The heart-tearing video made on cell phones by the Iran protestors is cinema of the body. The body of unqenchable spirit. Not watching. The actor and camera the same. Almost no separation between action being seen and action behind camera. Toal participation. To reveal the truth from the gut. This is cinemabody in its most real and truthful sense. Laying their bodies on the line while videotaping. But can we even call it cinema? It’s overpowering communication in the middle of life or death reality. The gap between us here sitting watching on TV and the people on the streets in Teheran is something i don’t have words for. That we can’t do anything. But it’s unforgettable because of those videos. Sitting here watching yet plunged into the center through our eyes. Yet from the vantage of total safety while they’re risking their lives. Perhaps these videos will make a change.

Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek

It was very moving to see Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek. Until then I couldn’t associate the man who made the photographs for Spirit In The Flesh with Spock. Now I can. His voice was laden with his deep commitment and identification with the deepest meaning of Star Trek.  Perhaps it is: putting us in direct contact with the cosmos, and through this encounter putting us in relationship to each other and to encountering the unkown in ourselves. He is the still center in the wild, careening film. The heartbeat behind the scenes.

One of the amazing things about Kabbalah is placing human life in relation to the cosmos. The Shekhina is the link between cosmos, the animation, the spirit of our world and the residing of spirit within us.  The Shekhina is the healing power in the world.I felt that in making Spirit In The Flesh and felt it in Leonard’s words and in his face. Spock was no longer  Spock the first officer but the Wise Old Man with the healing power of unity within him, uniting future and past, uniting planets, uniting the two main characters by uniting feeling with logic. 

The Vulcan greeting is the sign for the Hebrew letter, the “Shin”, which is the first letter of the word “Shekhina”.  It goes back to Leonard’s childhood in Brooklyn  - in the Synagogue when the priests, the Kohanin, would call the Shekhina to enter the temple. Nimoy relates how his father told him no one could look as the light from the Shekhina was too powerful to behold. But he looked and saw the Kohanin with their arms outsetreched, in ecstacy, their hands in rhe sign of the Shin. So he chose that sign as the Vulcan greeting. 

In some of Nimoy’s Shekhina photographs, the women have the Shin written  on them, sometimes like  tatoo, sometimes the letter printed as if on their palm reaching out to us, sometimes floating in space above them. A sign of power, of magic, or a brand of yhe sacred upon the body? Uniting the female body with divinity.

At the end of Spirit in The Flesh I have one of the dancers, Andrea Beeman, standing covered with a black shawl, making herself the middle prong of the “Shin” Vulcan greeting, then she spins, with the real cosmos as see by the Hubble telescope on the film screen behind her and embedded in the stars, one of Nimoy’s photographs, a star-women, looking down in blessing. the worlds united- going where no woman has gone before.

In Star Trek Nimoy seemed a messenger from a timeless realm beyond. The future beyond death. Or reincarnation? Certainly a visitation of blessing for us. For us to feel. A most un-Spock-like wish.  And he isn’t an alien destructive creature form beyond, but  a visitation of  ourselves from beyond putting us in contact with ourselves beyond ourselves.

Cinemabody

Cinemabody is short for “Cinema Of The Body”.

Cinemabody is this blogsite. And its my new company for the film, multimedia and installations I make.  And it’s a whole area of cinema I feel part of and wish to support in any way I can.

It’s not cinema about the body. It’s cinema which is the body. And how the expression of the body as cinema can give kinesthetic vision to all that we can’t see and generally regard as separate from the body, but which I see as coming through the body – Cinema Of The Body And Spirit.

I use dancers. I was a dancer. I know that dancers can accomplish this “magical” expression. The body moves. Dance moves. Cinema moves. But my cinemabody isn’t about dance, just as film actiong isn’t about acting. It’s about everything else. As many great actors say, real film acting is invisible. And just as film actors can reveal thought, emotion, intention, even lgith andcdarkenss through the face, so can some dancers – film dancers – through the body.

For me, good film dancing is caught up in the invisible rather than itself and its own image. I’m not interested in the identifiable image of the dancer. Cinema of the body is not ‘dance for camera”. It’s the dance of cinema itself, for me a dance of the essence of our being as humans, through the human body’s expression.

