“Life is full of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure we will never forget Tiny Tim, or this first parting there was among us.”
~Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit in A Muppet Christmas Carol
So as many of you might have guessed from my facebook activity lately and last week’s Thing, my dad passed away last Thursday around noon. This piece is dedicated to him, the best father anyone could ever hope for.
Not much to say about this one; just an embarrassingly geeky source material that became an intriguingly perplexing dance. And no, I’m not telling you what the source material was. At least, not until you’ve watched the dance. If you really must know, comment and ask!
And be sure to check out Thing-A-Week, every Sunday, right here on Geeksdanz!
This Thing was inspired by all the spirals we’ve been doing on the Alexander course the past week or so, coupled with the fact that two of my friends are pregnant and both are due this coming week. Good luck, ladies!
Be sure to check out Thing-A-Week, every Sunday, right here!
I was going to do some pointework for this week’s Thing, but after an hour in the studio in the middle of a heat advisory, determined that it was neither safe nor smart to bust my butt getting back into my shoes. So, this week’s Thing is about melting in the heat. Incorporates a gesture motif inspired by my friend Meagan’s comment that it was so hot you had to swim through the air.
The Alexander Tech training course started up again this week, so I’ve been taking the bus more frequently than I did over the summer. I knew I wanted to do a gesture piece this week, and suddenly realized that all sorts of old movement patterns were kicking back into gear now that I’m back to school again.
Here’s this week’s Thing-A-Week, the first in what will become an intermittent series of Dungeons and Dragons Character Studies. Today’s entry is Dwarf Fighter.
To create this character study, I first had my fiance “roll” a character for a pretend Dungeons and Dragons game. (”Rolling” a character refers to the process of using dice rolls to determine the character’s vital statistics, such as strength, dexterity, wisdom and so on.) Looking over his rolls, he told me this character was a Dwarf Fighter. I then translated those statistics into movement parameters, which I applied to a base phrase that will be used for all character studies.
I’d like to keep returning to this concept throughout the coming months, so if anyone out there is a D&D geek who’s interested in helping out with the experiment, here’s what you can do:
Roll a character using the classic straight-roll method–no re-rolls, no extra dice, no throwing out the lowest result. Just roll the six traits in order and record their values. Based on your rolls, determine the race and class of your character, and send me an email at ellen@geeksdanz.org with all of this information. I’ll experiment with your character in the context of my study format, and you just might find yourself on a future Thing-A-Week!
I’m here to introduce a brand-new series to the Geeksdanz site: Thing-A-Week!
So here’s the deal: I recently got into Jonathan Coulton’s music, which I will affectionately term “Geek Folk.” One of his projects that really intrigued me is his “Thing A Week” series. In Jonathan’s own words:
“From September 2005 to September 2006 I recorded a new song every week and released it for free on my website as a podcast. It was an attempt to keep the creative juices flowing as freely as possible, and a way for me to push myself to take risks, work quickly and trust in the creative process. It was also a stunt designed to get people to notice me. It worked, suckers!”
That strikes me as a really neat idea and a great way to keep the creative juices flowing, as he says. So I’ve decided to start my own Thing-A-Week series. Each week I’ll choreograph a new little ditty, film it, and upload it to the site.
So without further ado, I present to you the inaugural Thing in the series, titled “Bing-Bang”!
So it’s been rather quiet on the Geeksdanz front, but that doesn’t mean it’s been quiet on the geek front, oh no. My friends and I went to Anime Central, a large anime and videogame convention in Chicago, towards the middle of May. We cosplayed (translated: dressed up) as the entire cast of one of our favorite videogames, Chrono Trigger, and paraded around the hotel and convention center all weekend. We were a big hit at the convention, so much so that a small geek website interviewed us each individually for a web video. Well, that video has finally been posted, and I’ll present it to you now, courtesy of YouTube and Henshin Justice Unlimited:
On a (somewhat) more serious note, plans ARE in the works for the first ever Geeksdanz concert! The project is still in the scheming stages, but thanks to a generous graduation gift from my grandparents, it will most definitely be happening at some point. The current frontrunner idea is as follows:
ACT 1: Gaming Past and Present
A series of solos, one for each dancer in the concert, that deal with the gameplay and/or character-related aspects of several popular videogames throughout the years, from Castlevania in 1988 to last year’s wonder child, Portal.
ACT 2: The D&D Dance
The second half of the evening would contain a longer group work for six dancers based around the world of tabletop Role-Playing, specifically Dungeons & Dragons. Current ideas for this dance center around the use of dice rolls to determine the outcome of various situations and the juxtaposition of literal movement versus metaphorical action.
More updates will be forthcoming as this project begins in earnest.
