COLLABORATION ARCHIVE
Cold Vein (2012)
Performance
Duration: 12 minutes
Cold Vein is a dance through proxy, proposing a lack of adornment as singularity, where one voice vibrates into three.
Choreography: Biba Bell
Sound: Ben Hall
Performances: Detroit Institute of Art (Biba Bell solo), 2012
Roulette (Paige Martin and Christine Elmo duet), 2012
Contemporary Dancing at NADA Fair New York (Tyler Ashley, Biba Bell, Nicole Daunic trio): http://newartdealers.org/Fairs/2013/NewYork/Programs
THE BELLS (2012)
Performance
Duration: 28 mins
THE BELLS traces localized geographies over a choreography, an architecture, a city, excavating the characteristics of daily life.
Performers: Biba Bell, Marianne Brass, Tina Crockett, Jordan Holland, Jason Murphy
Choreography: Biba Bell
Sound: Ben Hall
Performances: Jam Handy Building, Detroit, July 2012, The Garage, San Francisco, July 2012 (solo) , Roulette, Brooklyn, NY, Sept 2012
Mouth w/ Objects (2011)
Performance
Duration: 15 minutes
The mouth can do things without saying so. It makes quiet sounds run across the body, across its objects. This is a process of dancing. They cluster together to create consistency, vibrating and falling in and out of collision. Resisting, it can be an opening—a twisting vacuum, a circular staircase. Speaking, we pull sounds back in and through the body. This is a process of dancing.
Mouth w/ Objects dances things without saying so. The mouth and its objects force ventriloquist moans across the body that stammer and collapse distances of communication.
Choreography and Performance: Biba Bell
Sound: Ben Hall
Performances: Roulette, Brooklyn, Feb and Sept 2012, Picasso Machinery, Brooklyn, Nov 2011
Kilterstase (2009)
Performance, Installation
Duration: 2 hrs
a collaboration with James Coleman of Live Architecture Network
presented by ROLL CALL
Movement Research Festival 2009
Choreography: Biba Bell
Music: Mark McGuire
In Collaboration with Dancers: Nohemi Montzerrat Contreras, Jacqueline Fritz, Ruby MacDougall
Archeography IV at SuperFront Gallery
This dance is working with an idea of vectors of force that traverse space, creating threads of relation and tension between objects, bodies and surrounding structures. The desire is to connect movement to the articulations of a space: a dusty corner, pathway of light or shadow, cluster of furniture, and create movements that follow an elusive map of overlapping seams/edges inside a space and between its objects and bodies. Beginning with the corners of the studio, we've (the dancers) worked to weave a complex web of such invisible relations, responding to them as they cut through the room, imbricating our bodies, guiding and creating tensions with the choreography. Ultimately the architectural installation adds to the layers, transforming the space of Superfront into a mobile, undulating web of vectors, giving us dancers a very material encounter with our preliminary movement concept and imagery.
(easy) PRISM (2007)
Performance
Duration: 20 minutes
Man lives with things mainly, even exclusively--since sentiment and action in him depend upon his mental representations--as they are conveyed to him by language. Through the same act by which he spins language out of himself he weaves himself into it, and every language draws a circle around the people to which it belongs, a circle that can only be transcended in so far as one at the same time enters another one. ~ Wilhelm von Humboldt (from Prisms by Theodor W. Adorno)
Performers: Biba Bell, Gelsey Bell, Will Bowling, Claire Duplantier, Musetta Durkee, Jamm Leary, Ruby MacDougall, and a group of joggers.
Choreography: Biba Bell
music:Fellini's Satyricon sung in mirror canon by Gelsey & Musetta.
I am curious about identity in relationship to another, an intimate other. I am curious as to trait and character, affect and sympathy that are generated in response to another. And what of this other is projection and/or reflection of the self? Is one able to distinguish the self in another – where overlap occurs, where the discretion of the body begins to waver? Furthermore, I am curious as to how this place between, where lack might occur, is inhabited by an alterity of the two selves, envisioned as a space where identities are constantly projected, absorbed, refracted and reflected, where the epidermal layer of self is translucent and transparent, creating a space between the two that acts somewhat like a prism. These bodies might at once be supported in special space by soaring, radiating light - harnessed, generated and expressed by each self in the rise to meet. The energies converging in this space may also have a different temporal life… if the bodies are at once absent, what remains as a trace? Might space be marked or carved by the movement of this dance, invisible yet present?
Properties of a prism:
+ refracts, reflects and disperses light into constituent spectral colors;
+ traditionally a triangle in shape;
+ as light enters it is slowed down and bent;
+ acts like a mirror;
+ polarizes light.
easy prism began as a piece that explored the relationships between repetition, contemplation, contraction and habit as described by Gilles Deleuze in his essay “Repetition for Itself.”
easy prism is compiled of phrases that I have been dancing for an extended period of time. As the phrases are repeated, specific types of narratives begin to unfold. The structure of narrative may or may not be easily recognizable as the form or the choreography remains relatively constant, persevering through its repetition. It is rather the experience undergone, by dancer, by audience, through time. How apparent this is remains subjective. Dancing these phrases through the months has also shifted, as meaning, impulse, reason, desire and response I procure has changed. The personal context of creating this movement can certainly be underscored by an intensity of emotion… though in line with my formal aesthetic preference, such feeling is refracted off the dance, rather than generated by it as a place of origin. (Here raises the question of where dancer and dance might be distinct.)
easy prism aligns itself with each space within which I find myself dancing: be it a classroom, an entry foyer to an apartment building, a gallery. Through this (re)contextualizing new forms of structure and potential narratives emerge. Feelings change as every day is different. Every step is a new song.
easy prism offers sensation through endurance. The dance does not require a sympathetic audience, or dancer, though it relieves impersonal overtones through sheer physicality.
Raydon (2006)
choreography: Biba Bell
Performers: Aura Fischbeck, Biba Bell, Kalliope Kalombratsos
Video: Dillon de Give
a dance in two parts.
first part:
invisible signals. telepathic communication. the radio waves of ships crossing the ocean, signaling to the land dwellers of their experience, their arrival. we are listening. the dancers are listening. tune in. we are responding, speaking too. we use a peripheral focus to acknowledge one another, to acknowledge these imminent signals.
this is a story of the inner world. we go into our private spaces and communicate to the beyond, to the beings out there. we are not for sale.
second part:
the performance has begun. the dancers rehearsed they're ready, the dance is given, it's taken, it is performed and alive alive. we are right here, right here in the room. in the warehouse. there is no stage, but presence on part of the performer brings existance up a notch. like that of the archtype, the rock star; the spot light makes it happen. the dance is the spotlight, the performer, the gaze, all in one. alive, we dance. here take it, it is for you. raydon.