Mind the Gap

I’ve managed to miss all the installments in the Step Up movie franchise (aside from the over the top trailers showcasing the struggles of dancers working out rich/poor, uptown/downtown, ballerina vs the street cliches), and the latest “now-in-3D!” chapter doesn’t quite sound like the place to wade in:

Preposterous plot devices, leaden acting, and clunktastic dialogue are acceptable in a dance movie, but bad choreography is not, and it’s during the dance scenes that Step Up 3D fails. (from the Slate review)

Even though I like dance, I’m not quite sure that the best things happen while you’re dancing when you’re simultaneously trying to advance a plot. (SYTYCD and Dancing With The Stars made me think that adding a panel of judges to the mix was also a bad idea, but clearly I’m in the minority on that one.) All of that is an overly long way of explaining why I, an avid Hulu user, had also been avoiding the internet channel’s special made-for-Internet production THE LXD. I may love new media experiments, but the name alone–The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (!)–was much too much more than my jaded mind could take.

Still, battling a bout of insomnia the other night, I noticed that the episodes didn’t require much of a time investment and I caved to taking a sample. And then I proceeded to watch them all. It was a fun ride! I started to wonder about all those conversations we have in the wider performing arts field about the work we love and the public we know we need to find new ways to reach. Will THE LXD and slickly packaged productions like it do anything to help advance that audience-building cause? Here’s a sample to help you decide:

When I saw this tonight, I thought it was a commercial advocating in favor of net neutrality, which is, um, kinda weird, considering.

From The Independent:

German, Austrian and Finnish musicians have created an audio/visual symphony played literally from the heartbeats of 12 musicians in São Paulo, Brazil using ECG sensors.

And…cue song.

But seriously:

The FILE site explains that the “software analyses the data and generates via different algorithms the real-time musical score for the musicians, the electronic sounds and the computer graphic visualization.”

[via John C and Kelley G]

In this weekend’s news feed: The New York Times follows a BMI licensing executive around the American Southwest on bar, club, and coffee house calls. Anecdotes involving strippers and guns ensue, but the deeper issues resonate beyond the clichés. The law vs. common perceptions vs. recession budgeting vs. kill-them-with-patience strategies: Getting paid–it’s…complicated.

It struck me as kind of odd that ASCAP got little more than an “oh, yeah, and them too” reference, since I think it might have been interesting to hear more on how their philosophies and enforcement styles differ in the current era. Still, even though the article provided a pretty elementary outline of PRO activities, for those not already deeply in the know I’m sure it’s bound to generate some discussion–if for no other line than this one, re: new technologies that improve tracking music usage, whether for commercial gain or not. The author notes that:

Friends I talked to had a similar reaction. To a one, they said: “Jesus. Sounds like Big Brother.” When I mentioned this to [BMI’s former Vice President of Business Development David] DeBusk, he smiled ominously. “Yes. Well. We’re here to help.”

In the end (of this article, at least) the barkeep with the heart of gold signs on the dotted line.

Through writer angst and ice cream truck melodies, I have adored One Ring Zero’s output. Now, just on the heels of Dr. Dre’s revelation that he’s been looking to the heavens for musical inspiration, ORZ drops their own set of odes to the solar system. You can listen in and sample here.

From Vibe:

ON A COMING INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM:

You mentioned a hip-hop album without rapping. Will we ever hear a Dr. Dre instrumental album?

Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.

My favorite comment on this so far is someone hazily and/or sarcastically pointing out that it “seems like this has been done before“, here and there, one or twice. Perhaps a Dr. Dre/Kyle Gann collaboration would be appropriate here?

At a colleague’s suggestion, yesterday I signed up for Thomas Cott‘s daily email digest of news you can use. It was waiting in my inbox this morning right on schedule, and the very top item blew my mind:

Blogging about the process of choreography – ugh!
Posted by editor-in-chief Wendy Perron on Dance Magazine’s blog, July 26, 2010
There’s an annoying new trend of blogging about the process of making a dance. I am talking about young choreographers, anxious to be in the public eye, who think that writing about what happened that day in the studio will somehow 1) bring them a wider audience and/or 2) make them a better choreographer. I realize a blog is a good way to keep your website alive and to involve your potential audience. But explaining how you make a dance, the problems you encounter and how you solve them, is not going to help either you as the choreographer or your potential audience.

This struck me a really odd position to take in our Facebookified Twitterverse, so I was super curious to find out how the dance community responded to this post. Alas it does not appear that Dance Magazine allows comments, though a few readers have published blog posts re: on separate sites. Perron’s original post is worth reading in full, as in it she gets deeper into specifics on exactly why she worries about this reliance on words when it comes to creating fresh art. Her thoughts were really interesting to me, particularly because she’s cautioning young artists to pull in the reigns and that’s not a message I come across very often. Usually it’s about how to be more, do more, and say more, all in the hope of reaching more, teaching more, and selling more.

So, to blog or not to blog about process, that is an interesting question in the messy rule-breaking world of creative expression. Did Perron intend this as dance-specific advice, particularly needed due to its physical nature? How important is the “pre-verbal place” in other types of creative work? I personally thought Perron’s admonishment to knock the blogging off was a little harsh, but the seemingly always-distracted-by-blinking-technology side of me understands that she has a point. It was a point that was only amplified later in the day by Paul Graham’s piece on cigarettes, heroin, crack, and Facebook.

I can’t help myself: I keep imagining how this would have rocked the classical music world if some nice lady string quartet had made it…

Sxip may live in New York City…

and if you do too, you’ll have the chance to check out his new record at the City Winery release party tomorrow night.

I, however, live in Baltimore, so I will be taking myself on a tour of sonic adventure ’round these parts this evening. With Whartscape in full swing, you’d think there was hardly room for any more music in this zip code, but indeed we’ll be getting Zappa, Glass, and a guest beat courtesy Shodekeh at the BSO’s early show, and then we’ll all follow Sho’ over to the Windup Space to catch a tour stop featuring Londoners Gabriel Prokofiev, GeNIA, and Powerplant.

• To showcase nation’s arts, first lady isn’t afraid to spotlight the unexpected

Besides the warm and fuzzy feeling it might give us (hey, who doesn’t like to read that famous people agree with them?), what kind of public relations and/or political influence does this kind of activity and attendant media coverage accomplish for the cause of the performing arts in America? Several of the folks chatting over on this week’s special AJ Creative Rights and Artists blog have mentioned that we may not be the best people to work on public policy/legislative changes and perhaps our quite limited resources would be better placed elsewhere. But it makes me wonder: Do Michele Obama’s actions carry any real impact, or are they just a nice story for the Arts & Living section?