I know I’m breaking my format (and it’s too soon to call it artistic license), but I’ve been too busy to do any of my last what i want to do list, and i still want to do all of that! I probably should have back-dated a post about what i actually got to, but whatever…
‡ Raw Material at Dance New Amsterdam. This show was impressive. A collection of 10-minute works from emerging choreographers that left me wanting more minutes. Highlights were my sometimes colleagues cakeface, whose Amanda Szeglowski and crew created a smart multimedia commentary on business-speak melded with tasty dancing (and a fluffer-nutter sandwich). Kudos to Mandy Ringer for another gorgeous light design. I also want to see more from GoGoVertigoat Dance. Their Sell Out Demos, choreographed by Lindsey Drury, took on the commodification of identity in the digital age with a wisdom that transcends sarcasm. Creating photocopy after photocopy of body parts by lowering co-director eunkyunkim onto the machine’s glass (who knew that glass was so strong!?) made for a great low-tech/high tech symbol of digitizing one’s self and the fear of being unknown in the facebook universe.
‡ Big Dance Theater’s “Comme Toujours Here I Stand” at the Kitchen was a great cross between visual art, dance and theater. I think Roslyn Sulcas nailed it in her Times review, so I’ll leave you to that.
‡ Les films. Finally, I interrupted our endless Netflix queue of Battlestar Galactica disks with some European classics, two of which I haven’t seen before. Le Samurai, by Jean-Pierre Melville with Alain and Nathalie Delon, is beautiful, and manages to be both fast-moving crime fiction and gorgeous endless shots, both fixed and tracks. While I didn’t see mention of it in the reviews I just looked up of Ghost Dog, it’s evident to me that Jarmusch is a fan of this one. The second flick that somehow slipped past me all these years was L’Avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni. It helped to prep us that when we looked up the title in my Italian dictionary I noticed the secondary meaning of “adventure” in Italian: “amorous affair.” This movie had us falling into amore with its star Monica Vitti, who has more emotion in her upper lip than most actresses have in their entire repertoires. And speaking of amore, I went one more time around Rome with La Dolce Vita and found it my most satisfying trip ever. All the elements of Fellini’s vocabulary, but somehow held in the realm just below the surreal… the source of the word papparrazzi… plus I never tire of Anita Ekberg’s classic line: “there are three things I like the most: love, love, and love.”
Monica Vitti is wondrous. I could watch Red Desert forever and ever. The anxiety in that movie holds enough wattage to light up Vegas.
I’d love to see Red Desert again — oh no it’s not in Netflix. Have to find it old school!