MP3 from the Vocal Ensemble Solo Concert

In addition to the link to the Dance Concert photos, today I also got the MP3 of me playing Finlandia from the May 10 Vocal Ensemble Solo Concert.

You can download it here.

It includes my spoken intro to the piece (which is not the full-length intro I usually give; I abbreviated it), plus you can hear the audience cheering at the end - AND you can hear my professor say, "Wow!"

Yay! :-)

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Pics from the April 29 & 30 Dance Concert

haiti17
Originally uploaded by mfranky

The school had a photographer at the May April 29 & 30 [thanks, Sharon, for pointing out the error!] Dance concert. I just got a link to the set of pics on Flickr. This is really the only one I'm clearly visible in (though I am at least partially in some of the others).

Here's a link to the whole set -- my class did the ones labeled "Haiti".

Monday night's Vocal Ensemble Solo Concert

This past Monday night (May 10) was the Vocal Ensemble Solo Concert. We had the main Vocal Ensemble concert the previous Monday night (May 3). Apparently last year, the solos performed during the main concert, but this year there were so many people who wanted to do solos that our professor, Bill Bradbury, decided to do a separate concert for them.

Anyway, at the beginning of the semester Bill asked if I'd be interested in playing bells on the solo concert. Of course, I said yes! I decided to play Finlandia because it's a beautiful piece, very accessible to most audiences, and has a big dramatic ending.

Knowing that I'd only have a few minutes of rehearsal time with the accompanist -- mainly because I didn't want to have to schlep my bells to school more than once (the last 2 letters in the acronym for our campus - CSUSM - are said to not be "San Marcos," but rather "Stair Master"!) -- I gave her an MP3 of me playing the piece when I gave her the sheet music. A couple of Mondays ago before Ensemble rehearsal, I sang through the piece with her, too.

So, this Monday I arrived early so I could load in & set up my equipment in the school's theater:



When she arrived, we played through the piece once and hit a couple of spots over again just to make sure we had the transitions down. Then after that, I had about 90 minutes before the concert started, so while the pianist rehearsed with the other students, Brian & I went out for pizza. Yum!

Finally the time came for the concert. Bill took all of those who would be performing over to the other room so we could figure out the concert order. Bill asked me if I would mind going first. I said no problem. After figuring out the rest of the show, we all headed back to the concert hall. Bill asked each of us to introduce ourselves before our piece, so after he did the main intro for the concert, I gave an abbreviated introduction to Finlandia.

Then I played.

I have to say that it was one of my better performances. Everything just kind of "clicked." When I hit the last chord, the audience cheered! Woo-Hoo! :-)

Bill came back on stage to help me move the bells back out of the way for the rest of the performers and as he was doing that, he looked at me and said, "Wow, that was really impressive!" I'm sure I grinned from ear-to-ear to get such a nice compliment from him. Later, he sent me an email saying "Your playing is beautiful and inspiring... I think I might have to write a piece for you (and the choir?)."

How cool is it that an Emmy Award-winning composer wants to write a piece for me? :-)

After the concert, one of the audience members told me that she had spent several years in Finland, and that she loves the song Finlandia. She said that my performance was so beautiful it brought her to tears. My classmates came up to tell me how cool the bells were - many of them had played bells in elementary or middle school, or at church, but had never seen a soloist.

Bill also came up and said, "That was crazy!" I frowned a little bit and replied, "You think I looked crazy when I played?" He said, "No! That's what was crazy about it; you made it look so effortless!" High compliments, indeed. :-)

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Last class of Spring Semester 2010

This was the last week of the Spring Semester here at Cal State San Marcos. Yay! Tuesday night was the last class for Public Speaking but I still had Dance and Electronic Music today.

The semester isn't *quite* over yet, though, as I still have a concert on Monday night for Vocal Ensemble (it's the solo concert - I get to play bells!) and I have to turn in my take-home final for Dance class on Tuesday morning.

