Performa 11, one of two new festivals in NYC that defy artistic boundaries post-9/11

Like many people, the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11 brought up many “What if’s” for me. What would my life be like now if 9/11 hadn’t happened? What would my art look like? What would the fields of dance and dance film look like? And then after being baffled by those questions, I started to think about what actually did happen. How did September 11th, 2001 change my views of my artistic work, and my chosen field of dance?

For me, I wonder if I would have become obsessed with dance for the camera. Without the traumas of 9/11 and the political and cultural awakening it inspired in me, I might not have felt such an urgent need to seek other outlets for artistic expression. In an uncertain world, film and new media gave me hope that my artistic work could make a difference in the world. The feelings of mortality that were triggered by 9/11 made me desperate to be able to create work that would last (ie be able to be watched repeatedly) and the rage and violence that has surrounded the event (and still does to this day) gave me an urgent need communicate with people outside of my tiny circle of acquaintances. I felt that if we were to reconcile with our enemies and restore stability to our lives, then we had to start communicating and learning about each other. Live performance was too limiting for me, I needed to tap into media, and thankfully with the rise of broadband internet that became more possible than ever before.

Looking around at the greater effects of 9/11 on the arts and dance in particular, I can see that I was not the only one looking outside of my discipline at that time. One of the biggest art trends of the last ten years is the movement towards interdisciplinary work. Everywhere you turn you see all the arts mixing and intermingling. Dance in particular has become almost ubiquitous in art museums and gallery spaces. The Guggenheim started the highly popular Works & Process series that has presented many dance companies over the years. The Whitney’s Biennials are peppered with dance works, and smaller museum and gallery spaces such as P.S. 1, Chelsea Art Museum and Location One are hotbeds of interdisciplinary artistic activity. I commonly read artist bios that say “choreographer, dancer, and visual artist” (such as those of Ralph Lemon, Shen Wei, Tony Orrico, and Yvonne Rainer to name a few). Likewise, many visual artists repeatedly incorporate dance into their work (such as Kelly Nipper, Julia Mandle, Christian Marclay, and Isaac Julien).

Curators have had a huge influence on this shift to a post-disciplinary era. Two of the most progressive festivals to have emerged in New York after 9/11 are FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, and Performa. Both were born in the mid 00’s to advance boundary-defying artistic practices through commissions and presentations. Crossing the Line has an emphasis on French and American artistic exchange, however it keeps a very broad view of what that exchange could entail. Performa was founded by Roselee Goldberg, a leading authority on performance art since the ‘70’s, whose festival’s mission is “dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.”

Both Performa and Crossing the Line have pioneered new curatorial approaches to performance presentation, that revolve more around central ideas and less on the particular art forms that are on display. In this year’s Crossing the Line Festival program, the events are grouped around 3 curatorial perspectives: “Fiction & Non-Fiction”, “Lecture/Performance” series, and “Endurance/Resistance/Inspiration.” Within these categories are works that incorporate all the art forms and most of them are interdisciplinary, such as choreographer Kelly Bartosik’s “i like penises: a little something in 24 acts” that involves a dialogue between three dancers and a visual artist that perform live alongside each other in layered scenes. Performa endeavors to single out the influence of performance on the visual arts, both past and present. This leads to programming that is by nature interdisciplinary as multiple art forms collide and are influenced by each other within the works, such as choreographer Boris Charmatz’s “Musée de la Danse (Dancing Museum): Expo Zéro,” an exhibition that takes place in empty rooms and includes both real and imagined performance.

After 9/11, artists – particularly in New York City – suffered on many levels. We experienced rage, sorrow, and exasperation as our nation inflicted violence and war on innocent people while using every excuse to devalue the arts – the very lifeblood of culture that restores humanity and compassion in the world. Despite this, I believe that amazing growth has taken place in the arts that has led artists to see beyond boundaries and closed-mindedness within our own communities, and forced us to grapple with the world in a way that is collaborative, healing and ultimately life-affirming. I believe in the power of artists to regenerate a fractured and ailing world no matter what happens and under any circumstances. As much as I wonder how my life could have been easier and better if the events on 9/11 hadn’t occurred, I am so thankful that I was driven to explore the medium of film, and the infinite artistic riches that lay there for me.

FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival is taking place now until October 16^th at venues all over New York City.

Performa 11 will take place November 1–21, 2011 in New York City.

Anna Brady Nuse is a dance filmmaker and director of Pentacle’s Movement Media. Examples of her work can be seen here.

This ground-breaking video collection, just launched on March 28th, has been designed to draw users into the Jacob’s Pillow Archive and make it easy and fun to navigate through the site. One can start out looking at Kyle Abraham, and then a few clicks later be watching Shantala Shivalingappa and Anna Duncan from 1942. For a dance lover, this site could start to consume as much of your time as Facebook or Twitter.

From a technical point of view, the site is surprisingly sophisticated behind its clean and simple looking design. Users can access videos via four main pathways: Artist, Genre, Era, and Guess (a fun quiz that tests user’s dance literacy). Each video is only one minute long, which provides just enough time to make you want to see more (while keeping them within Fair Use Law and avoiding a lot of legal hassle). For now, there is no advanced search function where you can type in an artist’s name or key word and get results, but this will most likely be added when more content has been uploaded. For now, the site functions to give users a taste of the archives and encourage them to visit them in person on site if they want to really delve into the artist or the material.

Dance Interactive started as a physical kiosk on-site at Jacob’s Pillow for people to be able to peruse the archives without having to go in and bother an intern to get out the works. The original Dance Interactive was designed as a touch screen, and the site today has kept that tactile feeling so it translates well to the iPad and other tablet and mobile devices. As one can imagine, selecting a one minute clip from each artist would be difficult, and Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow Director of Preservation is responsible for selecting all of the excerpts and writing thoughtful text descriptions that help contextualize the content. Given the vastness of the task, for now the Virtual Pillow Team is aiming to upload a video a week as well as include all current and future programming as it happens at the Pillow.

The video content itself is beautifully shot and looks great on screen. Many of the clips are viewable in HD and can be projected for a classroom presentation without looking too pixelated. On the backend, the site was built on Drupal and designed by ClearMetrics, NYC. All the video is hosted by Vimeo, which gives it stability and flexibility for customizing the player and changing the files easily.

In an era when to exist at all means to exist online, Jacob’s Pillow’s Dance Interactive has breathed new life into dance history for audiences everywhere. Although this collection only represents dance that has passed through Jacob’s Pillow, I hope that it inspires many other dance institutions to dust off their vaults and open up their archives to become part of the living networked world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

TenduTv/Marc Kirschner’s Essential Dance Film compilation is set for release on 9/14 in the US (iTunes, Amazon, CinemaNow) and Canada (iTunes). This collection will be the first non-documentary dance program on the iTunes platform. Pricing will be $14.99 to purchase, $3.99 to rent in the US. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/dancefilm.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, LIQUID FILMS, cinedance pioneer, Amy Greenfield, takes dance into the water in a splash of amazing classic and neo cine-dance from 1903 to the 21st century, to transform the very nature of dance as only a screen medium can. Anna Brady Nuse interviewed Amy to find out why this theme, “Liquid”  excites her:

Liquid is sexy and always in motion and catches the light. It dances. And I found over the years so many liquid cinedances I love and feel connected to because of my own film “Tides”. And I thought how great it would be to see them all flow together.

Tides

They break boundaries which I feel still need to be broken in the field – there’s no way you can take dance and a camera into the water and not have kinetic cinema. And the definition of dance itself changes, becomes re-united with natural movement and at the same time transformed in the liquid flow, breaking totally with a tradition of dance vocabulary. All of these qualities are wonderful for cinematic material – they deal with color and light in relation to the body in motion on a cinematic level – a dynamic, unpredictable flow for both dance and camera. I feel that too much screen dance is static, and flat and unaware of the essence of cinema, which is light in motion, and how it can replace the third dimension with a transposed heightened plasticity.

“Nymph Of The Waves” was one of the first liquid cinedances, and is now an early film classic, and was perhaps the first use of a superimposition in the history of cinema. The connection was made right at the beginning, because it was a natural fit. One of Isadora Duncan’s great sources of inspiration was the movement of the ocean, but only with cinema could dance and the rhythms and motion and world of water come together and be communicated.

