Rowley Gallery Blog
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.
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.
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.
Video by Simona Ciocoiu with music by Penguin Café Orchestra.
あやとりで、ハンモックを作りました。飼い猫そら君も、しっぽだけ参加しています。
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.
In a series of painstakingly constructed works using found materials Chris Kenny examines and muses on the notion of Paradise: our attempt to define it, build it, reach it or perhaps remember it. Rows of little wooden houses built from abandoned amateur landscape paintings are incised with the names of ideal worlds: Arcadia, Elysium, Utopia. They poignantly demonstrate the common desire to make a heaven on earth, a perfect garden, a harmonious society.
Chris Kenny’s exhibition is at Pitzhanger Manor Gallery, 26 April – 11 May 2014. More details here.
