Women's Circle: 'Dancing an Unwinding,' Summer Solstice 2009

direct link to Dancing an Unwinding

Dance is an ecstatic, uplifting, enlightening experience. I hope this little video imparts some of the warmth and joy of the connectedness that occurs during these wild and nurturing dances. After last Summer's Solstice DOWH (Dance Our Way Home) session, some women kindly stayed to dance. The camera taped us for dance stills for an article I was writing. The footage was so sweet, however, that I created this little videopoem. You can read the prose poem here: Amaterasu.

Dancing Women: Erica Ross, Laura Nashman, Angela Greco, Jade Niemczyk, Linda Robinson & Brenda Clews. Event: Dance Our Way Home (DOWH), June 20th, 2009, at Dovercourt House in Toronto: danceourwayhome.com

Background music from *Collection Hapa* by Keli'i Kaneali'i & Barry Flanagan: mountainapplecompany.com

Videotaped, edited & prose poetry by Brenda Clews: sites.google.com/site/brendaclews 

__
It's important for those in the entertainment industry to create smart, cool, sexy, funky, daring, glitzy videos to be noticed, to make a name, to become famous.

I'm not trying to call attention to myself except as one of the participating women; I have nothing to sell; I am not attempting to make money on this; I am not trying to impress anyone.

I'm promoting the creative self-expression of women, ordinary women, in unfacilitated dance. No choreography. It's all about feeling comfortable with who you are and flowering as yourself.

This video was shot on a tripod with a democracy whereby no-one got close-ups or special attention. No cuts were made to the footage, the music is uninterrupted, but some filters were added. The stop motion filter, for instance, was done frame by frame, about 7 hours. It took probably 20 hours to produce something that looks like almost nothing was done to it, that's perhaps slow and ordinary to the eye used to action and special effects.

Makes me think of Wordsworth's language of and for the common man, or Courbet's determination to paint the ordinary, stones, roads, fields, farmers.

An aesthetic: the beauty of the ordinary. How the ordinary is dreamy. How enlightenment flows out of the ordinary. How what is truly marvelous is the unassuming, the everyday, expressions of joy in everyone simply because they are. What is most surreal is the real. I hope to convey some of this with the way I chose to show the footage.

                                                    

Once Upon a Time there was a Dreaming Woman

Once upon a time there was a dreaming woman whose dreams were of the moon that the animals sang to.

When the flames came out of the fires in the dark night the people fell like stones and joined the earth.

Afterwards in the great scrolls it was written that a lake arose in the sky and the mountains flew like clouds.

Those who remained knelt before the great healer, a man with white flowing hair and copper woman breast-plates, and received the blessing of the future.

Golden grains of the earth filled the communal baskets of the dreaming woman.

___

Dreamtime story I wrote based on the pictures of random Tarot cards at Caro Cloutier's Dreaming in the Dark Series.