Month: August 2013

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indelible

In 2005 I finished a practice-as-research PhD called Indelible. It’s about improvisation, archives, memory and liveness in dance and performance and although it’s already a bit dated I thought it still might be of interest to people involved in performance and dance research, or who are doing practice-as-research projects.

Indelible was originally presented on a DVD-ROM (those were the days) and every now and again I get people asking for copies. I’ve decided to make both the Windows and Mac versions available as free downloads. Some further details about the project are available at http://skellis.net/hypermedia.

Please note two things:

  • the downloads are large (approximately 2GB)
  • the Interactive component of the Mac OS X version will not work on recent (post July 2011) Intel-based Macs running Lion or Mountain Lion. I’m working on a fix.
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cheap joke

Last month I went and saw/listened to Nils Frahm at St John’s at Hackney Church in London. I like his music a lot – particularly the album Felt – and there was something quite memorable about the intensity of his performance that contrasted with his easy-going manner of engaging with the audience.

At one point in the gig Nils thanked us for staying so quiet (some of his material is pretty subtle), but he encouraged us to not to feel inhibited by the intimacy of the sound: ‘Do whatever you feel like, even come up here and do some expressive dance’ [1].

The audience, predictably, laughed.

How is that doing expressive dance (perhaps only one slightly better than interpretive dance) is a cheap gag, the line that is assured of getting a laugh?

I’m pretty tired of the apologies that surround the discipline that moves me, that challenges me, that I pursue with all my heart, and that I make a living from. And so, I’d like to be clear (in bold):

I am an interpretive dancer.

Fuck yeah.

  1. I was tempted, and if I had that time again …  ↩