Pina Bausch died on Tuesday, aged 68, less than a week after being diagnosed with cancer. Dozens of eloquent and heartfelt obituaries honoring the Queen of Tantztheater and her incalculable influence on modern dance are going up all over the web. Mark Brown’s eulogy over at The Scotsman contains some especially incisive remarks:
She was one of a select few modern artists - such as James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett - whose work can be truly described, in the most profound sense, as transcendental.
Bausch’s immense influence extended - and will continue to extend - far beyond her fellow dance and theatre makers, into film making and the visual arts. She was described so often as a “revolutionary artist” that the term became almost a platitude. Yet there is no other phrase which quite captures the impact of her deeply intelligent, humane, fearless and iconoclastic aesthetic.
Hell to the yes. It’s very rare to find an artist (in any medium) who strikes such a perfect balance of craft, grit, and grace; laughter, tears and squirminess. That lame fucking “Pornography of Pain” label bestowed derisively upon Bausch by the New Yorker years ago may have stuck, but considering the emotional commitment and complexity of her work, it just doesn’t ring true.
Photo via the AFP.
Obviously, I’m no expert, but based purely off my own intuitive response to her stage and screen work, I’d call Bausch’s vision one of compassionate absurdity. Life and death, male and female, joy and grief, discipline and abandon are all presented with courageous honesty. She didn’t just break down boundaries between the mediums of theater, dance and film; she challenged our perceptions of performance itself. Stanford lecturer Janice Ross nails it:
In a Pina Bausch dance, the invisible divide between the real person and the stage character seems to collapse so that one often has the sense of watching barely mediated real life events. This isn’t art rendered as life so much as living rendered as art.
I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a shame that Bausch died when she was still so actively, splendidly creative. What a tremendous gift that she was ever here at all! In her honor, I’ve added “Revolutionary” to the list of Coilhouse category tags. Long may her dance live on.
Funereal excerpt from Wuppertal’s Die Klage der Kaiserin.
SAMPARKOUR, directed by Wiland Pinsdorf, featuring Zico Corrêa. (Via William Gibson, thanks.)
Commercial/music video director Wiland Pinsdorf’s SAMPARKOUR is “a short that reveals the city of São Paulo (Brazil) under the look of Parkour. Where people see obstacles, Zico Corrêa visualizes new possibilities.”
Shot in HD with a 35mm lens adapter, the short is simultaneously dizzying and becalming, presenting Corrêa’s death-defying feats in a breathtaking rush of carefully framed shots and well-paced edits. Today –perhaps more than most days– it is deeply satisfying to witness a collaboration (between filmmaker and athlete, city and gravity) so vital, immediate, and perfectly alive.
Hi, hello, yes, good morning, my brain is broken. I’m afraid this is the best I can do.
I know. It’s scary and wrong and you’re all probably going to get gushing nosebleeds just from looking at it and loudly shout profanities at work and then get fired and hate me forever.
JUNE 12–A North Carolina man is facing criminal charges for creating an amusing piece of public art from construction barrels. Joseph Carnevale, 21, was nabbed Wednesday after a Raleigh Police Department investigation determined that he was responsible for the work constructed May 31 on a roadway adjacent to North Carolina State University. Carnevale was charged with misdemeanor larceny for allegedly building his orange monster from materials pilfered from a construction site. According to an arrest warrant, Carnevale “destroyed three road blocking barrels by cutting and screwing them together to form a statue.” Police estimated that Carnevale’s artwork caused $360 in damages to Hamlett Associates, the North Carolina construction company that owned the barrels. Carnevale is scheduled for a July 21 court appearance in Wake County.
Nick Cave & Blixa Bargeld announce 120 Minutes for MTV, recorded early 1994.
If anyone here can decipher Blixa’s sinister whisper divulging the 4th circle of MTV hell (”sea of burning lead of … hippie …” something?) please leave it in comments.
*For those of you just tuning in, we three Coilhouse editors share a breathless, bone-deep predilection for all things Nixa. The depth, power and futility of our combined, confused longing easily eclipses the paltry obsessions of even the most twitterpated tween Twilight spastic. (Say that three times fast.) Fear us. Pity us. We are lost.
It’s my pal Bricey’s birthday. In addition to being a bottomless font of warm fuzzy vibes, moral support and hilarious butt jokes, Rachel Brice is widely regarded to be one of the most accomplished and innovative belly dancers working in the Tribal Fusion style today. So, for those of you who are (like me) shamefully staggering out of bed just in time for dinner (hey, man, some of us were up ’til 11am copy-editing Coilhouse print edition #3) and in need of something awe-inspiring/energizing/exquisite to look upon, here’s an assortment of clips of Rachel Brice: Professional Belly Dancing Badass and Beloved Goofball.