Your program spans the entire history of cinema. How have technological changes affected filmmakers’ treatment of this subject – water and the moving body?

To me what’s marvelous is what we do with the technology we have. Technology itself changes the kinds of films we can make but not the quality.

Yet it’s wonderful that now an individual filmmaker can successfully shoot with a light portable video camera of high enough quality underwater for a not staggering price tag. When Reifenstahl made the diving sequence from “Olympia” she had to invent technology to shoot it – gigantic cameras with a gigantic crew. But here are underwater dance films being made one-on-one, and we feel the intimacy, as in “Rapt”. And Elle Burchill can be the filmmaker and underwater dancer herself, an autobiographic cinedance. And Ben Dolphin shoots digitally with the high speed Phantom camera which can create slower than slow motion, a camera he uses for shooting TV commercials, here used for an experimental, personal cinedance.

In your film, “Tides”, the choreography of the camera is as integrated as the movement of the body being filmed. How did you direct this duet and then shape it in the editing?

I’d worked with Hilary Harris before in my film “Element” which is the mate to “Tides”. By the time we made “Tides” we almost communicated by osmosis, because we had “Element” as a basis. In “Tides” I wanted him with the Lo Cam handheld, actually standing in the waves himself, experiencing the same movement I was subjected to. And unless the film ran out or I ran out of steam we couldn’t stop, so the communion could build. The physical set-up worked in relation to communicating some key kinetic concepts: the extreme slow-motion, the movement of the camera in flow and counterflow to the human motion, and never losing the essential kinetic point of tension, where the body and ocean met. After the first shoot, looking at and discussing the film rushes became paramount -my pointing out “I want more of that, but more like this” or “I don’t want that” etc. Sometimes I directed with my hands – one hand the human motion, the other hand the camera motion, moving the hands as I wanted the two to symbiotically relate. This sense came from the fact that I had a film image going on on automatic inside my head while I was performing. So when I saw some kind of correspondence in the actual footage to that imaginary ideal film, that’d be great. While Hilary could never be inside my head, sometimes he came close.

The artists on your program represent a great range of filmmaking styles and approaches. Which are most like yours and which are the most different? Have any had an effect on your filmmaking? How?

All the films on the program are different, yet united by the maker truly wedding the surge and flow and weightless state and viscosity to how the camera moves in relation to the mover moving through the water. In that sense I feel a commonness with all the films. I feel close to the daring to expose the nude body in Sara Joel and Jody Oberfelder’s “Rapt”, the kinetic tension combined with slow motion in Ben Dolphin’s “Arising”, the film-maker herself in a journey in the water in “Mother/Daughter”, and when I saw “Immersion” several years ago I felt I wished I could have made a film something like it and felt I’d show it some day.

Arising

But the film-makers which have had the greatest affect on my film-making are Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. Not Deren’s “Study In Choreography For Camera” except for the editing, but the beginning of “At Land”, which had such a direct influence on “Tides”, “Meshes Of The Afternoon” and “Ritual in Transfigured Time” for so many reasons, including the always inner drama coming from the silent language of movement, the border between metaphoric and real, natural movement and unnatural states, the woman’s silent journey, the strictness of structure, the mystery, the intensity. And her writing on film and dance. Kenneth keeps a great deal of this but does away with psychodrama. I hadn’t seen most of his work when I made a lot of my films but I know I was influenced by “osmosis”. He’s so powerful. Mystery and simplicity and the ‘dance’ totally part of the fabric of the film, and between the cuts, everything so cinematically visual/visionary, yet corresponding to some unknown invisible world and force. “Eaux D’Artifice” is a masterpiece. “Tides” was also influenced by Reifenstahl’s Diving Sequence from “Olympia”: the sculptural athleticism of the camera, the off axis turn of the camera, the dramatic point of intersection of body and water, the use of slow motion.

