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Goth waterfalls. (at Iceland)
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3rdwaveblackfeminist: blackhistoryalbum: The Way It Was……Mobile, Alabama, 1956. Series 4/5 “By Any Means Necessary”…..An African American teen, with his siblings in the background, standing guard with a gun during racial violence in Alabama,1956. Gordon Parks, Photographer. chills.
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bluepueblo: Reading Alcove, Montana photo via besttravelphotos
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Best thing anyone who has ever seen the Google truck has ever done.
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sailingfree: by Ivone Martínez
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bluepueblo: Autumn Tree Tunnel, Smuggler’s Notch State Park, Vermont photo via stephanie Do you understand why Vermont is one of my favourite places?
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I said to him, “I have to be free!” and he said something that changed my life. He said, “Well, you just be careful that you’re not a slave to freedom.”  - Rod Steiger
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moviebarcode: Sequence from Ocean’s Eleven (1960)Title Sequence (by Saul Bass)
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Levée des conflits: A Review One dancer climbs onstage, wipes the floor with her hand until she is down on her elbows, shaking her ass, at which point another dancer walks up the stage and begins to wipe the floor. There will be twenty-four of them, performing the same series of twenty-five movements, over and over again. This initial canon allows the audience to travel back in time all depending on which dancer their eyes rest on at any given moment. This is Boris Charmatz’s Levée des conflits. It is in one way chaotic because of the sheer number of performers; and yet it isn’t because each is so clearly doing exactly what they should be doing. And the first dancer begins to wipe the floor again, a loop is formed, and we understand: we are locked into this sequence. There is something of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow in Levée de conflits. Like in his movie Sshtoorrty, in which the same simple short story is not only overlapped but repeated at least ten times. And yet each time the viewer notices something different since human perception is such that not everything can ever be all taken in at once; which is why when people say that, after a certain point, they “got it,” you know they didn’t get it because it’s simply impossible. We can also think of his seminal film Wavelength, a 45-minute zoom across a mostly empty loft. In terms of storytelling, Wavelength is cheekily minimalist, but the celluloid is manipulated to such a degree that on a formal level it is so excessive as (again) to make viewers feel like they have always missed something. With its changes in lighting, no matter how seemingly few, the same could be said of Levée des conflits. And the variations occur. They perform the sequence while going in a circle in a space that progressively gets smaller. Time seems similarly condensed. Then they slow the movements down as they get even closer to each other. One could also be reminded of Michael Trent’s conceptual show It’s about time: 60 dances in 60 minutes, in which dancers repeated the same sequence of fifteen actions four times, each action first taking a minute, then fifteen seconds, then three minutes, then a minute again. Levée des conflits might be less playful than It’s about time, but more ambitious in scope. Then some of the dancers can be seen performing the sequence backwards, until they are all wiping the floor. And the cycle begins anew, abandoning the canon in favor of synchronicity. The choreography’s simplicity gets exposed, and yet it’s also more pleasurable. What is it about synchronicity? Is it because deep down we’re all order-loving fascists? Is it because it gives us something the universe doesn’t? The illusion of control, no matter how trivial? We exit Levée des conflits the same way we entered it, like the characters in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. It will have taken an hour and forty minutes to complete the cycle, but it will be with a feeling of resolution so logical that it might induce chills. I usually try to avoid saying such platitudes, but hopefully the advantage is that when I do say them you know I mean it: Levée des conflits is the best dance show that’s been presented in Montreal this past year. May 30 & 31 at 8pm Place des Arts – Théâtre Jean-Duceppe www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822 Tickets: 48-58$ / 30 years old and under: 43-48$
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Birds with Skymirrors: A Review  The human body is fragmented by light until it becomes unreadable as such and it becomes a poetic body, a body that means something other than itself. Having seen Lemi Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without a Body at Festival TransAmériques two years ago, I went into his new show, Birds with Skymirrors, knowing what to expect. Even though I was tired, I didn’t drink coffee before the show because I felt caffeine might interfere with my experience. Thank God, because Birds is even more meditative than its predecessor. It even feels like a dream, simultaneously meaningful and elusive; slow, yet slippery. It helps that Ponifasio is an expert at achieving otherworldliness from the get-go, with his creatures in long black robes, moving across the stage in small steps so swift they seem to float. With their synchronized movement, they still seem to function as a single entity. Unlike in Tempest, however, here they do not appear to be threatening. The dream-like state is also induced by unlikely juxtapositions, like when a bare-chested man slowly moves while holding his hands behind his back, making his torso look torturous, while we can hear astronauts communicating over radio. (Maybe the dream is about how, while men were busy trying to reach the moon, they prevented this oil-soaked pelican from flying?) Other similarities with Tempest abound. The set and costumes are entirely black, and the only lights to reveal the action are being reflected off those surfaces. It’s goth as shit. The three women are wide-eyed, with shaking hands, while their bodies remain sinuous. It is the performers’ arms that do most of the talking, turning the dance into a ritual. Ponifosia doesn’t mind making his performers cover the stage in white powder for 5 to 10 minutes, and that’s what makes Birds with Skymirrors so hypnotic. May 29-30 at 8pm Place des Arts – Théâtre Maisonneuve www.fta.qc.ca 514.844.3822 / 1.866.984.3822 Tickets: 43-58$ / 30 years old and under: 38-53$
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