Today, I submitted my Final Project for Electronic Music. All semester, we've had lab assignments to do. The prof would lecture on the material for about an hour, then we'd have another hour to do the lab work. He designed it so that each lab built on the previous one and by the end of the semester we would accumulate a final project. We mostly used Reason software for sequencing & synthesis, working with wavetables and other samples. Toward the end of the semester, we started working in ProTools and recorded stuff to create our own electronic instrument, then combined our Reason and ProTools sessions for the final project. I really enjoyed the class & plan to take the next one in the series, too, probably next Spring.

Oh, of course I brought in a handbell (my G#4, which hardly ever gets used!) to record and transform into an electronic instrument. Honestly, by the time I was done with it, you can't tell that it's a handbell at all!

Our final project isn't being graded on the aesthetic qualities of it -- it's just an Intro class, after all -- but rather on if we actually included all the requirements of the lab assignments. This was kind of frustrating, actually, as I'd work to get it sounding the way I wanted to, then the next lab would have us add or change something and all of a sudden it wasn't so good any more! Grr! After a couple iterations of this, I decided that I would take it as a challenge to make something that I liked that still fulfilled all the requirements. (I also did some geeky things like building the piece around the whole tone scale and using Pi to determine the placement of some elements....)

My piece is not some grand masterpiece of electronic music, but I think given all the stuff we were required to do and the fact that it was my first time ever working with electronica, I think it's pretty good.

What do you think?

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Dance Journal, Week 12 (Apr 22, 2010)

DNCE 320
Journal, Week 13
April 22, 2010

Stein, Bonnie Sue. "Butoh: ‘Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty, and Mad’." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 376-383. Print.

This paper presents an overview of the development of the Japanese contemporary dance form “butoh” as well as short artistic biographies of butoh’s important personalities. Butoh is described as “an anti-traditional tradition seeking to erase the heavy impact of Japan’s strict society and offering unprecedented freedom of artistic expression.” Butoh was developed in the late 1950’s when Japanese dancers turned away from traditional Japanese dance, but also wanted something that was still inherently and uniquely “Japanese” and not Western. (Ironically, Eiko and Koma, two New York-based butoh dancers, say that their most revered teacher is a German, Marja Chmiel, a student of Mary Wigman.)

The developers of butoh wanted to explore the things that Japanese society hides or ignores, “such as deformity and insanity.” Thus, butoh was very controversial from its beginnings. One choreographer, Hijikata, says that he created butoh dance with three principles in mind: 1) to emphasize “discontinuity, imbalance, and entropy” in direct contravention of the Western ideals of “rhythm, balance, and the flow of kinetic energy”; 2) to use traditional Japanese sources of inspiration; and 3) to recognize that Japanese bodies have different proportions from Western bodies, resulting in a dance form with movements specifically designed for the Japanese body.


"Moving Contexts." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 370-375. Print.

This reading is an introduction to the fourth and final section of our anthology textbook. The authors tell us that “readings in the final part of the book help us to see how contemporary dance is negotiating – at times resisting, and at other times stimulating – an increasingly global world view.” After discussing the new interest in multi-culturalism, its ideas and art, and warning against taking anything at face value (that is, without regard for its historic, present, and perhaps even future context), this introduction ends by giving a short overview of each paper presented in this section and why it was chosen.


PRACTICE JOURNAL

This past weekend, I presented a concert in Menlo Park (in the SF Bay Area). I stayed with friends and after the concert, in the course of our meandering discussion, I demonstrated some of the dance moves we’ve been doing in class. My friend responded, “You dance while you play [handbells], but each movement is completely controlled. But when you dance like this now, your body seems so out of control.”

My prof wrote: "I think that is okay in this context."

Upon my return home, I mentioned this conversation to my husband, who replied, “When you play bells, you do dance, but dance is not the purpose of the movements, the movement is incidental, derived from what the music requires your body to do. Whereas, when you dance, the purpose of the movement is ‘dance’. I think that’s the difference she saw.” I don’t know if that has any significance beyond “I need to learn to control my movements a little better,” but there it is. :-)


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Dance Journal, Week 12 (Apr 15, 2010)

DNCE 320
Journal, Week 12
April 15, 2010

Chatterjea, Ananya. "Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female Body and Movement in Cultural/Political Signification." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 389-397. Print.

