This Just In!

YEAR MAKE & MODEL is a Director's Choice selection of Black Maria Film +Video Festival.

For over 30 years the Festival has been acclaimed for advocating, supporting and widely exhibiting fresh short works up to an hour in length by emerging as well as by veteran independent film and videomakers.

This is the second consecutive year Renzi work has been selected for inclusion in Black Maria's touring series. Last year's 2011 line-up featured WHERE THE DANCE IS, my 16-minute doc on Doug Elkins @ Beacon School.

(And long-time fans may remember that Renzi & Black Maria first linked up in 1989 to screen my second PBS half-hour videodance, MOUNTAINVIEW, made in collaboration with John Sayles,)

I share my laurel wreath with the Rhode Island College Dance Co. students - including Cassie Murdock, pictured above - who created it with me LAST January in under a week from audition to wrap!

Wait, where IS my laurel wreath?

Happy Old Year!

The year 2011 was very good to me. Thanks to arts presenters in the fine state of Rhode Island I was essentially commissioned to make two dances - one shot in a car repair shop and one performed live in the woods.

Also in 2011 YEAR MAKE & MODEL was screened in festivals in the US and abroad, along with last year's short AQUA BOOTY.

And July 2011 saw a shoot of my latest dance film, with trio material developed by 3 men in a few weeks of sweaty rehearsals. Sensual and lyrical, BROTHERS KEEPER has already got some screening dates set up for the new year.

March 14th

Dance Films @ The Flea, NYC

February 16-18

Congress on Research in Dance 2012 Special Topics Conference

Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Now, as the year ends - on New Year's Eve in fact! - we're shooting a new project danced by Ching-I Chang and Jenny Tortorello. Framed against views of beautiful cast iron buildings outside 590 Broadway, I expect the footage will afford me many happy hours of editing in 2012.

What better way to ring out the old and ring in the new!

Bon Voyage!

Tomorrow I head off to attend a dance film festival called Cinedans in Amsterdam, and then to In Shadow Festival in Lisbon, where both of my recent shorts - YEAR MAKE & MODEL and AQUA BOOTY - are being screened.

Meanwhile, YEAR was also accepted to its first non-dance film festival: one in Duncan, Oklahoma, which showed PORCH STORIES in 2008. Even though it's called Trail Dance Film Festival, it's a regular film festival: "an open-genre contest for independent filmmakers." Nothing pleases me more than being in that mix, especially with YEAR, which features regular folks performing with talented but completely unpretentious student dancers from the Rhode Island College Dance Company, in a recognizable location, with music by Dion that gets your foot tapping.

Hey, one festival's experimental is another one's old school.

Can't make it to Oklahoma or Portugal? Check out the YEAR MAKE & MODEL Trailer on Vimeo.

Fall is in the Air

Can you pick out the iconic shot of Amos & Tina from NOBODY'S DARLING taken by Matthew Murphy?

DARLING showed last month in at Rice University's Third Coast Film Festival in Dallas Texas. It will also be screened later this fall in Budapest, Hungary as part of EDIT 2011.

And YEAR, MAKE & MODEL is starting to make the rounds - last month at Sans Souci and this coming November in Buenos Aires as part of VideoDanzaBA. YEAR and AQUA-BOOTY were both selected to join the lineup of Videodanca Sao Carlos in Brazil.

A few posts ago I made a joke about AQUA-BOOTY showing at a festival called danca em foco - also in Brazil - "where booty is beloved". AQUA features 4 beautiful broads in bikinis, it's kinda smart-aleck, rocks along to the music, turns female exploitation on its...ass. It's not esoteric fare, admittedly - but I continue to be amused that only Brazil seems to recognize its value. See for yourself. [This just in on October 2: InShadow Festival in Lisbon, Portugal has also selected both AQUA-BOOTY - and YEAR - for its December 2011 Festival. BOOTY's fans can now be expanded beyond Brazil to the larger Portuguese-speaking world...]

Meanwhile, I've kept busy on current projects, posting APPLE TREE to Vimeo as promised. Actually, it's due for a sequel or update, because Mica is now legally an alien among us...

And the men's trio I shot in July - TANGLED ANGELS - is pretty much edited. It just needs a little cosmetic work before I begin submitting it to festivals - esoteric or otherwise.