Archive for the ‘artists’ Category

On Sunday May 6th 2012, a crowd of 100+ people came out to The Wild Project in the East Village for a screening and dance extravaganza by the Girl Walk//All Day community.

Opening the show was a performance by the flex group Street’s Finest with a guest appearance by Anne Marsen (star of Girl Walk//All Day). Sporting new pink hair, Anne danced fiercely along side the six guys in the group, who popped, locked, and dropped it as soon as they walked onto the stage. In black preppy outfits with red sneakers, they danced to some of today’s hottest songs including Ellie Goulding, Starry Eyed. In between each song mix, a comedic voice would transition into the next song keeping the audience members on their toes. Throughout the performance were movements of slow motion, acrobatics, tutting, and freestyle clumps. One particular moment that stood out was when one male dancer supported all of his weight from his arms while being on top of another partner’s back. The audience embraced the high energy of this group with their comedic styles and facial gestures. At the end everyone got to their feet to applaud. Who knows maybe we will see them on America’s Best Dance Crew?! Read the rest of this entry »

Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.

In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anthology Film Archives presents an event celebrating the book release of FLESH INTO LIGHT: THE FILMS OF AMY GREENFIELD by ROBERT HALLER on Monday, April 30th 2012 at 7pm.

The event includes a screening of Greenfield’s pioneering cine-dance and video-dance works that span 40 years and features the premiere of BODYSONGS, a work commissioned by WGBH TV in 1979 and made in collaboration with cinema verité filmmaker Richard Leacock. At the time Greenfield and Leacock shot a clothed version and a nude version of their film, but both ended up being banned from broadcast. When Leacock passed away in 2011, Greenfield revisited the nude video dance footage, restored it on today’s technology, and found in it a new concept of timeless nude duets as moving image art: BodySongs.

Other films on the program include MUSEic Of The BODy (2010), edited from Greenfield’s 1994 multimedia performance with video art pioneer Nam June Paik, the underground classic Element, and Wildfire from Greenfield’s acclaimed Club Midnight film cycle.

Greenfield and Haller will be present to answer questions and sign Flesh into Light at the reception following the screening.

In Flesh Into Light, Haller articulates the essential principles of cine-dance through Greenfield’s films, which re-invent dance as fundamental human motion not just for the camera, but as and inseparable from cinema. “For Greenfield, the body moving with and against the close-up camera can be the concrete image of inner human nature, an instrument for its expression and a vessel containing images and actions that crystalize the meanings and mysteries of experience: movement and memory, the past and the present moment.” – Robert Haller, Flesh Into Light

Admission is $9. No reservations required.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. (@ 2nd Street)
Manhattan, New York.

Click here for more information on tickets.

Also of Note: Amy Greenfield will be present at Movement Media’s next Kinetic Cinema event on May 7th at Uniondocs, screening her film Wildfire and taking part in the discussion.

PORCH STORIES, Photo: Gary Tacon

Marta Renzi’s Kinetic Cinema program “Let Me Entertain You” presented at Gibney Dance Center on Thursday March 22nd had a political and moral message behind it’s light title – Making an audience laugh is just as important and necessary a function of art as making them cry, or question, or think.

The evening was centered around a quote from Preston Sturges’ iconic 1941 film “Sullivan’s Travels” in which a Hollywood filmmaker sets out to make a “serious” film about poverty in America during the Depression. After a series of mishaps, the hero is believed to be dead and he ends up in jail, where he truly learns the dehumanizing oppression of poor people. The only light in the whole experience comes when he watches a movie with his fellow inmates, and he finds himself laughing tears of joy at the antics of Disney characters (just the sort of trite entertainment he was critical of when he set out on his journey). At the end of the film he tells his producers he wants to make a comedy, and leaves us with this unforgettable last line: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!”

