DRAWING LIFE by fred hatt

2009/11/23

To Dance a Landscape

Filed under: Video: Dance and Performance,Video: Natural Phenomena — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 08:33

November from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

November is a film I made in collaboration with dancer Jung Woong Kim of U-Turn Dance Company.  This is about as spontaneous as filmmaking can get.  Jung Woong and I just met one day at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, walked around looking for suitable settings, and then filmed Jung Woong’s improvisations in the moment.

Most dance video makers nowadays seem to rely heavily on editing, choreographing by assembling moments of movement.  Our approach, by contrast, was to find settings that would provide a frame or field of play, keeping the camera fixed and allowing mostly uninterrupted movement to sketch the spatial potential of the topology.

There is no music, but the crunching and swishing of dry autumn leaves becomes a complex rhythmic composition.  The urban aspect of the setting is expressed through the auditory environment, which includes aircraft, traffic, and distant voices.

Before the advent of high definition video, this kind of mise en scène approach required 35mm film.  This video was made with a humble Canon HV20 (with wide angle adapter and external microphone), but the detail is sufficient to show texture and atmospheric depth in a long shot, which conveys a great deal about a dancer’s exploration of the possibilities of a natural space.

If your computer can handle high definition video, check out the HD version on Vimeo.

Here are three still frames from the video:

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

Still from "November", 2009, a video by Jung Woong Kim & Fred Hatt

2009/11/04

Subway Sax

Filed under: Video: Music — Tags: , , , , — fred @ 23:30

Subway Sax from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.

In honor of my brother, Frank, and in celebration of his moving back to the Northeast after a sojourn in Oklahoma, I’m posting a video we made eighteen years ago. This is Frank improvising on his alto saxophone in the West 4th Street Subway Station in Manhattan on a late evening in 1991, filmed with the new technology of the day, an 8mm video camcorder. I observed Frank as I would observe an unknown Subway musician, sometimes watching him, sometimes watching other things going on in the station as a dance to the saxophone’s wail.

This became a piece about the rhythms of crowds and loneliness, trains and people coming in and going out like waves on the shore, an urban surf that goes on ceaselessly through all the stations of the Subway.

I made new titles for it and changed it to monochrome as the original color wasn’t very pretty.  Otherwise this is the same as the original edit I made in 1991, edited on U-matic at Film/Video Arts, where I worked at that time.

2009/10/14

Shows!

Filed under: My Events: Performances — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 23:58
Still from Fred Hatt's video for "Ka=Fire Mi=Water"

Still from Fred Hatt's video for "Ka=Fire Mi=Water"

This week in New York there are two performances I’m associated with and recommend.

On Sunday, October 18, at 8:30 pm, Monkey Town, Brooklyn’s immersive video cube bar/restaurant presents a program of Music and Butoh (Japanese avant-garde dance).  My elemental video imagery is part of the performance Ka = Fire  Mi = Water, by dancer Mariko Endo with live music by Gregory Reynolds.  “Kami” is a Japanese word for God.  Its syllables are the words for fire and water.  It suggests a conception of spirit as a circulation of rising and falling energies, and that’s about as good a description of what this piece is about that I can offer.

Also running from tonight through the 18th, Seeing Place Theater‘s production of Keith Bunin’s play The Credeaux Canvas is presented at the Bridge Theater at Shetler Studios.  This is an intense little story with complex, nuanced characters, and its depiction of young New York bohemians is rich and real.  The lead actress is Anna Marie Sell, whose portrait by me graced the cover of American Artist Drawing Magazine last Spring.   Anna Marie models for an artist in the play.  The director of this production is the multitalented Lillian Wright, also an actress and a great model I’ve worked with many times.  Lillian was the model for my light painting photograph below, which was used for the postcard and program for this show:

Lightpainting for "The Credeaux Canvas", 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

Lightpainting for "The Credeaux Canvas", 2008, photo by Fred Hatt

To keep up with my performances, exhibits and events, check the “Calendar” page on this blog.

2009/05/01

Blind Sight

Filed under: Dance,My Events: Performances — Tags: , , , , , , — fred @ 01:27
Journey, 2009, still from video by Mana Hashimoto

Journey, 2009, still from video by Mana Hashimoto

I’ve collaborated with many dancers and performers over the past fifteen years or so, creating projected imagery and other visual elements to integrate with live performances.  Among all of them, my collaboration with dancer Mana Hashimoto has been unique.

