{"id":3034,"date":"2014-06-21T23:12:18","date_gmt":"2014-06-22T05:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/?p=3034"},"modified":"2014-06-21T23:12:18","modified_gmt":"2014-06-22T05:12:18","slug":"the-fly-on-the-wall-and-the-artists-that-are-very-much-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/2014\/06\/21\/the-fly-on-the-wall-and-the-artists-that-are-very-much-present\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fly on the wall and the Artists that are very much present"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Filmmaking classes are the best opportunity to play lots of foosball. It&#8217;s funny&#8211; so many creative powerhouse studios provide game rooms to employees, because when you are involved in Film, you&#8217;re living there. In that, if you&#8217;re editing a film, you live in the editing room. Every day at break, whether I was tired, frustrated, or sleep-deprived and delusional, I would always look forward to foosball with my classmate Djake. Now that we are in the heat of our externships I haven&#8217;t played in what feels like years, but it&#8217;s really nice to have that foosball table as an outlet when some nights I feel like screaming at the monitor watching the same interview clip over and over until I never want to watch it again no matter how interesting I thought it was before. Sometimes the most strenuous, creative activity like filmmaking needs a ridiculous activity to match it.<\/p>\n<p>After stressing more than I needed to deciding which organization to pick for my externship, I chose the Ormao Modern Dance Company in Colorado Springs. Check out their website here if you&#8217;re interested.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"jt4fZ11J3X\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/ormaodance.org\/\">Home<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;Home&#8221; &#8212; Ormao Dance Colorado Springs\" src=\"https:\/\/ormaodance.org\/embed\/#?secret=CRnd6npSna#?secret=jt4fZ11J3X\" data-secret=\"jt4fZ11J3X\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t really know what to expect; I have never danced, and some of my friends are dancers so I have a slight idea. My best idea of dance is <em>Black Swan<\/em>, which may be somewhat accurate for the cut-throat ballet world, but this is modern dance. It&#8217;s completely different. Also, my biggest fear is that somehow I impose <em>Black Swan<\/em> onto Ormao, making it a hyper-dramatic life and death environment. There is no way to make a good documentary if I impose a story where that story doesn&#8217;t exist, or worse, makes a really good, interesting story inaccurate. The biggest takeaway I had from our discussion preparing the class for our externships was &#8220;trust the process&#8221;. It&#8217;s so difficult. It&#8217;s not a screenplay, maybe in some ways it looks like one, ultimately, but I can&#8217;t force through coffee and creative willpower something good onto paper. I need to make sure it exists first, so I need to wait. With that in mind, I entered Ormao excited to get to know each dancer personally, hopeful that somehow I could find a dramatic, emotional story.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a lot of observing, I don&#8217;t want to say fly on the wall but that sums up a lot of what I have been doing so far. Ormao just finished a performance called &#8220;Interplay&#8221; in the spring, hosted by CC, so now the Company dancers are in the offseason, meaning they aren&#8217;t meeting regularly. So far, I&#8217;ve met most of the dancers as they come into the office to teach various summer classes offered to the public. Ballet, Modern, Jazz, Hip-Hop, B-boy, it&#8217;s a lot of dance world terms for me to take in at once. It&#8217;s a bit strange too, the most regular class is a choreographer&#8217;s class for high-school aged girls, mostly girls about to enter high school, so it&#8217;s a bit awkward being the 6&#8217;3&#8243; college male that I am asking this group of teenage girls as politely as I can to watch their rehearsal. I nonchalantly sit in the corner and observe as best I can, watching how they rehearse and learn to choreograph and direct each other. I just find it a bit comical being the &#8220;college guy&#8221; in the room, who they just met, and keeps randomly coming in to watch us rehearse, kind of like how I feel when my parents visit me in my college classes and sit next to me, watching intently as I feel like they expect me to say something ground-breaking at every opportunity. It&#8217;s a bit odd, but I try to be as fly on the wall as I can, despite knowing that just my being there has an influence on how the dancers act. It&#8217;s hard not to&#8211; and I don&#8217;t even have a camera yet. Thankfully, I have a couple weeks to make everyone around me as comfortable as possible, and I can avoid the &#8220;hi, my name is, can I film you?&#8221;. It&#8217;s hard to be genuine when lights are shining in your face, and some guy you don&#8217;t know begins asking strangely intimate questions about your life.