Vitro Nasu

Birthday of Igor Google Igor
Igor by Pablo Picasso (via)
See previous post.

R.I.P Maria Tallchief (Chicago Tribune) she was 88.

Maria with Mr. B.

On Balanchine.

Passion and romance didn’t play a big role…. We saved our emotion for the classroom. And despite his reputation as a much married man obsessed with ballerinas, George was no Don Juan.”

Under Balanchine, Tallchief changed physically. Her neck grew longer. She dropped 10 pounds. She took on the deportment of the Russian stylist. Her chest was high, her back straight, her instep arched. “What did I learn? I learned to turn out. How to point my toes properly. Where I belonged. Where to place my body. What muscles had to be developed — every one. Otherwise there was no way I was going to dance his ballets.”

Nureyve chose Maria to dance with him for his debut in America..
Nureyev had affairs with the ballerina Maria Tallchief and with Erik Bruhn, long his idol as a dancer and the complicated, often unhappy, love of his life.

Parade wiki

In 1917 Guillaume Apollinare first coined the word Surrealism in the program notes for the ballet Parade; partly reproduced here.
It was an extraordinary gathering of enormous talents with the set, curtain and costumes by Pablo Picasso (these pictures seldom seen and never published)

The scenario was by Jean Cocteau; and the score by Erik Satie.

picture via

Collaboration with Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau (youtube)

More image from Flickr

Click to see large
Click to see large

Paperware. (4 images here) by JTWine full body armor
selected images from the paper wear clothes line: shopping bags, color sheets & safety pins; posing in hat-masks, bibs, loin cloth, skirts and ties, 2003-2005, with Silvia Nonenmacher

Jurgen Trautwein NOW - (Jtwine blog)

Mike Kelley (many fabulous images from Contemporary Art Daily)

Dance from Tearoom

Paper man (Oscar award winning animated short)

Dome

Noguchi Garden
in Jerusalem <>

( Photos by Fung-Lin Hall taken from the Billy Rose Garden in Jerusalem)

Isamu Noguchi – Nov 17, 1904

(image via)

This set by acclaimed designer Isamu Noguchi, used in Martha Graham’s ‘Embattled Garden,’ was damaged when basement storage of the Martha Graham Dance Company, located in the West Village, flooded in late October 2012. The company said it is still assessing the extent of the damage.

See Isamu Noguchi design from The Appalachian Spring..

Noguchi Museum NY..(youtube)

Yoshiko and Isamu Noguchi
Yoshiko Yamaguchi - Isamu Noguchi’s ex-wife .. an international diva who became a politican and has become a passionate advocate for Palestinian causes.

Edward Said on Israel occupation (youtube)

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(Thanks to Mirjam Wildner)

After being invited by Benjamin Millepied to a rehearsal for the L.A Dance Project’s premiere performance, Oscar-nominated director Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Biutiful (2010), Babel (2006)) was inspired to make a video-exercise that documents movement and dance in an experimental way, with a stream of consciousness narrative. The result is NARAN JA (One Act Orange Dance).(The Creators’ Project)

Benjamin Millepied is married to Natalie Portman.

Image via

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Paddy Considine On Asperger’s Syndrome, BBC Radio Dec 2011

Happy birthday Peter Mullan

Peter Mullan directed Magdalene Sisters (Joni Mitchell dedicated the song – previous post).

Peter Mullan was in Young Adam

Pina Bausch was born on 27 July 1940.

See more from Pina Bausch Archive.

TELL THEM ANYTHING YOU WANT: A PORTRAIT OF MAURICE SENDAK 2009 directed by Lance Bangs, Spike Jonze.

Maurice Sendak’s Opera inspired drawings here.

Dance, Dance Otherwise We’re Lost

Wim and Pina

Happy birthday Wim Wenders!

What I saw there, moved me deeply.
I troubled me, amazed me, but most of all: it concerned me.
What I had thought impossible – in the context of dance -
had happened!
This spoke to me in a very powerful way.

When the piece was over,
- it only lasted 40 minutes,
but it felt like I had visited a whole universe -
I realized that this (unknown) woman Pina Bausch
had shown me more about men and women
then the entire history of cinema had.
And all that without a word,
with nothing but movement, body language and dancing.
I might be exaggerating a bit,
and the history of cinema has a lot to offer
about the relations between men and women,
but that’s how it felt: mind-blowing.

