David Dorfman Dance will dance to the music in PROPHETS OF FUNK at the Joyce
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
January 24-29, $10-$39
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org
www.daviddorfmandance.org
For more than twenty-five years, David Dorfman Dance has been staging narrative and abstract works that deal with such subjects as political activism, violence, abolitionism, athleticism, and life and death. Among its many projects are underground, Lightbulb Theory, Subverse, and Approaching No Calm Counting Laughter. This week the company returns to the Joyce to present its latest work, Prophets of Funk — Dance to the Music, which harkens back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, set to songs by Sly and the Family Stone, featuring dancers Kyle Abraham, Meghan Bowden, Luke Gutgsell, Renuka Hines, Raja Kelly, Kendra Portier, Jenna Riegel, Karl Rogers, Whitney Lynn Tucker, and Dorfman. Performances run January 24-29, with a Dance Chat following the January 25 show.
In 1961, Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin wrote, “I’d like to thank the guy / who wrote the song / that made my baby / fall in love with me.” The title of that be-bop song, “Who Put the Bomp,” inspired one of music’s first fanzines and later the punk record label Bomp! Records. In their 1999 song “Deceptacon,” the riot grrrl group Le Tigre flipped that question around, asking, “Who took the bomp from the bompalompalomp? / Who took the ram from the ramalamadingdong?” In the song they also dare, “Let me hear you depoliticise my rhyme.” Formed in 1998 by former Bikini Kill leader Kathleen Hanna, zine writer Johanna Fateman, and visual artist Sadie Benning, who was replaced in 2000 by DJ and projectionist JD Samson, Le Tigre challenged the male-dominated world of rock and punk, championing individuality and sexual freedom while redefining gender roles. In 2004, Hanna, Fateman, and Samson set out on a world tour in support of their third and final album, This Island, and asked their lighting designer, Carmine Covelli, to capture it all on film. The result is the engaging Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour, in which Covelli and director Kerthy Fix go onstage, backstage, and behind the scenes as the influential trio heads across four continents and ten countries, playing exciting live shows, meeting the media, taking pictures with Slipknot, revealing what they pack in their luggage, exercising in the gym, and talking about facial hair. They also discuss more serious issues such as gender identity, lesbianism, and their DIY mentality, which flew in the face of the music industry. The seventy-two-minute film, which features live multimedia performances of such songs as “Hot Topic,” “Keep on Livin’,” “Viz,” and “Deceptacon,” is screening on January 25 at 9:00 at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn and will be followed by a Q&A with members of the band.
“Kino-eye has managed to find its way in the struggle with bourgeois cinema,” Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov wrote in 1925, “and we seriously doubt that the latter (despite its present international dominance) can long withstand our revolutionary onslaught. There is another, greater danger — the distortion of our ideas.” One of the early masters of the new art form, Vertov, along with such contemporaries as Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, explored the potential power of the cinema in both fiction and nonfiction storytelling and as a propaganda tool. Vertov, whose most famous film is 1929’s Man with a Movie Camera, a revolutionary work about cinema itself, searched for truth in his films, what he referred to as “kino-pravda,” employing a unique cinema-verité style to capture real life. Not that he also didn’t have a very specific agenda. In the seminal Kino-Eye, what Vertov called a “tapestry of life,” Vertov and one of his brothers, cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, depict Soviet life of the 1920s, exploiting the technology of the medium while following a group of Young Pioneers marching through towns putting up political banners and waving flags. Along the way they stop by a village party filled with drunken revelers, wander through a street market, camp out in the fields, watch a Chinese magician perform, and come upon such health issues as tuberculosis and mental illness. Several scenes are projected in reverse, including the butchering of meat, the baking of bread, and even the sport of diving, as Vertov and Kaufman play with the story while also revealing the methods of production. By focusing on the children, Vertov is forming a blueprint for the future of the nation, just as in the film itself he is laying the groundwork for the future of cinema. Kino-Eye is screening on January 21 at 5:15 as part of Anthology Film Archives’ continuing “Essential Cinema” series, which followed by Vertov’s Forward, Soviet! at 7:00 and A Sixth of the World at 8:45.