Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center - dance film festival

Dance Magazine, March, 1997 by Rose Anne Thom

The Dance on Camera Festival celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary by finally finding an appropriate home. Last December Dance Films Association (DFA), which initiated the festival, collaborated with the Film Society of Lincoln Center to screen outstanding films and videos at the center's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater. This year, when directors took questions after their films were shown, they faced significantly larger audiences. Whether it was the more fashionable location or the society's publicity campaign, what had been one of the dance world's best-kept secrets seemed on the verge of becoming a highlight of the dance season--as well it should.

The DFA jury, composed of Elliot Caplan, Karen Cooper, Rhoda Grauer, Allegra Kent, Monica Moseley, and Joanna Ney, gave Gold Awards to Caplan's CRWDSPCR ("Crowdspacer") (Caplan did not participate in the deliberations on his film) and Falling Down Stairs by Barbara Willis Sweete. Milt and Honi and Dido and Aeneas (the latter not shown the public) won Silver Awards; the Bronze went to Lodela and Terpsichore's Captives.

Attention this year was focused on the controversial Russian entry, Terpsichore's Captives. Directed by Efim Reznikov, it unveils what a blurb for the film calls the "tempestuous" relationship between Natasha Balakhnecheva, an advanced ballet student, and Ludmila Pavlovna Sakharova, her teacher at the Perm Ballet School. "Abusive" is more like it! The verbal harangues, the destructive criticism, not to mention the pushing and hitting complete with some close-ups of red blotches on Balakhnecheva's back--would be grounds for a lawsuit in this country. Others who were interviewed--teachers, administrators, artists, and even Balakhnecheva's mother--offer defensive platitudes but no justification for this kind of behavior. Balakhnecheva says little to her teacher; her humiliation, despair, and desperation are expressed in heartbreaking excerpts from her diary and confessional moments with friends. Any armchair psychologist would recognize that Sakharova's vicious harangues emerge from her own deep emotional dysfunction, not from some inadequately performed port de bras.

At the session following the screening, Reznikov was asked why the footage focused more on the students' faces than on their dancing. He replied that he was interested in depicting relationships. How is the audience to judge this teacher's artistic impact if we rarely see what she is correcting and how her students respond physically, given their frazzled emotional state? More to the point, does Reznikov not realize that the body reveals as much as the face in dancing?

What a contrast between Terpsichore's Captives and CRWDSPCR, the latest of Caplan's films on Merce Cunningham! As in Captives, time is distorted by footage out of chronological sequence. There all similarity ends. For those familiar with Caplan's other award-winning work with Cunningham (Points in Space, Cage/Cunningham, and Beach Birds), CRWDSPCR represents a logical extension, as well as an artistic development. In this film, Caplan eschews explanations and adopts Cunningham's predilection for chance procedures; he appears to let the scenes fall where they may, allowing the artists to reveal themselves.

Cunningham doodles at the computer. Dancers rehearse with him or in smaller groups or by themselves in dressing rooms; even while they eat and smoke, they are immersed in realizing the choreography that emanates from the tiny figures on the video screen. They clearly reveal their frustration at committing these difficult movements to muscle memory. With equal clarity they exude the joy of performing once they succeed. The serene, even tone of this collaboration reflects artistic temperament and professionalism of the highest order. Along with the intensity of creation, Caplan's camera captures the quiet passage of the seasons from the glorious height of Cunningham's Manhattan studio that overlooks the Hudson. Even for those viewers perplexed by Cunningham's philosophy, watching CRWDSPCR should prove utterly fascinating.

Milt and Honi, directed by Louise Tiranoff, chronicles the sixty-year friendship between the late, legendary tap dancer Charles "Honi" Coles and the great bass player Milt Hinton. With Gregory Hines as narrator, the film uses two primary locations, a darkened stage space and a midtown Manhattan Chinese restaurant. In the former, the artists show their stuff, collaborating with other musicians and Coles's protegee Brenda Bufalino. Tapping with an easy elegance and crystalline perfection, Coles belies the fact that he was in his seventies when the filming was done. (He died in 1992.) In the restaurant, Coles and Hinton reminisce over dinner. Their life stories--revealed through film clips and photographs--elucidate the interaction between dance and music over the better part of this century. Through their experience, the history of black artists touring the country unfolds. Their stories, told with great affection and optimism, are framed by a larger social backdrop of racism.