Five Gorgeous Minutes of Dance, Set to the Lyrics of Lou Reed

I rarely link to stuff featured on Neatorama, because most of you have probably already seen it. But this piece only has about 100K views on YouTube, and is simply stunning. Do yourself a favour and take five minutes to watch it. It’s exquisitely danced, and features an extraordinarily cool version of “Waiting for the Man” by The Velvet Underground.

That’s normal speed, by the way. The piece is by La La La Human Steps, a Montreal dance company (it’s enough to make you want to move there, eh?).

I was reminded of another short film of ballet that I saw a few years ago. I did a search for it, and, as happens occasionally, I found my own blog post discussing it:

The Company was preceded by a three-minute short film. It was part of Shadow Pleasures, a collaboration of former ballerina Victoria Tennant and (one of my favourite) author Michael Ondaatje. It was a gorgeous, senuous dance piece accompanied by Ondaatje reciting his wonderful poem “The Cinnamon Peeler”.

Why is this short film languishing in some archive? It has a commercial value of near zero–put it on YouTube. Even if you do put it on YouTube, the people who want to own it want it at a much higher fidelity than dodgy Flash video.