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The first annual
Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP)
Feature films, short films, documentaries,
advance screenings, meet-the-filmmaker Q&A sessions,
and panels with leading artists in the field.
All day long on
Thursday, January 29 and Friday, January 30, 2015
at The Segal Theatre Center,
The Graduate Center, City University of New York,
365 Fifth Avenue, at 34th Street
FREE - First come, first served
The FTP Film Festival will present works by or about Reza Abdoh, Back to Back Theatre, Big Art Group, Romeo Castellucci, Lucinda Childs, Gabri Christa, The Cockettes, Mathieu Copeland, Zeina Daccache, Jonathan Demme, Tim Etchells, Jan Fabre, Free Theatre of Belarus, Richard Foreman, William Forsythe, Arnon Goldfinger, Half Straddle, John Jesurun, Joan Jonas, Chiemi Karasawa, Ken Kobland, Elizabeth LeCompte, Sol LeWitt, Richard Maxwell, Meredith Monk, Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Rimini Protokoll, David Roussève, Madeleine Sackler, Kristina Satter, Christoph Schlingensief, Elaine Stritch, John Walter, David Weissman, Bert Williams, August Wilson, Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group, Hu Xiangqian, with contributions from all over the world including Australia, Belgium, Dutch Caribbean, China, Dutch Caribbean, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Lebanon and the UK.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center announces its inaugural international Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP). The film festival will take place all day long on Thursday, January 29 and Friday, January 30, 2015 at The Segal Theatre Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City.
The FTP (Film Theatre Performance) Festival will be an annual US event for films that deal directly with the themes of theatre and performance. The mission is to present experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. The festival program includes feature films, short films, documentaries, advance screenings, meet-the-filmmaker Q&A sessions, and panels with leading artists in the field.
This event is co-curated by festival founder Frank Hentschker and film producer/theater artist Tanya Selvaratnam.
Films: * Sneak-peek
Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass, and Sol LeWitt - Dance (US/France 2014) 60 minutes
Dance, created in 1979, with choreography by Lucinda Childs, music by Philip Glass, with film work by Sol LeWitt, is a New York downtown minimalist iconic work. Now preserved in Paris by the masterful Sol LeWitt himself in pure form for the screen.
*Mathieu Copeland - The Exhibition of a Film/(L'Exposition d'un film) (UK, 2014) 60 minutes
Taking its construct both within the reality of a film and its medium, The Exhibition of a Film imagines through a polyphony of sound and images new possible textures offered by a cinematic environment. The works of over 40 artists like Lawrence Weiner, Nick Cave, Meredith Monk, Kenneth Goldsmith, Mieko Shiomi, among others, are interwoven.
Romeo Castellucci - Brentano (Italy, 1995) 27 minutes
Visionary theater director Romeo Castellucci's rare venture into film, inspired by short stories of Swiss novelist Robert Walser (1878-1956) who reflected on the German Romantic poet and writer Clemens Brentano (1778-1842), an enthusiastic fan and correspondent of Goethe.
Jan Fabre
1. Do We Feel with Our Brain and Think with Our Heart? (Belgium, 2013) 15 minutes
A visual dialogue between Flemish theater artist Jan Fabre and Italian neurobiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti, who discovered the mirror neurons, the basis for the capacity of empathy. Over the course of three years, Fabre creates startling associations to Rizzolatti's experiments.
2. The Problem (Belgium, 2001) 30 minutes
In this work Jan Fabre compares himself to his fetish animal, the dung beetle and considers that his goal as an artist is similar to the role of insects in life evolution- a performance with the German star philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Dietmar Kamper.
Pavol Liska & Kelly Copper / Nature Theater of Oklahoma
1. Silent Movie Screen Test No. 1, 2, 6 (Zurich, Oslo, Ghent, US 2011) 3 minutes each
Liska and Copper started video experiments using text from their latest work Life and Times as research for future work. Each film, shot in the theaters or dressing rooms they we were performing on tour, is composed of hundreds of black and white still images, like a digital flip-book.
2. Episode 7 - Behind the Scenes (Romance and Portugal Shorts, 2014) 3 minutes each
These short-films are out-takes from the feature length movie NTO is producing for Episode 7 of the durational performance project Life and Times, to be released in 2015.
Richard Maxwell / New York City Players - THE FEUD OTHER (US, 2007) 25 minutes
Jim Fletcher and Richard Maxwell himself star in this short film as two man who are lost in life, in the snow, inside a forest and a wooden hut. In typical Maxwellian style of unattached delivery of surprising lines in a hyper-realistic setting we witness a Dinner with Richard.
*Kristina Satter/Half Straddle - Half Straddle Webisode (US, 2014) 30 minutes excerpt
The 2013 Obie Award-winning Brooklyn-based ensemble of performers and designers creates plays and performances, as well as videos. For the FTP Festival they share a preview of an up-coming web series they are developing loosely based on Half Straddle's company and work.
Thierry de Mey - William Forsythe: One Flat Thing, Reproduced (Belgium/Germany, 2006)
1. The Film: A play for 14 dancers and 20 tables was choreographed by Forsythe to the music of Thom Willems. Dance film specialist and composer Thierry de Mey documented this unique work with a great theatrical intensity that oscillates between disorder and symmetry. 30 minutes
2. The Software: Forsythe's visualization project Synchronous Objects takes the choreography of One Flat Thing, reproduces and processes the data, resulting in a number of different ways in which the viewer can experience the dance at a computer through various software tools.
