Brenda Clews

direct link: dance/ …indigo folio leaves (with poem)

A dance that is creative movement, a moving meditation. Brenda Clews: prose poetry, dance, video. Music: José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith.”

Music

…enters your backbone, joints, plucks the
cartilage holding you together. Music is the
moon of the red tides of your bloodstream.
Drift to and fro, a willow tree, or sway, bend,
a flamenco, stretch, purple morning glories
on the vine, jump. Sway your hips, delta of
fiery flow. Express yourself, woman. No-one
is watching. Say it all. The lyric travels tenderly
through your wrist, a memory of the wind on the
hill. You are an instrument of the musician who
is absent, gone. Whose music plays on; who
does not know you exist. Orphean muse. Twirl
on the floor, the beat in your ankles, room
spinning, see the canvas walls, luminous see
the sun, moon, stars that are always there.
Spin on the clock turning. Give everything.

Wanton woman. Harlot of the night. Mother of
angels. Insufferable radiance. Black hole of
emptiness. Sweet moan nectar.

Mystery dangles like your silver bracelets,
the ghosts are present. Approach yourself by
disappearing. Undulate your liquid bones.
Beautiful sensuality. Seek invisible illumination
in your writhing steps. Leave time, transform in
your multiplicity, a seer searching the spheres.
Manifest your dreams. Shake them out of the air
to materialize before you like light forms. Shimmy,
wet sweat, a flag in a wind storm. Thunder the
floor. Witch, werewolf, Goth beauty, fragile
starchild, cyberpunk, pull the sky down. Sway
those hips, woman. Sway them until you ignite.
Dance with your ineffable muse. Just, dance.

I pull purple veils over my vision, indigo
blue silk lights and shadows.

Listen: dance on the stage of your
imagination.

© by Brenda Clews, 2011
_

Folio: a sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves of a book or manuscript.

Late afternoon, when the spring sun was pouring in, I videotaped some dancing to José Travieso’s track, ‘Monster,’ on his album, “No More Faith“:  Besides being technically beautiful, quite goth baroque in its composition, there is an undercurrent of feeling in this music. Music like this can awaken the inner self in its dance, or this is how it calls to me.

And I layered two different dances to the same music: first I separated the figures, but it didn’t look quite right, so I superimposed them, allowing the dance of the two to occur in the same space, an intertexuality of subjectivities, like folio leaves.

I see the woman of the dance transformed into figures that are, but are not me.

I wrote to the Spanish musician, José, on his track, ‘Monster’: ‘This piece is so beautiful, like the passion of angels, pain and transcendance in the music that you play, what is the monster? Is beauty the monster?

How can beauty be a monster?’

He teaches all day, and at night, the music. Stressful, hard. He rarely has time to read, walk, visit friends, relax. “Everyday I work on it with passion… or maybe just obsession. So, everyday, when I’m recording an album, I feel more and more tired, it consumes me… Music is my own monster, my search for the perfection and the beautiful thing is my own monster. This is my explanation.”

‘I understand. A consuming passion. A beauty that devours its creator in consummation.

I, too, prefer art that is vulnerable, without pretence.’

Contemplating the Muse

                                          

direct link: Dance of Gold Canvas

Performed, videoed and edited by Brenda Clews.

Music by arnoldsrecords, ‘There’s a hole, there’s a wall.’

__

A performance piece, hints of the epic, the metamorphosis that life is. Age and grace. Frivolity and art. Pain and laughter. Humor and seriousness.

In the dance I speak a poetry whose volume I dimmed to just below audible. A poetry below the threshold.

And of this nearly silenced subliminal speaking? It’s part of the motion poem. A tantra. Dance, the journey of the soul, guttural, the women crying for help during the tsunami, women in war, survival, a Blakean crawl across the canvas at one point and I allowed some words to rise, utterances, Butoh not in style but expression perhaps in parts, and of strength, empowerment, and the fecund, the buds of spring about to burst, Boticelli’s Primavera, the rich earthy tapestries of the natural world, and Zen, laughter at the absurdity of life, and love, love everywhere, enjoyment in the body itself, sensuality, a wit, humour. Dancing with shadows of the self was intriguing in the editing, as was slipping between colours of a rich Buddha saffron and the smudging shadows of black and white. Editing itself a psychic process, shaping a moving poem.

How a video comes to be is almost surreal. Magic in the editing. I enter a state where time doesn’t matter and think it closest to the dream, the mind’s most deeply creative process, where you’re exploring something, and you’re not quite sure what it means, or where it’s going, but are fascinated, compelled.

A dance poem, an enactment, a one-act play. Perhaps in this piece something visionary, in that there is resolution to the conflict, the paradoxes, in the process of art itself, in the dance of the self.

Self-conscious but daring to anyhow, give everything you’ve got.

The dance of the self within Krishna’s cosmic dance, the spinning painting of us on the canvas, the dance we all share.

-
Without memory, the fragile present disappears.

blog: Rubies in Crystal
art and writings: brendaclews.com
Starfire, an album of poetry performance pieces
(listen, download for free)

direct link: Anansi Hides the Moon

A painting, ‘Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones,’ hanging on a wall. Sunlight moving through wind-waving branches falls through a window onto it. You can also see the shadows of the window itself. That morning I was absorbed watching the light and shadows dancing quietly over the painting and videotaped it. Then, on an evening walk I came across a light on a patio with a thick white gauzy curtain around it, and shot some footage with my iPhone video camera. Later, playing with the footage, I added the billowing curtain and its light next to the painting of doubles and shadows. Then I cut sections of a photograph of the painting out, animated them and added them to the film. Finally, pondering on what I had produced, I wrote a whimsical poem of the African trickster spider god, Anansi, and wove it in with handwritten notes.

It does have a serious theme – can you guess it?

Take a moment to look at the moon.

(An aside: the video as it shaped itself inspired the poem. I made the video and then wrote the poem over a few days, meditating on each tiny section to see what was emerging/wanting to be said. I swear Anansi, the trickster, was loose in my computer, though, since sections of the video kept inexplicably changing while I was working on the text. Eventually I had to use a video I’d made of the footage only for the trickiest text -the opening title- which had repeatedly, every time I tried to lay it on the timeline, caused bizarre things to happen to all the other tracks, like shortening them or making them speed up for small durations, but chaotically and if you fixed this, that went off. Nothing like this has ever happened when I’ve edited a video before. It was as if the components of the video had taken on a life of their own. I kept resorting to the earlier versions FCE saves in ‘the vault’ before using a ‘fixed’ file, the .mov file I uploaded to Vimeo a few days back. These trickster gods do keep us hopping!)

The painting, from chalk drawing to nearly finished, can be viewed here: Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones.
Flute music a very small section of ‘Bodydrama at the Nave‘ by ARTSomerville.
This videopoem was featured at Moving Poems.

Anansi Hides the Moon

Anansi
the spider
dropped
in from
where
African
gods and
goddesses
hang out

Anansi
hid
the moon
behind a
curtain

The sun flickered

The parchment
figures, doubles,
doppelgangers
and clones
barely
noticed

The days
were
sun bright
and the city
was electric
light
at night

Sometimes
it’s
like that
_

From Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones

direct link: Burning Brightly in the Night

Brenda Clews: video, editing, poetry, voice, figure, and mix; music by José Travieso, ‘El Juego de las Atracciones,’ from, “A Retrospective: the early years”: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/41740

I’ve re-done the soundtrack on this video. For inexplicable reason, I said ‘billions’ for the degrees of the sun’s internal temperatures instead of ‘millions’ (in the readings I used). Trying to change a section of voice in a recording is nearly impossible – the timbre of voice, breath, emotion, you can never capture it twice.

So I spent 5 hours on Sunday re-recording and mixing. Then uploaded for 4 hours, only the upload to YouTube failed, for unknown reasons.

Then I went back into the recording, and wow, it was hours of more work trying to balance voice and music without distortion. The video was finally live on YouTube at 2am. What a long day!

The more I learn about sound production the less I realize I know. Back to the manual, I guess. (Apple’s Final Cut Express manual, all 1200 pages of it, is the best – truly a good teacher).

I hope the final product – the video here – is watchable, listenable, and worth smiling over, and pondering over…

A few quick things – the swirling photons are tiny white seasonal lights and their motion is hand-held camera dancing. The figure was of me in Venus Enroute (one of the videos YouTube inexplicably froze for about 8 months after I embedded it at my SoundClick site and began allowing viewcounts only after I complained in a forum so the stats are entirely off).

Because I wanted that video darker, but the tunic to be bright satiny red I masked the figure in an oval matte to boost the red colour, and followed it frame by frame -in FinalCut Express you have to do this sort of thing manually- which took, if I recall, from about 9pm to 5am the next morning, about 8 hours, an intense labour.

You understand I simply couldn’t go through such an exercise for this video, so I dropped that footage in here, then added a mirror filter to it (so there are a couple of figures, multiplicies, ahem, so to speak).

I’ve uploaded a music-only version to Facebook (it’s public, so you can watch if you wish).

The fabulous music is by that very talented, brilliant young Spanish musician, José Travieso, ‘El Juego de las Atracciones,’ from, “A Retrospective: the early years.”

Burning Brightly in the Night

Not an other reality, purified for those who access it through prayer or meditation. Perhaps there is nothing at the centre.

Hovering there.

Like the sun whose winds steal away Venus’ atmosphere.

I don’t know what
your essence is,
or if I could think of you that
way.

Revelations of you.

Can I interrupt my solitude ––– for you?

Our planet of love, stripped by solar winds.

By modulated magnetic and thermal fields of ionized plasma streaming through the inner solar system, causing our auroras, magnetic storms, power failures, this electrified force, its proton furies.

It forms a barrier at the edges. The heliosphere protects us from super-charged sub-atomic particles coming from outside our solar system.

How is this light the light which enables us to see eternal forms? Out of the Platonic cave, blindingly. A mystic’s vision is of the truth beneath the illusion, of a pure reality amidst appearances. Are ideal forms only understood through intuition?

In the combustion, an internal temperature of 15,600,000° Kelvin, or 28,000,000° Fahrenheit.

Tell me the eternal form of you, in that burning star.

©Brenda Clews, Dec 6, 2007

-

The music-only cut that I uploaded to Facebook (the quality is okay, but Facebook has a ways to go to catch up with YouTube I’d say).

A few stills:

(below icons that open to different webpages at my Art & Writings website)

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