DANCE MOViES Commissions support new works that fuse dance with the technologies of the moving image.  

World premieres of three new dance films and an installation commissioned by EMPAC’s DANCE MOViES program, followed by a procession led by the punk marching band Mucca Pazza, featured in the film Fanfare for Marching Band.

A Circus of One

US, 15-minute looping video installation Director: Alison Crocetta Composer: Jason Treuting A Circus of One is a 16 mm black-and-white film directed by visual artist Alison Crocetta in collaboration with composer Jason Treuting. This film records Crocetta as a clownish figure within a one-ring circus completing a series of eight acts that run the gamut from feats of daring to absurd gestures. These performance actions form a filmic garland with Treuting’s score that draws inspiration from historic circus music and the tradition of musique concrète.

Fauna

Chile, 20 minutes Script and General Direction: Paulo Fernández Choreographic Direction and Production: Rodrigo Chaverini Original Music and Sound: Tomas González Art: Paulo Fernández & Antonio Becerro Performers: Camila Scholtbach, Luis Acevedo & Daniela Tenhamm Fauna creates an audiovisual world of confined and fantastical spaces, setting in motion a poetic dialogue between nature and artifice. Bodies possessed by different states inhabit landscapes configured in these restricted spaces. The film evokes a rhythmic relationship between body and location, dark and latent, questioning the concreteness of reality and life as staging.

Fanfare for Marching Band

US, 15:35 minutes Director: Danièle Wilmouth Choreographer: Peter Carpenter Band: Mucca Pazza A film following the mayhem created by a ragtag musical militia that embarks on an impotent invasion through a parallel universe, where their exuberant music is out of sync and unheard. The two worlds are finally unified when the band masters the tempo and patience of empathy.

Spring Cleaning

US, 10 minutes Director: Pooh Kaye Performer and animation assistant: Alexander Clack Sound design and sound edit: John Kilgore Choreographer and filmmaker Pooh Kaye’s alter ego, Wild Girl, played by Alex Clack, has a busy day weeding the dandelions, raking up dead brush, and mowing the lawn. Dandelions swirl in animated patterns around her, the flowers popping in and out of her ears and mouth as she tries to speak. The ground swallows her and spits her out, and piles of brush attack her as she tries to rid her lawn of dead branches. Kaye returns to her early Super 8 films from the 1970s, which explored the human body’s relationship to the world.

Evocative artist interpretations of an array of environments, real and imagined, from surreal urban worlds to the mutation of natural landscapes via architectural explorations highlighting our ever changing world.

• philip hunt: lost and found / uk 2008 / 24:00
• harduin, phrakornkham, bourgois, cabourg + vergne / miam! / france 2008 / 06:35
• astereokid: galactic mail / uk 2008 / 04:50
• pascal bideau: oona… sometimes flips out / uk 2008 / 02:14
• lefebvre, tanon-chi, tardivier, vovau + walker: après la pluie [after the rain] / france 2008 / 02:58
• clement crocq: machu picchu post / france 2008 / 05:35
• desfretier, dufresne, kauffmann + laugero: bave circus / france 2008 / 04:50
• guru studio: hazed / canada 2009 / 02:00
• loubaresse, bouyer, cheriet + vivien: scoop volante [flying saucer] / france 2008 / 01:29

Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed paired Guy Maddin’s first feature film with a live performance of a newly-commissioned score by Matthew Patton, performed by a cast of Icelandic string musicians and vocalists including twin sisters Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir and Gyða Valtýsdóttir (formerly of the band múm), Sigur Rós bandmates Amiina, Borgar Magnason, and more. A new narration, written by Maddin, was also performed live, accompanied by Foley sound effects (by Seattle’s Aono Jikken Ensemble) and live visuals created by electronics engineer Paul Corley. A cult sensation when it was released in 1988, Tales from the Gimli Hospital tells a dream-like, elliptical story of jealousy and madness instilled in two men sharing a hospital room in a remote Canadian village. In this new performance, the score takes the original film in an entirely new direction: layers of music mirror the film’s story-within-a-story structure and provides an ethereal quality that underscores the dark and haunting elements of the film.

Untitled-Epilog is a two-channel video installation that examines how media influences our view of other cultures, taking as a starting point an earlier piece by Domke where intercultural collaboration failed. The residency consisted of production and post-production on a series of video interviews (partly documentary and partly scripted) with the participants of the former project. Shifting between various layers of representation—the documentary and the staged—the protagonists move within a neutral, culturally undefined space: a film studio, and later on, a cinema. Reality and representation are interlocked as filmed interviews are later projected in the cinema, playing with the idea of “cultural projection” and commenting on how media industry shapes the image we have of other cultures.

