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Justin Peck's THE DECALOGUE with Music by Sufjan Stevens


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We now get a brief look at Justin Peck's THE DECALOGUE with Music by Sufjan Stevens at NYC Ballet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7jXp0qFz0Y

The video has a great 1940s Modernist feel to it - reminds me of two Maya Deren shorts:

A Study In Choreography For Camera (1945)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9D3e12rq9c&spfreload=10

Ritual in Transfigured Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKyYI7i3FVM&spfreload=10

I just hope that the full ballet is able to retain some of this feel. But who knows what it will really be like?

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Thanks for posting the Maya Deren films, pherank, and pointing out the similarities. Deren was very influential when I was in film school – there was that Botticelli image of her on the cover of Film Culture that you'd see pinned up as a poster in dorms and apts. Didn't realize she worked with Anais Nin (brief shot of Nin at 2:40 in "Ritual in Transfigured Time"). Beautiful series of cuts of the dancer at the end of "Study." 

 

Peck's film looks as if it was shot on real film stock which is great. Perhaps the beginning of a "slow" dance film movement: without color, without digital, without Steadycam?

Edited by Quiggin
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2 hours ago, Quiggin said:

Peck's film looks as if it was shot on real film stock which is great. Perhaps the beginning of a "slow" dance film movement: without color, without digital, without Steadycam?

 

Reminds me a bit of the photographs of George Platt Lynes.

 

Although it's impossible to tell from this video what the true character of the ballet is like, I found it encouraging to see that Peck might actually be using moments of slow interplay, and choreography for the arms, hands, perhaps even the fingers! Glory hallelujah! It may not be only bodies hurtling through the air at fastest possible speed. Maybe he's starting to develop a deep vocabulary of the musculature of the body.

Or not.

 

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