LINE DANCES
Theatre and Web Cinema/Gallery Installations/Projection Mapping. Funders: Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa, Creative NZ Choreographic Fellowship 2010 (awarded to Daniel Belton), Otago Community Trust, GCA and partners.
World Premiere: Otago Festival of the Arts 2010, New Zealand. Official selection; Dance on Camera Festival 2011, New York, USA; The Big Screen Project 2011 (Acrobat), New York, USA; Finalist Selection Napolidanza il Coreografo Elettronico 2011, Naples, Italy (Awarded Special Mention Napolidanza, il Coreografo Elettronico 2011). Custom Edition Bauhaus Facade versions for Genius Loci Weimar International Video Mapping Festival 2013, Weimar, Germany.
https://vimeo.com/dbel/linedances-geniuslociweimar (doco film link)
Official selection; World Stage Design Festival 2013, Cardiff, UK; Romaeuropa International Festival 2013, Rome, Italy. 2014 Zentrum Paul Klee commission to SPACE-NATURE-ARCHITECTURE major exhibition, Bern, Switzerland. Miniature Award for Best of Dance, NZ Listener Arts Awards. Critics Survey DANZ Quarterly 2010 for Outstanding Choreography Award.
Paul Klee said “One eye sees, the other feels”. Watching dance unfold live or on screen is emotive. Capturing the body moving on film holds the dance in time. Like a specimen, you can revisit it, dissect the dance, re-interpret and re-choreograph in the process of editing the film. The film print pulls us back to a flat space experience. Although movement is inherent, it has become artificial. The kinetic passages are given the heart of the machine - however there is beauty in these processes, with great potential for expression and discovery within the confines of the technology available to us to capture and re-create dance. Choreography quite literally is the method for graphing body movement.
Line Dances demonstrates various levels of interaction between moving figure/body and other imposed geometric systems, aiming towards a fluid space, a modification and metamorphosis. We reference built environments, with aspirations towards an amalgam of the structural and the organic. This multi-dimensional window carries an illustrated geometry underlying all that moves - there is pulse in the line. The dancers are forced to interpose between visual and audio static realms - electromagnetic fields. Here, the figures are negotiating a series of physics storms. Bombarded with lines, they are fully emerged in this world of cosmic challenges. Digital weather, mathematical weather, electrical surges, pulsing linear anomalies, dancing zeros and ones.
Digital lines derived from Paul Klee's drawings, establish starting points for the collaboration between the filmed dancers and new virtual environments. Part of this exploration is the imagined relationship to quantum physics. Film episodes are constructed with oscillating lines that are become re-calibrated through the agency of the dancer. We use the visual matrix of the screen like a tuning field. Stations of movement are tuned into and out of for these kaleidoscopic journeys. This is literally choreographing the screen. Our attempt is to create a compressed theatre of light where the artificiality of the stage is evoked in cinema. This film window is as much an instrument as the body is instrument.
A series of seven films pursue the visual space as an amplifier and a telescope in Line Dances. Early cameras present us with a miniature stage inside; concertina wings and heightened perspective. In this close, incubating framework, the dance, visual graphic, and sonic aspects can belong together. The scientific references to string theory and astrophysics suggest further spatial potential. Dance and music converge to usher in, as Klee said a ‘between world' (Zwischenwelt). The seven film titles after Klee are: Portrait of an Acrobat, Harlequin on the Bridge, Realm of the Curtain, Saint A in B, Equilibrist, Perspective with Inhabitants, Growth and Branching Out.
Miniature Award for Best of Dance NZ Listener* DANZ Quarterly Outstanding Choreography Award* Special Mention Award Napolidanza il Coreografo Elettronico Naples Italy*
Film Excerpts:
https://vimeo.com/dbel/linedancesfacade
https://vimeo.com/dbel/saint
Reviews
Line Dances
Daniel Belton and Good Company | Metro Cinema | Festival of the Arts Dunedin | October 2010 | Reviewed by Bronwyn Judge for DANZ QUARTERLY Summer 2011 Issue no.22
Despite tutus, toe shoes and piano accompaniment, there is nothing conventional about choreographer Daniel Belton's films Line Dances. Good Company's film cements Dunedin's reputation as a source of innovative dance ideas, where leading exponents in the arts work together enriching each others pieces. On this occasion it is Anthony Ritchie who has composed the score for Line Dances and who also plays it, as an introduction, to create an otherworldly atmosphere before the screen darkens.