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what my documentary is going to be about. Maybe it will be about the Ormao director, maybe it will be about a Company dancer, maybe it will be about a choreographer in the workshop. That&#8217;s the fun (and the frustration) of it. Ultimately it is fun, because I know I am going to get something good. From what I have seen, the dancers in the Company have an uncanny intimacy to them. Today I realized I am on the verge of something good. After attending my first advanced Modern class, I learned that on Wednesdays and Saturdays there are regular Modern classes that I could watch. The class began with \u00a0the dancers and instructor, including me, sitting in a circle to introduce ourselves again, especially to me, as I mentioned that I am part of the documentary class. I get to meet some more of the Company dancers, which is great, and I start to feel pretty comfortable as everyone gapes at the astonishingly blue, round eyes of the one of the dancer&#8217;s year-old daughter. I sit down excited to watch the warm-ups.<\/p>\n<p>The teacher breaks everyone into pairs, and the first exercise involves staring at a part of your partner&#8217;s body. Yep. And it gets more comfortable. The warm-up progressed from walking across the room staring at a body part, to staring at each other&#8217;s mouth, to staring into each other&#8217;s eyes, to hugging and moving around the room as a follower, then a follower. The intimacy and improvisation, as well as comfort and trust, required to do these exercises genuinely, and without writing it off as a &#8220;haha we&#8217;re staring at each other middle school dance&#8221;, was incredible. Each pair moved very differently. Some moved forcefully, with pace, others moved slowly and methodically; yet, each group shared the same intensity for the exercise. I sat gaping as I watched each pair come into contact with each other, sliding, grazing, engaging each other&#8217;s bodies in such a unique way that public interaction doesn&#8217;t allow; I just cried. I didn&#8217;t really know what to do, or why I was crying, but it was just stunningly honest and beautiful. That emotion, that sense of intimacy I felt between the dancers is what I need to capture on film. That&#8217;s it, that discovery, that breaking of normal physical boundaries, that letting go to another person. I can&#8217;t imagine what its like to experience, and maybe sometime this week I can get a chance to do some of the exercises to know what I will need to convey to the audience. The dancers have asked me if I&#8217;m doing the classes, and so far I have been pretty nervous to say yes, but maybe that openness is just what I need to know more of in order to make the best documentary I can. The filmmaker&#8217;s nightmare is someone who is bad on camera, and that is certainly not the case with \u00a0the Ormao dancers I have met&#8211; it&#8217;s a great feeling knowing I have that already.<\/p>\n<p>Filmmaking is obsessive, and requires some obsessing. I need to gain as much knowledge of modern dance in a couple weeks as I can, so when we begin to pitch our movies to the class, and ultimately Rocky Mountain PBS, nobody says &#8220;oh, actually, that&#8217;s not how modern dance works&#8221;. So far I&#8217;ve learned that modern dance can be technical, improvised, people rolling on each other while keeping parts of their body in contact, moving around upside down in a box, jumping on a bed; it&#8217;s a wide-reaching discipline. I keep thinking about the movie <em>The Artist is Present<\/em>\u00a0and the intimacy that film achieves through Abramovic&#8217;s Moma exhibit, where she stares into whatever person&#8217;s eyes sits across from her. It&#8217;s stunning. If I can even come close to that power in my film, I&#8217;ll be happy. With the level of intimacy I experienced today, I know something is definitely there.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Filmmaking classes are the best opportunity to play lots of foosball. It&#8217;s funny&#8211; so many creative powerhouse studios provide game rooms to employees, because when you are involved in Film, you&#8217;re living there. In that, if you&#8217;re editing a film, you live in the editing room. Every day at break, whether I was tired, frustrated, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/2014\/06\/21\/the-fly-on-the-wall-and-the-artists-that-are-very-much-present\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Fly on the wall and the Artists that are very much present&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,15,108,242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-block-a","category-courses","category-film-new-media","category-fm205","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1RtXj-MW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3034"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3039,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions\/3039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/blockfeatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}