For filmmaker and choreographer Marta Renzi, this sentiment can be seen throughout her thirty years of art making, in which she has worked with people of all ages, classes, and races, both professional and amateur. Her mandate is to bridge art with real life, and she has done it in laundromats (The Welcome Table), auto mechanic’s garages (Year, Make, Model), neighborhoods (Porch Stories), and rust belt towns (Little Wild Heart) to name a few. In the mini-retrospective she showed at Kinetic Cinema we could clearly see her love for common people. Regardless of technique, budget size, or production elements above all else, Renzi wants to show the virtues of ordinary people in their daily lives, and the acts of celebration, joy, pain and pride that are there if only someone will shine a light on it. Interestingly, Renzi has approached this not as a gritty documentarian, but as an entertainer and a dancer.

In many ways, it is the archetypes of the working person that interest Renzi rather than the specific stories of individuals. In her films dance is a means of turning everyday tasks into ritualized sacred acts that defy normal space and time. In “The Welcome Table” working class black women look like high priestesses of the laundromat. As if by magic, the little white girls whose clothes they are washing appear in a procession through the laundromat and then disappear again, only to reappear in a hidden garden of a crumbling mansion. In Porch Stories the neighborhood characters evoke fairy tale counterparts including a “Pied Piper” old musician being followed by mischievous children, and a “Rapunzel”-like author trapped by her own writer’s block on her porch high on a hill.

Opening the evening was a short improvisatory solo and a video work by Arthur Aviles, a long time friend and performer of Renzi’s. Arthur’s video, “To Be Real” tells the story of a pheasant that was trapped in the Hunts’ Point neighborhood of the Bronx, and how the bird’s release inspired a dance (performed by the beautiful Althea Pace outdoors on the Bronx waterfront). Aviles is also concerned with bridging art with community and creating an atmosphere of inclusion. He is the founder of BAAD! (The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance), in an old factory space in Hunts Point that has become a beacon for creative talent in this notoriously poor and underserved part of the city.

In a world that is polarized by words such as entertainment vs. art, socialism vs. capitalism, liberal vs. conservative, it is so refreshing to see Renzi and Aviles’ work which seems to bridge these dualities and show us how we are all in this “cockeyed caravan” together. That is the beauty of art, especially poetic forms like dance. We can go beyond the either/or’s and see how we are connected in divine and beautiful ways.

To learn more about Marta Renzi and her work go to: martarenzi.blogspot.com.
To learn more about Arthur Aviles go to: www.bronxacademyofartsanddance.org

PORCH STORIES, Photo: Gary Tacon

Kinetic Cinema: Let me Entertain You

Screening and discussion with Marta Renzi

Marta Renzi, an acclaimed choreographer and filmmaker, curates a provocative program of Kinetic Cinema that reveals the real inspiration behind her work, and reminds us of why art matters:

“Asked to share something about why I make dance films, I find myself showing excerpts from feature films that include a prison gang, a drunken orgy, and run the gamut from Greek tragedy to Saturday morning cartoons. To accompany these, I’ve chosen bits from my own dance films featuring characters with everyday lives and actual jobs – nursing aide, garbage collector, fast food worker, bartender – and who dance like it.”

Arthur Aviles, a long time performer and collaborator of Marta’s will open the evening with a video and solo piece of his own.

Marta Renzi has been making dances professionally since 1976.  In 1992, Marta received a New York Dance & Performance Award (a “Bessie”), and in 1995 was the first recipient of a Dancing in the Streets award as “a fearless explorer of all manner of unconventional sites, integrating art into everyday life.” In 1981, she made YOU LITTLE WILD HEART, a half-hour video dance for PBS, followed in 1989 by a second for television entitled MOUNTAINVIEW, made in collaboration with filmmaker John Sayles. Since 2005, she has self-produced several short films which have been screened nationally and internationally.

Arthur Aviles is a Bessie Award-winning dancer and choreographer of Puerto Rican descent. Mr. Aviles was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and toured internationally with the company for eight years 1987 to 1995. In 1996 Mr. Aviles founded Arthur Aviles Typical Theatre (AATT) in Paris and moved the company to the Bronx the same year. In December 1998, he inaugurated a new performance space in the American Banknote Building, a warehouse in the Hunts Points section of the Bronx. His company is the centerpiece of BAAD! – The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance.