Parma, Italy ... Lincoln Center and more...

In early July I was tickled to receive an unsolicited request to share my videodance Tumult with the Parma International Music & Film Festival in Parma, Italy. As we corresponded, it turned out they also asked to screen 3 other Renzi shorts - Inter Library Loan, Wait a Minute and A Day's Work - in the festival, which runs in late September. Unfortunately, I can't be there in person because I'll be returning to Pennsylvania to make a new dance film with students at Slippery Rock University.

The Parma program includes two pieces with student ensembles (Rhode Island College Dance Company & SRU) as well as long-time collaborator Jennifer Keller who will shoot for me again in September. Poised as I am to launch a new project, with all its accompanying unknowns, it encourages me that previous work attracts a new audience, and stands the test of time. Join me in celebrating the contributions of Selina Shida Hack and Ana Egge (Wait a Minute, 2021); Brooklyn Toli, Crespo Rosario, Alexis VonMakulski and Emily Holden (A Day's Work, 2022) Jennifer, Addy Birkes & Angelica Vessella (Inter Library Loan, 2026), and some repeat thanks for many in the RIC cast and crew who made Tumult in 2019. A ridiculously abundant output in just a 5-year-span, and that doesn't even include everything made in those years!

Closer to home, On October 18 New York area folks will have a chance to see an even older work - Las Madres from 2015 - made with 6 pairs of Spanish-speaking mothers and daughters in Sleepy Hollow, New York. It's an Official Selection of the Moving Body - Moving Image Festival which this year focuses non "the moving immigrant body on screen" - in fact, a big screen at the David Rubinstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. I'm delighted that Las Madres (y sus hijas!) is in the line-up. Because of its low-budget, lo-res, direct cinema quality, it didn't quite fit in the elegant Moving Body trailer featuring newer work. So I'm posting my own trailer here.

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 (described in previous blogpost) - has found a good home online.  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 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 with us 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 dance film 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 create 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)