Via the most brutal and unrelenting Ben Catmull. \m/
If a Speedo-wearing, paddle-wagging, KVLT AS FUCK individual and his demonic friend headbang in the forest, does it make a sound? Apparently not, save for the mesmerizing voosh voosh voosh of dewy black metal tresses sluicing through crisp mountain air (and some Attila-worthy bellowing at the very end, there).
Canadian YouTube user and Dark Overlord of the Perplexing Non SequiTORRR, esy87, explains: “the music is coming from a headset close to us but the camera hasnt picked it up. for natural perservation of the vid we didnt edit it to put the song on it, but for ppl interested it was ‘Decade of Therion‘ from Behemoth.”
Ah. Yes. That explains everything. Except the banana hammock. But in any case, well done, good sirs. I’d throw you some horns, but I’m still doubled over in hysterics.
(Via Gala Darling. Bear with the janky visuals and audio! It’s worth it.)
Confession: I am a terrible dancer. Really, truly awful. Nothing graceful, mysterious, strong or sexy about me on a disco floor. More like a capuchin monkey being electrocuted. Once, in my early twenties, partying at a club in downtown NYC (land of folded arms, reserved weight-shifting and ambivalent head-nodding) a friend pulled me aside and frankly informed me “sweetie, you look like a twat out there.” For one immensely painful split second, I was deeply wounded. But the bullet passed through non-vital tissue. No permanent damage.
“I know. So what?” I pinched my friend’s cheek, went right back out there and recommenced shakin’ my monkeymaker.
Yes, many of us are terrified of making asses out of ourselves for all eternity. Me too. But when it comes to dancing for the sheer joy of it, all bets are off. All of you cool coordinated kids in the peanut gallery can point and laugh, but babies, you’re the ones missing out. Mark Twain knew his shit, and like Maude once said, “everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves. You can’t let the world judge you too much.”
Who knows? Maybe the world just wants to join in the fun.
California-born dancer/singer Heather Parisi isn’t a household name in the US, but some of our Mediterranean readers might recognize her. Back in the late 70s, an Italian producer discovered the flexible 19-year-old sunning on a beach in Rimini. Parisi was set up with the best thrustiest jazz choreographer liras could buy, pimped out in one seriously bedazzlicious wardrobe, and became an Italian TV pop sensation overnight.
There are so many transcendentally Stupid/Awesome aspects to this video for her song “Crilù”, it’s hard to know where to start. Just… enjoy.
Gyrations atop a giant Rubik’s cube? Check. Uber groiny, hardbodied ballet dancers in metallic bowler shoes? Check. Intimated BJ three-way with male Moschino models? Check. Glittering Mickey Mouse butt cleavage? OKAY NOW THAT’S JUST GOING TOO FAR.
Clip via DJ Dead Billy, thanks. More Parisi videos after the jump. Additionally, if you appreciate this level of Stupid/Awesome 80s kitsch, you may also like:
Murder Rock (Italian horror director Lucio Fulci’s answer to Flashdance)
Today is IDAHO, 2009. On this date not too long ago (1992), homosexuality was finally removed from the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO). This year, in a gesture of pride and solidarity, hundreds of folks from 48 countries across six continents around the world participated in a video message produced by the Parisian IDAHO committee in conjunction with the Hong Kong-based site, Gays.com.
“Participants submitted videos in all of the world’s key languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and even American Sign Language.”
Unfortunately, you can’t actually watch the video (or anything else) on the official Gays.com site right now because they’re experiencing a big ol’ DDoS attack that hit the site approximately 48 hours ago, shortly before various global IDAHO celebrations were set to begin. Coincidence? Um, no. Gays.com spokesperson Kenneth Tan, who spoke to Pitch Engine earlier today, says that “this is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before.”
Okay, who else is getting REALLY effin’ sick of irony? Thankfully, Gays.com has been able to upload and share the video on many other sites. Ooo! AND… via Calpernia Addams’ Twitter, I just found out that (with a nod to the weekend’s worldwide IDAHO celebrations) France has just become the first country in the world to officially depathologize transexualism as a mental illness. Woot!
Two steps back, three steps forward. Let’s keep on dancing, shall we?
