Purfled Promises was a work of expanded cinema. Two neo-drag entities entered the cinema and held a screen in front of the auditorium's red curtain on which a video was shown that consisted entirely of zooming shots of veils revealing more veils, increasingly baroque in nature until a voice over addressed the audience directly. As we'd been watching these 'reveals' it told us that what we hadn't noticed was the screen itself which was moving slowly closer towards us. At which point we did notice this and the screen kept on coming, its supporters clambering over the cinema's seats and audience's heads, finally laying it down on top of half a dozen of them who had to struggle out of it as the cinema lights came on.
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McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The video culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.
6.3High school hotshot Zach Siler is the envy of his peers. But his popularity declines sharply when his cheerleader girlfriend, Taylor, leaves him for sleazy reality-television star Brock Hudson. Desperate to revive his fading reputation, Siler agrees to a seemingly impossible challenge. He has six weeks to gain the trust of nerdy outcast Laney Boggs -- and help her to become the school's next prom queen.
0.0My Trip to Miami follows a well-meaning, misguided, tourist as he tries to self-actualize via Trip Advisors algorithmic script. My Trip to Miami is a documentation of a fantasy, a failure in image-based expectations.
0.0A 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.
7.1Offbeat 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.
0.0A hybrid feature film that investigates contemporaneity through the body and its countless possibilities of expression and meanings. The film puts the body and the idea of the body in evidence, through metalanguage, articulation and confrontation of documentary, fictional and performative languages. The film follows the trajectory of the main character who uses her own body to formulate universes and investigate the meanings that are drawn in it. In a kind of subjective diary written on her skin, she records sensations and reflections, building relationships with thinkers, performances and archival materials, which lead her to other bodies and other stories.
3.7A loner artist with a history of abuse meets a beautiful woman who takes an interest in his life and work; leading to a chilling path of tragedy.
A groom becomes a bride in a gender bending fashion performance by Alexander McQueen.
0.0Erin O'Connor explores the meaning of fashion consumption in a short performance film.
0.0In the first 58 minute Performance, Relation in Space, which took place in July 1976 at the Biennale in Venice, Abramovic/Ulay, both naked, walk towards each other from opposite ends of a room, touching as they pass each other, and then they repeat the movement while their bodies collide and one of them (Marina) falls over under the impact, until they are both exhausted. A statically mounted video camera simultaneously filmed the touching of the bodies in the middle of the room.
0.0A witch appears in the south of the city, recites a poem, performs a spell and vomits the world.
0.0From an inverted position, high above the floor, the camera records Nauman’s trek back and forth and across the studio; his stamping creates a generative rhythm reminiscent of native drum beats or primitive dance rituals. However, Nauman is not participating in a social rite or communal ritual—he is completely individualized. Isolated in his studio, his actions have no apparent reason or cause beyond his aesthetic practice.
0.0Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and sexuality. Primal Scenes is an excellent example of women’s erotica, focusing on a woman’s experience of her body as both sexually powerful and deeply mysterious. Montano uses stirring images of women acting in the rather traditional roles of nun and mother, yet she recasts these roles and demonstrates, from a woman’s point of view, the possibility of claiming a fully-realized sexual intensity for women.
0.0A documentary featuring 30 Argentinian women aged between 4 and 80, sharing their stories of resilience, strength, and unique perspectives on womanhood through performance art.
8.0THE 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.
0.0One 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.
0.0The Rock Touring Around Great Britain is a performance piece by Chinese artist He Yunchang that involved a walking circumambulation of Great Britain from September 23, 2006 to June 14, 2007. Starting from the hamlet of Rock, Northumberland, the artist walked to the nearby town of Boulmer where he selected a rock which he then carried counterclockwise until he returned it to the precise location from which it was taken. As the artist commented, the work was primarily "an attempt to represent the iron will of an individual and the living conditions of his being with simple and pure methods."
