Yes, I could go for a 3rd viewing...

I've never had much of a desire to watch award shows. Sure, in the back of my mind I register when they're on and I want to see what everyone is wearing and watch the performances, but I don't get all that excited. Unless Idina Menzel is singing at the Tonys or something.


But this year I actually wish I was going to be home to watch the Academy Awards. Because PINA has been nominated for Best Documentary Feature, and I have a strange sense of pride in that fact. I guess this must be how sports fans feel...and to think I always raise an eyebrow when they say "we won"!


PINA was breathtaking...awe-inspiring...best movie of the year...yup all those adjectives that describe so tritely an experience that obviously goes beyond words. Well my capacity for words anyway. 


Go see this film. 

Dancer or not...go see it. Actually I'd like to hijack the next episode of So You Think You Can Dance and broadcast it instead. Those things are like 2 hours long right? Now THAT would truly educate the masses.

I think what struck me most about PINA was not the 3D (which was absolutely brilliant) or the elaborate stagings and beautiful cinematography, but the rawness that underscored all of Pina Bausch's work. It's in her dancers' ability to sit in front of a camera practically motionless, without saying a word, and express the deepness of sorrow in mourning, the complexity of laughing when you want to cry, and the elation of feeling capable of love and filled with strength. It's in her choreography as it always has been, but it's also in the solos created by her dancers, who eulogize her with heartfelt evidence of how dancing for her has peeled away the layers of artifice and left only artistry: human, vulnerable, articulate, captivating.


Anyway I'm gushing. Obviously I want to make a dance film now. I actually always have, and especially since 2009 when I created a dance called Buoyancy on ten UCI undergraduate dancers. It's about my experience working with a community in Nicaragua, and all that they taught me about survival and humanity, and I've always seen it in vignettes. Parts of it happening in the shallows of a river, others in the dirt roads of a tiny village, still others in a landfill that is juxtaposed hauntingly with the beautiful and awesome natural force of a smouldering volcano in the background...someday!


Thanks for the inspiration Pina...now and always. And come this Sunday, GO TEAM MODERN DANCE!!!


<3 Claire