To The Year of Dance Overview
A Year in Dance (2013-2014), or the data analysis stage of 2012: The Year of Dance, is the overarching name for two distinct works: A book–A Year in Dance: Art Family Bond Making, an experimental website, 40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers, and a multi-channel video installation, Deus Ex Machina. The video below shows an active demonstration of the book and the website.
A Year in Dance: Art Family Bond Making (2013-2016)
The book is a single edition artists’ book that acts as a chronological narrative analysis of the whole Year of Dance. Through the book, I aim to show how affection, respect and shared ideas and ideals can create a community, using transparencies, translucencies, and layering to create a visceral visual narrative that shows how the different parts of the Year of Dance connect. See here for more sample pages from the original book. A Year in Dance is being developed as an e-book, to be released by Segue Books in 2016.
The focus of the website is the nature of the bonds formed while making dances. Because most of the connections I am discussing are intangible, I decided that they would be more faithfully represented through the fluidity of a website rather than the more static nature of a book. I also chose here to concentrate on only the last phase of the research, the piece 40 Dancers do 40 Dances for the Dancers. The bonds formed through activities that are based mainly in physical interaction have a particular strength and quality. This results from a state I call the “being-with,” where intent attention to other people’s physical state leads to a wordless mode of communication. I used web design as a paintbox, and the website as a canvas, working experimentally with the tools at hand to create a unique experience. [The website can be found at https://s3.amazonaws.com/yearofdance2/Connect-homepage-052113-2.html. The site functions best when viewed on Firefox browser, and please allow at least 2 minutes for full loading.]
Deus Ex Machina: Adventures in the Archive (2012)
While looking through the data of The Year of Dance, I created six videos from manipulated rehearsal footage. I treated the documentation as art material rather than a faithful record of the event, and the transformation of the document revealed new information. Isolating and focusing on moments of process can show in high relief the sensuousness or precision of a gesture, the tactility of a physical contact, or a sense of movement in space (among other things…). This reveal was the result of the manipulation process, and the results were always unexpected.
These videos were shown as a multichannel video installation as part of the First Year Show at the Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice MFA program at the City College of New York-CUNY.
Installation Documentation
Clarinda Mac Low 