Following a four-month visit to Taiwan during the pandemic, New York-based artist Yo-Yo Lin shares a first-person account of returning to a place of medical and familial trauma. Moving through the artist’s intimate thoughts, Re:collections melds together new media performance, documentary, Chinese medicine, and Taoist cosmology to question how identity and language are conceived in the context of disability and immigration.
A documentary short film capturing the world of The Creatures of the Night, an up and coming group of alternative drag artists in the Coachella Valley.
A recently hatched turtle, made of sand and by hand, returns to the sea.
An experimental short where one's footsteps create sound on a piano, creaks and all.
"Encouraged by a special encounter between myself and an animal, my research into the “humanimal” began. This is a performative exploration reflecting on the place of animals and humans in their changing relationships throughout time. The research spans from topics like the cohabitation of different human species, the prehuman, the posthuman, to domestication and the numerous animal watching webcams found in zoos and online. Missing Link reflects on the intimacy between the species and how it can be expressed through movement here and now. "
Marepe, an artist from Bahia, produces art with anything he comes across in the town he lives in, Santo Antônio de Jesus. Packs of cigarettes, coconut palms, walls, and memories taken from the streets, go into putting together a personal archeology for this young artist.
Performance documentation of Mees Joachim's 'Homophobe', a 10 minute live-reenactment of a scene from 'E Kolór Korrá' (2017). A juxtaposition performed as minimally as possible. A destructively interpretive dance, literally shattering bones whilst forcefully dropping on the ground. A pre-cursor to their 'The Scaphoid Fracture' (2017) performance.
"The river Lek reminded me of the river Xiang in my hometown Changsha. I had not been home for 3 years and one of the connections with home was the poems my dad wrote me every day via WeChat. The rivers seemed equally significant for the people in the Netherlands and in Changsha. They are both a romantic connection and an important symbol of daily trade and industry. In a Wechat session my father and I simultaneously read three pairs of poems we wrote for this occasion, he by the Xiang and I by the Lek. Giving the words to the waters that ultimately will meet somewhere in the ocean. The video shows fragments of the performance which took place at the same time in Changsha and Culemborg in June. The full-length documentation is presented as a dual-screen video installation. The three poems written by me can be found on the page "Writing"."
IN 1988, rising star Kenneth Branagh tackled the role of Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark for the first time in his professional career under the guidance of celebrated actor Derek Jacobi. Narrated by Patrick Stewart, this hour-long film documents how Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi, two intelligent and passionate men, found new depths in Shakespeare’s classic drama, Hamlet. Filmmakers Mark Olshaker and Larry Klein follow the company through four weeks of rehearsals, from the first read-throughs to opening night.
Counter-culture video magazine created by Stuart Shapiro, featuring Bill Hicks, Robert Williams, Public Enemy, Butthole Surfers, Survival Research Labs, and much more! Hosted by Alex Winter!
The film explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.
THE ARTIST AND THE FORCE OF THOUGHT, reflects the relationship between balance and imbalance within the partiality of movement of the dancer Marcos Abranches. It oscillates the body to wake up from the emptiness and isolation caused by the imbalance. The movement's lack of aesthetics is felt by abandonment and rejection, understanding that relief is in the support of love. Investigating body movement in a world without anguish, without pain, without despair. Search for life. Find in dance the balance of the body and the beauty of the soul.
Offbeat performance artists The Blue Man Group have finally been captured live on this disc that features concert footage, three full-length music videos and three songs from Blue Man Group's album, "The Complex." The live footage was filmed during Blue Man Group's successful and widely acclaimed August 2003 rock tour, where they wowed 9,000 fans in two sold-out concerts.
Art dealer Salvatore Viviano and director Angela Christlieb embark on a search for the lost artist collective Gelitin, which since the 1990s has shattered the borders of "good taste" again and again with extravagant actions and installations. Interviews with old companions and artist friends in the U.S., Europe, and Asia are linked with anarchically montaged Gelitin archive material: intense, transgressive, experimental, gaudily colorful, funny, and virulent.
A collaboration between filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira and performance artist Thomas Pinnock, who performs his "immigrant folktales" using traditional lore of his native Jamaica to dramatize his migration to New York in the 60's.
The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance. Charting a path across four decades of avant-garde experiment and radical escapism, This Is Not a Dream traces the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.
Originally formed amidst the chaos of the 1970 Kent State anti-Vietnam War protest killings, the not quite new wave band Devo scored a hit with "Whip It" and gained mainstream success with their message of societal "de-evolution."
"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."
As Cirque du Soleil reboots its flagship production, O, more than a year after an abrupt shutdown, performers and crew members face uncertainty as they work to return to their world-class standards in time for the (re)opening night in Las Vegas. With unfettered access, filmmaker Dawn Porter captures the dramatic journey of the world's most famous circus act on its way back from the brink.
One Meter of Democracy (2010) challenged the endurance of viewers, as well as the courage of the artist. In a quasi-democratic process, He Yunchang invited approximately 20 friends to vote in a secret ballot on whether he should have a surgeon cut a one metre incision the length of his body, from collar bone to knee, without anaesthesia. The vote was carried by a narrow majority, with several abstaining. The performance was documented in video and photographs that reveal the emotional cost of witnessing this gruelling event. This work, sometimes also known as ‘Asking the Tiger for its Skin’ was also staged on a symbolic date: 10 October 2010 was the 99th anniversary of the Wuchang uprising and the Xinhai Revolution which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China. The final image shows the group with sombre, shocked faces.