A Dance in Purple, in Folio Leaves

A Dance in Purple, in Folio Leaves from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

(Recommend watching 'fullscreen' - movement and detail clearer.)

Folio: a sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves, or four pages, of a book or manuscript.

Late afternoon on Saturday, when the spring sun was pouring in, I videotaped some dancing to José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith." Besides being technically beautiful, quite Baroque in its composition, there is an undercurrent of feeling in this music. Music like this can awaken the inner self in its dance, or this is how it calls to me.

And I layered dances to the same tune: first I separated the figures, but it didn't look quite right, so I superimposed them, allowing the dance of the two to occur in the same space, an intertexuality of subjectivities, like folio leaves.

The figure is me mostly because I am a very private person and those closest to me, extended family I guess, don't want to be videoed. I see the figure as not me, though me.

I always leave space for text, but perhaps, there won't be any, it's unnecessary. Though it does need a title, and perhaps an inscription at the beginning, a quote, an image, not sure.

When this video is finished (and it might already be, not sure), I'll upload to YouTube (Picasa's great but doesn't offer an embeddable player like YouTube does, and without paying Vimeo you can only upload videos up to 500MG a week there, so YouTube for a higher resolution and potentially more viewers).

From The Canvas Backdrop

(The Picasa version, which is showing a blank green screen to some viewers, hence uploading to Vimeo this morning.)

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After I'd finished this version of the video, I thought of this painting and poem, from 2006:

Dancing of the Selves, painting and    photographs, ©2006

Dancing of the Selves What is the self? Peel away to nothing. Only energies, inner winds and flames streams of thought a body of cells of earthdust. Who am I? Am I my memories shifting and changing like ice flows or the sand of the desert? We are transducers, relay switches, cross-currents of selves. I deconstruct in paint across the canvas. Am I what I offer-- scrawl of words, strokes of paint, a flash dance through the air, a few ideas, a point of gravity where the light bends?

My children who tumbled out of me? I am a link in the generations, an ancestor's granddaughter, great aunt of the future, a name for genealogists. A living person breathing over the page where I write. A slight tangle in the ganglia of neurons, and my memories, gone. That's not me. I am who I am loving you.

                                          

Dance of Gold Canvas

direct link: Dance of Gold Canvas

A performance piece, hints of the epic, the metamorphosis that life is. Age and grace. Frivolity and art. Pain and laughter. Humor and seriousness.

In the dance I speak a poetry whose volume I dimmed to just below audible. A poetry below the threshold.

And of this nearly silenced subliminal speaking? It's part of the motion poem. A tantra. Dance, the journey of the soul, guttural, the women crying for help during the tsunami, women in war, survival, a Blakean crawl across the canvas at one point and I allowed some words to rise, utterances, Butoh not in style but expression perhaps in parts, and of strength, empowerment, and the fecund, the buds of spring about to burst, Boticelli's Primavera, the rich earthy tapestries of the natural world, and Zen, laughter at the absurdity of life, and love, love everywhere, enjoyment in the body itself, sensuality, a wit, humour. Dancing with shadows of the self was intriguing in the editing, as was slipping between colours of a rich Buddha saffron and the smudging shadows of black and white. Editing itself a psychic process, shaping a moving poem.

How a video comes to be is almost surreal. Magic in the editing. I enter a state where time doesn't matter and think it closest to the dream, the mind's most deeply creative process, where you're exploring something, and you're not quite sure what it means, or where it's going, but are fascinated, compelled.

A dance poem, an enactment, a one-act play. Perhaps in this piece something visionary, in that there is resolution to the conflict, the paradoxes, in the process of art itself, in the dance of the self.

Self-conscious but daring to anyhow, give everything you've got.

The dance of the self within Krishna's cosmic dance, the spinning painting of us on the canvas, the dance we all share.



Performed, videoed and edited by Brenda Clews.

Background music by arnoldsrecords, 'There's a hole, there's a wall.'

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Without memory, the fragile present disappears.

blog: Rubies in Crystal
art and writings: brendaclews.com
Starfire, an album of poetry performance pieces
(listen, download for free)

                                          

Paper Dancer

Dancer, 25.5cm x 11.5cm, 10" x 4.5", pen on Moleskin

May be a poem by tomorrow, or in the next few days.

                                          

A Poetic of Light/Une poétique de la lumière

This meditative video poem is dedicated to all of you. With thanks...



Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

The poetry is addressed to the lover, the soul mate, you, the viewer.

My videopoem is finished. After a week of nearly nonstop work, most nights till 3 or 4 am and up again at 7 or 8am and working right through, I am happy with it. For your enjoyment, I have uploaded both the final version with poetry, and the silent version too.

I searched through my writing for nearly a whole day to find what might work. I decided on 'White Fire,' a meditation on soul mates since I had been vaguely dancing with that poem in mind on the day that I taped this, and had printed it on fine paper and threw the pages in the air and danced on them during the videoing of my dance session last June.

