All Final GNews work–

– can be found in the Final Work category section.

 Thanks!

Jackie

Final Feature Piece

Ten years ago Tesha Buss was a cat in “CATS.”  She performed in the show for nearly two years, and every night anticipated the top of the second act, when the stage was dark, and the cast would sit still around Old Deuteronomy (an important CAT) as he sang a song called “Moments of Happiness.”             

For Tesha, this mid-performance ritual represented a reprieve from her otherwise hectic life.             

“It forced you to sit down and be quiet, just after you’d danced so crazily before,” she says.  “I’d have this moment of, oh right—everything is okay—I’m on Broadway.”           

Tesha is a 33-year-old retiree.  She is one of a vast number of dancers termed “transitioned” within the dance community.  To transition is to quit performance and pursue a second career.   Dancers, unlike other artists, employ a time-sensitive instrument: at a certain age, the body can no longer perform the way the form demands.  For an overwhelming majority of dancers transition is inevitable.             

Final Slideshow

–is unfortunately a Soundslides slideshow, so can’t post up.  So in lieu of having the audio/visual combination here, I’ve collected some of my favorite photos from the slideshow.  These photos are all  video stills; they’re from Karin’s “Swan Song” performance that I wrote about below, in which she “handed down” an old favorite rotine to her young protege Kathy Callahan.  Because they are taken from video the quality isn’t stellar– there’s quite a bit of intricate movement, hands and arms and feet, in tap dancing, and that means blurriness when you try to freeze the frame.  But I actually like it in these pictures.  There’s so much energy in the stills, and Karin and Kathy look so happy.  It was nice to use these images to illustrate the audio of Karin talking about passing down choreography, and tradition in dance.  Below, images of Karin and Kathy performing together an Ernest Carlos routine that Karin says “changed her life” when she first learned it, at age 10.

  

Final Video

GNews final video embedded below:

 

Thanks!

Side Note on Dunning’s Article (see below): Passing Down Dance

On another note regarding Dunning’s piece “Twisting and Chatting the Alvin Ailey Way,” Dunning is completely right when she writes that dances are handed down from older to younger performers.  I was really drawn to this idea when I first heard it– I like its traditional element, the concept of the hours logged in passing along an exact choreography, and the sort of old-world apprentice-sense of it.  One of my subjects Karin Baker, an older-generation tapper and a strong-minded traditionalist, has so far handed down some of her earliest tap routines– Ernest Carlos routines– to a young protege named Kathy Callahan.  

In fact, Karin’s last performance (which she refers to as her “Swan Song”) is a dance interpretation of this hand-me-down tradition.  In this performance, Karin dances with Kathy.  Karin performs a set of steps and Kathy imitates her.  The sets get more and more complicated, and overlap each other more and more, until Kathy and Karin are doing the routine together, their taps completely in unison.  The choroegraphy is great, and so is the sound of it. 

Karin was kind enough to loan me a DVD of this performance, and I’m working on ways to get it up on this blog.  So, hopefully, accompanying video to come.

Reporting A Conversation

An interesting article in the Sunday Times Arts section, “Twisting and Chatting the Ailey Way” by Jennifer Dunning, raises a few questions about storytelling, reporting, and the ways we employ different media forms.

In the article, Jennifer Dunning “covers” a sit-down conversation/interview between Matthew Rushing, a performer with the modern dance troupe Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater since 1992, and Judith Jamison, the troupe’s director. 

Dunning begins:

DANCES have traditionally been handed down from performer to performer, even since the invention of dance notation. But how do dancers learn about the mysterious culture of performing? Some of that can be soaked up in the daily work, but there is nothing quite like a lazily extended, spontaneous conversation with a veteran choreographer, dancer or company director.   

That last clause seems true enough.  But in that case, why are we reading a news feature about it?  What of the elements of conversation, in this instance: of a certain inflection, pauses for thought, laughter, sighing, all the rest?  Dunning attempts to recreate the scene of the talk for us, but ultimately falls short.  The article, in turn, is strange– it is merely all he-said-then-she-said, and the effect is distancing, almost uncomfortable.  We don’t know why Dunning was there.  And if the conversation was spontaneous, well, we don’t quite believe it from Dunning’s transcript.  How nice it would have been to hear actual voices.  To have an audio option!

