Margie Gillis at Glorious Vintage

I found this absolutely fantastic photo on Flickr:

Photo Scanned from Margie Gillis Booklet (1995 Place des Arts, Montréal Performance) by Glorious Vintage, November 2009.

I absolutely would love to do a shooting like this myself! Any willing North Yorkshire dancers reading this ;-)?

The photograph shows professional dancer Margie Gillis. You can find her biography and more information about her work in the Canadian Encyclopedia. I wonder how often she had to do this jump in order to capture the perfect moment. She has this amazing grace in her movement, which looks just great and gives the picture its dynamic. Margie Gillis was invested as a Member of the ORDER OF CANADA in 1988 and received the Walter Carsen Prize for career achievement in the performing arts in 2008. How cool is that?

I'm not quite sure who the photographer is, since it says on Flickr that the picture was scanned from one of Margie Gillis' own booklets. There is another guy mentioned alongside the photograph, Jack Udashkin. However, he is a bespoke producer of dance and was at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa for 12 years (1988-2000), so he is most likely not the one who took the picture. At the moment, he is developing a project to mount Festival Chaosmos, a biannual international dance festival in Montreal, which began in 2007.

I love her style so much, I just have to post another picture of her, which is on top of that taken by one of my favourite photographers Annie Leibovitz!

Photo by Annie Leibovitz, showing Margie Gillis in "Torn Roots, Broken Branches," choreographed by Margie Gillis

I want a studio!

A Douglas Adams Moment

Sometimes when we encounter something strange, there seems to be a driving force that tries very hard to make it appear to be the most ordinary thing in the world which makes perfect sense (at the time). However, if you remember and think about it later, you might think: "What the hell was that?" or "Did I miss something?".

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me give you an example: last summer holliday, my wife and I were wandering around in a small mediterranean village in Croatia when we found an abandoned house that was inhabited by a cow. My wife discovered the cow when looking through a window and took this photograph:

Photo by Gordana Malicevic, September 2009. View large on Flickr.

We were all excited about the cow standing in what was once a living room and apparently it was eating the sofa (or the straw with which it was stuffed, that was not entirely clear). Since we both find cows are rather cool animals, we watched it for a while and then waited in front of the house with the intention to take another picture when the cow would come out. After a while we got tired of waiting in vain and left.

It was much later back home when I was looking at this picture and I had this Douglas Adams moment; I was (and still am) worried that the poor cow is still there, trapped in that house together with the sofa. Fact is we saw the cow in the house and the picture proves it. The room is quite small and-now that I think about it-the doors of the house are very narrow and small too. In fact, it is astonishing that the cow managed to get in in the first place. However, it is unlikely that the cow is a quantum physicist and in the posession of an Improbability Drive, so it must have gotten in there one or the other usual way through the door.

The question is will the cow get out again? Is there enough room for it to turn around? The problem is that cows cannot walk backwards, at least not the common ones! Will the straw from the sofa keep it healthy and alive until I can check on it next year?

If you now think: "What is this guy talking about? Of course it will get out of there, why should it not?", then go and get the book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams and read what happened to the sofa and the staircase!