Month: 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.

  • 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”!)