Experimental Film Podcast & Other ramblings

If you have some time to listen, there's an interview with Ken Hess, host of the Experimental Film Podcast in which we discuss whether I am or am not an impostor when it comes to experimental film. If you want my origin story as a young choreographer and then as an emerging filmmaker, you might enjoy listening here. If you know me really well, you may have heard it all before. In which case...

You might enjoy checking out the other links at left, under PRESS / ANCIENT HISTORY.

And to beautify this otherwise all-text page, here's a sweet screen grab from our Garner Arts Adventure (see previous post) which is currently under construction as a video - definitely an experiment if not "experimental" - titled Umbrella Dances.

Roving pop-up coming soon

This just in!

Join us at Garner Arts Center for a chance to join in with roving dancers        

Aislinn MacMaster, Ching-I Chang and Leah Barsky.

Saturday May 16 from 12-4 (ish)

Chit-Chat: Grace vs. Gravity

[BRONX MAGIC will screen on Thursday April 23 at 7pm as part of BASEMENT TAPES at the Jacob Burns Film Center. Be there!]

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In the previous post, you read that all new projects were pending, as if frozen by bitterly cold temperatures. However, I did in fact manage to launch one right after the big snowstorm that froze everything in place. 

Without further ado, here's the trailer:

Now for the ado. The magic ingredients were two wonderful dancers - Hsaio-Ju Tang and Shannon Yu - both of whom were strangers to me except as a fan of their dancing in recent performances. They were brave enough to allow me to "commission" them to work with me on a project. A three-day weekend was the only mutual free time they could carve out of their busy schedules. So that's what we did, sleeping at my house, rehearsing and shooting at the Nyack Boat Club nearby.  We made movement material the first day, rehearsed with camera the 2nd, and shot the 3rd. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

What did I know going into this? That it wouldn't be a major opus because we didn't have much time; that I thought of the dancers as superheroes; that it would be humorous rather than serious. I'd settled on a few royalty-free cuts from the online repertoire of Kevin MacLeod - whose work I first used 15 years ago for 890 Broadway. The music had just the pseudo-bombast I was looking for. The room at the boat club had a lovely wooden floor and big windows facing the (absolutely frozen) Hudson River. Unfortunately, neither the location nor the boat club look suited us thematically. So after an analog attempt to create an indoor set featuring flags that would echo the nautical flags outdoors, when it came to edit I turned to ... AI.

Yup, AI. It's the only time I expect to do so. In the past I've heartily foresworn slo-mo and other digital tricks (Ok, except in Thaw, where I used lots of dissolves, and in Dancing is an Old Friend where I was practically forced to exploit the pandemic era split screen.) In a serendipitous stroke of luck the editing platform I use - Premiere Pro -  had just added a very user-friendly "object mask" which essentially allows for green screen after the fact.  And Adobe Firefly offered a month's bargain on AI Generation - those too-false-to-be-true backgrounds seen above that substituted for the boat club. 

My hope is that viewers will smile at the subject matter itself, and at the mail-order superhero mask/cape combo. But I'm also hoping that they'll recognize that the imperfect CGI is also a goof. It's a wannabe illusion from an OG practitioner who wants you to be conscious of two things going on: the actual live dancing of very particular humans warring for your attention with all of the generic and hypnotizing generated environments.  Meta enough for you?

It's the 4th in a string of work I've made recently that might be considered "weird", "ambiguous", "personal", "wacky" = unprogrammable (with the exception of Inter Library Loan which is completely straightforward.) On the other hand, maybe my work has always been all of the above. At Dance Theater Workshop, in a 1990 concert of relatively conventional dances (and having recently given birth to my second son) I played as my theme song "Everything I do Gonh be Funky" by Lee Dorsey. Give it a listen. 

And/or check out this video of the young choreographer / mother eager to present, defend, invite, connect (you'll probably want to raise the volume after the music stops.)

Still (more?) funky after all these years.

A Historic Occasion

Behold a picture that's worth a thousand words. On top is a post-rehearsal snapshot of the cast of What Practice Makes circa 1983, likely right before a summer residency where we shared its evolution more or less daily with audiences at Jacob's Pillow's Inside/Out stage.

At left is a re-enactment of that grainy photograph by the current cast of Practice, who more than did it justice at recent performances of Peter Stathas Dance on February 13-14 at Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn. That was history being made: a revival that I somewhat dreaded  turning out to be a gift.

Adding to the historic significance of the weekend was our decision to honor Liz Thompson who had changed the course of Jacob's Pillow - and many of our careers - by inviting us to expand horizons at the Pillow. Performing outdoors in nature, being trusted to make work that mattered, having informal conversations with a risk-taking audience was a gift we kinda recognized at the time ... and then, like young folks do, moved on.

These recent performances were a chance for many of us in the dance community to be absolutely sure Liz felt recognized for that gift. Peter & I were joined in admiration by illustrious colleagues whose thoughtful tributes to Liz you can read here. On a personal note, I was gratified to have in attendance Angelika Dewey, daughter of my first and most important dance teacher, Joy Anne Dewey. In a wonderful coincidence, Gerri Houlihan - whose work was also shown this weekend - is a past recipient of the American Dance Festival's Joy Anne Dewey Beinecke / Balasaraswati award for teaching. It was moving to be able introduce Ani to Gerri and in so doing, honor a woman who left a great footprint in my life, and left this world too soon.

I also have to admit that it was wonderful to experience an audience witnessing live dance (especially since I had no responsibility for booking rehearsals, paying dancers or administering the many details associated with presenting work in NYC.) Will there be more of it? Not likely, for the reasons expressed parenthetically. 

So back to my lonely - or anyway, digital - process of editing pre-recorded movement. All of my dance film projects are currently pending, as if frozen by the recent below-freezing temperatures. But I'll get back to it soon. And, as always, you'll be the first to hear.