White Fire now has a web page at my Art & Writings website, where you may read the prosepoem in its entirety. In the video I have only used a few quotes on the creation of the universe out of light. I wrote this prose poem nearly a decade ago, and at that time I was invited to read it on the radio and it nearly became a performance with 8 dancers and musicians!

The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in the album, 'Piano Paintings' by the brilliant Russian composer and pianist, Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova). Lena came by my website, since I had left a note at her site on Jamendo that the music in my videopoem, Venus Enroute, is hers, and wrote: "I am impressed by your art and happy that you have found inspiration from my music. I am looking forward to see how the Spring dance will evolve....with warm greetings from Helsinki, Finland, Lena." How wonderful.

One of the challenges I set myself in this videopoem was to create a self-contained movie. I have, therefore, included the text of the prosepoetry being recited in the movie itself. You will see that I have worked very hard to produce this video in a way that the text becomes a design element in the video itself.

Except at the end, where I felt darkness was most effective.

I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

Earlier version without words: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière (a poetry without words) at Vimeo.

Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière - In-progress

This clip isn't finished yet. I hope to add poetry -I'm thinking of not just voice, or maybe no voice at all (that piano so beautiful), but having the words float down the screen, especially during intervals when I 'disappear' from the 'room'- I'm sharing this earlier version because it has charm... when I finish this video I'll upload to YouTube... but I thought you might enjoy this stage in the creation, a little clip, this simplicity.

If you'd like to see a screenshot of the Final Cut Express window with the filters I used, you can see it at TwitPic (press the + sign to see full size). This video, taken in June 2009, was shot with an older DV camera, a Canon GL2.

The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in 'Piano Paintings' by Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova).

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I also tried unsuccessfully to upload this video to Blogger for two days! I'm hosting it from Facebook. Yes, I have a YouTube account, but I prefer to keep that site for finished videopoems. I don't think a Facebook url will work, but you can try: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière - In-progress (will work for fb 'friends' & send an invite if you're there- I'd love to connect.) The embedded video doesn't travel by email, and so I like to offer a direct url. I may upload to Vimeo when my 'new week' starts.

Video: 'Venus Enroute' from "The Botticelli Venus Suite of Poems"

Venus Enroute uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

The poetry is an excerpt from my "Botticelli Suite of Venus Poems":

She stopped to rest. Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

Without hovering, or insecurity.

It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

Then she continued on.

She didn't doubt her certainties.

The music clip is from Lena Selyanina's 'Sarah's Dance,' from her album, "Piano Poetry," which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45056.

The chair sequence and the poem added to it had no original connection. I cut the clip from two hours of footage as perhaps 'workable.' Then I searched for a poem. It's amazing how the poem 'fits' the movement, huh? Creatively perhaps we are a gesture, a gesture where here poetry and dance are an aligned fusion.

Albeit, the resulting video is a bit comic. The tag on the back of my dress? As soon as I saw the footage I grabbed the dress and cut it off. The other camera? Ahh, I'm still just learning how to make videos and don't have a clone plugin to remove these elements. Enjoy the humor!

(Or perhaps, in context of the poem, since Venus has swung her scallop shell around to enter the world of experience, we could say the tag on her dress reads: 'If this Vintage Venus is found wandering, send her back to "Mount Olympus"!)

White, a Butoh-inspired dance by Brenda Clews

A poetry in motion. I played with negatives. It reminds me of ice and snow, of liberation from constraint. Of imaging between being and non-being. Of the mother. Of the sorrow of the mother earth. Of disappearing into and emerging from. Of the continuous cacophony of the dance of life. Of the disjointed, an awkward grace. The film loses some of its quality in the uploaded video: the semi-opague layers appear more like faded images than the transparencies they are. Yet you let go of the white leaf and let it float out to the sea. I wanted to add a poem, and perhaps that's next. The flowers are from photographs I took last year of mandalas of fresh flowers in the street outside an Indian restaurant in honour of a Hindu festival. The increasing presence of the flowers behind the screen of the dance is a reminder of what is ever-present, profundita natura, the profundity of nature at its most beautiful, fragile, transitory, in the flower. I leave you with a screen of flowers, like a prayer.


Hi beautiful friends, Sharing 'White, a Butoh-inspired dance.'.. film clip from late last Summer, and then all last night editing (editing video I'm discovering is like that:-) ...layering... images, sounds, yet not wanting to disturb the vulnerability, perhaps strangeness, of this 'silent film'... Butoh can express the painful and beautiful paradoxes of life in an intimacy that is almost unbearable to watch, I don't know if this film has that, but it's in the intent.

Feedback is always wonderful as I stumble down the path of this art form.

If 'White' opens something out in you, even in resistance, or in a sense of discomfort, then that is the Butoh influence, and then I'll know your reaction is like mine. For I don't know who that woman is, something else takes hold, another energy flows through.

Many thanks for taking the time to look at this. Many thanks for the blessing you are in my life,

hugs, Brenda xo


direct link to the video at YouTube: White, a Butoh-inspired dance.