This blog started on Ada Lovelace Day
Which happens to be going on RIGHT NOW.
Instead of an essay this year, I’m referring one and all to the words of Dr. Helen Caldicott of Australia, the USA, and one of few people on Planet Earth who dares speak truth to power about the folly of nuclear energy.
Here’s a link to my comment/post on Ada Lovelace Day’s BLOG
If You Love This Planet — Listen to Dr. Caldicott’s radio show HERE
Pray The Devil Back To Hell
One Saturday in Salt Lake City, I attended the Gandhi Film Festival, held at the Utah Film Center in the beautiful County Library Building. The movie I saw started with oral descriptions of the unmitigated horror of the Liberian civil war, which was just one front of regional conflict which infected West Africa in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Only a heart of steel could take that hopelessness for long, and I was ready to run out of the theater to save my emotional health.
HOWEVER the movie was about people who actually possessed those metaphorical hearts of steel — women of Liberia, Christian and Muslim, banding together to demand an end to the wasting of their land and families. The movie bore the brave title Pray the Devil Back to Hell, and described how these women organized against bloody violence, hunger, privation, and even social constraints to be the change you wish to see in the world, as Gandhi so famously said. (See the website for this fine film HERE.)
At peace talks in Accra, Ghana, a critical mass of international outrage, and determination by Liberia’s women, gathered in the halls outside the meeting rooms of indifferent combatants, made a breakthrough shown in the film.
Leader Leymah Gbowee was one of those women, and she was awarded a share of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. The next president of Liberia, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, also shares it, but she was only shown as a distant public figure in the film. She IS the first woman to be elected chief of state in an African country though! The third winner, another woman named Tawakkul Karman, is a leader of the Arab Spring in Yemen, and her campaign may yet succeed — congratulations to all three.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell also features activists Etweda “Sugars” Cooper; Vaiba Flomo; Asatu Bah “Stabilizer” Kenneth; Etty Weah; and outspoken media lioness Janet Johnson Bryant. The director is Gini Reticker, the cinematographer is Kirsten Johnson, and we saw producer Abigail E. Disney projected via Skype in the discussion afterward. My readers have a chance to see this moving film on PBS on October 18, 2011 as Episode 2 of the series Women, War & Peace.
Pina Bausch Said: Dance Or All Is Lost!
THIS FESTIVAL was mostly in GOOD FUN, but still interesting, and did its part towards making the world a better place by bringing together practitioners of Dance, Film, and Dance for Film. I’ve written about the coincidences going on around this event, but let’s talk about what actually went on there!
Thursday night featured films from North and South America and Europe by filmmakers designated as “students.” Well, OK — I had nothing to do with that designation. Although I was a pioneer in shooting videos for Dance and Ballet in the old Dance Building at the University of Utah, I hadn’t been to the new Dance Building yet, and got embarrassingly lost on a campus I still visit in my dreams — it was pretty dreamlike too, wandering around in the late twilight dodging skateboarders, but I found the theater halfway into the second film.
There was something to like in everything I saw — Whirligig showed dance and reclaimed architecture to a catchy tune of the same name; Lola was likely the name of its beautiful lady subject, at least that was my guess; Volatile Three was what the title said; Hare and Lights Flicker in the Subterranea were fairly colorful; Cuban films Vivir es Vivir and Dancion (actually from Chile) had things to say about characters and expectations; I enjoyed Carry On Anyways and Wait of Gravity from the US for their directness; Two films from Colorado impressed me very much — the whimsical Stranger Dances, and heavier Blood In The Northwest: The Burden Of Skin; I’m giving an honorable mention to the very painterly Parallax Error by Anne C. Moore, although it wasn’t about Dance so much as it was about Color, and hangups about the Human Body. My second-favorite film had the poignant edge of loss — Shadowed by Hamish Anderson, also filmed with architecture in mind, although Anderson’s building was rather forlorn and decayed.
My favorite film on Thursday, by far, was Lost Horizon — Ronald Coleman finds a distant land called Shangri La and … wait a minute … that’s a whole other movie!
Tanja London’s Lost Horizon really achieved a synthesis of Dance and Film because the movements of her dancers made real magic through the restricted lens of the camera, although everything was beautiful, surprising, and accomplished. One major factor was our old friend Architecture — London’s film was shot in a stairwell. The painted box-metal railings, close rectangular walls, and tiny concrete floors were supporting actors, and I can’t say enough about how these elements came together to show me something I’d never seen before — If any of my readers get a chance to see Lost Horizon by Tanja London WATCH IT!
Even though nobody’s asked my opinion about Katrina McPherson’s films, I’m telling it anyway — everything I saw by her at the 8th International Festival of Dance for the Camera was EXCELLENT!
Friday night was devoted to her short pieces — There Is A Place, a solo by a Tibetian dancer named Sang Jijia, exquisitely edited by Katrina and her husband Simon Fildes; A jewel among dance films called Moment; The challenging tribute to Steve Paxton’s legacy, Sense – 8, shot in Australia under the guidance of disciple Katy Dymoke; and the documentary Adugna, about street kids turning their lives around in Ethiopia by the discipline and rigor of dancing for the professional company Adugna. They still exist, and have had many successes, but they face struggles in continuing their work, especially in a land where it is challenging to even produce enough firewood for people’s needs.
On Saturday night, Force of Nature featured my new friend Kirstie Simson, who shared the screen with Katie Duck’s associates Kenzo Kasuda and Michael Schumacher (along with a young Chinese man, whose name is evading me in the search engines). Force of Nature was unlike McPherson’s other, already-varied works — it was bracketed by sequences of dancing that were just plain masterful in execution and recording, especially the first 20 minutes. Mr. Paxton’s Contact Movement literally came into play again, but Kirstie Simson lived up to her forceful billing, and I took her beaming smile along with me in my memory as I left the old Post Theater at Fort Douglas.
Odds and Ends
Treat your ears to Shaunna Hall’s Elecrofunkadelica — just let it roll!
Johnny Melville and Jango Edwards continue to fool around the cinema.
Check out Parade of Fools for the latest on their movie!
Read my very personal review of 004’s CD State of Affairs: HERE
— Then buy one from SLOWTRAIN!
Check Out the Dance Histories Section !
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