This paper takes a look at some pieces by Chandralekha, a contemporary Indian choreographer. Chandralekha was originally trained in bharata natyam, but left dance to work with the Women’s Movement for ten years. When she returned to dance, she brought with her many of the political sensibilities and aesthetics of that movement. She now incorporates these ideas into her work, as well as using dancers trained not only in bharata natyam, but also in yoga and some martial arts. Chatterjea writes that upon her return to dance, Chandralekha completely deconstructed Indian classical dance and now uses its basic elements to create works that result in a “seamless overlaying of the aesthetic and the political in movement.”


Coorlawala, Uttara. "Ananya and Chandralekha – A Response to ’Chandralekha: Negotiating the Female Body and Movement in Cultural/Political Signification’." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 398-403. Print.

In this response to Chatterjea’s paper, Coorlawala presents a different “reading” of two of Chandralekha’s pieces analyzed by Chatterjea. In presenting her different reading of the works, Coorlawala calls into question Chatterjea’s understanding of both Indian history and the “gestaltic understanding” of the cultural meaning of several historical texts. While applauding Chatterjea’s efforts to describe the political significance of Chandralekha’s work, Coorlawala opposes Chatterjea’s inclination to present Chandralekha as being completely uninfluenced by non-Indian thought and aesthetics.


PRACTICE JOURNAL

I continue to practice in front of the mirror. I keep meaning to video-tape myself, but keep forgetting to do so. I am feeling really good about the first dance and am excited about our second dance. I’m looking forward to the concert at the end of this month!

My prof wrote: "Yeah!"

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Dance Journal, Week 11 (Apr 8, 2010)

DNCE 320
Journal, Week11
April 8, 2010

Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. "Looking at movement as Culture: Contact Improvisation to Disco." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 404-413. Print.

This paper begins by talking about the mind/body dichotomy. Some people think that movement/gestures must be translated into words in order to have meaning. The author cautions that this can “subsume the reality of the body” because the ways that people feel themselves move is part of who they are and how they understand themselves to be. On the other hand, some people elevate body over mind looking only at the movement itself and ignoring the mind inside the body. This reminds me of the Jowitt paper from Week 3, “Beyond Description,” and her admonition to avoid creating a “print analogue for dance.”

Both movement systems and language are cultural activities. People in a particular culture have particular ways of moving. Foreigners to that culture can sometimes be picked out of a crowd because they move in a different way. (This part reminded me of the Sklar paper, also from Week 3, “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance,” and her example of the movements of Episcopal versus the Pentecostal churches.) Bull reminds us that movement alone can't tell you what cultural ideas are involved.

The paper then talks about Contact Improvisation, an American dance form, and how it incorporates ideas such as gender equality (in that it's not always a male/female pairing, but could be female/female, or male/male), freedom of expression and movement, and an outward focus. Disco dancing, by contrast, was much more controlled and used exclusively male/female pairings. Aerobics is also discussed, even though it is neither a social dance nor a theatrical dance, because of the self-control aspects.

I think the author sums up the paper best when she writes, “Movement systems in any culture are not monolithic and static, nor is their relationship to social contexts always direct.”


Ryan, Peter. "10,000 Jams Later: Contact Improvisation in Canada, 1974-95." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 414-420. Print.

The opening paragraph of this paper made me chuckle. Phrases such as “a group of itinerant dancers initiated forays across Canada's borders” filled my mind's eye with images of scruffy unshaven dancers in camouflage jackets and berets, looking like Che Guevara! I think that image may actually be appropriate, in a way, because those dancers really were revolutionary in that their first “forays” brought contact improvisation to Canada, where it blossomed and spread.

The paper describes the “contact jam” as “an open event to which people come, warm up, and dance.” Jams are slightly different from one to the next and depend on the participants to “create their own format.”

Contact improvisation has faced some problems of acceptance within the larger dance community, whether due to fear or ignorance, or a perception that it is “non-professional,” but the author believes that it is an essential set of skills for any dancer to have in their artistic toolkit.


Paxton, Steve. "Improvisation Is a Word for Something That Can't Keep a Name." Moving History / Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Ed. Ann Dills and Ann Cooper Albright. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 421-426. Print.

