July 28, 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.

Comments (7)

  • I was just thinking of you the other day.  Fondly:).  I have no sound since the lightening storm but I wanted to send you my love.

  • @ydurp - 

    Sending you love, too, Pru. Your job sounds great, and glad you mother is in a place you are comfortable with. My 86yo mother broke her hip a few months back & is still in rehab. We do what we can. xoxo

  • I saw you dropped by and I imagine you surprised by the latest posts.  I know I am. 

    I went to look at your video and even though I still do not have sound I was able to marvel at the beauty of your dance with light.  I would like to see just the words, though, as I watched it twice but could not take my eyes off you long enough to catch the words, once you started moving.  I loved the prose I did see in the beginning, as the words express exactly how I feel these days.

  • …that was pretty special…mystic words, interpretive movement and music…almost need a smoke after that one ; )

  • @ydurp - 

    Pru, sorry to take so long to reply – in internet was down this week and our provider decided it was the cord and sent another one by Canada Post, which meant we were out for days. And I also accepted an assignment managing an email box in IT for a large corporate security change in the way things are structured in the shared drives in a major Canadian bank. For 3 weeks I’ve sat at a desk with almost nothing to do – they hired me ‘too early’ and apologized – but can’t so much as read a newspaper on-line and leaving this exhausting and challenging but rewarding video work to cut and paste into Excel files (the extent of the work I’ve been given so far) is exausting because it’s boring, dull, not what I was hired for, and the radical shift from the creative work I was doing to this has left me rather depressed. Though the weekly paycheck is nice, and that I definitely do like and need.

    Don’t worry. I’ve done the same thing for years, probably a decade or more, with ‘angels.’ It began with pendulums and asking the ‘yes’ ‘no’ questions about chakras while studying yoga, and progressed from there to asking many, many questions and receiving responses that made sense. Then a friend gave me a box of flower essences saying that they really helped her and that she had found a healer who worked exclusively with flower essences and didn’t need this introductory pack anymore. Anyway, while I don’t remember whose flower essences they were -and I passed the box onto another friend since the flower essences didn’t seem to be the healing method that works best for me – I read in the instructions about using ‘muscle testing’ to see which flower essences and how many drops would be most beneficial. She suggested touching the tip of the thumb of one hand to the index finger (or was it the Saturn finger or the little finger, I can’t remember), making a small circle, and with the fingers of the other hand, trying to open the circle. For me it is a definite ‘yes’ when I cannot, no matter how hard I try, open the circle the touching fingers make. No energy, where the fingers are too lax to even make a circle, or if they do it’s easily broken apart means ‘no.’ When nothing happens at all – hands are lax, for me it means ‘no energy here’ in this issue or decision at all – not even enough energy to form a question and response – go along another track of enquiry. Etc.

    The only thing with me is that I don’t attribute the responses I get to any divine being as such. My ‘angels’ are loving forces, certainly, and they extend that unconditional love to everyone, no-one is ‘bad,’ I understand them as my higher intuition.

    If I think through something with my ‘logical’ mind, I can only determine so much. It is a limited thought process. There are blinders to the thinking mind. The feeling heart similarly will overlook glaring inconsistencies in whatever because it wants to love without condition, thought of return, etc.

    But intuition is like a super computer of the heartmind. It can tabulate all the variables, with a good dose of precognition thrown in, and come up with an answer that is correct even if you had no idea how that decision was reached. Intuition takes into account thousands of bits of information faster than the speed of light.

    When I do a form of ‘muscle testing’ to determine which item to purchase, whether to send an email, what food would be good for me to eat today, how best to help in a crisis situation with a loved one, etc etc, while I consider the inner conversation to be with my ‘angels’ I know this process is simply a representation of the deep wisdom of intuition.

    So, you see, we both do something similar, but attribute a different cause to it.

    I don’t think what you’ve been talking about is strange at all.

    I’d say keep exploring this way of being in the world, there’s a higher wisdom to it all that I feel we tap into by have a clear and open path for our intuition.

    Oh, and the video has a beautiful soundtrack of Lena Selyanina’s piano solo, “Spring,” and me reciting the words that appear on screen. At the end, there is also a bit of voice, in the darkness. Sometimes I’ve listened just to the soundtrack, it has its own charm.

    Over the Summer when I was still out of work I put together a fairly large working website and I’d love you to take a look at it when you’re somewhere where you can hear sound and see the videos… an internet cafe with great food?… there’s a videopoetry page there as well…

    Art & Writings of Brenda Clews (I lost my url by letting it lapse with the place I had it intending to move it to Google and some advertising company grabbed it and brendaclews (dot) com takes one into an infernal internet mall now).

    Big hugs to you, and lots of love…

    Brenda xo

  • @capecodshoe - 

    Thanks… did you see the superlative Smoke videos? Smoke 1/3 is my absolute favourite, though they are all amazing. Mats Ek is the choreographer, brilliant. I saw these videos after my little dance and videopoem were done and made, so alas I can’t claim to be influenced by. But Smoke 1/3 is, so far, my favourite dance video.

  • Hi Brenda…

    I could not let the occasion of a year end holiday season pass without stopping by to thank you for your wonderful observations and kind expressions of thought and feeling during the year.

    I hope your christmas is the merriest and your new year safe and prosperous.

    Peace, my friend,

    Jay

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