A WORD FROM THE CURATOR

The following is the catalogue entry composed to accompany a screening of dance film organised by Edith Cowan University in association with Artrage Perth, entitled “Body Cuts”, Cinema Paradiso, 5 Nov 2006. See www.artrage.com.au for details (under Reel Dance).

In 1910, a coalition of painters from the Italian Futurist movement declared that the new art forms of cinema and stop-motion photography were those most in keeping with the modern world. Surrounded by cars, trains and later airplanes and telephones, the Futurists saw their world as one dominated by speed, by movement, and by the endless replacement of one image by another in a chaotic procession which Filippo Marinetti labelled “body madness.” Treating machines and humans alike as subjects for their representations, they proclaimed:

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears … moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

The Futurists themselves had little direct influence upon film or dance until the 1950s, when their work was rediscovered by the artists in the Fluxus movement and by key figures in postmodern dance and music such as choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, composer John Cage, and video artist Nam Jun Paik. Nevertheless, the Futurists’ championing of film for the creation of a kind of emotive “dynamism” in which both bodies and objects danced upon the screen as equals, accompanied by crashing, metallic noises and fervid symphonic explosions, was prescient. From the music videos of Chris Cunningham (Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy) through to Japanese anime (Akira, Ghost in the Shell), the films of David Cronenberg (Crash) or Matthew Barney (Cremaster), such modes of presenting bodies and objects have become commonplace in contemporary cinema and the visual arts.

As a performing art, however, dance is often strongly invested in notions of live “presence”—in the idea that one must be in close, sympathetic proximity to the embodied dancer to fully appreciate the work. When translated to film, this dancerly model may nevertheless create a visceral sense of physicality akin to that of Futurism or Fluxus. As in the work of Brown, DV8, or in Claudia Alessi’s films in this program, such an approach tends to emphasise the weight, texture, malleability and sensation of flesh. The body is examined in close-up, with pans and cuts across fragments of skin making up much of the montage. The body comes to feel highly “material” in these films, like the thickly painted surface of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, or the tough, glossy skeins of industrial sculpture. Such dance films also recall horror and action cinema in their attention to a body which endures being beaten, flattened, thumped, stretched and thwacked. When watching such films, one feels one could touch the body, leaving an imprint like the boot-tread on Alessi’s shoulder in Wandering.

Indeed, throughout its history, dance has been likened to sculpture. In 1921, a reviewer described one of Loïe Fuller’s films as an exemplar of “the art of moving plastique”—that is to say a performance which revealed the almost clay-like malleability of the body as it moved through space. Fuller was famous for her technique of manipulating long, serpentine extensions of her dress such that they were caught by her intricately designed light-shows and cinematic projections, transforming her dance into a display of dynamic forms and colors which whirled about the ever moving central point of her otherwise concealed body. Although a pioneer of modern dance, Fuller’s performances were as much about the creation of a vocabulary of shape and color akin to a moving, abstract painting, as they were specifically “dance” performances per se. As the critic observed, Fuller had:

constructed a film with almost no literary compromises, one in which the rhythmic movement of the characters and the skilful play of light and shadow suffices to create the expression and impart the emotion.

This short history of dance’s relation to the other arts reminds one that dance has never operated in the absence of influences from the other arts, including those from film, photography and projection. From the time of its invention as a technique to analyse movement in the 1890s, film has always been concerned with the body and its rhythms. Nor can the description and representation of the body on film be separated from principles of montage, image or sculpture. If dance represents a kind of dynamic living sculpture which pulsates and surges with different tempos and rhythms, then it is hard to see why the movement of a human body across the screen is any more a kind of “dance” than is a similar on-screen animation of the color or form of an otherwise inanimate object, such as the ice-cream we see in James Teackle’s film within this program.

With the rise in cinematic dance as a recognised art form supported by international film festivals like Reel Dance, it is perhaps time to reassess the history of both dance and film, and to see to what extent, and in what ways, the category “dance film” is really a useful one. This is especially pressing given that all forms of cinema—by definition—involve the editing of image and sound so as to create a kind of choreography via a dynamic display of forms and noise.

The program you see this afternoon is designed to recast the dance/film dichotomy, to suggest that all film is a form of “dance,” and that perhaps the best dance films are not those made to recast a live choreographic form as cinema, but rather simply good films. Such an approach to dance film would have as its canon not only great pieces of filmed choreography such as those from Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Robert Helpmann, but also the work of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Chan, Hype Williams (the music videos of Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot and others), Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera), Jean Cocteau (Blood of a Poet), Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), Jacques Tati (Playtime), Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), the Wachowski brothers (Matrix), Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin), and others.

—Dr Jonathan Marshall,WA Academy of Performing Arts / “RealTime Australia”

The Sonic Image: Exploring the relationships between the sound and visual worlds.

Perth, Western Australia, 27th – 29th April 2007

The THNMF Conference, held in conjunction with The 8th Totally Huge New Music Festival, is a forum for artists from diverse areas of practice, along with critics, commentators and academics, to discuss the ideas which underline contemporary New Music and Sound Art—the histories, methods, theories, approaches, techniques and dreams which make up the modern world of music and Sound Arts. The THNMF Conference offers opportunity for presentations of refereed and non-refereed papers, performances, demonstrations and workshops.

