Cleo Mees - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Cleo Mees

Dancefilm muddles the paradigms that would position film as an order of production controlling al... more Dancefilm muddles the paradigms that would position film as an order of production controlling all cinematic motion (including camera movement, film speed, editing etc.), and dance as motion, liberated and encompassing any-movement-whatever. David Hinton and Siobhan Davies’ experimental film, All This Can Happen (2013), draws text, image, and edit together via a poetics that is of the order of the choreographic. In a dialogue that echoes the collaborative spirit of the film, Erin Brannigan and Cleo Mees explore the corporeal and choreographic sensibilites at work in All This Can Happen, recognizing dynamics of breath and weight in various aspects of the film’s composition, including the movements of the bodies on screen, the qualities of the edit, and the text of Robert Walser’s original novella (on which the film is based). In exploring these corporeal-cinematic qualities, the authors work across and soften the dance-film binary described above.

Writing Dancing is a collective of artists, academics, students and writers who have met once a m... more Writing Dancing is a collective of artists, academics, students and writers who have met once a month since Stephen Muecke and Erin Brannigan’s ‘Finding the Right Language for Your Practice’ workshop that Critical Path held in collaboration with UNSW in 2010. We have a responsive, organic and non-outcome focused approach that is centered on writing exercises brought to the group from elsewhere or devised by group members that encourage writing towards, about, around and alongside dancing. Sometimes this involves us in dancing too. We also respond to particular writing briefs that participants put forward (succinct by-lines, responses to live works, feedback on writing), do some shared reading (for example the Language poets), and also discuss current work, programs, pedagogy and politics associated with Dance. Sometimes artists just talk about their current projects. The group is about community as well as work.

This issue of Critical Dialogues aims at sharing some of the writing strategies we have been deploying, some outcomes from those processes, and some of the ideas that shape our work. However, it is not without a sense of irony that we put forward this issue – the well designed, explicitly set-out record in black and white that a publication such as this involves in many ways runs contrary to the non-outcome focused, in-the-moment, generative kinds of writing that we normally pursue. In cataloguing a list of writing exercises we have engaged in since 2010, we found ourselves searching sketchy notes and dimmed memories, asking ‘When was that? Who did that?’ The examples of writing included here, while true transcriptions, have also gone through a translation process of context, fragments written on scraps of paper and excavated out of old notebooks never originally meant for display or publication.

Dancefilm muddles the paradigms that would position film as an order of production controlling al... more Dancefilm muddles the paradigms that would position film as an order of production controlling all cinematic motion (including camera movement, film speed, editing etc.), and dance as motion, liberated and encompassing any-movement-whatever. David Hinton and Siobhan Davies’ experimental film, All This Can Happen (2013), draws text, image, and edit together via a poetics that is of the order of the choreographic. In a dialogue that echoes the collaborative spirit of the film, Erin Brannigan and Cleo Mees explore the corporeal and choreographic sensibilites at work in All This Can Happen, recognizing dynamics of breath and weight in various aspects of the film’s composition, including the movements of the bodies on screen, the qualities of the edit, and the text of Robert Walser’s original novella (on which the film is based). In exploring these corporeal-cinematic qualities, the authors work across and soften the dance-film binary described above.

Writing Dancing is a collective of artists, academics, students and writers who have met once a m... more Writing Dancing is a collective of artists, academics, students and writers who have met once a month since Stephen Muecke and Erin Brannigan’s ‘Finding the Right Language for Your Practice’ workshop that Critical Path held in collaboration with UNSW in 2010. We have a responsive, organic and non-outcome focused approach that is centered on writing exercises brought to the group from elsewhere or devised by group members that encourage writing towards, about, around and alongside dancing. Sometimes this involves us in dancing too. We also respond to particular writing briefs that participants put forward (succinct by-lines, responses to live works, feedback on writing), do some shared reading (for example the Language poets), and also discuss current work, programs, pedagogy and politics associated with Dance. Sometimes artists just talk about their current projects. The group is about community as well as work.

This issue of Critical Dialogues aims at sharing some of the writing strategies we have been deploying, some outcomes from those processes, and some of the ideas that shape our work. However, it is not without a sense of irony that we put forward this issue – the well designed, explicitly set-out record in black and white that a publication such as this involves in many ways runs contrary to the non-outcome focused, in-the-moment, generative kinds of writing that we normally pursue. In cataloguing a list of writing exercises we have engaged in since 2010, we found ourselves searching sketchy notes and dimmed memories, asking ‘When was that? Who did that?’ The examples of writing included here, while true transcriptions, have also gone through a translation process of context, fragments written on scraps of paper and excavated out of old notebooks never originally meant for display or publication.