Shirley Clarke: In Our Time
Dance on Camera 2013
February 1 - 5, 2013
The first of our two-part celebration of dancer-turned-filmmaker Shirley Clarke!
Donna Cameron’s moving portrait of her mentor Shirley Clarke, which makes brilliant use of collage and home video, is paired with two modern works by Cameron and two by Clarke from the 1950s. Screening with Meditation for a Lonely Flute (Donna Cameron, 2011), Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clarke, 1958). and Bullfight (Shirley Clarke, 1955).
The second of our two-part celebration of dancer-turned-filmmaker Shirley Clarke! See related program: Rome is Burning.
“In this moving tribute to her friend and colleague Shirley Clarke, Donna Cameron brilliantly uses collage to fashion a focused but dizzying trip through…’Our Time’…while creating a personal, affectionate portrait of Clarke. The home movies of Clarke’s childhood are the idyllic center of the piece, but Cameron constructs a disruptive world through found footage that envelops the core images. The result is stunning and startling.“ —Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film, MoMA.
Screening with:
Meditation for a Lonely Flute
Donna Cameron | 2011 | USA | 4m
Conceived by Fredrick Kaufman during his service in the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur War, this chromatic vision of the desert transcends the bloodshed, the cold and the heat of the moment and meditates on the magic of the surrounding desert's sounds and sands. Music by Fredrick Kaufman. Flute: Adeline Tomasone.
Bridges-Go-Round
Shirley Clarke | 1958 | USA | 8m
Manhattan Island becomes a maypole around which its bridges, detached from moorings and land, execute a bewitching dance. Shirley Clarke has freed these formidable structures from their everyday functions and magically set them to dancing to two different musical tracks, one jazz and one electronic, so that each track affects the viewer’s response to the imagery. Music by Teo Macero, Louis and Bebe Barron.
Bullfight
Shirley Clarke | 1955 | USA | 9m
Working with the modern dancer Anna Sokolow, Clarke parallels the sense of spectacle and the real violence of an actual bullfight with a dance interpretation of the emotional experience, using a distillation of the ritual gestures we see photographed in the Spanish bull ring. In her intense interpretation, Sokolow embodies both matador and bull, both executioner and the sacrifice, to Norman Lloyd’s evocative score. Music by Norman Lloyd. Danced and choreographed by Anna Sokolow.
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