The Conference is presented by Tura New Music, in association with the Faculty of Education and Arts, Edith Cowan University, including the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and is supported by the School of Music at the University of Western Australia.

Theme

Sound and image have traditionally been seen as opposing concepts; a separation of eye and ear. Yet visual methods of transcription and recording have been part of standard musical practice since the invention of notation, through to the later development of waveform analysis and visualisation in the 20th century.

The focus of the conference is how have musicians and theorists—particularly in Australia—approached this dialectic between sound and image? How have composers/improvisers/sound artists drawn on visual languages, metaphors and techniques in creating their music, and how have they collaborated with practitioners in the visual arts and cinema to produce new sound works and new ways of thinking about the act of composition? Can visuality exist in contemporary pure music works?

Suggested Topics and Themes:

The 8th Totally Huge New Music Festival and the associated Conference are inclusive events, devised to appeal to both practitioners and academics, audiences and artists. As such, the Conference Convenors welcome proposals involving any aspect of Australian New Music, international Sound Art, composition and sonic creation. We are however particularly seeking papers and sessions which address the principal themes of the Conference. Suggested topics for papers include (but are not limited to): -

- Image in Australian composition in the 21st century

- Cinesonics and other intersections between screen culture and music/sound (film score, sound design for screen, installation, music video, musical composition for web-pages, gaming culture)

- Performance and projection (VJ-ing, A-V art, projection and sound in theatre and dance, the musical performer as a visual focus)

- The gap between visual scores and musical performance, improvisation and the score, conventional notation as visual art

- Visual metaphors in music (the acousmatic image, composition as
landscape, visualising space in music, the use of the descriptor “cinematic” in popular music criticism, waveform in Sound Art)

- Synaesthesia and the translation of visual perception into music or sound, and vice-versa (Futurist and Surrealist synaesthesia, colour in music, the close-up and extreme focus in music, operatic composition as a total art of sound and image)

Guidelines:

1. Individual or joint paper presentations should be no longer than twenty minutes. Panel organisers are strongly encouraged to enforce times.

2. Performances should be no longer than thirty minutes and may include a short lecture component.

3. The Convenors encourage proposals from artists, academics, composers, performers, sound designers, critics, instrument makers and students alike.

4. Following the conclusion of the Conference, presenters will be encouraged to submit their papers for publication in Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the THNMF conference. The journal will be refereed to DEST guidelines and will be published before Jan 2008. Style guides are available from the Conference Convenors.

5. Although encouraging submission of papers for formal refereeing, the Convenors are also calling for non-refereed paper presentations and performances, especially from practicing artists. Papers which are not presented at the Conference itself may also be considered for publication in the Proceedings. Priority will however be given to authors who present at the Conference.

6. Presenters are required to register for the entire Conference program Additionally, presentation at the Conference will automatically enrol the presenter in the Music Research Group of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, at no extra charge.

7. Performances and paper presentations will not be remunerated.

How to submit a proposal:

1. Abstracts and proposals are due by 1st October 2006. Please submit via email to: conference@tura.com.au

2. Proposals for papers should include an abstract of approximately 500 words. Please insert the abstract text into the body of the email and also send it an attachment file in rich text format (RTF).

3. Attachments should be named as follows:
THNMFC_Surname&initial_date(ddmmyy).rtf E.g.: THNMFC_SmithS_060706.rtf

4. Proposals for papers should clearly state if you are or are not applying to be refereed.

5. Proposals for papers should also include notes on any technical and/or spatial requirements for presentation (i.e. any audio-visual needs, use of PowerPoint, PA, etc).

6. Proposals for performances, artist talks and master classes—with or without a lecture component—should also include supporting material, such as an audio CD or score. Supporting material can be sent to: Tura New Music, Suite 10/1 Rokeby Rd, Subiaco, WA 6008.

7. All submissions should be accompanied by a THNMF Conference Submission Form (downloadable at www.tura.com.au).

8. The THNMFC Committee will acknowledge receipt of submissions and communicate its decisions via email by 1st November 2006.

9. All inquiries regarding the Conference should be addressed to:

Kate Parker
Tura New Music
conference@tura.com.au
(08) 9380 6996

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The 8th TOTALLY HUGE NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL
runs from 20th April to 6th May 2007.

The Totally Huge New Music Festival is a biennial exploration of New Music and Sound Art, featuring musicians from Western Australia and around the world.

The Totally Huge New Music Festival provides a captivating showcase of new chamber music, electronica, installations, improvisation, radiophonics, multimedia and Sound Art in metropolitan and regional Western Australia.

For program updates go to www.tura.com.au

Tura New Music
Suite 10, 1 Rokeby Rd
Subiaco WA 6008
Australia
Ph: 61.8. 9380 6996
Fax: 61.8. 9380 6997
Email: info@tura.com.au
web: www.tura.com.au