This paper is about perception, how we perceive the world around ourselves, in general, and how we perceive art such as film, music, art, and dance, specifically. Paxton delves into a philosophical discussion bringing in bits from Freud and Jung, neurology and history, as well as music and art. He opines that art can be understood only after our minds learn to create concepts that can “hold” the art in our minds. He gives the example of Duchamp's Dada art and how it took many years for ordinary people to develop a perceptual framework to where they could begin to think about the work, much less to “understand” it. He feels that improvisation is part and parcel of this perceptual framework, that it is because our minds naturally improvise all the time that we're able to create these new understandings and concepts. All in all, a very interesting paper and one I'm going to have to keep thinking about for a while. Thanks for assigning it!

My prof wrote: "Yes, some slippery ideas to chew on. You're welcome!"

PRACTICE JOURNAL

I feel like I'm finally starting to feel comfortable about dancing.

My prof wrote: "Yeah!"

I've figured out the pelvic isolation thing, even though it's easiest to do lying down, and if it must be done standing up, is easier when I'm not also trying to move my legs! I feel like I know where to go when in our first dance and am looking forward to performing it. I also feel very comfortable with the initial bits of the second dance we've done so far, the trying out of new steps to see what works and what doesn't. I like the faster pace and the “happy” sounding music.

My prof wrote: "Me, too!"

I really feel like all the time we spent on the first dance is paying off now as these moves seem so much easier now that I have a “perceptual framework” within which to think about them (thank you, Steve Paxton!)

My prof wrote: "Hah! Love it!"

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AGEHR Area XII eNewsletter "The Twelfth Tone" - May 2010

For the past 2 months, I've been the Southern California Regional Coordinator for AGEHR Area XII. One of the things I do is write up a short column about handbell happenings in my Region. The Southern California Region is: all of Imperial & San Diego Counties, and most of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties (there are just a few ZIP codes in them that belong to the LA Metro Region).

Each month, our Communication Coordinator gathers columns from all of the Area's Regional Coordinators, plus columns from our Chair (and sometimes the Chair-Elect, too) and other items of interest and publishes "The Twelfth Tone," Area XII's eNewsletter.

Here's this month's edition -- and the archives are here. If you know of any handbell happenings in the SoCal area, please let me know about them so I can make sure to put them in the eNews and the Calendar. The deadline for inclusion in each month's eNews is the 28th.

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Dance concerts are done!

Last night was the 2nd and final Dance Department concert at school. There were a lot of really cool pieces on the concert, most of which were choreographed (and danced) by students in the dance program. Some of the pieces were insightful or moving (like the one about breast cancer) and others were just fun or silly (like the Hip Hop one).

My class danced 3 Haitian numbers. The first was a solo dance by one of the class members to a vocal solo song asking for God's help for the poverty in the country. The second piece was a group dance to funerary music, which we dedicated to the victims of the Jan 12 earthquake. The 3rd dance was a happy festival dance to celebrate life.

I think we danced better on Thursday night than Friday night. On Friday, there was so much applause after the solo piece that we couldn't hear the beginning of our music, and so we started 3 beats late. All of us stayed together as a group and somehow managed to all skip one step at the same time to get us back on track by the end of the piece. The Festival piece went well both nights.

Here's a pic of me in my dance costume:



All in all, it was a lot of fun! I'm proud of myself for doing this. I have plenty of performance experience, so I wasn't nervous or anything, but I was uncomfortable because I know I'm a just barely competent dancer & it's always embarrassing to do something you're not very good at in public. It was a learning experience and I'm glad I did it.

During our dress rehearsal on Wednesday night, I found out there's a Theater Arts class on lighting and sound and I think I'm going to take that class either next semester or the one after. I think it'll be good to me to be able to communicate with sound & lighting people for my future concerts! :-)

Today is a rare weekend at home. Brian and I are going to go visit the beach & then tonight we'll attend a CD Release party for my Vocal Ensemble teacher Bill Bradbury. Check out his CD!

** P.S. Don't forget to help me get on The Ellen Show!

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