3 Street Dances

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.

                                            Abbott Farm, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania

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. 

 

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 right, 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!]

                                     ~    ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

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.