B For Barcelona

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This large letter B is on a rooftop in the Born district of Barcelona. Is it B for Barcelona or is it perhaps B for Born in Barcelona (that old Springsteen classic)? Or maybe it doesn’t stand for either, especially since it’s lying on its back. Maybe it’s B for Brossa, the Catalan poet, playwright and artist Joan Brossa. He liked to play around with letters and it seems to be on the roof of his theatre. We found it when we came looking for Lottie who lives nearby. We met her under the B for Beer. Continue reading “B For Barcelona”

Frames of reference

Sardana

Flamenco dancing was charged with sexual passion and melancholy, with the ‘duende’ of the south – “Nothing could be more antithetical to the Catalan character, or be more damaging to the severity and restraint of our race” (Josep Torras i Bages). Catalans should stick to their traditional ‘sardana’, a dance that expressed the social cooperation of the group, the village – Robert Hughes.

Frames of reference

Polka

Choreographer: Mark Morris.
Composer: Lou Harrison.
Musicians: Mitchell Drury (violin), Adrienne Varner (piano).
Dancers: Megan Bosaw, Ellen Cooper, Julia Cross, Erin Johnson, Deepa Liegel, Jessie Mays,
Rachel Pattens, Elysia Roscoe, Emma Sanford, Caitlin Schafte, Charlotte Smith, Morgan Spencer,
Elise Walker, Alex Wheelwright.

Frames of reference

Cat’s Cradle (6)

Grupo BanRara perform a traditional ribbon maypole dance from Guantanamo, Cuba.
The tradition of maypole dancing in Guantanamo came from Haiti via France where maypole dancing was in style in the 18th century as an art dance. The origins of maypole dancing may have began in ancient Babylon during sex worship and fertility rites.

The men dance around one maypole and the women dance around another until a cat’s cradle is intricately woven between them and the dance becomes more frenzied and the two become one.

Frames of reference

Cat’s Cradle (2)

At the beginning of Stan Brakhage’s filmmaking career, he read all the writings of Sergei Eisenstein he could locate, and this dense montage film is one result. A record of an encounter between Brakhage, Jane, and their friends James Tenney and Carolee Schneemann, it intercuts fragments of each with a cat, floral wallpaper, an embroidered fabric. The figures, the cat, and inanimate objects are made to collide with each other, but they also seem to mysteriously commingle, almost as if alchemically transforming themselves into each other, people becoming objects and animals, and inanimate things seemingly becoming human.

Frames of reference