It's been a long time

We shouldn't have left you, without some dope beats we step to. I don't know about you, but I am in full and total support of this Balkan beat movement, epitomized by the music of Zach Condon and his band Beirut. Here is a clip from the latest version (2.0) of La Spectra where Movementpants simultaneously embraces his music and ourselves as fools. And if the below is not enough, here's pt.II, III, and IV.

Nasty Nas in her area

Welcome to the latest edition of Movementpants' spotlight on talent! Nasim is a Movementpants collaborator. She is half Iranian and half Polish and plays the guitar. She also, until recently, had a wonderfully mysterious apartment in Crown Heights. It was the type of place where one could get lost in spacetime and yet feel completely at home in two places at the same time. Also, she had wonderful furniture, including some fabulous antique Persian rugs, that she displayed without any shame whatsoever. Here is a video that seeks to simultaneously capture the captivating disorientation of Nasim's former apartment and her shameless enjoyment of it's manipulation. Bon Apetit!

SO Lucky

Movementpants has been performing on fairly consistent basis these days. However, with fans all over the world, and the nature of live performance being such that unless you are there the moment it is happening, you can't see it, many of our fans have been unable to see our performances. Many other live performance companies and artists have the same problem, so they document, or live-stream it or come up with other ways to engage their audience (as I've mentioned in a previous post...remember, only 80% of what you read here is bullsh*t). These efforts, while mildly engaging, never really seem to capture the feeling of actually BEING there, experiencing the event live, watching us respond to music in real time. You know, dance. That dance performance thing. Well, it turns out we, Movementpants, and our fans, are extremely lucky, because we have Anne. Anne is extremely talented. One of her talents is cinematography. Another is live Foley effects. Check out some of her work below, and feel what it's like to be....IN Movementpants! Oh, and don't worry if you don't get it...you kind of had to be there.

WILM 690

Coming this summer to the Brick Theater's "Antidepressant Festival", WILM 690, Pirate Radio.


Music by Chris Becker off his cd "Saints and Devils".

Man and Crane

The consciousness of styles

Today, as I was riding my bike with a friend back from dance class, I noticed that she was wearing green socks. Being St. Patrick's day, I assumed that she had worn them for that very reason and said so. She replied that actually, it was completely random and that she didn't even know it was St. Patrick's day when she put them on. I told her that I believed that she believed that was the case, but that sub-consciously she must have wanted to wear those socks. She said "maybe." Now I'd like to remark that generally I strongly dislike it when people tell other people why they sub-consciously do something or other. My subconscious, as far as I can tell, is just doing it's thing, as I'm sure everyone else's is, and no matter what claims I make to understanding its operations, I'm surprised by it daily. Anyway,I looked closer at the socks and noticed that they had little sheep all over them. As i laughed about that, she proceeded to tell me that stitched on socks are the words "Made in Ireland", and that those socks had been hand delivered to her from Ireland. At this point, I knew that I was wrong. Her subconscious had nothing to do with it. I realized that it was the consciousness of the socks, in fact, that forced themselves to the top of the sock drawer and called my friends reaching hand toward them.

So then, I came home and White Nights was on TV. I hadn't seen it since it came out, and so I decided to watch. There are a couple of scenes where both Gregory Hines and Misha have solo dance sequences, each excellent in case you needed me to remind you. Then about 3/4s of the way through, they have this scene. I began to think about the consciousness of a dance style, how it reproduces and propogates itself. And then I thought about two dance styles making love and then having a love child, and 24 years later that love child growing into manhood and becoming this...

Upcoming...get involved

Movementpants will be performing "La Spectra" at the the Tank on April 23rd and 24th at 9:30 pm. We've been working on this piece for over a year, experimenting, researching, playing and performing, and are very excited to be able to finally premiere it in NY this spring. But, we're not there yet. Indeed, we are still working days and nights. If you don't know, the new thing with dance companies is for them to post video of their rehearsals. Well, we are, according to ourselves, a dance company, and who are we go against the flock. So here's some of our last rehearsal where we hyped up what used to be a duet and made it a trio.

Another new thing with dance comapnies is to engage their audience in new ways. Why? Since they are a part of theater,and theater is dead (that's what they say anyway...if you don't believe me go check out "Really Bad Plays: 1 night, 8 awful plays" at New York Theater Workshop this Thursday night (3/5/09)), everybody is scrambling to keep they're loyal audiences engaged in between performances. Hence, blogs...rehearsal footage...remixing dances...and this. So, for our upcoming show, we are taking suggestions for songs for warm up numbers. You know, dance numbers to get your audience juices flowing. Just e-mail us your suggestion, or include it in a comment on this post. All entries received by March 21st will be entered into a lottery drawing and the first song chosen will have a dance made for our show in late April. There's only one criteria for your entry. It must be 3-5 minutes in length. And it must be a song...no soundscapes of you going to the bathroom like we received last time. So holler at us!!