had been asso­ci­at­ed and moved toward “the sup­posed puri­ty of pre-Judeo-Chris­t­ian, Aryan-Nordic cul­ture,” as Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher writes.

“Between 1920–24, the cou­ple per­formed their dance rou­tines to the bewil­dered and often antag­o­nis­tic audi­ences of Ham­burg. Though some crit­ics appre­ci­at­ed the pair’s tal­ent and star­tling orig­i­nal­i­ty, this praise was nev­er enough to pay the rent.”

“Accord­ing to con­tem­po­rary crit­ics, Lavinia seemed to be the more cre­ative one,” writes Reet­ze. “Wal­ter, on the oth­er hand, was the bet­ter and more dis­ci­plined dancer, he exact­ly knew his for­mal means and how to use them.” The coun­ter­part to Holdt’s rig­or was Schulz’s more pri­mal genius, a sen­si­bil­i­ty that man­i­fest­ed aes­thet­i­cal­ly — seen in her high­ly uncon­ven­tion­al use of every­day mate­ri­als like “wire, gyp­sum, papi­er mâché and indus­tri­al garbage” — and emo­tion­al­ly.

Reet­ze quotes from the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of com­pos­er Hans Heinz Stuck­en­schmidt, who briefly lived with the cou­ple: “Depri­va­tion, hunger, cold­ness, nordic land­scape with storm, ice, and cat­a­stro­phes: That was her world, and she had found her­self in it with Holdt.”

Schulz and Holdt also refused to be paid for their per­for­mances. “You can­not sell spir­i­tu­al ideas for mon­ey,” Schulz wrote. “Spir­it and mon­ey are two antag­o­nis­tic poles, and if you sell spir­i­tu­al ideas for mon­ey, you sold the spir­it to the mon­ey and lost the spir­it.” Even­tu­al­ly their pover­ty — as well as the unusu­al­ly volatile nature of their rela­tion­ship, said to spark phys­i­cal mar­i­tal spats on stage — reached a break­ing point. “Both were in their 20s, and had earned lit­tle mon­ey from their artis­tic work,” writes Meier. “In finan­cial ruin, on June 18, 1924, Schulz shot Holdt, and then turned the gun on her­self.” But against all odds, their still-star­tling cre­ativ­i­ty — the kind that can, per­haps, emerge only from the oppo­si­tion of two incom­pat­i­ble forces — lives on.

via Dan­ger­ous Mind

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let, First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

An Online Trove of His­toric Sewing Pat­terns & Cos­tumes

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Science Shows That Snowball the Cockatoo Has 14 Different Dance Moves: The Vogue, Headbang & More

in Biology, Dance, Music, Nature, Neuroscience | August 16th, 2019

We humans think we invent­ed every­thing.

The wheel…

The print­ing press…

Danc­ing…

Well, we’re right about the first two.

Turns out the impulse to shake a tail feath­er isn’t an arbi­trary cul­tur­al con­struct of human­i­ty but rather a hard-wired neu­ro­log­i­cal impulse in beings clas­si­fied as vocal learners—us, ele­phants, dol­phins, song­birds, and par­rots like the Inter­net-famous sul­phur-crest­ed cock­a­too, Snow­ball, above.

Ani­mals out­side of this elite set can be trained to exe­cute cer­tain phys­i­cal moves, or they may just look like they’re danc­ing when track­ing the move­ments of their food bowl or shim­my­ing with relief at being picked up from dog­gy day­care.

Snow­ball, how­ev­er, is tru­ly danc­ing, thanks to his species’ capac­i­ty for hear­ing, then imi­tat­ing sounds. Like every great spon­ta­neous dancer, he’s got the music in him.

Anirud­dh Patel, a Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­o­gy at Tufts who spe­cial­izes in music cog­ni­tion, was the first to con­sid­er that Snowball’s habit of rock­ing out to the Back­street Boys CD he’d had in his pos­ses­sion when dropped off at a par­rot res­cue cen­ter in Dyer, Indi­ana, was some­thing more than a par­ty trick.

