the urgent artist

So as you know (because, duh, you’re here) we recently switched from our old blogger blog, to this beautiful new home. Since there’s been lots of growth and re-definition within the last year, we decided to start fresh rather than bring all the posts of years past when we transferred with us. But fear not! We’ll leave the old UA up as an archive. An artifact, perhaps? Oh yes.

If you’re new to UA or to me, here’s a brief glossary of some of my hot button issues linking back to the past articles that didn’t come with us. Hell, maybe you just want to reminisce:

Hypermedia

Urgent Artist (folklore has it) was originally started as a blog to promote and explain my work with Hypermedia. Hypermedia systems are one of my ongoing projects that investigate an alternate model for making, presenting, archiving, and studying dance. These systems, which center on following the piece’s creation and then linking all information possible into an interactive DVD-based experience of the “final performance”, were the focus of my senior thesis at Sarah Lawrence, and continue to be a useful model for me to ruminate on, although my involvement with them at the moment is mainly theoretical.

If you trace back to the early days of the urgent artist blog, you can track my one-a-day mini lesson about the project, or you can trace the topic everywhere it shows up.

The A.O. Movement Collective

Urgent Artist has long been the web-home for my dance company, the A.O. Movement Collective.  Though the blog was started when we were nearing completion on “the What’s Left Over After”, it’s main involvement with the AOMC was during work on the then-unnamed “Wake”, on which, you can see, we’re still hard at work.

To see the early rehearsals of “Wake”, and track our evolution to the present, take a look at our rehearsals through the process.

You can also check here, here, and here, as well as searching by specific section: 90 ways to wake from drowning, Muerte Chiquita, Glass Tree/Bloomcycles, and 13 Variations on a Car Crash.

Dance Criticism

Those of you that know me are familiar with my fluxing levels of discomfort about the state and practice of dance criticism in our current time and community.  From my own stabs at redefining it, to laying out theories, to down and out rants at our good friend Alastair, see what’s been said here.

Dancefilm

Is there anything better? I certainly think not.
Check out our little collection here and here.

New Media/Digital Natives

Right on the heels of dancefilm comes my growing love of all things tech and digital native. You can check out this and that for the overview, or skip straight to this one – an especially delicious and explosive post in my opinion.

***

Looking back and doing a little re-reading to pull all these links together for you has been really great, actually! It’s interesting for me (as i’m planning what to do tonight and Saturday in rehearsal) to look back on the very beginnings of Wake – some of the initial ideas for sections i’d totally forgotten by this point! It’s nice too to see the waxes and wanes of when i’ve been really good about posting regularly or had no time at all for months at a time, and nice to see that it’s just a fluxing cycle, and always will be. I think i’m happiest looking at posts that got fierce in their discussion, though, maybe the digital native one above especially. It’s nice to have artifacts of how intensely you felt about something, how exciting it was to have someone engage with what you said – no matter how much the agreed or tore it apart. Thanks for all the good times and good arguments, friends.

Remember: though we may be forging ahead towards new territory, you can always still access the old Urgent Artist at http://www.urgentartist.blogspot.com

Onwards.

Tweet This Post

Tags: archives, dance criticism, dancefilm, digital natives, hypermedia, new media, the A.O. Movement Collective