I went to a dance performance in the new The Atrium building as part of Victoria’s Dance Days festival. The Atrium is a private building with a big courtyard with restaurants and shops bordering on it – basically a contemporary, upscale take on a mall, although I’m sure the architect would hate to hear me say that.

The dancers were three women and a man, wearing street clothes with some face makeup. Their style was contemporary: afterward one of them told me that the spatial and emotional structure of the piece was planned but the individual moves were improvised. There was a sign on an easel by the main entrance that just said “Dance Days brought to you by YAM magazine” – there was no spoken introduction. A camera person filmed the performance with a hand-held camera and there was a photographer at the start. There was no music, just ambient noise from a coffee shop.

There were at most a dozen audience members who seemed to know what was going on, everyone else were just passing through or sitting in an adjacent restaurant. For me, the piece raised some critical questions:

What separates the dancers from normal people and from crazy people? How do we know that those people are dancing and other people aren’t? Their sign, makeup, camera person, training, schedule and audience are what make them official, not anything inherent in their actions. (As you can see in my photos, I was a bit obsessed with the sign.)

It felt like the sort of thing you might watch in a public square or a park – how is it significant that The Atrium is private space that feels public? What would happen if me and my friends were to try the same thing? I’m sure the public amenity of The Atrium’s courtyard figured into the development permit, so is this just a case of government outsourcing the creation of public space?

I dig Aronofsky, and his latest is fairly true to form. It’s a pomo retelling of Swan Lake and the descent into madness of the prima dancing it.

The use of CG is over-the-top, mostly because it strays over “the line” occasionally. Some things are better left implied, is all. Some of the body horror is fantastic.

Watch for the nice, symbolic use of mirrors!

Is there something fundamentally existentialist about the tango? [solved]

- The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume X, Issue 4, pages 859–866, Spring 1977 (thx, Jill).

I attended the Saturday program of Light on our Feet dance cabaret. There was only one interpretive routine and no bad modern ballet, so I enjoyed it more than other dance cabarets I’ve been to in Victoria. On the other hand, there was two comedy routines that had nothing to do with dance, which kind of muddied the show.

My favourite performances:

Nath Keo

Bellydance fused with Cambodian (Khmer) classical dance. Nath’s gender presentation, particularly his signature costume, is a man. Given that both of these styles were traditionally danced primarily by concubines (although both have male minorities), I consider this performance to be genderqueer. Nath’s dance was aethetically pleasing, technically impressive and very political (in contrast to the banality of interpretive dance).

Ballet Victoria

Classical ballet to contemporary dance music. I’m usually dismissive of ballet, but I have never seen it danced to such engaging music. The dancers stuck to classical footwork while adding a few modern hand motions. It made me want to sign up for ballet class.

Rachel Oates Tribal Fusion

The fusion included flamenco, which kind of stole the show from purer flamenco dancer Monique Salez. Rachel’s dance wasn’t awesome through-and-through, but there were some moments of brilliance.

LauraBellyDance

A pair of traditional bellydancers with burning candles balanced on their heads! I suppose the chance of injury was pretty low, but dropping the candles in front of a big audience seemed likely. One of them was pregnant, which strikes me as a bellydance cliche.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is a Moroccan-Belgian choreographer whose dances fuse older forms like ballet with newer forms like breaking and with marital arts (and I suspect with media art):

In the above he is performing with Shaolin monks. I like how the narratives in the pieces seem readily apparent, cinematic.

Via R., some fucking badass ballet:

I love the photography, esp. during the opening credits. Framing the dancer using the receding curve of the pipe, the play of light and shadow and the color-matched costume-flesh: Magnifique.

Cool choreography too, like emotionally distrubed automata; a manic music box. And I dig the kabuki body-horror hair.

I also love the sound design — not only the score, but the slightly-mic’d dance. It’s like for some parts there’s an ambient mic far away to catch slight room tone, just enough to throw relief on the lack of sound (much like the lighting seems to exist only for aesthetic contrast).

Oh, and: It’s Canadian.

Sorry, Eastern Conference — maybe next year. But what did you expect? Not even LJ can stop Kobe and Shaq under Phil Jackson.

The Jabbawockee Reserve intro was great, just not embeddable (and where is the giant head spin?). Shaq’s entrance as “the biggest Jabbawockee” was awesome:

Sager calling them the “Wockajabbeez” was possibly the whitest fucking thing I’ve ever heard the white man say, and I grew up in White Town. Kobe was right to laugh.

You can’t really see from this video but Dwight Howard was trash talking Shaq right up to the surprise attack here. LJ was right to laugh:

Did LeBron’s final dunk foreshadow his 2010 dunk competition appearance? Will Mark Cuban really get 100,000 people into Dallas Cowboy New Stadium next year? We shall see, we shall see.

Sometimes, for no good reason, I watch a movie I would never under any circumstances watch. I keeps it fresh like that. Plus my family are all big dancers gangstas.

There are exactly three good parts of Bring It On: All Or Nothing:

1) The opening cheer-at-the-prom sequence, where they trick you into thinking the movie might be good.

2) At about 40:00, in the Crumping segment, where they stop pretending dancing isn’t primal.

3) The final cheer-off (~1:26:30), which contains the best part of the whole movie starting at about 1:28:00 — the “gang violence” dance.

Save your time and under no circumstances watch the rest of the movie — it’s what you’d expect from something written and starring dancers instead of, you know, written by writers and starring actors.

Alex likes dance. What.