Uniting that cinema of the body with live dance is my one of my current challenges, especially in the new 40 minute Spirit In The Flesh,which I wrote about in December and January when it was in progress, and which I’ll now start to write of.

Spirit in The Flesh is inspired by and based on actor (now also a photographer) Leonard Nimoy’s wonderful photography book, “Shekhina”. Infact the title,”Spirit In The Flesh” are words of Leonard’s taken from his book which express his photographic visualization of the “Shekhina” – Kabbalah’s  divine female spirit which dwells with us – are seen on the large screen. My editor, George Engleos,and I,  transformed them with motion imparting techiques, into what I call “photo-cinema”.  in “spirit/Flesh”, this photo-cinema is on the large screen, united – melded – with live dance, spoken word – Nimoy’s and other from his book- and  music by John Zorn; plus Zahava Seewald &Michael Grebil;  Oren Ambarchi and z’ev, all on John’s label, Tzadik.

Leonard’s photographs are a little known part of his being and work, compared with Spock, and seem separate from Spock. But I eventually think I found links between his Shekhina photographs and his participation in Star Trek.

I took a long break from blogging after the 40 minute “Spirit in The Flesh”  was presented at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space in Manhattan,NY, last January. it was presented with some of the films from my cinema-dance cycle, “Club Midnight” (visit www.clubmidnight.net). 

The response was great, so we’ll be doing it again. With live performance integrated with the Club Midnight films. With more work on “Spirit/Flesh”.  And the premiere a new piece for video and live performance, MUSeic Of The BODy: For Nam June Paik, which came out of a past  dual Paik/Greenfield video and live dance performance  piece, which was named a Best in the Arts & Entertainment in dance in The New York Times by Jennifer Dunning.

I’ll write about all that as it comes  along. And about others’ work. But right now I wish to write about Spirit In The Flesh.

So -more tomorrow or Friday.

I feel blessed to be visioning upon Leonard Nimoy’s vision. And it’s  a visionary experience. Not coming from my own root material but his i find my inner and outer vision going in new unexpected directions. he says his Shekhina photographs are the envisioning of the invisible and my piece has come out of close-eyed visioning.

I haven’t met Leonard only communicated with him through his photo rep and gallery and right-hand-man, Rich Michelson. But I feel I know a generally hidden side of him through his photographs and his book. I  work with him through his spirit in the photographs. And i more and more find myself feeling in contact with my mother’s spirit and also of Hilary Harris’. Hilary was my mentor in film editing and then lent himself to my accomplishing my own vision by becoming my cinematographer. Hilary was a wonderful experimental and documentary filmmaker yet he never imposed his vision only lent himself to mine. His film Nine Variations On A Dance Theme is a film anyone who care about cinema and dance   -or about exrtraordinary cinema of the body. It’s perhaps the most perfect flm dance (or if you will cine dance or if you will screen dance) ever made.  when my Club Midnight:Flesh into Light shows are over I’ll write more about it.

What else can one write about today , Obama’s inauguration day?  Going through Manhattan today there was a feeling of release and buoyant hope and expectation swirling in the air, around us all. When I got on the ferry one of the guys who works on the ferry said, “Bush isn’t presisent anymore. We have a new president.” Like -”thank God.”

One of my two cats is very very ill. She’s 19. I never thought she’d walk again. But tonight she suddenly got up and walked! Now I can breathe again.

The Shekhina is a healing female power in a broken world. When i told Tasha this she said she thinks of dance as putting together the broken pieces. Maybe that’s why some of us are compelled to dance, aren’t sane without it. Maybe that’s why we’re doing “Spirit in The Flesh”.

re Spirit in the Flesh in which i transform Leonard Ninoy’s photography series and book into large screen cinema-photo joined with dance, music, spoken word.

We have just two weeks more until the shows of Club Midnight:Flesh into Light, at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater of Symphony Space, 1/30 and 31 (if you’d like to come, go to www.symphonyspace.org!)

I haven’t been able to blog because one of my cats is ill and in the animal hospital and deserved my devotion But she is being taken care of, and today my great editor, George Englezos, and I did the final final screen edit for Spirit In The Flesh. The piece is 40 minutes long. When I first started on Spirit in The Flesh,  i thought there was only enough material to sustain 15 or 20 minutes. But then i delved into Leonard’s photographs – the images themselves, the insight INTO them that the amazing digital motion computer techniques make possible – the mysterious metaphysics of MEANINGS behind the photographs and their relationship to the words in this book from ancient and modern sources, plus his own words. And i felt and feel the ten year journey of insight and realization it took for Leonard to make the photographs and the book out of them. Then riches spilled out and there were almost too visions to realize of my own in relation to the photographs. So now i could go on and on.

