Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures
Title | Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures PDF eBook |
Author | Kristin Juarez |
Publisher | |
Pages | 256 |
Release | 2021-11-15 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9781737838807 |
Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures is the first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name co-organized by the Getty Research Institute and Art + Practice, on view at Art + Practice in Los Angeles from September 18, 2021 through February 19, 2022.A foundational figure in dance, Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup (1981), Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography; the dance was designated an American Masterpiece by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Samada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.
Meaning in Motion
Title | Meaning in Motion PDF eBook |
Author | Jane Desmond |
Publisher | Duke University Press |
Pages | 412 |
Release | 1997 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 9780822319429 |
On dance and culture
The Thriving Artist
Title | The Thriving Artist PDF eBook |
Author | David Maurice Sharp |
Publisher | CRC Press |
Pages | 204 |
Release | 2015-02-11 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1317611411 |
The old cliché about the "starving" artist may have a basis in reality, but it isn’t set in stone! The Thriving Artist provides valuable advice for the performing artist, whether you’re an actor, dancer, lighting guru, costumer, or stagehand, on investing, saving, and building a diversified and stable financial portfolio. Written specifically for artists who have fluctuating, uncertain, and sometimes limited streams of income, this book promotes an understanding of finances and the investment world for the artist by offering clear, basic explanations of how finances work and instruction on how to participate in them as an investor. It also provides unique strategies for integrating financial awareness and planning into your life as an artist, and how that can help to provide a better sense of financial security. With The Thriving Artist, author David Maurice Sharp guides you with unflappable good humor through the tricky financial waters that come with following your passion.
High Winds
Title | High Winds PDF eBook |
Author | Sylvan Oswald |
Publisher | |
Pages | 254 |
Release | 2017-06-10 |
Genre | Hallucinations and illusions |
ISBN | 9780998861609 |
How does sleep--or its absence--change us? At the end of another wakeful night, High Winds tears off on a hallucinatory road trip in search of his estranged half brother, led by cryptic signs and coincidences. Part modern-day pillow book, part picture book for adults, and told in an associative, elliptical style, the narrative takes readers deep into a dreamlike Western landscape. Jessica Fleischmann's atmospheric imagery amplifies the words on every page, referencing 1980s graphics, net art, and something yet unseen; Sylvan Oswald's text inhabits and draws meaning from this visual environment. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, medication, spatial structures, and bodily functions--inspired by the author's experience of gender transition, insomnia, and moving to Los Angeles. Poetic and funny, surreal and beautiful--High Winds makes a delightful companion, before or instead of a good night's sleep.
The Artists' Prison
Title | The Artists' Prison PDF eBook |
Author | Alexandra Grant |
Publisher | |
Pages | 157 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | Artists' books |
ISBN | 9780998861616 |
The Artists' Prison looks askance at the workings of personality and privilege, sexuality, authority, and artifice in the art world. Imagined through the heavily redacted testimony of the prison's warden, written by Alexandra Grant, and powerfully allusive images by Eve Wood, the prison is a brutal, Kafkaesque landscape where creativity can be a criminal offence and sentences range from the allegorical to the downright absurd. In The Artists' Prison, the act of creating becomes a strangely erotic condemnation, as well as a means of punishment and transformation. It is in these very transformations--sometimes dubious, sometimes oddly sentimental--that the book's critical edge is sharpest. In structural terms, The Artists' Prison represents a unique visual and literary intersection, in which Wood's drawings open spaces of potential meaning in Grant's text, and the text, in turn, acts as a framework in which the images can resonate and intensify in significance.
Exhausting Dance
Title | Exhausting Dance PDF eBook |
Author | Andre Lepecki |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 286 |
Release | 2006-07-13 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 1134230893 |
The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US. Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies. In this far-ranging and exceptional study, Andre Lepecki brilliantly analyzes the work of the choreographers: * Jerome Bel (France) * Juan Dominguez (Spain) * Trisha Brown (US) * La Ribot (Spain) * Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany) * Vera Mantero (Portugal) and visual and performance artists: * Bruce Nauman (US) * William Pope.L (US). This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.
Marking the Occasion
Title | Marking the Occasion PDF eBook |
Author | Tara Aisha Willis |
Publisher | Wendy's Subway |
Pages | 184 |
Release | 2020-12 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9781732708693 |
Literary Nonfiction. Art. Performance Studies. Dance. MARKING THE OCCASION represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, "Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work?" In this case, the rough draft took place at Mount Tremper Arts during a 2019 Watershed Residency. Taking the practices of choreography and co-writing as methods of investigation, curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis introduce new trajectories for live work and text by bringing together dance and performance artists from across the US who occupy multiple roles within art economies and in whose work language and writing are prevalent. Exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event, MARKING THE OCCASION gathers together archival materials from the residency alongside new contributions from participants David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi. The publication also marks the events of 2020, and traces their reverberations through each artist's practice as time, movement, action, and collaboration take on new meanings.