Category Archives: Colleagues & Friends

Facepainting Event: Modern Art Faces in Philly – Pt.1: Britt

We had a wonderful day on Saturday at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. The weather was perfect, the streets crowded with people and the event was extraordinary. While I was performing my storytelling show, we had a team of facepainters transforming the crowd with faces to suit the theme of Paris of 1910-1920 — faces based on the Modern Artists that themselves transformed what painting and sculpture looked like in that fertile, creative time in Paris. Our company was hired for the event by The Kimmel Center and the facepainting was free for the public, so the lines were long. The crowd, though, was in a great mood all day, despite the wait, and people were very receptive and excited about being turned into Modern Art.

Britt painting a face using a detail of fabric patterns from a Matisse painting

Here are a collection of faces from one of our company, Britt. Each of our artists brings their own style and interpretation to the Transformation Facepainting concept. I continue to admire Britt’s use of soft colors and the expressive  quality of her brush strokes. I feature her today because I feel her approach to this theme captured the spirit of the artists that inspired our faces for this event in a way I can learn from.

from Picass Head 1961

Picasso inspired bird face

from Monet's Women with Parasol

Monet waterlilies - an idea that inspired several faces

Monet's painting of a sunset in Venice

Monet inspired Paris scene - Eiffel Tower

Another of Britt's take on Monet-esque Eiffel Tower

Monet's garden, with footbridge

from a Max Ernst painting

from one of Matisse's gold fish paintings, again Britt used a detail of a famous painting to craft the face design

from Paul Klee painting

from a Gauguin painting

from an Andre Derain painting: "The Dance"

taking other elements from an Andre Derain painting: "The Dance"

Thank you, Britt, for such an expressive contribution to our collective art at PIFA.

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Ver Veris — The Evolution of Civilization

A fascinating video from a young friend, Tzintzun Aguilar:

“A symbolic synthesis of the history of mankind composed of clips taken from old black and white documentaries. Though the images may not be modern, they are edited in rhythmic sequences to express current themes. 

Simbólico resumen de la historia de los seres humanos, compuesto por clips tomados de viejos documentales en blanco y negro, editados de tal forma que expresen temas actuales.”

Tzintzun is the son of one of my mentors, Sigfrido Aguilar — a master of physical theater. Sigfrido’s teachings on the universal language of physicality, of synthesis of content, and of the use of the abstract/concrete to add resonance to imagery, these are concepts that imbue all my work, visual and theatrical. To learn more about his Estudio Busqueda de Pantomima-Teatro, located on a mountainside in beautiful Valenciana, Guanajuato in Mexico, visit:

http://www.pantomimetheater.org

The view from Valenciana, with the city of Guanajuato in the valley below

The Nuba Bird Dance at Bodies Alive! – Nao Dance Collective

The Nuba Bird Dance, performed by the Nao Dance Collective as part of our Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) in Orlando, 2008 — in black and white bodypaint designs based on the analytical sketches of James C. Faris in his book "Nuba Personal Art"

by Christopher Agostino

The underlying creative intention behind Bodies Alive! was to explore how movement and performance can bring bodyart to life, so we sought to create a modern dance piece inspired by bodypainting. In any previous opportunities I’d had to bodypaint dancers for performance my task was to create designs to support an existing theme and concept. For this dance the makeup design came first.

Nao Dance Collective  http://www.naodance.com/  is a structured improvisational company under the direction of Linda Eve Elchak — just the kind of group we were looking for to create a brand new piece for a single performance. We discussed the project and I sent the music, sketches for the bodypainting and some insight about the functional effect of this type of tribal bodyart: that the use of hard-edged  geometric designs is intended to break the human form and destroy recognizable individual identity, and thereby create a new unified tribal identity. I suggested the dancers could take advantage of this visual confusion by contrasting movement as a group with movement as individuals. From that, they created the piece. It was thrilling for me to see what these elements had led to in the rehearsal before the Orlando show. We didn’t paint them for the rehearsal, so they had some concerns about what performing in bodypaint would be like, particularly if they had to be careful not to smudge it by touching each other — and I reassured them that I wanted the paint to be alive, to change and to smear and to transfer from one dancer to another as it would in a tribal dance.

The dancers were painted by a group of experienced bodypainters following my designs (see their foto below, and the video of the bodypainting room). Bodies Alive! required the participation of dozens of models and performers, along with teams of designers, painters and assistants — a resource we might only have found at an event like the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) http://www.fabaic.com/ , celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this year, and I will be there again.

Putting the music together for this piece involved some serendipity. Although I wanted something tribal, I was taking these body designs so far out of their original context that I didn’t want anything directly connected to the Nuba or African culture. The chant is listed as “Kecak: The Ramayana Monkey Chant  from Bali” on a cd of Indonesia music from Nonesuch Records‘ Explorer Series  http://www.nonesuch.com/artists/explorer-series-indonesia Once you hear it, it stays with you. I had it stuck in my head for this, but didn’t think it was enough to build the dance around and was looking for alternatives when I heard “Surfer Bird” by The Trashman on Bob Dylan’s radio show. The pieces fit, the rhythm was right and there is that iconic Nuba face design of the ostrich over the eye to seal the deal.

See the previous post, and search “Nuba” on this site for more information.

Nuba Bird Dance Painters: Paola Paredes-Shenk, Leah Reddell, Kerry Ann Smith, Diane and Theresa Spadola, Pam Trent, Jeff Edney, Deidre MacDonald

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

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