Re: Kate Bush's Videos

[blblbl!henrik@WONKO.MIT.EDU (Larry DeLuca)]

> From: blblbl!henrik@WONKO.MIT.EDU (Larry DeLuca)

>> I really respect her as a musical artist, but frankly she's a
>> *terrible* choreographer (though I will admit that her cinematic
>> view
>> 					larry...

> [ Well, you don't have to like Kate's choreography, but that certainly
>   doesn't make it "terrible".  It's certainly unique, and that alone
>   is worth a whole lot.  -- |>oug ]

It's not unique at all.  First of all, the poor girl is hell-bent on
symmetry.  Doris Humphrey, in her book _The Art of Making Dances_
(required reading for anyone *anywhere* in the arts) says, "Symmetry
is death.".  She's right.  For when you know that every movement done
on the left will be exactly repeated on the right, boredom sets in
quickly.  Much of the excitement of dance comes in surprise.

Second, her approximation of the choreographic art is crude, at best.
Her efforts (especially in early videos -- the reader is referred here
to "Wuthering Heights" ("It's me your Cathy I've come home and I'm so
cold"), "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" ("Oh, I'm so worried
about my man"), "Wow", ("Hitting the Vaseline" -- here I refer to the
_The Single File_ compilation and not to _The Whole Story_, which
features a different video composed of her concert footage from the
_Live at the Hammersmith Odeon_ tape)) are more akin to pantomime --
much telling of the story and repitition of things already said in the
song.

Dance is a compressed language.  It will, at its best, make clear new
inroads of interpretation and understanding.  However, the
choreography in the early videos (even up to the loathsome "Suspended
in Gaffa" -- a huge disappointment as it's one of my *very* favorite
songs and deserved a *much* better treatment than it got in the video
-- it was seeing that video again after slaving over my videodisk
player with a warped disk for four hours that made me write my first
posting) doesn't serve to do anything other than weakly mirror the
words in most cases.

Kate Bush's choreography is hardly unique.  I see reams of the same
stuff put on little girls in their first jazz classes because they are
too young to learn anything more complex or their
teachers/choreographers just aren't very good.  As a choreographer
myself, I have found a lot of Kate Bush's music inspirational (I'm
working on "This Woman's Work" right now -- to be presented in early
September, and have also started drafting ideas for "The Ninth Wave")
but really feel she's never realized the potential (or even come close
to it) herself.

I hope the trend I've seen in _Hair of the Hound_ continues -- she's
improved quite a bit, and letting other people do some of it has
helped.  She still needs to give up symmetry almost altogether -- she
can say a lot more without it.

					larry...