Mana, who trained as a musician at the famous Berklee College of Music in Boston, lost her sight completely as a young adult.  Since that time she has pursued an international career as a solo dance artist, while raising a daughter as a single mother.  Despite all her challenges, Mana has a beatific smile and a funny laugh.  Her performances are personal journeys, often involving interactions with hard and awkward objects.  She also leads workshops on “Dance without Sight”, guiding her students to explore their own environment and to observe the movement of others through touch and the other non-visual senses.

I’ve collaborated with Mana on several performances.  Mana has a strong visual imagination and always has visual ideas for her pieces.  With other collaborators, I show them things and see what they think, working towards realizing their ideas.  With Mana I have to describe everything to her, trying to convey to her the total visual effect of the images I am providing in combination with her movement and presence on stage.

Mana’s newest piece, called Journey, is being presented at CRS in Manhattan tonight through Sunday (May 1-3).  It incorporates video that Mana shot during her travels last winter in Finland and Poland on a performance tour.  I edited the video and worked on integrating it with the performance.  (Marijke Eliasberg is presenting a separate piece in this program, a complex choreography that rearranges thirteen dancers into ever-changing combinations.)

Journey, 2009, still from video by Mana Hashimoto

Journey, 2009, still from video by Mana Hashimoto

Of course, Mana could not see what she was filming.  She had to show the video to others and have them describe the content.  But the images she provided are lovely, and it was amazing how easily they fell into place in the performance, and how well they go with the music and the movement.  A sighted person tends to frame the video around focal points of attention, but Mana’s video becomes an environment and lets her performance be the focal point.

I am, even more than usual, a visually oriented person, and my consciousness tends to rest right behind the eyes.  But there is much to be learned from closing the eyes.  Working with an artist who cannot see makes me see, and feel, in new ways.

2009/03/26

Emergence

Filed under: Video: Dance and Performance — Tags: , , , , , — fred @ 22:37


Emergence from Fred Hatt on Vimeo.  2003, duration 13:45

Butoh dancers use breath and visualizations projected within and around the body to embody elemental forces and to explore pre-verbal sensations and experiences.  It’s a form of dance that arose in Japan in the ferment of experimental art and postwar radicalism starting in the late 1950’s.  You may find that this video tries your patience, but if you surrender to it, this kind of performance can alter your perception of time.

Emergence is an improvised performance by butoh dancers Corinna Brown and Craig Colorusso.  Corinna is a long time friend with whom I have collaborated many times, and you’re sure to see more of her here.  I videotaped this performance on May 31, 2003, at a performance at a Brooklyn loft party/art exhibit that was a fundraiser for oceanic ecology.  The recorded music is by Diving Bell, a duo consisting of Craig Colorusso, also seen dancing here, and Joel Westerdale.

There was supposed to be a special spot light for this performance.  I was to videotape, using Corinna’s old Sony Hi8 format camcorder.  But as the performance began, the spot light failed to work.  The space was almost completely dark.  I wasn’t getting anything on tape.  Thinking quickly, I switched the camera over to the NightShot mode, which records in monochrome in dark conditions, and pulled the Mini MagLite out of my back pocket.  This is one of the tiny AAA battery ones, not very bright, but bright enough for NightShot and bright enough to let the audience see the performance in the dark loft.  Holding the camera with the right hand and the light with the left, I used thumb and forefinger to change the focus of the light, causing a ring of brightness to expand and contract around the performers.

The look of this video is all thanks to an accident and a seat-of-the-pants solution.  The eerie greenish whiteness, the looming shadows and pulsing aura, would not have been part of this video had the intended lighting not malfunctioned.  And yet it’s perfect.  Not only does it stylistically fit the performance in the video, I think the dim and eerie hand-held light also enhanced the live performance.  The stage light would have separated the performers from the crowd and made people stand back, but the darkness drew people into it and made it more intimate.

Chaos is an artist.  When she emerges to collaborate with you, do not refuse her, but welcome her and answer her openly and freely, and she will impart something better than you could have conceived.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress

Theme Tweaker by Unreal