Dr. Patel notes that par­rots have more in com­mon with dinosaurs than human beings, and that our mon­key cousins don’t dance (much to this writer’s dis­ap­point­ment).

(Also, for the record? That goat who sings like Ush­er? It may sound like Ush­er, but you’ll find no sci­en­tif­ic sup­port for the notion that its vocal­iza­tions con­sti­tute singing.)

Snow­ball, on the oth­er hand, has made a major impres­sion upon the Acad­e­my.

In papers pub­lished in Cur­rent Biol­o­gy and Annals of the New York Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, Patel and his co-authors John R. Iversen, Mic­ah R. Breg­man, and Ire­na Schulz delved into why Snow­ball can dance like … well, maybe not Fred Astaire, but cer­tain­ly your aver­age mosh­ing human.

After exten­sive obser­va­tion, they con­clud­ed that an indi­vid­ual must pos­sess five spe­cif­ic men­tal skills and predilec­tions in order to move impul­sive­ly to music:

  1. They must be com­plex vocal learn­ers, with the accom­pa­ny­ing abil­i­ty to con­nect sound and move­ment.
  2. They must be able to imi­tate move­ments.
  3. They must be able to learn com­plex sequences of actions.
  4. They must be atten­tive to the move­ments of oth­ers.
  5. They must form long-term social bonds.

Cock­a­toos can do all of this. Humans, too.

Patel’s for­mer stu­dent R. Joanne Jao Keehn recent­ly reviewed footage she shot in 2009 of Snow­ball get­ting down to Queen’s “Anoth­er One Bites the Dust” and Cyn­di Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” iden­ti­fy­ing 14 dis­tinct moves.

Accord­ing to her research, his favorites are Vogue, Head-Foot Sync, and Head­bang with Lift­ed Foot.

If you’ve been hug­ging the wall since mid­dle school, maybe it’s time to take a deep breath, fol­lowed by an avian danc­ing les­son.

How did Snow­ball come by his aston­ish­ing rug-cut­ting con­fi­dence? Cer­tain­ly not by watch­ing instruc­tion­al videos on YouTube. His human com­pan­ion Schulz dances with him occa­sion­al­ly, but does­n’t attempt to teach him her moves, which she describes as “lim­it­ed.”

Much like two human part­ners, they’re not always doing the same thing at the same time.

And the chore­og­ra­phy is pure­ly Snowball’s.

As Patel told The Har­vard Gazette:

It’s actu­al­ly a com­plex cog­ni­tive act that involves choos­ing among dif­fer­ent types of pos­si­ble move­ment options. It’s exact­ly how we think of human danc­ing.

If he is actu­al­ly com­ing up with some of this stuff by him­self, it’s an incred­i­ble exam­ple of ani­mal cre­ativ­i­ty because he’s not doing this to get food; he’s not doing this to get a mat­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, both of which are often moti­va­tions in exam­ples of cre­ative behav­ior in oth­er species.

You can read more sci­ence-based arti­cles inspired by Snow­ball and watch some of his many pub­lic appear­ances on the not-for-prof­it, dona­tion-based sanc­tu­ary Bird Lovers Only’s web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why We Dance: An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains the Sci­ence Behind Why We Bust a Move

The Strange Danc­ing Plague of 1518: When Hun­dreds of Peo­ple in France Could Not Stop Danc­ing for Months

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why We Dance: An Animated Video Explains the Science Behind Why We Bust a Move

in Dance, Neuroscience | March 21st, 2019

Has any cul­ture, apart from that of the tiny Utah town in Foot­loose, done entire­ly with­out danc­ing? It would at first seem that any human need the rhyth­mic shak­ing of one’s limbs to orga­nized sound ful­fills must reside pret­ty low on the over­all pri­or­i­ty scale, but anthro­pol­o­gy tells us that var­i­ous human soci­eties start­ed danc­ing before they got into most every oth­er activ­i­ty that fills their time today. “Why is this osten­si­bly friv­o­lous act so fun­da­men­tal to being human?” asks the Aeon video above. “The answer, it seems, is in our need for social cohe­sion — that vital glue that keeps soci­eties from break­ing apart despite inter­per­son­al dif­fer­ences.”

