Saturday miscellany + fabulous dance performance
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I want to am going to make a vidlet! It is from Powder, a movie I've been afraid to admit in fandom-public to liking. Just need to find a better song.
While researching music, came up with a fun idea for a multisource vid. Yay for being enthused about a vid idea. Doing research and gathering clips will take some time, though.
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My college/Star Trek friend S. is leaving town on two weeks' notice. For good reasons, but still sad to lose him.
We hung out last night and watched the DS9 ep "The Quickening"; it seemed (in)appropriate, given current events. Now, this is the same friend who, during "Past Tense," spun a tale with me about how Sisko was pimping out Bashir in exchange for clothes and rations, and who is of course fully on board with Garak/Bashir. Last night he decided someone should write a slash story where Sloan continues to creep on Bashir by (not only watching him in his sleep, etc. but also) doing inappropriate things to Kukulaka [Bashir's teddy bear] and leaving him notes about how he's next.
On Friday, before S. does his final packing, we'll get to see Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun, Brunt, Re-Animator, etc.) in a one-man show about Edgar Allan Poe. It got good reviews, so I'm looking forward to that.
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Have you ever encountered the modern dance company Pilobolus? Saw them perform last night and they were spectacular.
From what I've learned, they are a troupe of dancer-athletes who collaborate with one another and with other artists to produce two to three new works a year. That makes for a range of styles and emotions. In this show, for example, collaborators included OK Go and Penn & Teller. The composition of four men and two women made for interesting math as well: two threesomes, three same-sex pairings or two m/fs and an m/m, for example. I read that Pilobolus was influential in its early days in inspiring other dance companies to allow male dancers to pair up and be otherwise close to one another. There was a real focus on bodies here, on physicality and muscle and sex and symmetry and color and angles and flow. The racial diversity was great, too.
This particular program included some traditional, ballet-like dance in the form of "Sweet Purgatory," set to Shostakovich's beautiful Chamber Symphony/op. 110a (excerpt). That was the kind of performance I thought I'd like best, but it turned out to be something of an anticlimax as the closing piece. Although the program outlined a clear narrative -- Hades through Purgatory into Hope -- I had trouble following or being engaged by parts of it. And the end seemed more like the dancers were trapped, reaching for something they couldn't touch, than that they were hopeful.
The opener, by contrast, was stunning. It was called "On the Nature of Things" and it involved a godlike character carrying first a man and then a woman over to a two-foot-wide platform, where he watched them discover each other, then joined them, then seemed to become the devil in Eden tempting the woman to fall into sin (literally to touch the ground and slide off the platform), then wrestled with the man in a way that seemed both seductive and confining/combative until the man, too, succumbed/escaped. Just beautiful combinations and contortions and balances of nearly naked bodies impossibly close to one another. Here is a taste:
"Automaton" was a neat, alternately robotic and sensual piece, if a little long. It was maybe the story of humans caught up in a clockwork life who are able to break free for a short time? Or an artificial intelligence that discovers the sensuality of inhabiting a human body and sharing that experience with other human bodies? In the first part, the dancers moved together as if Pilobolus had been challenged to interpret "do The Robot" and knocked it out of the park. Then the machine broke up and one part (one dancer) began moving freely, fluidly, while the others got stuck in repetitive mechanical motions like gears without anything to move. Then they brought out a series of mirrors for the discovering humanity part. Unfortunately, I think I missed out on a lot of the aesthetics and symbolism of that portion because my seat was far to the side. And at the end, they clumped back together and ticked a few times. Tragedy that they became once more a machine, or celebration that they had those moments of their minds opening? Clips here:
"All Is Not Lost" was four minutes of fun. They'd recorded this music video with the band OK Go where they set up a camera under a transparent platform so that they could slide forward and it would look like they were floating or climbing upward. In the live performance, you could switch between watching them on the platform at stage left and watching the live video feed on a screen at stage right. The setup also meant you could see them dance from beneath, seeing the soles of their feet or watching their muscles flatten when they sat or lay down. Between that and the kaleidoscopic patterns they formed, it was a real treat. Here's what the official video looks like:
The other piece was the Penn & Teller collaboration, "[esc]," less dance than strength/flexibility showmanship and more than a hint of Vegas theatrics. That was okay! Especially because what dance there was, consisted of two of the men in leather g-strings and black ankle tape getting chained to each other hand and foot against a stripper pole and doing all sorts of yummy undulations, twists and flips to free themselves. Narrator: "All this bondage gear is from Home Depot!" Also featured: breathplay, duct tape bondage, a hogtie, crossdressing, confinement in a duffel bag, and the old switcheroo-in-a-sealed-box trick.
This was the only video I could find:
There are also pictures.
