Photography by Jacob Holdt
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
Top: Untitled
Middle Left:Mohammed, Garba, Baba & Bintu
Middle Right: Hopper
Bottom: Merkabah
(via adrowningwoman)
Title: Ballet Dancers, Zagreb, Croatia Artist: Steve McCurry (1950, American) Year: 1990 Materials/Techniques: cibachrome print on Fuji cystal archival paper
Barbara Morgan - Martha Graham, Primitive Mysteries, 1938
“This generation,” Yuriko explained, “is conscious of the shape they are creating. They check the mirror to see if a shape is correct instead of creating the shape from within themselves. There is no life in a movement that comes from the outside. There is only a visceral imitation. Movement must initiate within before it has an outer shape. Film and video have contributed to this habit of outer imitation that is different from the generation that learned a work from live dancers. The result is a copy of a movement—lacking spatial awareness, weight, power, and abstract qualities that cannot be sensed from a screen.”
The group began by working on technique. Yuriko noted that this generation of young dancers has legs and arms that seem detached from the center of the body. “To give them an image,” she said, “I asked them to see a tree in their mind’s eye that begins with roots, grows into a trunk, and then freely spreads and moves its branches upward. We forget that we are part of nature. Martha talked about the spiral growth of plants: We, too, don’t move straight up, but grow as everything in the body spirals in rotation to enable us to move in any direction.”
Getting deeper into the inner meaning of a movement meets with some resistance from young dancers. “It’s scary,” Yuriko says, “because we all prefer to sort, analyze, and hide behind physicality. I told the dancers that each role, no matter how small, represents a person, a human being; not a machine, but someone who lives aside, in a geographical location, at a different time, with another scenario. All that has nothing to do with reality, the reality of one’s existence, but is about regaining the lost innocence of childhood when you could become whatever you were told to become. A child will become a spider if you ask him to do so. As we grow up, we begin to pretend to be a spider and lose the capacity to become. You have to trust that you will return to being yourself as you are in real life. The dancer has to learn to make this trade again and again between stage roles and real life. You have to just do it until it becomes comfortable. And you know, it’s so wonderful when I see truth and individuality emerge in a dancer. I can tell the difference day by day, from moment to moment, if the content is there or if it’s not, or when it falters, or drops, or doesn’t connect with the next image.”
(via harpy)
Anzas Dance Studio by Yoshimasa Tsutsumi, architect
By applying a gradient of dots on to the room’s mirrored surfaces, a deep fog effect is created, resulting in a dramatic altering of the room’s atmosphere.
The design aims to bring into dizzying focus the presence of the floor which has been done in a grainy, deep-coloured tigerwood. The holistic effect of the materiality coupled with the mirror applique is a merging of the space and a blurring of the room’s depth and boundaries.
(via ianbrooks)
Uliana Lopatkina performing The Dying Swan by Saint-Saens.
Gundula Schulze Eldowy
via godforsaken, anormaux
Sally Mann