Direct­ed and ani­mat­ed by Rosan­na Wan and Andrew Khos­ra­vani, the four-minute explain­er frames our deep, cul­ture-tran­scend­ing need to “bust a move” in terms of the work of both 19th- and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry French soci­ol­o­gist Émile Durkheim and more recent research per­formed by Bron­wyn Tarr, an Oxford evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist who also hap­pens to be a dancer her­self.

Durkheim posit­ed the phe­nom­e­non of “col­lec­tive effer­ves­cence,” or “a sort of elec­tric­i­ty,” or “that exhil­a­ra­tion, almost eupho­ria, that over­takes groups of peo­ple unit­ed by a com­mon pur­pose, pur­su­ing an intense­ly involv­ing activ­i­ty togeth­er.” When you feel it, you feel “a flow, a sense that your self is meld­ing with the group as a whole.” And has any prac­tice gen­er­at­ed as much col­lec­tive effer­ves­cence through­out human his­to­ry as dance?

Mod­ern sci­ence has shed a bit of light on why: Tarr has found that “we humans have a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy to syn­chro­nize our move­ments with oth­er humans,” thanks to a region in the brain which helps us make the same move­ments we see oth­ers mak­ing. “When we mim­ic our part­ner’s move­ments, and they’re mim­ic­k­ing ours, sim­i­lar neur­al net­works in both net­works open up a rush of neu­ro­hor­mones, all of which make us feel good.” Lis­ten­ing to music “can cre­ate such a euphor­ic delight that it appears to acti­vate opi­oid recep­tors in the brain,” mak­ing it even hard­er to resist get­ting up and danc­ing. “They said he’d nev­er win,” Foot­loose’s tagline said of the movie’s big-city teen intent on get­ting the town danc­ing again, but “he knew he had to” — an assur­ance that turns out to have had a basis in neu­rol­o­gy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Three Soci­ol­o­gists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno

The Strange Danc­ing Plague of 1518: When Hun­dreds of Peo­ple in France Could Not Stop Danc­ing for Months

The Addams Fam­i­ly Dance to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” Video Changed Pop Culture Forever: Revisit the 13-Minute Short Film Directed by John Landis

in Dance, Music, Television | December 4th, 2018

Michael Jack­son’s Thriller, the album, had spent the pre­vi­ous year at the top of the charts before the John Lan­dis-direct­ed video for the title track debuted in 1983. Two pre­vi­ous videos, for mas­sive hits “Bil­lie Jean” and “Beat It,” kept him on con­stant rota­tion on the fledg­ling MTV and oth­er net­works. It seemed that the “naïve, preter­nat­u­ral­ly gift­ed 25-year-old” couldn’t get any more inter­na­tion­al­ly famous, but then, as Nan­cy Grif­fin writes at Van­i­ty Fair, “it was the ‘Thriller’ video that pushed Jack­son over the top, con­sol­i­dat­ing his posi­tion as the King of Pop.”

His naïveté was matched by a shrewd, cal­cu­lat­ing ambi­tion, and the sto­ry of the “Thriller” video high­lights both. After see­ing An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, he chose Lan­dis to make a video that would goose Thriller’s sales as they start­ed to fall. Lan­dis, the pro­fane, irrev­er­ent direc­tor of The Blues Broth­ers and Ani­mal House, may have seemed an odd choice for the whole­some pop star, who pref­aced his zom­bie spoof with a pious dis­claimer about his “strong per­son­al con­vic­tions.” (Short­ly before the video’s release, Jack­son, under pres­sure from the Jeho­vah’s Wit­ness­es, asked Lan­dis to destroy it.)