Line Dances reiterates themes from Belton's other works, notably the dance performance Soundings, which was performed at the Regent Theatre at a previous Arts Festival. It is as if Belton has decided that if he can vary his presentation, a wider audience will eventually understand and appreciate the substance behind what he shows us. My companion was not hesitant in proclaiming that she felt on another planet from the choreographer, and Belton gave no concessions to the conventions of theatre, spurning dynamic pacing, climax and denouement. Episodic in nature, with each section cryptically titled, the energy consistently ebbed and flowed, as unrelenting as the line of the horizon.
Sir Jon Trimmer, as the fool, is the only character we see in close up, old and raddled with a kindly gleam in his eye he conducts the dancers by baton. These dancers - tiny, dainty, silent figures - appear to respond, moving to and fro. Highly delineated and balanced on phantasmagorical constructions of lines that suggest edifices, houses, churches, staircases, they defy gravity, dancing upside down along imaginary footpaths. Impeccable lighting paints their costumes so that even when in monochrome they glow lustrous against a black backdrop.This is not dance where the sweat flies, muscles strain and breath is laboured. It is far more the ultimate refinement of ballet as an illusion divorced from the earth, poised on its toes; it reflects Western society's heady preoccupation with the intellect.
Accompanied by the click and whirr of ancient mechanisms, the music is interlaced with ambient sound redolent of the workings of the antique concertina camera that looms large between each choreographic story, magnified in size as many times as the dancers are diminished in scale.
The commonality of the "digital weather, choreographic weather, weather of physics" that the dancers encounter, of which Belton writes, is unpredictability.The dancers with their stretching and contracting movements are the space that influences the trajectory of light. They show us a "between" world. On one side is the choreographer's idea made physical by the dancers and on the other side the camera recording the dancer's images two-dimensionally. These two activities are not dependant on the observer, whereas the in-between world depends for its actuality on the interaction of the audience, what they bring to their observation and interpretation.
Attempting to explain the nature of light, quantum physics lends itself to depiction in dance. Moving at the speed of light, photons bounce off obstacles with random abandonment. Belton's dancers similarly tumble irrepressibly along linear pathways. Line Dances is significant in that it contains a universal truth; whichever world we are in, whichever world we see, is different from that of the people in the other world looking back at us.
Line Dances is a vehicle for the choreographer, although Belton surrounds himself with superb dancers and supporting crew. The dancers are viewed as if backwards through a telescope, and apart from recognising the quizzical, querulous gait of Donnine Harrison, as the goose girl, they would be hard to distinguish from each other if you bumped into them on the street.
Belton challenges the way we view dance and his demands upon his art form to explicate complex scientific theories, undermines our certainty of what dance is able to convey, lifting our horizons as to what it is capable of.
Quoting the modernist artist Paul Klee, Belton states his intention is also for "the one eye to see, the other feel", but his dance seems visual rather than visceral, groundbreaking in that it draws the eye into thinking and reviewing our expectations of dance and what it might be attempting to communicate. It is a strange and enticing blend of dance theatre derived from the bygone era of commedia delle'arte and the science of today's physics.
A Line Going For A Walk
RealTime issue #100 Dec-Jan 2010 pg. 25 Reviewed by Jonathan Marshall for RealTime Magazine, Australia.
Belton's early training as a painter is again evident in these works. He references many of the visual and thematic concerns of his previous films and multimedia dance pieces (RT92)—lines of perspective and sketched trajectories evoking Renaissance illustration, architectural drawings, as well as influences from Russian Constructivism, Futurism and the delicate, minimalistic version of Modernist painting seen in the work of Paul Klee. Belton indeed cites Klee's lectures at the Bauhaus School of Art during the 1920s as a key influence.
