painful self-searching
The last few years or so I've spent some time reckoning with my past output - creating the two Volumes of Newsletters, creating Her Magnum Opus whose central question is about what lasts, trying to figure out if it's time for a major pivot.
Can you believe that this is the 12th year of this blogspot!? To be sure, I browsed back through "older posts" on the About Marta Renzi page. There was a 2006 entry about Acceptance and Rejection which sounded awfully familiar ... and one about my double life which reads:
for more than ten years, I've led this kind of double life, working with families, often Spanish-speaking, around literacy, advocacy - liberation, really ... this work helps me to feel balanced, feeds me in a different way from making art. If you asked me which of my lives is more rewarding to me, more valuable to my community, more remunerative in the long run, more fundamental to my identity, I'm not sure I could say.
Twelve years later, I'm still "working with families around literacy" through the Parent Child Home Program, and still being fed by it. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose, baby.
self-promotion
She Who Doubts has had a rocky few months, behaving like her own worst critic, not feeling quite as "balanced" as she declared herself to be in 2006. So it was a boost to receive the news that Red Dirt Dances is an Official Selection of Dances with Camera, at Short Waves Festival in Poznan, Poland.
We selected 18 international short films showing innovative, authentic and original perspective on dance and your film is absolutely one of them. It fits perfectly our programme and we are sure our audience will appreciate it as much as we do.
May this be the first of many.
breaking news
a few projects coming up in 2019:
a 3rd videodance commission by my pal Angelica Vessella at Rhode Island College, shot by my pal Jennifer Keller from Slippery Rock. Great young people, 5 days, Catholic school uniforms, one camera. See the previous blog post for my assignments to myself
5 days in Bratislava, Slovakia with my long-time collaborator Anka Sedlackova. We'll finish the solo about aging that we started in Nyack this past June - and Anka's arranged a screening of Her Magnum Opus. By the way, if you'd like to celebrate the New Year by supporting my work, you can throw me a few dollars by watching it on Vimeo on Demand. Or that DONATE button is sitting over there on the right ...
And finally, here's the trailer for Where Love Leads, shot in September and edited in time to premiere at the December dance concert at Slippery Rock University. For that occasion, the full 15-minute version was screened - including a lovely-and-now-deleted scene at the garden of our cinematographer Jennifer Keller. Immediately after that screening, She Who Doubts edited a 10-minute version which presumably has a better chance of getting programmed at film festivals. But is it actually better at 10 minutes?
What does better mean?
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