Johanna Domke was educated in fine arts in Denmark and Sweden; her work crosses between art and cinema with both a structural and socio-political approach. She is concerned with how images influence the course of history, the creation of meaning, and the shaping of identity.

Mary Reid Kelley used her residency at EMPAC to produce The Syphilis of Sisyphus, a black-and-white, 11-minute video in which she plays a young, pregnant, 19th-century French grisette (or bohemian) named Sisyphus. She wanders through an elaborately designed set, waxingphilosophically in metered, rhyming verse about beauty, artifice, and the natural world. Jesus, Karl Marx, and Diderot are among figures of intellectual history that appear in this satire. Performing scripted narratives in rhyming verse, the artist—with her husband Patrick Kelley and various family members—explores historical periods through fictitious characters such as nurses, soldiers, and prostitutes. The piece was later included in season six of the PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century (Art21) and released on DVD.

Kelley’s videos and drawings present her take on the clash between utopian ideologies and the realities of women’s lives in the struggle for liberation and through political strife, wars, and other historical events.

Over the course of three visits to EMPAC, Ralph Lemon worked on post-production on the video component of 4Walls, a multimedia installation with live performance that provides four points of view on one dance—entitled Wall—that was the central section of Lemon’s 2010 stage work How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? Lemon’s intention for Wall was to create a “dance that disappears,” and which dramaturge Katherine Profeta characterized as an effort to “fling the body headlong into an instant of pure presence.” 4Walls was a collaboration between Lemon and videographer/editor Shoko Letton and video editor Mike Taylor, using months of footage from the development of Wall to create a film that would provide viewers with a different kind of engagement in a creative process, one that is relentless in its questioning of the nature of what passes between performers and audiences.

Based on the Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a young girl caught in an endless dance by a pair of magical shoes, The Red Shoes is Powell and Pressburger’s celebrated film about the life of an artist. Set in a ballet production of The Red Shoes, the film follows a ballerina struggling with dueling allegiances to love and career.

The Red Shoes was unprecedented in its treatment of dance on film, featuring an extended 17-minute ballet sequence, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performed its Oscar-winning score. One of cinema’s most famous early uses of Technicolor, this newly remastered digital version was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archives in 2009.

Cinematic Chimera presents works that strive for a radical synthesis of artistic genres, reviving the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork. United by their integration of theater, dance, music, architecture, literature, and visual art, these films also realize the Gesamtkustwerk’s technological imperative by making use of advanced cinematic techniques.

New York City-based artist Graham Parker created new film and audio work in residence at EMPAC to be shown alongside a series of alterations made to the building’s environment—ranging from the theatrical to the virtually invisible. Parker has long been interested in “spectrality”—the concealing of one set of operations behind the appearance of another. His 2009 book Fair Use (Notes from Spam) explored spam emails as the latest manifestation of a longstanding mode of deception reaching back to 19th-century railroad cons and medieval beggar gangs. The Confidence Man featured work growing out of that research—including hacked ATMs, rogue WIFI networks, monologues drawn from spam emails, and a tribute to the 1973 film The Sting. For the first three weeks of the exhibition, the artist worked on site and was available for conversation with the public while he made ongoing alterations to the installation.

As we gear up for next season’s onedotzero_adventures in motion festival, two nights of double feature screenings will be presented from the international touring festival which premiered in London in 2010. Curated and compiled by onedotzero, all programs explore new forms and hybrids of moving image across motion graphics, short film, animation, music videos, and more.

extended play 10

Championing filmmakers who push the boundaries of traditional storytelling with adventurous narrative structures and distinct visual styles, this eclectic and engrossing range of shorts demonstrates how a powerful visual narrative can be used to create dramatic effect, and even social change.

nightfall

Some of the more extreme and often bewitching examples of entries into this year’s festival program—from gaming-edged horror and sci-fi weirdness to trippy psychedelia—what more could you want from an alternative film night?

Down The Rabbit Hole was a workshop performance of a new piece created in residence by Phyllis Chen (toy pianist/composer) and Rob Dietz (video artist/electronic musician). A multimedia work for toy pianos, music boxes, live electronics, live and edited video, and amplified objects, Down the Rabbit Hole was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories; rather than a re-telling of a beloved tale, it drew upon objects and themes from the novels: the ticking of a pocket watch, the shuffling of a deck of cards, and the clattering of a tea set were reinvented in visual and sonic terms. With the use of microphones, a magnifying glass, and live video feeds, commonplace objects were brought to life, and a miniature stage was set in motion inside a toy piano. 

Chen creates original multimedia compositions using toy pianos, music boxes, electronics, and video, presented in concert alongside works by prominent 20th century composers such as John Cage and Julia Wolfe. Dietz is a multimedia artist, VJ, and electroacoustic musician with an interest in generative audiovisual systems.