Day 3 Prompt: Dance
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tolkienekphrasisweekMandatory Art Form Prompt
Day 3's required ekphrasis theme is dance. Dance is one of the most basic human art forms: anyone at all can dance. From virtuoso concert dancers to happy toddlers to clubbers to someone moving to music alone in their room, dance is a constant in the human experience. It does not require able bodies, hearing, or resources beyond oneself and the urge to move. As a spectacle, a social practice, a religious activity, exercise, or any of its other manifold uses, dance is at once enduring and utterly ephemeral. Before the invention of video and dance notation to preserve choreographies, specific dances survived solely through practitioners passing their body memories down to those who danced after them. Ekphrasis of dance, then, seems particularly suited to contemplation of transience, ecstasy, discipline, memory, and community.
Optional Writing Method Theme
Day 3's suggested style for writers is the review. Common in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and personal blogs, critical reviews weigh the strengths, weaknesses, and contexts of exhibits, performances, and individual artworks. Reviews can be more or less personal, formal, and objective in the criteria and styles they use to rate the merits of their subjects. By critically analyzing the critics, much may be revealed about the reviewer’s own biases, contexts, and artistic milieux. What kind of reviews might we see in Tolkien’s universes?
Optional Art Method Theme
Day 3’s optional artistic theme is a new-to-you medium. Longing for watercolors? Think felting is cool? Always wanted to give composing a shot? Give it a try for today!
Optional Pain Theme
Because of the ephemerality of dance before recording technology, most dances are lost to time. Some were recorded, however, in at least some of their aspects, in paintings, reviews, sculptures, or novels. Today’s bittersweet theme, then, is meta-ekphrastic: art known only from other works of art.
Optional Joy Theme
Day 3's optional joy theme is inspired by Loïe Fuller (google her and her hot Jewish butch girlfriend) positive impacts of technology on art. Fuller invented new uses and techniques for new projection and stage-lighting equipment to use in her dances, and we know what that looked like, because someone used the relatively new technology of video to record her doing so! What new innovations become possible when new technologies step on stage?
A number of examples for your inspiration.
Day 3's required ekphrasis theme is dance. Dance is one of the most basic human art forms: anyone at all can dance. From virtuoso concert dancers to happy toddlers to clubbers to someone moving to music alone in their room, dance is a constant in the human experience. It does not require able bodies, hearing, or resources beyond oneself and the urge to move. As a spectacle, a social practice, a religious activity, exercise, or any of its other manifold uses, dance is at once enduring and utterly ephemeral. Before the invention of video and dance notation to preserve choreographies, specific dances survived solely through practitioners passing their body memories down to those who danced after them. Ekphrasis of dance, then, seems particularly suited to contemplation of transience, ecstasy, discipline, memory, and community.
Optional Writing Method Theme
Day 3's suggested style for writers is the review. Common in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and personal blogs, critical reviews weigh the strengths, weaknesses, and contexts of exhibits, performances, and individual artworks. Reviews can be more or less personal, formal, and objective in the criteria and styles they use to rate the merits of their subjects. By critically analyzing the critics, much may be revealed about the reviewer’s own biases, contexts, and artistic milieux. What kind of reviews might we see in Tolkien’s universes?
Optional Art Method Theme
Day 3’s optional artistic theme is a new-to-you medium. Longing for watercolors? Think felting is cool? Always wanted to give composing a shot? Give it a try for today!
Optional Pain Theme
Because of the ephemerality of dance before recording technology, most dances are lost to time. Some were recorded, however, in at least some of their aspects, in paintings, reviews, sculptures, or novels. Today’s bittersweet theme, then, is meta-ekphrastic: art known only from other works of art.
Optional Joy Theme
Day 3's optional joy theme is inspired by Loïe Fuller (google her and her hot Jewish butch girlfriend) positive impacts of technology on art. Fuller invented new uses and techniques for new projection and stage-lighting equipment to use in her dances, and we know what that looked like, because someone used the relatively new technology of video to record her doing so! What new innovations become possible when new technologies step on stage?
A number of examples for your inspiration.