Coming up next at Kinetic Cinema:

Liquid Films

Curated by Amy Greenfield

Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 7:30pm

Tickets: $10

Reservations: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/87612

Films include: “Nymph Of the Waves“, by American Mutoscope and Biograph, one of the first dance films ever made, superimposes the dancer with the ocean waves, as well as Amy Greenfield’s primal “Tides”, with Greenfield and camera operator, Hilary Harris, both braving the ocean tides in their symbiotic camera dance. Kenneth Anger’s restored “Eaux D’Artifice”, with his “Water Witch” in the Tivoli fountain, is one of the great classics of the American avant-garde, and Ben Dolphin’s “Arising” has us flying joyfully with his dancers inside a waterfall, blurring an artificial screen world and the natural world. Jodi Kaplan’s “Immersion”, Jody Oberfelder and Sara Joel’s “Rapt”, Elle Burchill’s “Mother Daughter” and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s “Pulsion” all made recently, are original, daring, entrancing, lyrically beautiful new cine-dances envisioning women moving in real underwater worlds.

Pina Bausch was one of those living legends. Her work has been seen by many. Her influence is felt throughout the dance world, and her memory will live in the history books, although she had already infiltrated them.

Her choreography reached a wider audience when snippets of Cafe Muller was shown in Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her. Bausch’s work had a raw and timeless cloud around it. Her pieces were about “things,” not just one “something.” Metaphor was huge. The relationships between men and women always being dissected and presented to an audience that never knew what exactly they were going to see when she premiered a new work.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the scale of the pieces were unthinkable. Snow falling on stage for a whole second half of a show. A mound of dirt blocking half of the stage. Flowers, chairs, walls, screams, sweat, tears, bruises. All real. Although the visuals were impressive, I do not believe they were ever used to impress upon. I feel that her work was honest and humble. It was ugly and beautiful. If one opened themselves up to the experience of the dancers, they would leave exhausted, but not abused. Bausch was true to her vision and dancers. The audience had to take the role of accepting that and to enjoy the ride, no matter how uncomfortable it might get. The pieces always ended beautifully.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her pieces were made to be seen in grand, large theaters, but the attention that she asked for, and got, from the audience, was that of an intoxicating program on television.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her work, I feel, was living cinematogrophy. There are many clips of her work around the Internet that can be found and enjoyed. But the greatest news is Bausch’s collaboration with famous film director, Wim Wellers Wenders. Before she passed, they announced plans to create and film a retrospective documentary on Bausch, and in 3-D. Wenders had cancelled the production after her death, but through public opinion and the amount of letters he received from lovers of Bausch’s work, he will be continuing on with the project.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A 3-D film on the life and work of Pina Bausch. This might be one of the best gifts that the dance world will receive. And in 3-D!! It might seem cheesy, but personally I have only had the privilege to see one Bausch piece live, and I am welcoming the opportunity to see another, in a way, Bausch original.

If you haven’t read it yet, check out Joan Acocella’s article, “The Faun,” in this week’s New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/29/090629ta_talk_acocella

It’s a really interesting article about Christian Comte, a French artist, who makes animations from still images. Recently he chose Vaslav Nijinsky, the much revered Ballet Russe dancer and choreographer, as his subject, and posted what appeared to be film fragments of the artist on YouTube that were never known to exist before. The appearance of the clips sparked a frenzy of excitement and debate among balletomanes and dance historians.

If you go to his YouTube page you can see all the videos he’s made and all the comments users have left. They have said everything from praise for Compte “finding” these videos, to appreciation of him using his talent to finally bring some idea of Nijinsky’s movements to life, as well as reprimands for him fooling them. He does insist that he is not trying to pass his films off as originals, but the confusion is understandable…sometimes.

Here are couple of Comte’s videos:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’d love to hear your responses to this work and the debate surrounding it.

To celebrate a year’s worth of late nights putting off much-needed sleep to pursue a very bizarre obsession about a very bizarre subject, here are few of my “Greatest Hits”, one for each month of this year.

Phillipine Prisoners Resurrect Busby Berkeley. This was my second post ever, and probably my best to date! I wish I could pull an article like this out everytime I sit down to write!

Viva la dance dance revolution! This was my wild idealist phase

Papelbon Dance I’m actually a Yankee’s fan, but the fact that Jonathan Papelbon has increased dance appreciation around Red Sox Nation is blog-worthy in my book.

