More 'Alexis Investigates dance and visual arts' Article four: Catching movement, painter Peter Lanyon now live on Dance UK website

Here is an excerpt:

I first came across Peter Lanyon's paintings over ten years ago. At the time I had a conundrum, I was looking at a career in the visual arts but my natural affinity was with moving in the world, not looking at it. My only arena for this was ballet and I was awful at it, my teacher often having to disguise her horror at my imprecise joy in throwing myself around. There were no release based contemporary dance classes on the Isle of Wight where I had grown up or things may have been different. I spent a lot of time outdoors on the beach and I wanted to paint how it felt to physically be in landscape, rather than what it looked like viewed from a fixed point. Lanyon did just that and I felt such an affinity with him that at 18, I made a decision. I moved 300 miles away from home to experience what he had, paint what he had, and immerse myself in his homeland, Cornwall. I was subsequently reffered to by critic Max Andrews in New York Arts Magazine as part of the St.Ives New School (read the article here). Tate St. Ives has recently held a restrospective of Lanyon's work called Peter Lanyon, which ran from October 2010 to the end of January 2011.

Read the full article on the Dance UK website here:

www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-dance-and-visual-arts-article-four-catching-movement-painter-peter-lanyon/

www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/797558/0/1/asc

Picture credit: Peter Lanyon 1918-1964 'Wreck' 1963 Oil on canvas 122 x 183 cm Tate © Estate of Peter Lanyon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2010

Siobhan Davies article re post request from Jade

I have recently been contacted by Jade regarding the article

Alexis Investigates: Dance and Visual Arts. Article One: A Visit to Siobhan Davies Dance Company.

This article is not available online, at www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-dance-and-visual-arts-article-one-visit-siobhan-davies-dance-company/

It was temporarily offline due to a data transfer error .

Apologies to all those of you who have been trying to access it, all back to normal now.

Yvonne Rainer and my divorce from painting

The Big Intensive has been mind shaking so far. Words about that are on the way, in the meantime, Dance UK, the national voice for the dance sector, have published my third article about visual arts and dance.

Here is an excerpt from the article, titled Falling in Love With Another Artform, Yvonne Rainer and My Divorce From Painting:

'As an artist with integrity, you have to be prepared to follow your line of enquiry to the end wherever it may take you. This very situation stared me in the face three years ago, and it was heartbreaking to realise that my love affair with painting was over. After basing my identity, and whole world around striving to be the next great painter, I had fallen for another art form - dance. What is more I wasn’t trained in it and I was 25. However, as anyone who has fallen out of love will know, you just can’t ignore that pull of something that makes you feel life is meaningful again, offering you possibility to move forwards. So in 2008 I shut the studio door, leotard in hand and ran away with dance.

Yvonne Rainer similarly moved from dance to film. She was co-founder of The Judson Church during 1960’s in New York, where she first became intrigued by the relationship between the performer and audience, the political and the private in everyday life. In the 1960’s she rocked the conventions of the dance world, introducing pedestrian movement and using people as props. Her works were task based and looked to the uneducated eye, like someone doing Ballet badly.'

All the three articles and the introductory text that goes with them are collected here on my Artists' Newsletter project blog:

www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/797558

Here is a video of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A in 1978:

Working alongside international artists at Sadler's Wells from the 13 December

I have been invited by Sadler's Wells to be part of this year's Big Intensive from the 13 December 2010. The Big Intensive is a weeklong choreography lab. I will be joining 15 other international artists: Zoi Dimitriou, Mark Smith, Riccardo Buscarini, Charlotte Spencer, Arno Schuitemaker, Yuyu Rau, Linda Remahl, Nic Chalmers, Anna Melander, Lucia Tong, Flora Wellesley Wesley, Robbie Synge, Rachel Birch, Petra Söör, and Elena Jacinta who I trained with in 2008.

A weekend at the Southbank for 'MOVE:Choreographing You'

I am just getting ready to go back to the Southbank for day two of MOVE: Choreoghraphing You, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal.

It has been an inspirational weekend so far, and it is drawing together people currently working in the field. Last night Susan Sentler (Laban and ex Martha Graham), Rosemary Butcher and I stood in the Siberian cold outside discussing the days events until we could stand it no more!

Simone Forti blew me away, rolling down and then up some stairs without changing her dynamic even slightly, and she is 75! More about her here:

Rosemary Butcher's reconstrcution of Alan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 parts, was fascinating and very well done, more about her here: www.rosemarybutcher.com/

Anna Haplrin's show Parades & Changes, Replays, reconstructed by Anne Collard, was spectacular, funny and very high quality. The cast undressed and ripped up huge sheets of paper, furling it round them like a bunch of Reneissance cherubs, with gentleness and joy that I recently saw during a festival hay fight at the Secret Garden Party. More about Anna Halprin Here:

The aesthetic remindeds me of Jessica Stockholder, my favorite artist. More about her here: http://art.yale.edu/JessicaStockholder

I can't wait for more today!

Dance Uk publish my second article about art and dance

www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-dance-and-visual-arts-article-two-coffee-stephanie-rosenthal-curator-move-choreo

Alexis investigates: A coffee with Stephanie Rosenthal, Curator of MOVE Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery. October 2010.

Dance UK publish the first article in my series about art and dance.

http://www.danceuk.org/news/article/alexis-investigates-dance-and-visual-arts-article-one-visit-siobhan-davies-dance-company/

Alexis investigates: A visit to Siobhan Davies Studios. October 2010.