Archive for Ashley Byler
May 22, 2008 at 5:38 pm · Filed under dance, TONY, Ashley Byler, ASHLEY, dtw, peformance
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Tonight I am going to see Ashley Byler’s Champions of Dance: Make Millions! at Dance Theater Workshop. Since last fall Ashley has been in creative residency at DTW as part of their STUDIO SERIES. The residency consists of a 100 studio hours culminating in a final showing.
Tickets for tonight and tomorrow are sold out though I have one extra ticket if someone would like to accompany me this evening. dance_plan at yahoo dot com. The showing starts at DTW’s rehearsal studio at 7:30. Act now, this dance is a hot commodity.
I have had the ongoing pleasure of visiting rehearsals during the process of making this dance. I have learned much from these visits about directing dancers and the elusive art of how one actually makes a dance. This is something that confuses me to no end and to which the Bylerian science provides many answers.
The Science
- Start with dancers. Caitlin Koch, Jeremy Pheifer, Sarah A. O. Rosner, Elizabeth Schafer, Lynne Schlesinger-Rudeman and Enrico Wey. These are your subjects. Love them and rule them.
- Understand that a dance consists of real human beings. Step back motion capture, we cannot extract the dance from the dancer. This is a social science. Cultivate interactions between subjects.
- Communicate by any means necessary. Use sound. Stron Softi. Use video. Give descriptions or rules for improvisatory trials. As in cybernetics, communication is control so be expressive to your subjects.
- Curate, harvest and distill movements and qualities. Take what you like and burn the rest. Be the master of your dance. You are caesar so fill out every cranny in your aesthetic universe.
- Make their organs move. This means being funny and sexy. Dont be afraid to show a little skin or body hair (respectively).
I cant wait for tonight when everybody turns up and the dancers turn on. I have lots of favorite parts in this dance and I don’t care if thats oxymoronic. Caity’s solo, Lynne’s monologue and when Sarah goons on Jeremy are tops. Other jewels are when Enrico gets kicked in the stomach and when Elizabeth lifts her leg.
You too may be a champion of dance if you act now for the only ticket left on the entire planet.
dance_plan at yahoo dot com
Recent Posts by tony schultz
April 10, 2007 at 7:11 pm · Filed under dance event, TONY, Ashley Byler, sarah lawrence college
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| Posted by Tony Schultz
This week, at Sarah Lawrence College, our friend Ashley Byler presents her MFA thesis project.
I will go on Friday the 13th. Scary!
Recent Posts by tony schultz
December 8, 2006 at 5:51 pm · Filed under TONY, Ashley Byler, Erin Reck, Sarah Richison
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
This weekend Sarah Lawrence College presents student choreography in the Bessie Schonberg Theatre. Three of my wonderful graduate students, Sarah Richison, Erin Reck and Ashley Byler will be showing their work. I am so excited to see what they have invented. Come up to SLC to see the comotion and challenge your ontology of dance.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
November 8, 2006 at 8:27 pm · Filed under TONY, sarah lawrence, dance technology, Ashley Byler, computer graphics, opengl, stage, video cube, ASHLEY
| | Posted by Tony Schultz
This is the latest experiment in my Dance and Technology class at Sarah Lawrence College. We networked 4 computers to record synchronously and set them along the cardinal points of my favorite studio, the “Small Studio”. Each student recorded a solo. Next we reconstructed the 4 views using OpenGL video planes and effectively rebuilt the structure of the studio with the dancer’s image projected on the walls. Students are now writing scores to choreograph cinematic movement around their virtual architecture.
In class discussion, this project has raised so many questions about dancing, viewing and the staging of the two. I think back to Kate’s post on seeing Merce Cunningham’s ‘Ocean’ at the Roundhouse in Camden.
She wrote, “Ocean was performed on a round stage. Arriving at the Roundhouse felt like going to the circus. The audience sat all the way around the stage, and the 150-piece conductorless orchestra sat behind the audience all around the amphitheatre. It was very odd.”
The physical structure of a stage changes the the way the dancing is seen and performed by the way it shapes the surface between spaces of performer and viewer. In the same way, cameras and the reconstruction of their images mediate the relationship between performer and viewer. Visible Cities demonstrated that mediating the interaction between dancer and viewer through architecture involves the assembly of both real and virtual structures.
I hope to develop this technology and line of thinking more in the future. Let me know what you think.
Recent Posts by tony schultz
