Laban's Ikosaeder
A man dances nude inside and touches all the points.
by Jack Bowman - 2007
BERLIN - In 1919, Laban started a dance theater. He borrowed ideas from the Futurist and others but did not give them credit. The Futurist themselves were obsessed with space and time. Depero's drawing of "Mechanical Ballet with Music" of 1924 followed Laban but Balla's drawing of "movement of Actors" in 1914 preceded him. Valentine De Saint-Point performed a dance in Paris in 1913 where math equations were projected onto the walls. Valentine De Saint-Point was also the author of the "Manifesto of Lust" that was released in 1913.
In the early 1930's Rudolf Laban was the director of the Allied State Theaters of Berlin. He survived in early Nazi Berlin because of his racist ideas. In 1933 he threw out all his non-Aryan ballet students. But by 1936 he fell out of favor.
| Today most scholars credit Rudolf von Laban with the founder of German Expressive Dance. His invention, the Ikosaeder, or Space-crystal was to define the space that surrounds a dancers body. |
Laban's Ikosaeder A man dances nude inside and touches all the points. |
DAYTON -
| In July of 1993 I was the Artist in residence
at Dayton's Visual Art Center. While there I was given a studio and I did a
lot of my work on geometric shapes as well as insects. These were combined
as well as individually emphasized in my later works. During this
performance I was to take the SeaCity kids and create a performance art
piece. It was the Super Code. It used bees, dance, anarchy, math, evolution
and the tetrahedron. The students were excellent. The performance, although
a little obscure 14 years later, laid out math as a performance medium in
Dayton.
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THE SUPERCODE performed at the Dayton Visual Art Center. SUPER CODE VIDEO CLIP |
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Dr. Jack explaining "Jack's Theorem" where you take any two positive numbers, run them through the formula and you will always get the answer three. This photo was from the performance at the Front Street Warehouse Artists complex in Dayton Ohio. |
A short video clip of the Dance associated with JACK'S THEOREM AND THE PRIMAL THOUGHT |
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POWER OF PERCEPTION performed by Laurana Wong at the Sideshow II in Dayton Ohio. For a five minute video made by Braille in .wmv format. |
Laurana Wong says about her art, "The
Power of Perception is an account of how I tangled with The American
Dream. I originally intended it to be about control. That's how the wooden
contraption came into existence inside my head. I wanted to physically
represent how applying control can have unexpected and undesirable results.
As I built the machine and began to choose other props, it became evident
that this was a story about me. I used to have a job as an Electrical Engineer. I had a house in The Oregon District. I had 30 movie channels on my TV. I was an excellent consumer. I supported myself by living a life that American society encourages. A "normal" life. But, all of the energy that I used in trying to achieve freedom was actually hampering it. I wasn't happy. I was living someone else's story. I didn't trust myself enough to create my own life..." |