The Bauhaus is known for promoting the notion of colours possessing specific correspondences to each other and to spiritual sensations. With the exception of a few geometric blocks of red recalling the work of Piet Mondrian and the Constructivists, Belton's Line Dances, though, are largely black and white.
This suits Belton's purposes well. It gives Line Dances an antique feel consistent with the broadly Modernist visual iconography, as well as establishing a link between these allusions and earlier Baroque and Rococo architectural settings and theatrical modes. The commedia dell'arte Harlequin—or his representation as a figure of ironic playfulness and visual fantasy in Modernist art by Cocteau, Picasso and others—appears, as does a generic, white-attired Columbine ballerina, along with clockwork, automaton-like figures, angular acrobats (looking as if they have stepped out of Meyerhold's productions) and line drawings of fantastic spaces and buildings with indeterminate, shifting dimensions (shades of Klee's Room Perspective With Inhabitants, 1921, and The Great Dome, 1927).
Klee's influence is manifest principally in the work's conceptualisation. He saw abstract art as based on transparency and opacity, enabling multiple perspectives and viewpoints to be layered to make up a larger, composite picture. Belton either follows suit, or produces similar effects, by dividing the screen into repeating and varying fragments. The reproduction of dancers, figures, motifs, lines and even sounds across the field of perception is a marked feature of Line Dances' aesthetic.
The onscreen figures are light as paper. Lines of movement or shape are carefully traced across the screen, and then morphed into lyrical smudges. This recurrent theme gives a curious immateriality to the figure. Belton explains in his program notes that he sees the screen as an inherently "artificial" realm, hence his bodies have no weight.They arc, glitch, twitch, curve, multiply and swing, but never thud, hit, crash or stop. The look of the piece, as well as the movement of objects and human shapes, is of constantly evolving insubstantiality. It is the conditional sketchiness of Belton's films that provides their central structural conceit, as well as their curiously unresolved ambience. Although often described as a producer of "dance films," Belton's relative lack of concern for bodies qua bodies, and his construction of the body as merely one element among a number of parabolic, architectural, painterly and photographic motifs (notably stop-motion photography, as in the work of Anton Bragaglia, Étienne-Jules Marey and its painterly versions by Umberto Boccioni) means that his cinema is perhaps best characterised as moving painting, akin to that of avant-garde filmmakers Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and Len Lye, whose work Belton's intermittently evokes.
Klee contended that art should represent a "multiform world...[a] branching and spreading array"—which Belton literally shows in one film, offering an ever diminishing series of budding miniature figures sprouting from rods held at the shoulder of an initial character—and which Klee compares with the "root" and "crown" of a tree. Like Klee, Belton constantly oscillates from one point, outcome or physical position (the crown), through to a root, and then back again.The ideal metaphoric structure for Belton and Klee is therefore the Golden Ratio of mathematician Fibonacci and Cubist theorist Albert Gleizes: the recurrent spiral, such as one sees inside a Nautilus shell.These films never resolve, but microcosmically coil and repeat internally at an ever-reduced scale.Whilst this approach underpins Modernist painting, it is perhaps less effective for the movement in time of the screen space or of the music.
The planetoids threading their way backwards and forwards along a white parabola running behind the dancer therefore epitomise this cinematic cycle. Complex and sophisticated though Belton's films are, they function more as sketches than as final paintings; as a provisional, thoughtful set of lines, or as Klee might say, "a line going for a walk."
