Tuesday, 28 July 2009

  • Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière




    Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.


    My videopoem is finished. After a week of nearly nonstop work, most nights till 3 or 4 am and up again at 7 or 8am and working right through, I am happy with it. For your enjoyment, I have uploaded both the final version with poetry, and the silent version too.


    I searched through my writing for nearly a whole day to find what might work. I decided on White Fire since I had been vaguely dancing with that poem in mind on the day that I taped this, and had printed it on fine paper and threw the pages in the air and danced on them during the videoing of my dance session last June.


    White Fire now has a web page at my Art & Writings website, where you may read the prosepoem in its entirety. In the video I have only used a few quotes on the creation of the universe out of light. I wrote this prose poem nearly a decade ago, and at that time I was invited to read it on the radio and it nearly became a performance with 8 dancers and musicians!


    The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in the album, 'Piano Paintings' by the brilliant Russian composer and pianist, Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova). Lena came by my website, since I had left a note at her site on Jamendo that the music in my videopoem, Venus Enroute, is hers, and wrote: "I am impressed by your art and happy that you have found inspiration from my music. I am looking forward to see how the Spring dance will evolve....with warm greetings from Helsinki, Finland, Lena." How wonderful.


    One of the challenges I set myself in this videopoem was to create a self-contained movie. I have, therefore, included the text of the prosepoetry being recited in the movie itself. You will see that I have worked very hard to produce this video in a way that the text becomes a design element in the video itself.


    Except at the end, where I felt darkness was most effective.


    I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

    Earlier version without words: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière (a poetry without words) at Vimeo.

Thursday, 23 July 2009

  • Venus Enroute



    Venus Enroute uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

    The poetry is an excerpt from my "Botticelli Suite of Venus Poems":

    She stopped to rest. Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

    Without hovering, or insecurity.

    It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

    Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

    Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

    Then she continued on.

    She didn't doubt her certainties.

    The music clip is from Lena Selyanina's 'Sarah's Dance,' from her album, "Piano Poetry," which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45056.

    The chair sequence and the poem added to it had no original connection. I cut the clip from two hours of footage as perhaps 'workable.' Then I searched for a poem. It's amazing how the poem 'fits' the movement, huh? Creatively perhaps we are a gesture, a gesture where here poetry and dance are an aligned fusion. Albeit, the resulting video is a bit comic.

    The tag on the back of my dress? As soon as I saw the footage I grabbed the dress and cut it off. The other camera? Ahh, I'm still just learning how to make videos and don't have a clone plugin to remove these elements. Enjoy the humor! (Or perhaps, in context of the poem, since Venus has swung her scallop shell around to enter the world of experience, we could say the tag on her dress reads: 'If this Vintage Venus is found wandering, send her back to "Mount Olympus"!)

Monday, 18 May 2009

  • Dance of the Solar Wind (2:28min)

    A recording of a prosepoem. While I made the recording in 2007, I never posted it. This morning I played with it in Garageband, adding loops (actually, this is the first time I have ever done this - a new direction perhaps). Surprisingly, I like it. Not sure about the image, oh, not the sun, the sun is beautiful in its golden fields of fire, but, hey, I don't have a whole lot of images of myself.

    Read the text here.


    ________________

     DSL or Cable

    Dial-up

Saturday, 20 September 2008

Friday, 05 September 2008

  • Me as an Audience Extra

    The last year has been one of the most difficult years of my life. While I cannot share much of what has happened, the good news is that I am still going. Sometimes I'm not sure how.

    At the end of May my last contract position ended and since then I have been officially unemployed, a disempowering experience to say the least.

    Anyhow, for a new experience last Friday I was an 'audience extra' at Market Call Tonight on BNN. Here's a clip of me asking a question, something I make myself do whenever I attend a seminar. Okay, I don't know a lot about the stock market, but I realized that I know more than I thought I did.

    By all means watch the whole show, Ross Healy's viewpoints are interesting. If you want to see yours truly, a little nervous (could have done with some of those beta blockers, laughs) go to 7:25 on this clip (after the ads) for about 2 minutes to hear his full answer.

brendaclews

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    • Name: Brenda
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