I believe completely in the power and effect of carefully-wrought writing, and especially in narrative.   And I prefer good writing to good versions of all other media forms (audio, video, etc., whatever).  Had Dunning been interested in voice, had she made an attempt to convey through writing what couldn’t be conveyed through audio alone– something visually important, some small moment or almost imperceptible gesture (maybe too easily overlooked on video), than the writing might have been worth it.  But without, why not just have an audio bar?  Why not a video of these two people interacting? 

I think this example draws upon what I consider the major lesson of our course: that different stories call for different storytelling media, distinct forms.  And it’s the author/videographer/editor’s job to use the chosen form to its maximum capacity.  I’m not sure if this is something I’ve been able to accomplish in every exercise this semester, but it’s something I’m certainly more aware of than I have been before.     

Second Slideshow

Made in iMovie and uploaded to YouTube.  Embedded below:

 

 

Thanks!

Soundless Slideshow

Put together, mostly for practice, a silent (video) slideshow composed of photos of Karin Baker in movement. I’d like to play around a bit more with pacing– I wanted the movement to speed up to the end, but I couldn’t get the clips to play for less than one second each. Also in compressing the movie file for YouTube, the picture quality degraded quite a bit, which is unfortunate– though I don’t see any way to remedy that problem without money.

And of course once I have an audio complement, it will be easier to convey a clear narrative. See slideshow below …

Audio Snag

In composing my photo slideshow, have landed on an audio problem: sound quality.  Sound quality is a big, big issue.  I didn’t fully accept that concept when we were working with video, in which medium there are moving images to focus on and (in theory) a greater theme at play.  But when sound is isolated with only still image, poor quality is even more evident, and, in the case of my recorded interviews with Karin Baker, pretty unbearable.  I had clumsily tried to transfer audio from a digital recorder to a mini-DV by rigging a connection between recorder and camera, and that only aggravated the lousy sound and created an additional constant buzz in the foreground.  So next week’s interview– remiked and reworked– will be especially important for contextualizing Karin’s images; I really want to do them justice.

 In the meantime, two of my favorite images are below: the first, Karin (left) and her sister in the studio Karin created in the family’s basement when she was ten years old (she gave dance lessons there into her teenaged years); the second, a later news clipping of Karin (left again) with a few of her younger pupils.

Picture Story

Recently met again with Karin Baker, former dancer and one subject of my in-progress feature piece.  Unlike many of the dancers I’ve been in touch with over the course of the semester, Karin has a vast and beautiful collection of photos to document her dance career, thanks to her fastidious and attentive mother.  Which is lucky, because her career was pretty amazing.  There are pictures of Karin in her teenage years, giving ballet lessons to students her own age in the basement of her childhood home in Cinncinnati (Karin turned the basement into a dance studio when she was 10).  There are pictures of Karin on stage performing in a USO tour, her hands and legs blurred by movement and her face over-the-top animate.  There are even pictures of her performing on The Carol Burnett show; her mom snapped close-shots of the TV screen to get those.  (The quality isn’t so bad, considering.)  And above is a picture of Karin in a Capezio ad which ran, she says, for nearly a year.  She doesn’t remember how, or when exactly, she landed that job.  It’s a cool addition to her albums nonetheless.

I’m interested in the idea of portraying dance through still image.  If a photo slideshow were well-done it could call attention to intricacy of movement, to the lines of the body, those things more difficult to notice when a dancer is in motion.  I worry a bit about minimalizing the true extent of story, though; in Karin’s case, for example, it would be easy to show Cute Dancing-Karin Age 10 next to Beautiful Dancing-Karin Age 25 next to Wise Teaching-Karin Age 40.  But that doesn’t really reveal anything significant about Karin’s career or self.  In arranging photos I’m working with transcripts from my original interviews with Karin as the accompanying audio, but I wonder whether it might be better to follow up with a photo-based interview– if that doesn’t push any ethical lines– and ask Karin to talk specifically about each image’s context, her mindset within that context.  On its own the images are pretty and interesting and generally nice to look at, but I’d very much like if I could compose the slideshow so that it says and means something more.