I'm happy to report that Umbrella Dances - edited from footage of our roving pop-up audience interaction at Garner Arts earlier this summer - has found a good home online. It's a video I I had the bright idea of placing it in a "series" which includes Wait a Minute and Bronx Magic, on a website called "Our Declaration of Independence." My work is on a page called MARTA RENZI: 3 Street Dances. If you haven't seen Minute (2021) or Bronx (2022) or Minute lately, check them out: they stand the test of time, if I do say so myself.
Umbrella Dances is the newest and the most tossed-off of the 3 videos. I'm still experimenting with how and where to get people dancing in public, toying with the idea of an appearance at the boardwalk at Coney Island. The message is meant to be: Upstage us, please!
Meanwhile, old and new work is traveling the globe - Blow Me Down in Pondicherry India, Bronx Magic in Naples, Italy and the new one - Grace vs. Gravity - in Rosario, Argentina. Of course there are also plenty of rejections ... it's the price of doing business. Or, well, art.
And I am doing art: I'm editing a documentary about Francine Maitland Abbott, who I met while making Where Love Leads in 2018 with students from Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. Francine is an extraordinary subject: a horse and dog trainer who has been living with chronic illness since childhood. She's eloquent, fierce, honest and beautiful. We had a wonderful week together earlier this summer. It looks like I'll be making my 3rd project with SRU students in September, in which case I'll have a chance to do some "pick-ups" with Francine if needed.
But oh lord, the US is spiraling more and more into authoritarianism: the unauthorized war on Iran, the demolition of the Voting Rights Act, the corruption of Supreme Court, the billions of dollars for ICE which is on track to become a police state.
And me doing art - fiddling while democracy burns.
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