It is such a great, rare blessed privilege to be divining the mind, the sensibility of Leonard Nimoy. He is such a generous person to be allowing me this freedom to make his vision part of my own. Thank you Leonard Nimoy!

the dance of spirit in the flesh Tasha Taylor and John Zorn

on Spirit In The Flesh, a multimedia performance which unites Leonard Nimoy’s sacred nude photography of dancers as Spirit in the Flesh with dance (lit by the photography moving on the large screen) music by John Zorn and the “Dance of the Veils” from 1917 Diva film Fantasia Satanica.The full evening of mulimedia,  CLub Midnight:Flesh into light will be at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater, Symphony Space,
nuary 30 & 31.

Our new dancer, Tasha Taylor is a Bessie Award-winner for her work with Rosanne Spralin I can see why she has won a Bessie! She combines years of exquisite technique which she’s made her own, with a depth which regiesters meaniing through both the simplest movements to wild and complex. She is truly spirit in the flesh.Today I worked on the section of “Spirit In The Flesh” with Tasha  which comes from the words from Leonard’s Shekhina book, a poem by Norma Farber which starts “Demon of tenderness, Shekhina accessible…” which traces her descent. Like most of the other section it is to amazing John Zorn Masada string music. How his music gives expression to Leonard’s Shekhina photographs and our Shekhina dance. His music is an inspiration, as is the rich voice/music of Zohara, and the mystery of “Spirit Transform Me” by “Oren and z’ev.

I learn more about the Shekhina, from the great 20th century philosopher/scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Sholem. There are two Sehkhinas in Kabbalism: the one which is ‘”above”, is the active creative flow of the universe – a female creativity. The one “below” is in creation itself. our world. The spirit with us. Dwelling. Both come from wisdom, is associated with wisdom (usually a male attribute?).

The Heavens are Dancing

Today worked on screen inages for The Heavens Are Dancing – the new Hubble telescope-scapes. They are dazzling. Set in motion, a few of the most beautiful, with pulsating deep space “suns”, will be on the screen in the finale of Spirit In The Flesh. Nimoy writes that in Kabbalah the origin of creation came about because a tiny point of light after the infinite power withdrew to make room for creation. only tiny point filled a vessel. the energy was too great and broke the vessel and sent shards of broken light careening through space. The latest creation-of-universe theory coming from Hawking and colleagues is similar – one tiny point led to the big bang. Kabbalah postulates worlds beyond worlds – and we’re now glimpsing worlds beyond worlds through the Hubble telescope. Nimoy grew up with Jewish mysticism. I’m coming to understand the connection between his Shekhina and Star Trek selves. And that connection is made ecstatically i hope in the finale of Spirit In The Flesh. Hope you NYC guys can come – 1/30 or 31.go to www.symphonyspace,org.

BlogCatalog

Today I met with Sarah Timberlake,  my fine costume-maker, in the garment district. Looking for fabrics is one of my favorite activities. We found a white stretch jersey material which lies along the whole body like a glove, for Andrea’s costume for the”screen dance” section of Spirit In The Flesh, in which she “becomes” a  screen, wielding a large piece of material as she flows back and forth across the screen images, lit only by the projector. A human screen. The images seem to come out onto the stage and dance not only on her but with her. Andrea’s “screen dance” becomes the integrating force of the Shekhina, uniting a collage of Leonard’s images even as they dissolve into movement. One of Nimoy’s – and our -  Shekhina’s attributes is to unite opposites without judgment. What is sacred; what is profane? An anonymous text from Nimoy’s book  is called “Thunder: Perfect Mind.” It is from an ancient manuscript found in Egypt in 1945. The narrator is the voice of  an omniscent female power who seems to be  Semitic and Egyptian and Greek:

“I am the first and the last . . . I am the honored one and the scorned one . . .I am the whore and the holy one . . .I am the mother and the daughter . . . I am the union and the dissolution . . . i am the one who cries out, and I listen.”