Wim Wenders speaks about her death (Youtube)

Wani Ballet (Crocodille Ballet)

See Theco (youtube dance clip by Tsuyoshi Shirai)

The Dancer (via Shift)

Interview with Tsuyoshi Shirai

TSUYOSHI SHIRAI is a dancer, choreographer and founder of the Contemporary Dance Group daneto, which performs dance, music and video works. The groups performances, which feature collaboration with contemporary music and a wide range of artists, have been well received both at home and abroad.
In 2004, Shirai performed the solo work “mass, slide, &.” In 2011, he created and presented a new visual work based on “mass, slide, &.” called “mass, slide, &. in frames” at YCAM. He has been trying many new things not only showing his visual works on the web but also make all materials downloadable. He describes this new creation as “dance as a visual work.” We asked Shirai to explain his views on the difference between theatrical and video works.

Jill Johnston May 17, 1929 – September 18, 2010
(author and critic)
NYtimes obit

Ms. Johnston started out as a dance critic, but in the pages of The Voice, which hired her in 1959, she embraced the avant-garde as a whole, including happenings and multimedia events.

Ms. Johnston continued to write on the arts but took a strong political line with a marked psychoanalytic slant evident in “Jasper Johns: Privileged Information” (1996), which explored the artist’s works as a series of evasions and subterfuges rooted in conflict about his homosexuality, and in the two volumes of her memoirs: “Mother Bound” (1983) and “Paper Daughter” (1985), both of them subtitled “Autobiography in Search of a Father.” (NYtimes obit)

[Paper Daughter] is a joy To be sane about insanity is the neatest trick in anybody’s book, and Jill Johnston’s has it.
Peter Schjeldahl

Thespian lemonist, dance cricket, and irrepressible funster…(Vancouver Observer Obit)

Feisty, irreverent, difficult, incomprehensible, surreal, as one critic put it, she was “part Gertrude Stein, part E. E. Cummings, with a dash of Jack Kerouac thrown for good measure.”

Book on Jasper Johns.

Magill Book Reviews for EBSCO Publishing
In her book on Jasper Johns, Jill Johnston combines a superb background in art history with a penetrating understanding of the artists psychology. As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, the biographers first obligation is to the truth. Of course, the biographer must be tactful and subtle qualities that Johnston exhibits on every page of her fine book.
Carl Rollyson

Jill and Dick Cavett

Throughout her childhood she believed that her parents had divorced, but in 1950, when The New York Times ran a short obituary about her father, an English bell maker named Cyril F. Johnston, she learned the truth.

Her mother informed her that she and Johnston had never married. A lifelong fascination with this absent figure, whose company, Gillett & Johnston, supplied bells and carillons to churches and cathedrals all over the world, motivated her to write “England’s Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells” (2008), a biography of her father and a history of bell making.

Jill Johnston (wiki)

Johnston’s most recent writing March 2010

Jill Johnston (Huffpost)

Jill Johnston On Palin: Little More Than A Smokescreen

Jill Johnston on “Life” Jan 1, 1971

Columnist Jill Johnston who recently announced her lesbianism in dance column of THE VILLAGE VOICE.

(photograph by Eiko Hosoe)

A tribute to Ohno

Ohno at 95 years (Adagio Samuel Barber)
Ohno October 27, 1906 – June 1, 2010

Kazuo Ohno

NYtimes Obit Kazuo Ohno a Founder of Japanese Butoh, Dies at 103

Kazuo Ohno, a founder of Butoh, the influential Japanese dance-theater form whose traditional look of darkness and decay evoked for many the horrors of the wartime bombings of Japan, died on Tuesday in Yokohama, Japan. He was 103 and had continued to perform beyond his 100th year.

Obit from Times online (Ohno’s first performance was at an advanced age of 47 years)

A short clip of Ohno dancing while sitting on his chair

Kazuo Ohno Studio

On the verge of death one revisits the joyful moments of a lifetime. One’s eyes are opened wide-gazing into the palm, seeing death, life, joy and sorrow with a sense of tranquillity.”