Daniel Belton and Good Company, Line Dances, director, performer, editor Daniel Belton, co-producer, performer Donnine Harrison, piano Anthony Ritchie, Metro Theatre, Otago Festival of the Arts, Dunedin, New Zealand, Oct 10-12
Line Dances (seven cinematic journeys)
Seven films for web and new media. Directed by Daniel Belton. Dunedin, NZ. Good Company Arts, 2010. International Journal of Screendance | Spring 2012 | Volume 2 | Review Essay by Claudia Rosiny
They look like human creatures in artificial cobwebs of lines—Daniel Belton, head of Good Company Arts, based in Dunedin, New Zealand, created and directed seven dance films under the headline Line Dances. And, in fact, lines are the joining elements in all these films, which vary between five and twelve minutes.The unique aesthetics of the imagery are remarkable, combining human beings performing dance movements into a graphic environment that is often detached from any real spatial perception. On the surface of the cinematic image, Line Dances looks like a formal dialogue between human beings that resemble animated representations of human characters on one side and geometrical patterns on the other. Throughout this approximately seventy- minute program, a black afterimage dominates these “seven cinematic journeys,” as Line Dances are subtitled.The intermediate sequences always return to this blackness in which blurred images of an old fashioned camera show up. Each “Line Dance” has a title: Saint A in B, Portrait of an Acrobat, Realm of the Curtain, Harlequin on the Bridge, Equilibrist, Perspective with Inhabitants, Growth and Branching Out. As you read them, they do give narrative hints, as they refer to pictures with the same title by Paul Klee.
Indeed, the idea of interacting human figures with abstract lines and geometric systems resulted from Belton’s research on Modernism, especially the drawings of Paul Klee and the background of the Bauhaus movement. Some of Klee’s pictures in fact seem to emerge out of the image like his squares in red connected with fine lines in Portrait of an Acrobat. And the use of baton reminds us of the famous Bauhaus baton dances, which Gerhard Bohner reconstructed in the 1980s. Belton uses Klee’s quotation, “One eye sees, the other feels,” as a guideline to indicate what he wishes to achieve in his films. He wants to exhaust the visual and physical potential of dance. Common stereotypes like a ballerina, an acrobat, or a harlequin are a strong contrast to these simple graphic lines. Formalism and emotional potentiality seem to melt; you don’t have to be moved, but maybe these fairytale-like figures call up sensations and souvenirs of whatever we associate with them.
Paul Klee’s drawings were Belton’s inspiration, but his artificial images also awaken references to early experimental and abstract film of this period (the 1920s), such as the “dancing” of painted patterns that Len Lye, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman or Viking Eggeling created. These pioneers of experimental film were artists who applied drawings directly on the film material, the celluloid.
Belton’s most exciting passages are those when the interaction between moving bodies and geometrical forms leads to a metamorphosis: the lines stretch, bend, and curve, initiated through the movement of a figure; then suddenly there is a pulse in a line and the geometrical patterns become natural. In the first film, which starts with a white afterimage, the lines serve foremost as a surface, as spatial references on which the figures start to move. Later the lines form a building with an abstract cupola:“the lines exaggerate the corporeal, and develop texture within the space,” as Belton describes his idea. Belton works with multilayered images, with duplications of his figures that emerge out of the black and fade back, seemingly into outer space. Often the duplication —for example of the ballerina and fool couple—is displayed in a smaller size and the motion of the mirrored couple has a slight retardation. Line Dances are strongly cinematic insofar as there is hardly any reference remaining to a stage perception.We seem to look into a nirvana space that has a ground, but no limitations in all directions.The screen is the stage but with no resemblance to a theater stage.A high grade of abstraction is also achieved by a mainly black and white image. Sporadically, the figures change to color, which adds an accent of realism and narrativity to the characters.
In addition to multiplications of figures, Belton also works with size and magnitude, setting them like small toy figures in his creative playing field.Whereas the ballerina symbolizes the dance world, the fool in theater history is the figure that has freedom to query and contest.With these strong character types he also interrogates the conditions of theater and dance.
The third aesthetic level next to the figures and forms is the elementary sound track, piano music, composed and played by Anthony Ritchie. Daniel Belton and his Good Company’s numerous video dances have already been selected for countless festivals and gained scores of awards, it is certain that Line Dances will tour and find its audiences.At the end of January 2011, Portrait of an Acrobat was selected for the oldest Dance on Camera Festival in New York City. Seen in the context of the rise of a new genre, video- dance, which emerged in the 1980s, Line Dances offers an interesting link to art history and a unique film concept.