In my Kinetic Cinema screening series I posed a question to my guest curators from the  NYC dance community, “What films and videos have influenced and inspired your work in dance?” Each curator came up with a completely different way of answering that question, and the works they chose revealed their own unique thinking patterns and artistic processes. Some curators, such as Malinda Allen, chose to curate autobiographical evenings, chronicling their artistic development through pivotal works that have inspired them. Other curators, like Levi Gonzalez, chose to show work that was new to them, and investigate the commonalities and differences between screendance and dance performance. Still others such as Jonah Bokaer and Kriota Willberg, have studied the history of film and video art extensively, and for their programs they decided to delve into very specific areas of research such as feminist video art and the female body, or “bad dance” films.

Judson Dance Theater, photo Elaine Summers
Kinetic Cinema is an example of what I have dubbed “artist-driven” curating, in which artists get together and share works that have meaning to them, often in informal intimate settings. The value of this type of curating is that it sparks artistic dialogue and exchange between the “makers” in a field, which can then lead to new art movements with distinct identities and progressive agendas. There have been numerous artist-driven curating collectives in the past that have had a huge impact upon the development of dance and film. A classic example of artist-driven curating is the Judson Dance Theater that formed in the early sixties as a collective of experimental dance artists interested in pushing the boundaries of post-modern dance. They were given the meeting room of the historical Judson Church to conduct their investigations and present public performances. The work that resulted from these programs went on to fuel the modern dance community for decades to come, with generations of dancers and choreographers spring-boarding off of the ideas and breakthroughs of the original collective.

On the film side, Jean Luc Godard would never have developed his unique and influential style without his competitive and close relationship with fellow French New Wave director, François Truffaut. Although they were very different in many ways, their artistic visions were honed and shaped by the intense dialogue and exchange of ideas they had with each other over many years. The French New Wave was born out of the critical discourse started by writers and cinephiles in the film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma. These writers were seeking a new type of cinema that didn’t exist in France at the time, one that married their love of low-brow Hollywood genre flicks, with more experimental, intentional, and referential nuances found in high art, all brought together by their strong vision of the director as auteur. When these writers began acting upon their critiques, and creating work of their own, the French New Wave was born, and gave rise to a new era of filmmaking that completely changed the art form in much the same way the Judson Dance Theater group did for dance.

There have never been more ways for individuals to share and distribute their media content than there are today. With the rise of the internet, and the social media of Web 2.0, today’s artist-driven initiatives are less inhibited by distance or financial limitations. Some recent examples of artist-driven projects for screendance on the internet are the social network dance-tech.net founded by NY-based dance media artist, Marlon Barrios-Solano, blogs such as this one, and email lists such as the media-arts-and-dance listserv moderated by Simon Fildes. These online forums are bringing together an international community of dance filmmakers who can interact and share work and ideas with each other easily and instantaneously. The result will be a more unified and cosmopolitan screendance community, where new entrants can feel part of an existing movement.

New art movements and genres don’t get made overnight, but in the case of screendance, it is crucial to raise awareness and interest in the dance community. Through curating initiatives that pose questions and engage artists and audiences in dialogue, we can facilitate praxis. This process involves leading artists to examine, critique and analyze dance in media, and also to make work of their own, thereby transforming and shaping the genre and, by extension, the world. Artist-driven curating is one proven way to galvanize an arts community and further the identity of an art movement. These artist-driven initiatives, while often underground and informal, serve as springs that feed into larger institutions, such as dance film festivals, museums/galleries, performance venues, and universities. It is in these small, seemingly insignificant ways, that we can move screendance into cultural prominence, and make dance relevant in today’s mediatized world.