It turns out, how­ev­er, that when Jack­son called Lan­dis, he hadn’t seen any of the director’s oth­er films (and Lan­dis hadn’t heard the song). It was Lan­dis who sug­gest­ed that the video be turned into a 14-minute short film, a choice that set the bar high for the form ever since. As he told Billboard’s John Bran­ca on the video’s 35th anniver­sary, just days ago:

Music videos at that time were always just nee­dle drop. Some were pret­ty good, but most were not, and they were com­mer­cials. Michael’s such a huge star that I said, “Maybe I can bring back the the­atri­cal short.” I pitched him the idea, and he total­ly went for it. Michael was extreme­ly enthu­si­as­tic because he want­ed to make movies.

Before “Thriller” even aired, it was a high-pro­file event. “Mar­lon Bran­do, Fred Astaire, Rock Hud­son and Jack­ie Kennedy Onas­sis all turned up on set,” notes Phil Heb­bleth­waite, “and Eddie Mur­phy, Prince and Diana Ross were spot­ted at the pri­vate pre­mier.” After the video pre­miered on MTV at mid­night on Decem­ber 2nd, it sealed the network’s “rep­u­ta­tion as a new cul­tur­al force; dis­solved racial bar­ri­ers in the station’s treat­ment of music,” and “helped cre­ate a mar­ket for VHS rentals and sales.”

“Thriller” turned the mak­ing of music videos into a “prop­er indus­try,” says Bri­an Grant, the British direc­tor who made videos for Tina Turner’s “Pri­vate Dancer” and Whit­ney Houston’s “I Wan­na Dance with Some­body.” It “launched a dance craze,” Karen Bliss writes at Bill­board, and “a red-jack­et fash­ion favorite.” It won three MTV Awards, two Amer­i­can Music Awards, and a Gram­my. In 2009, it became the first music video induct­ed into the Library of Congress’s Nation­al Film Reg­istry, des­ig­nat­ed as a nation­al trea­sure.

But as we look back on unprece­dent­ed his­toric impact “Thriller” had on pop cul­ture, we must also look at its con­tin­ued impact in the present. It remains the most pop­u­lar music video of all time. “’Thriller’ is thriv­ing on YouTube,” Grif­fin writes. Celebri­ties and ordi­nary peo­ple, pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur dance troops, Fil­ipino pris­on­ers and Nor­we­gian sol­diers, rou­tine­ly per­form its dance moves for the cam­era all over the world. An entire genre of how-to videos teach view­ers how to do the “Thriller” dance. This past Sep­tem­ber, it became the first music video released in IMAX 3D.

The video received the doc­u­men­tary treat­ment in Jer­ry Kramer’s Mak­ing Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which pre­miered at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val last year. Lan­dis tells Bran­ca one sto­ry that did not make it into Kramer’s movie. After Quin­cy Jones refused him per­mis­sion to remix the song, he and Jack­son walked into the stu­dio at night, took the tapes, dupli­cat­ed them and returned them. The song that appears in the video “is very dif­fer­ent than the record,” says Lan­dis. “I only used a third of the lyrics. It’s a 3‑minute song; in the film, it plays for 11 min­utes.” Jones and engi­neer Bruce Swe­di­en didn’t even notice, says the direc­tor, they were so enthralled with what they saw onscreen.

What con­tin­ues to dri­ve “Thriller’s” pop­u­lar­i­ty? The com­bi­na­tion of good clean fun and per­fect­ly-pitched camp horror—Vincent Price voiceover and all? The vir­tu­oso dance moves, zom­bie chore­og­ra­phy, and irre­sistibly sleek 80s fash­ions? All of the above, of course, and also some inde­fin­able sum of all these parts, a per­fect com­bi­na­tion of cin­e­mat­ic depth and shiny pop cul­ture sur­faces that set the bench­mark for the for­mat for three-and-a-half decades.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Michael Jack­son Wrote a Song: A Close Look at How the King of Pop Craft­ed “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”

The Ori­gins of Michael Jackson’s Moon­walk: Vin­tage Footage of Cab Cal­loway, Sam­my Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More

James Hill Plays Michael Jackson’s “Bil­lie Jean” on the Ukulele: Watch One Musi­cian Become a Com­plete Band

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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