DANCING DREAMS offers teens the chance to work with dance-theater legend Pina Bausch
TANZTRÄUME: JUGENDLICHE TANZEN “KONTAKTHOF” VON PINA BAUSCH (DANCING DREAMS: TEENAGERS DANCE PINA BAUSCH’S “CONTACT ZONE”) (Anne Linsel & Rainer Hoffmann, 2010)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, October 27, $14, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.pina-bausch.de/en
From 1973 until her death in 2009, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch ran Tanztheater Wuppertal, the German company that changed the face of dance theater forever with such seminal productions as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Danzón, Masurca Fogo, and so many others, many of which had their U.S. premieres at BAM. In 1978 she staged Kontakthof, collaborating with Rolf Borzik, Marion Cito, and Hans Pop, set to music by Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Sibelius, and other composers. In 2000, she revisited the piece with a cast of senior citizens, and eight years later she turned the roles over to a group of Wuppertal high schoolers, most of whom had never heard of her and had never danced before. Director Anne Linsel and cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann follow the development of this very different production in Dancing Dreams, speaking with the eager, nervous participants, who talk openly and honestly about their hopes and desires, as well as with rehearsal directors Jo-Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billet, who do not treat the teens with kid gloves but instead are trying to get them to reach deep inside of themselves and hold nothing back. When Bausch shows up to choose the final cast, telling the teenagers that she doesn’t bite, the tension mounts. Dancing Dreams is an intimate look at the creative process, about dedication and determination and what it takes to be an artist. It suffers at times from feeling too much like a reality television show, mixing American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance with the fictional Glee, but it also offers a last glimpse at Bausch, whose final interview is captured in the film. “You might think I’ve had enough of Kontakhtof,” she says at one point. “But every time it’s a new thing.” Dancing Dreams is screening October 27 at 7:30 in conjunction with the current production of Kontakhtof running at BAM October 23 – November 2 and will be followed by a Q&A with longtime Tanztheater Wuppertal members Billiet and Dominique Mercy, moderated by Marina Harss. In addition, on October 25 at 12 noon, BAM and Dance Umbrella will present a free live stream of “Politics of Participation,” a cross-Atlantic panel discussion at King’s College with Penny Woolcock, Matt Fenton, Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, and Michael “Mikey J” Asante and at BAM with Julie Anne Stanzak and Simon Dove, moderated by Dr. Daniel Glaser.
More than thirty years after Faith McNulty’s book The Burning Bed, which was adapted into a powerful and influential 1984 film starring Farrah Fawcett, Private Violence shows that there is still a long way to go in dealing with the very real issue of battered women. In the moving, emotional documentary, director-producer Cynthia Hill tells the story of Deanna Walters, an abused North Carolina housewife working with advocates Kit Gruelle and Stacy Cox to try to put Deanna’s dangerous and abusive husband behind bars so she can have a life with her young daughter. It’s horrifying to see photos of Deanna’s severely beaten face and body, then hear that law enforcement agencies and the legal system still often regard such cases as minor domestic disputes that do not require arrests and imprisonment. At the center of the controversy is the prevailing attitude that it is somehow the woman’s fault for not simply leaving her abusive partner, instead returning again and again for more physical and psychological torture, a premise that is proved wrong in many ways. Hill (The Guest Worker, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family) concentrates on the main narrative, not talking heads and statistics, following the developments procedurally, while more is revealed about Kit as well, who suffered her own torment at the hands of an abusive husband.
In 1943, Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, determined to stop the mass atrocities that were being committed by governments around the world, came up with a name for what he was lobbying heavily to make an official crime recognized by the international community: genocide. In Watchers of the Sky, director and producer Edet Belzberg (Children Underground) explores Lemkin’s vision through the modern-day work of four people battling against the odds to end genocide and bring those responsible to justice. Inspired by Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Belzberg follows Chad field director Emmanuel Uwurukundo of the UN Refugee Agency as he tries to find humanity among the horrific suffering in Darfur after losing most of his family in Rwanda; Transylvania-born Benjamin Ferencz, the chief U.S. prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case in Nuremberg who today continues to implore the UN to do something about the horrifying crimes of aggression being perpetrated by multiple countries; Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court whose job was to gather evidence to arrest and try Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir for war crimes; and Power, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations who uses Lemkin’s activism to attempt to end the inaction of the international community, which sits idly by as mass murder takes place right under its nose.
Director Ian Thorpe’s Eternity: The Movie tries to be a good-natured riff on those lame 1980s films like Can’t Stop the Music, Fast Forward, Flashdance, and Xanadu, in which main characters dream of stardom and get their chance to make it, all set to terrible period music. Unfortunately, Eternity is more like those lame 1980s films themselves instead of a send-up of the genre. Barrett Crake stars as Todd Lucas, an eager blonde singer-songwriter who has just moved to Los Angeles from Omaha. He gets a job in “fashion” working at retailer BJ Maxx (yes, that is Eric Roberts playing his creepy boss), where he meets B. J. Fairchild (Myko Olivier) — yes, the BJ jokes are endless — a mustached brunette who specializes in playing jazzy TV cop-show themes on his sax. Todd, who’s looking for true love, and B.J., who thinks of himself as a ladies’ man, both develop a thing for bartender Gina Marie (Nikki Leonti), but when it comes right down to it, they really belong together, as writer Joey Abi-Loutfi and Thorpe continually allude to the clear and obvious gay attraction between them. The story of their rise and fall as lily-white R&B popsters Eternity, who had such synth-heavy hits as “Make Love, Not Sex” and “Sambuca & Cider,” is jaw-droppingly inane; it’s often hard to tell what is intentionally bad from what is just plain bad. Oh, and did we say that the whole thing is a one-note joke about Hall & Oates? Eternity feels like it goes on for an eternity, but don’t expect it to have much of a long life in theaters, DVD, or Netflix.