<Body+Act>
Special Film Screening for
2016 Multi-Arts Project, MMCA x KNCDC
Introduction
Merce Cunningham, an
American modern dancer who maximized the expression of pure body language
stated that dance is "always mystical like water slipping through the fingers".
A German modern dancer, Pina Bausch developed the expressionist technique of Tanztheater
style, a combination between dance and theater. Bausch mentioned that she had
contemplated “where dance began and what we have to deliver through dance”.
Yvonne Rainer is a feminist and an experimental film director and American
modern dancer who pursued free and improvisatory performance apart from the
existent form and style through The Mind is a Muscle(1966), and she has
continued working on projects that paid attention to the interactivity between
the performer and the audience. Such fundamental questions raised by the modern
dancers who pioneered the integral sequence of modern dance greatly contributed
to the expansion of performance form into poetic gesture of exhibition form
with human body as the medium. The movement of dance transforms the space and
the images of such movement arouse desire to reexamine the energy of the act,
which vanishes right at the moment. In this sense, dance film is not just an
effective record of a performance, but close to the landscape of moving space
through the body.
MMCA Film&Video
introduces various genres of films through the special film-screening program,
Body+Act in connection with 2016 Multi-Arts Project. This screening program
intends to examine the transformed images according to the tide of history and
the historicity of performance art, which is a form of contemporary art
extended from the immaterial world created by the body movements. For the dance
film program, Pas de deux directed by a Canadian experimental film director,
Norman Mclaren who progressed the methodology of recomposing the movements of
dancers in limited space and the change in the invisible space into film, and
Philippe Baylaucq’s 3D film ORA, which shot the dance movements of José Navas
in infrared imaging camera will be presented. Moreover, it will also include
three films produced by the collaborative work between an experimental film
director, Danièle Wilmouth and the Japanese Butoh dance team that modified the
form and movement of body into abstract rhythm and A Heretic's Primer on Love
& Exertion: 29 incidents of dual consequence, collaborated by a dancer
Trevor Martin and performance art of Kym Olsen will be aired as well. Feeling
Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer, a documentary on the life of a master of
minimalist dance, Yvonne Rainer and a film director by Rainer, Journey from
Berlin/1971 will be introduced for the first time to the Korean audience.
The second collaborative
project of a documentary director David Hinton and Laurence Oliver
Award-winning choreographer Siobhan Davies, The Running Tongue, will be shown
in a looped format with the theater doors open. This project has been completed
with 22 choreographers who worked with an animator to create individual
‘visions’ surrounding a running figure. The film is then edited using an
algorithm to create unexpected relationships. Together it creates a surreal
sense of contemporary urban experience, making the entire theater into an
exhibition space.
A performance artist,
painter and sculptor, Stuart Brisley collaborated with film director, Ken
McMullen for the work, Being and Doing. This film speaks about performance art
that compares the relationship of anti-cultural power and gesture challenging
the social taboo by intercrossing several performance footages from 1979 to
1983 along with the origin of performance art in connection to folk culture.
The meeting of contemporary
art and contemporary dance regenerates the lost time of existence and act
through cinema. The movement of a dancer is visually unfolded before our eyes
and the space becomes vanished before our eyes to implicate the various time
and layers of the world. Body+Act of MMCA Film&Video will present the works
of different artists who revive these vanishing points.
※ 《Body+Act》 Screening Schedule Download
※ 《Body+Act》 Brochure Download