Such a fun evening.
I want to am going to make a vidlet! It is from Powder, a movie I've been afraid to admit in fandom-public to liking. Just need to find a better song.
While researching music, came up with a fun idea for a multisource vid. Yay for being enthused about a vid idea. Doing research and gathering clips will take some time, though.
+/-
My college/Star Trek friend S. is leaving town on two weeks' notice. For good reasons, but still sad to lose him.
We hung out last night and watched the DS9 ep "The Quickening"; it seemed (in)appropriate, given current events. Now, this is the same friend who, during "Past Tense," spun a tale with me about how Sisko was pimping out Bashir in exchange for clothes and rations, and who is of course fully on board with Garak/Bashir. Last night he decided someone should write a slash story where Sloan continues to creep on Bashir by (not only watching him in his sleep, etc. but also) doing inappropriate things to Kukulaka [Bashir's teddy bear] and leaving him notes about how he's next.
On Friday, before S. does his final packing, we'll get to see Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun, Brunt, Re-Animator, etc.) in a one-man show about Edgar Allan Poe. It got good reviews, so I'm looking forward to that.
+
Have you ever encountered the modern dance company Pilobolus? Saw them perform last night and they were spectacular.
From what I've learned, they are a troupe of dancer-athletes who collaborate with one another and with other artists to produce two to three new works a year. That makes for a range of styles and emotions. In this show, for example, collaborators included OK Go and Penn & Teller. The composition of four men and two women made for interesting math as well: two threesomes, three same-sex pairings or two m/fs and an m/m, for example. I read that Pilobolus was influential in its early days in inspiring other dance companies to allow male dancers to pair up and be otherwise close to one another. There was a real focus on bodies here, on physicality and muscle and sex and symmetry and color and angles and flow. The racial diversity was great, too.
This particular program included some traditional, ballet-like dance in the form of "Sweet Purgatory," set to Shostakovich's beautiful Chamber Symphony/op. 110a (excerpt). That was the kind of performance I thought I'd like best, but it turned out to be something of an anticlimax as the closing piece. Although the program outlined a clear narrative -- Hades through Purgatory into Hope -- I had trouble following or being engaged by parts of it. And the end seemed more like the dancers were trapped, reaching for something they couldn't touch, than that they were hopeful.
The opener, by contrast, was stunning. It was called "On the Nature of Things" and it involved a godlike character carrying first a man and then a woman over to a two-foot-wide platform, where he watched them discover each other, then joined them, then seemed to become the devil in Eden tempting the woman to fall into sin (literally to touch the ground and slide off the platform), then wrestled with the man in a way that seemed both seductive and confining/combative until the man, too, succumbed/escaped. Just beautiful combinations and contortions and balances of nearly naked bodies impossibly close to one another. Here is a taste:
"Automaton" was a neat, alternately robotic and sensual piece, if a little long. It was maybe the story of humans caught up in a clockwork life who are able to break free for a short time? Or an artificial intelligence that discovers the sensuality of inhabiting a human body and sharing that experience with other human bodies? In the first part, the dancers moved together as if Pilobolus had been challenged to interpret "do The Robot" and knocked it out of the park. Then the machine broke up and one part (one dancer) began moving freely, fluidly, while the others got stuck in repetitive mechanical motions like gears without anything to move. Then they brought out a series of mirrors for the discovering humanity part. Unfortunately, I think I missed out on a lot of the aesthetics and symbolism of that portion because my seat was far to the side. And at the end, they clumped back together and ticked a few times. Tragedy that they became once more a machine, or celebration that they had those moments of their minds opening? Clips here:
"All Is Not Lost" was four minutes of fun. They'd recorded this music video with the band OK Go where they set up a camera under a transparent platform so that they could slide forward and it would look like they were floating or climbing upward. In the live performance, you could switch between watching them on the platform at stage left and watching the live video feed on a screen at stage right. The setup also meant you could see them dance from beneath, seeing the soles of their feet or watching their muscles flatten when they sat or lay down. Between that and the kaleidoscopic patterns they formed, it was a real treat. Here's what the official video looks like:
The other piece was the Penn & Teller collaboration, "[esc]," less dance than strength/flexibility showmanship and more than a hint of Vegas theatrics. That was okay! Especially because what dance there was, consisted of two of the men in leather g-strings and black ankle tape getting chained to each other hand and foot against a stripper pole and doing all sorts of yummy undulations, twists and flips to free themselves. Narrator: "All this bondage gear is from Home Depot!" Also featured: breathplay, duct tape bondage, a hogtie, crossdressing, confinement in a duffel bag, and the old switcheroo-in-a-sealed-box trick.
This was the only video I could find:
There are also pictures.
Such a fun evening.