Addendum:
I should clarify a few assumptions and opinions I have about dance and “screendance” which came up in discussion after my presentation at the Screendance conference. First, I am coming from a dance background, and ultimately, I want my work in screendance to have a positive effect on the art form of dance in general. I learned while at the conference that this isn’t a common position among everyone in the screendance field. Karen Pearlman, a dance filmmaker and co-artistic director of PhysicalTV helped us all tremendously by making a Venn diagram to illustrate the hybridity of screendance at the last Screendance conference in 2006. (see below)

What I learned at the conference is that practitioners of screendance can come from one of three different art areas: dance, film, or visual arts. Everyone’s location on the diagram is different and can move around, sometimes overlapping more with dance and visual arts, other times more with film, etc etc…

I shade towards the dance circle, and am biased about wanting screendance to do something for dance in general. Not that it should always serve to directly promote live performance, but rather that I think a vibrant screendance movement can have beneficial impact on live dance performance as well.  I also feel that dance as an art form has suffered and is suffering from a lack of resources and cultural capital (meaning attention and value from the culture at large). I believe that one reason for this poverty of cultural capital for dance is due to the art form’s lack of visibility in media (meaning mass reproduced and distributed moving images). After the birth of film in the late 19th century, cultural capital has shifted away from the live performing arts and towards mediated arts, such as film, television, and now broadband video. Unlike music and drama, dance has not developed a recorded media industry around it, and this has left dance artists (for better or for worse) with very few opportunities to reach a mass audience, have an competitive economic engine, or come out from behind the banners of other genres such as music videos, movie musicals, or even commercials.

I’m not interested in being part of a huge dance media industry, however I do see some benefits that other art forms have gained as a result of spawning commercial media juggernauts. Take music for instance. Over the course of 50 years of pop hits and mega record sales in the “Rock & Roll” (and then just “Rock”) music genres, there was a huge influx of kids learning to play guitar, forming garage bands, and talking about music. Today, even with the music industry floundering in the digital file-sharing age, the indie music scene is flourishing better than ever with 35 million users on MySpace (many of them musicians or music lovers), magazines, books, radio shows, tv channels, films, documentaries, and blogs that feed a vibrant discussion that most Americans can engage in. Imagine if dance had this kind of relevancy to peoples’ lives…Maybe there wouldn’t be so many dance critics being laid off, maybe more people would be interested in the difference between modern and post-modern contemporary dance, or maybe dance classes would be as popular as sports in public schools. Being a choreographer would be as cool as being a rock star…. Actually, this is already starting to happen with popular dance competition shows like “So You Think You Can Dance”… But I digress…

So, now you know my agenda, but I’m never going to be a media mogul. I will leave it to other shrewd bean counters to figure out how to squeeze out the dollars and cents from an art form ripe for the picking.  I’m an artist who sees limitless artistic potential for dance in screen-based mediums. Alongside the commercialization of dance screen, I want to see a vibrant exploration by dancers in the dance/film/visual art hybridity called screendance. This is where artist-driven curating comes in. I believe screendance can empower dancers who decide to enter into it. The movement for screendance has been slow to happen in the dance community, and dancers in the United States at least, have not seen media as a tool for artistic empowerment and growth. Despite the rise of dance film festivals around the world, I haven’t seen a comparable rise in awareness and understanding about screendance in my own dance community here in New York. The Dance On Camera Festival happens in January when the APAP conference is consuming the attention of most dancers. Even dancers who do get exposed to screendance, and then decide they want to try making a video or film of their own, usually hit a wall when they realize the massiveness of such a task. It’s an incredibly steep learning curve to jump from stage to screen, requiring a completely new set of skills and collaborators who understand dance, and there is little support or resources out there for dancers who want to make this leap. What is lacking is funding for production and creative development, distributors, classes, mentorship, critical writing, and even a central repository of knowledge or easily accessible catalogue of films to look at.

Things are definitely improving however, and as I listed above, there are numerous new artist-driven initiatives that are springing up on web-based media platforms. I hope that local movements also continue to grow and multiply. I would love to see artist-driven curating collectives spring up in other cities around the US and the world. It doesn’t take much to do, you just need a space, a projector and some friends to get started. Pick a question and try to answer it visually. Share what inspires you and talk about why. Have a dinner party and cater the films. In whatever fashion, we all have the ability to participate in the discussion, and help shape this unique art form of screendance into a vibrant cultural phenomenon.

CLUB MIDNIGHT by Amy Greenfield
Amy Greenfield is a pioneer of cinedance and videodance, and for the past decade has embarked on a series of shorts about exotic dancers and strippers that were recently compiled in collection called CLUB MIDNIGHT. In these sensual films, the female subjects are the embodiment of ancient female archetypes. Under Greenfield’s treatment, female strippers become goddesses reincarnate, who carry out rituals of mythological proportions. In DARK SEQUINS dancer Andrea Beaman becomes Salome, performing the dance of the seven veils for a single man in an empty theater. In WILD FIRE four women whirl like the elements, whipping up energy into a hot frenzy.


Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome by Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger’s work is not usually associated with dance, but nevertheless, his wordless films are highly attenuated to movement. According to the curators of “Cinema Dance Eros”, Anger trained as a dancer in his youth, and one of his unfinished projects was a film of a Jean Cocteau ballet (Oh, if only we could see that!). The programs this weekend will feature some of his most famous works including FIREWORKS (which first garnered him attention from Jean Cocteau) and INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME.

These two programs are sure to fan the flames of any lover of mythology, magic, and eroticism! Don’t miss it!

Here are the details:

CINEMA DANCE EROS
Featuring filmmakers Kenneth Anger & Amy Greenfield

June 20th & 21st
Amy Greenfield in person!

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

32 SECOND AVENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10003
phone (212) 505-5181 fax
(212) 477-2714

PROGRAM 1:
Amy Greenfield DANCING IN FRONT OF THE DARK
(1980/1992, 4 minutes, video)
Amy Greenfield DIRT (1971, 3 minutes,
16mm)
Amy Greenfield ELEMENT (1973, 11 minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger
FIREWORKS (1947, 15 minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger MY SURFING LUCIFER (2007,
4.5 minutes, video)
Amy Greenfield TIDES (1982, 12 minutes, 16mm.
Photographed by Hilary Harris.)
Kenneth Anger EAUX D’ARTIFICE (1953, 13
minutes, 16mm)
Kenneth Anger RABBIT’S MOON (1950/1971, 16 minutes,
16mm)
Kenneth Anger PUCE MOMENT (1949, 6 minutes, 16mm. With Yvonne
Marquis.)
Amy Greenfield CLUB MIDNIGHT (2006, 8.5 minutes, 35mm. With Bonnie
Dunn & Andrea Beeman. Poetry by Charles Simic, spoken by Dennis
Hopper.)
Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.
-Friday and Saturday,
June 20 & 21 at 7:00.

PROGRAM 2:
Kenneth Anger
PUCE MOMENT (1949, 6 minutes, 16mm. With Yvonne Marquis.)
Amy Greenfield DARK
SEQUINS (2005, 13 minutes, 35mm. With Andrea Beeman.)
Amy Greenfield LIGHT OF
THE BODY (2004, 11 minutes, 35mm/video. With Francine Breen. Music by Marilys
Ernst.)
Amy Greenfield WILDFIRE (2003, 12 minutes, 35mm. With Andrea Beeman,
Francine Breen, Bonnie Dunn, Cynthia DeMoss. Music by Philip Glass.)
Kenneth
Anger INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (1969, 11 minutes, 16mm. With Kenneth
Anger. Music by Mick Jagger.)
Kenneth Anger INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME
(1954, 38 minutes, 16mm. With Samson DeBreer, Cameron, Curtis Harrington, Anaïs
Nin, and Kenneth Anger.)
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.
-Friday
and Saturday, June 20 & 21 at 9:30. 

Kriota Willberg’s program, “The Worst of the Best” for Kinetic Cinema Monday night was extremely entertaining. She proved beyond a doubt that examining truly bad dance film is fun, inspiring, and highly effective at eliciting an emotional response from the crowd.

For all of you who thought about or responded to Kriota’s earlier online poll “What’s the Worse Dance Film Ever” you may be interested to see what made the cut in the end. Here is the list of the films she discussed Monday night and a short summary of why they were chosen:

The Mothering Heart (1913), Dir: DW Griffith
Reason: MADE BAD AND STRANGE BY HISTORY

Spectre of the Rose (1946), Dir: Ben Hecht, Dancer: Ivan Kirov, Chor: Tamara Geva
Reason: MADE WORSE BY THE BACKSTORY
 


Torch Song (1953), Dir: Charles Walters, Dancer: Joan Crawford and ensemble, Chor: Charles Walters
Reason: OFFENSIVE = BAD (Cast was in black face in 1953!!)

