Personal Cyber Botanica…

Kettly Noël is one of those impressive performers who can leave a very sharp mark in your personal memory because she’s wiling to deal with roots only to come out with something very concrete… like a mental razor…

Dancer and choreographer Kettly Noël came from the Creolian city Port au Prince in Haiti but has decided to primarily explore her African roots, therefore she oriented her professional carrier to work and develop African contemporary dance scene. At the age of 17 she joined the company led by dancer Patrick Lacroix, then at the beginning of 90’s she set up her first company.

Photo: Val Adamson&Jomba! (c) from Ti Chelbe

Afterwards she followed her path towards African continent where she established an art / charitable community in Benin. Some of the youngsters she had trained there, later on become a regular members of the Benin National Ballet. At the end of 90’s Noël has relocated to Mali in order to do the same. She is an award winning choreographer and a founder of dance festival in Bamako.

Kettly Noël is a respectable female artist dealing with women’s issues and trying to resolve their position on the African continent, not being afraid to dig deeply where some people are not willing or not capable to go.

Photo: Compagnie Kettly Noël (c) from Errance Read more… »

Robert Hylton is an ‘urban classicist’… being continuously tainted with the virus called street art in its most refined sense…

As a youngster he was involved in the UK’s underground Hip Hop scene (break dance and popping techniques included), then jazz dance&stylez, and after a while he realized that contemporary dance might work for him too in a very coolish way…

Photo: Robert Hylton Urban Classicism (c)

As a very young artist he was a member of many street art crews, for instance Bamboozle; then he decided to blast himself to the next level by studying contemporary dance at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance.

In 1999 he founded Robert Hylton Urban Classicism which could be considered as a dance company, production crew and a training platform within whose Robert ‘transmits’ his knowledge and artistic vision.

As a real ‘gimme some tunes’ artist he often collaborates with respectable DJs, among them also with Billy Biznizz - UK’s well known DJ, producer and remix-maestro who did some stuff for the House of Pain, Jade, N.W.A, 4Hero and Mark Morrison.

Urban Classicism by Robert Hylton and Oliver Ashton in 2001

Robert Hylton performed at many international festivals either as a solo dancer either with his own crew. He was a member / guest performer of several dance companies, such as: Jonzi D, JazzXchange and Phoenix Dance. Hylton is also well known for his hip hop/art/educational movies: Urban Classicism South Side, Two Sugars with My Hip Hop please…, The Real Thing, Frames, Urban Classicism, Urban Voodoo, Jaffaman, Simmetry, etc.

This spring he spent some time in Zagreb (Croatia) with b-girls and b-boys from the School for Contemporary Dance ‘Ana Maletic’ and the local company What Evaa in order to work with them… they successfully presented their skills almost two months ago where else but on the street…

Photo: Robert Hylton Urban Classicism (c) Read more… »

Do controversial events result in controversial people, or it’s inversely?! Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I don’t remember the heavily boycotted XXII Summer Olympic Games in Moscow which took place in 1980… But I do remember badges (bear Misha, remember!?), which could be today easily found at all flea markets or antique shops in South-East Europe.

Photo: Leni Riefenstahl

(I don’t have a problem with sport, as a matter of fact, luv it! - although, I’m not so enthusiastic anymore while watching for instance athletics, because I feel like I’m watching a running chemistry labs, not human beings.)

Since Olympic Games this year mostly emanate bitterness, it’s just a perfect time for a small remembrance on controversial photographer and filmmaker (who used to be a dancer, too!) Leni Riefenstahl.

Photo: Leni Riefenstahl Read more… »

This is interesting… Yesterday I went to see the photography exhibition by Michael Benson entitled ‘Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes’ with photos of planets in our Solar System and when I came home and switched on my TV (Arte and DW TV, mostly!) I’ve heard that NASA has again confirmed the existence of water on Mars. To be more precisely, some coolish robot (who is walking now through the Martian’s parks) actually found and tasted the soil sample containing water. I believe, this robot is now, after becoming a celebrity on Earth (and Mars!), pretty thirsty.

Photo: Mars crater, NASA/JPL/Kineticon Pictures (c)

Michael Benson’s exhibition represents images he collected, processed and presented in his synonymous book; an ongoing project with images collected by robots in space; where he is using photos made during missions involving spaceships, orbiters or mini-cars such as Lunar, Voyager 1, Terra, Galileo, Cassini, Viking, Mariner 10, Pathfinder, Opportunity Rover and Spirit Rover, to name a few.

Time-collapse sequence Voyager 1 to Jupiter, NASA (c)

Benson started his project in mid 90’s when browsing through the web has got another dimension with photographs published jointly with text on the web sites. I guess we all had a certain relief back then, because good text is the essence of a narrative quality but with photos and illustrated stuff very often we can say even more apart from wordz… Read more… »

Hiroaki Umeda was certainly one of the most interesting performers I saw this year at Dance Week Festival. Being completely aware of all possibilities and consequences of our modern society, Umeda strikes you directly in your mind if you are enough opened to recognize or perceive the voices, soundz and flashing of today’s digitized generation.

You know that I was writing about him almost two months ago and I promised then to publish soon all the interviews I did with some dancers. So, the first interview from that series is here…

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Hiroaki Umeda…

Photo: Fred Villemin (c)

Since you’ve studied photography and then started to work intensively with your body, what I’m interested in is how you managed to connect those two disciplines? They certainly interact on many levels…

U: I actually drop out photography (laughs). To me it is the same thing to express something because when I was studying photography I’ve tried to find what I can’t express with photography. Actually, I think that after ten years of studying dance I find it very difficult to work only with photography and I wanted to express changes in some circumstances. Since photography doesn’t have a time and dance have a time… This is for me the main difference between dance and photography. I can’t express the same thing I want in both of them. Read more… »

Akram Khan has this interesting approach in his work: choreographing and dancing through mistakes…

Once he said that when people ask him something like: “What do you want to say with your performance?” His answer always remains the same: “No, I don’t have anything to say, I just do!” …and that’s something that thrills me completely… being totally aware of the importance of working processes, ‘because at the end all stuff come back to you’ if I may paraphrase Mr. Sagmeister…

Photo: Carl Fox (c) Read more… »