Staying Alive (1983), Dir: Sylvester Stallone, Dancers: John Travolta, Finola Hughes, Cynthia Rhodes, Chors:  Dennan and Sayhber Rawles
Reason: DRAMA!!!!

Center Stage (2000), Dir: Nicholas Hytner, Dancers: Amanda Schull, Sascha Radetsky, Ethan Stiefel, and ensemble, Chor: Susan Strohman
Reason: THE SAFE CHOICES AREN’T ALWAYS THE BEST CHOICES

Showgirls (1995), Dir: Paul Verhoeven, Dancers: Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon and ensemble, Chor: Marguerite Pomerhn-Derricks
Reason: DRAMATIC! OFFENSIVE!  MADE WORSE BY BACKSTORY!

Preceding the bad dance films, Kriota also discussed the difference between BAD and BORING and illustrated it with a montage of boring dance film and video clips she culled from the web (actually her poor assistant, Gretchen culled them from the web!). The interesting thing about the difference between bad and boring is that it often comes down to money. Apparently the “have nots” aren’t really capable of making truly bad art, only dull art. As Kriota explained, when a filmmaker has over a million dollars to make a dance movie, and it turns out to be boring, then we are outraged, “Is that all that you could do?” and that automatically bumps it into the bad category. Whereas when a low budget video of, say, a naked man flapping around on the floor in a puddle goes on and on, it’s just dull and we feel like we are wasting our time.

I’d never thought of this difference before, but in terms of my emotional response it’s true, I’m more outraged by a squandering of resources and opportunities than watching a boring video on YouTube. I guess jealousy has a big role to play in what makes something bad or just boring, which is also proof positive of the irrationality behind all demarcations of good and bad. Who can really judge these things beyond a reasonable doubt? No one, but at least Kriota has taken a stab at defining her standards for judgment, something all of us curators, presenters, and critics should do!

Amy Greenfield, a cine- and videodance pioneer, was also in attendance Monday night and had some interesting insights to share…

“Thoughts on Monday. Great premise btw  – most thought-provoking program so far. That’s GREAT.  BAD ISN’T BORING!

It
was also so enjoyable because except for the boring tapes,
cinematically this “bad” filmdance was the best cinema of the season -
Hollywood films! I love the contradiction and feel it needs to be
recognized. Also realized Monday that “dance people” and “laypeople”
looking at them will have very different reactions cause most people
look at the film as film first, and in context with the rest of the film
as they were features. Yeats asked ‘How do you tell the dancer from
the dance?’ Monday night’s
delightful, insightful show made me ask ‘How do you tell the cinema
from the dance?’

Some of my own thoughts on Monday PM: 
I’ve
seen The Mothering Heart and it’s an important silent film by the great
film pioneer, DW Griffith. I love the film and never noticed the dance
moment screened. The actress in the foreground is Lilian Gish, one of
the great silent film actresses. Notice her restraint vs the dance.
Lilian and her sister Dorothy were sent by Griffith to study dance at
Denishawn. The ACTING in these films was good filmdance. (What’s good filmdance and
whats good dance put on film is there a difference?) Griffith used Denishawn dancers including Martha Graham in his masterpiece, Intolerance.

Ben
Hecht who made Specter of the Rose was one of the great Hollywood
screenwriters who obviously didn’t know anything about dance. The dance
in Spectre massacred influences from Deren’s Study In Choreography For Camera
and more especially Cocteau’s Blood Of The Poet. The two ‘good film
good dance’ moments had to do with real action, and the film actor’s
dictum – don’t act, re-act: when the dancer lays down the knife at the
sleeping woman’s neck, and when he lept out the window, shattering the
glass and going into non-existence as Nijinsky did on stage. That last
moment was GREAT and worth all the previous BAD dancing.

Staying
Alive was REALLY good cinema and I didn’t think it was bad dance either
though I just couldn’t separate the film from the dance until the unfortunately stupid climax which went over the top – and tellingly,
was the only part not shot close-up, fast cuts, and wasn’t such
excellent cinema.

The
Stroman [Center Stage] was bad dance and bad cinema. Interesting how bad cinema can ruin
good dance by Amanda Schull.“

Amy