Back to Back Theatre - The Democratic Set (Australia, 2008 & 2014) 4 and 11 minutes
Disturbingly simple and tantalizingly strange The Democratic Set-a globally adapted performance-is a rapid series of short video performance portraits; an assembly that demonstrates how performance as an experience can, like democracy, allow people to be seen, to speak, and to be heard.
Ken Kobland/Elizabeth LeCompte/The Wooster Group - Rumstick Road (US, 2013) 75 minutes
The haunting video reconstruction of The Wooster Group's legendary 1977 production Rumstick Road, a collaboration between Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte. The work remains faithful to the original theatre piece by registering, in a new composite, the vivid texture of time and memory that shaped the live performance.
John Jesurun - Shadowland Episode 2: Monkey With Purple Flower (US, 2012) 25 minutes
The web-serial Shadowland by New York avant-garde director, writer and sculptor John Jesurun explores the simultaneous combination of personal, social, and political ideas emerging from the flux of a continuously developing plot. Featuring actors from Jesurun's "living film series" Chang in a Void Moon performance ensemble.
Gabri Christa - Kasita (Bonaire, Dutch Caribbean, 2014) 25 minutes
A young woman travels to Bonaire in the Caribbean to grieve the loss of her partner. where legend has it that during times of slavery, the men and women who wanted to escape did so when the dolphins passed along the coasts, by attempting to swim to Venezuela.
Tim EtchellsTim Etchells is the artistic director of UK's legendary company Forces Entertainment.
1. Mark Does Lear (UK, 2002) 35 minutes
Late at night, after a single first-time reading of Shakespeare's King Lear during a long train ride, the artist's brother Mark attempts to re-tell and make sense of the story in a single unedited take.
2. 100 People (UK, 2007) 15 minutes
100 People conjures the imaginary presence of one hundred people, each of whom exists only by virtue of brief descriptions on screens.
Paul Poet - FOREIGNERS OUT! Schlingensief's Container (Austria, 2002) 90 minutes
Set in Austria, 2000: Right after the ultra-right-wing political party FPÖ had become part of the government, infamous German shock director Christoph Schlingensief staged a Big-Brother-Container-Show, where Austrians could vote for the asylum seeker they hated most.
Hu Xiangqian - Sun (China, 2008) 10 minutes
Inspired by current events and his own surroundings and with a keen eye for the absurd, Chinese video and performance artists Hu Xiangqian tries to tan himself the same shade as two of his close African friends.
Big Art Group - The Imitation (US, 2014) 30 minutes
Big Art Group's exploration of the Image-Performance combines elements of rock spectacle with the grotesque and avant-garde films of the 1960s while merging contemporary visual language with a literary dramaturgy.
*Richard Foreman - Once Every Day (US, 2013) 60 minutes
The legendary New York auteur-du-theatre Richard Foreman returns 30 years after Strong Medicine to a full-length film. Shot in just six days, Foreman uses his performance work as a matrix for fascinating collage of images, sounds, and ideas for a film with no plot.
Jonathan Demme - Ibsen's Master Builder (US 2014) 130 minutes
The magnetic performances in this masterful adaptation are delivered by Julie Hagerty, as well as by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, the long-term collaborators who brought us My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. Both worked for over 10 years on the Ibsen project before Demme's brilliant adaptation after a few brownstone performances in New York.
Documentaries:
*John Walter - The Earth Moves (US, 2014) 30 minutes
Excerpts from the upcoming documentary on Robert Wilson's Opera Einstein on the Beach, reflecting on theatre and science from Brecht to Wilson-featuring interviews with Robert Wilson, Philipp Glass, and Christopher Knowles. (Work in Progress)
*Adam Soch - Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary (US, 2014) 60 minutes
With his company Dar A Luz, formed in 1991, Iranian-American avant-garde director Reza Abdoh created spectacles known for their sensory overload, ferocious energy, and hallucinatory dreamscapes. Abdoh died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 32. (Work in Progress)
*Sam Pollard - August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand (US, 2014) 90 minutes
The first in-depth exploration of the life, work and cultural impact of the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning African American playwright and Pittsburgh native (1945 - 2005). Advance screening of a brand-new PBS American Masters production.
*Christine Cynn - The Space Between (Germany, 2014) 60 minutes
The co-director of The Act of Killing presents excerpts of the behind-the-scenes film about Rimini Protokoll's The Situation Rooms: a global performance about 20 people from seven continents whose life has been affected by weapons and arms trade. (Work in Progress)
Madeleine Sackler - Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus (UK, 2013) 80 minutes
As the members of the Free Theatre confront the choice of either repression at home or exile in the US and the UK, DANGEROUS ACTS reconfirms our belief that the power of art and hope can indeed change the world.
Zeina Daccache - Scheherazade's Diary (Lebanon, 2013) 80 minutes
During a 10-month drama therapy/theater project female inmates at the Baabda Prison in Lebanon reveal their stories-tales of domestic violence, traumatic childhoods, failed marriages, forlorn romances, and deprivation of motherhood.
*Elevator Repair Service - Standing By: Gatz Backstage (US, 2014) 30 minutes
Excerpts from a behind-the-scenes documentary about the sensational eight-hour reading performance of F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby by New York's experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service.
John Walter - Theater of War (US, 2008) 95 minutes
Tony Kushner, Meryl Streep, and her costars tackle Brecht's challenging pacifist play Mother Courage for The Public Theater's daring production in Central Park, New York. Walter also focuses on Brecht's creative life and his years in exile from Nazi Germany.
Babeth M. VanLoo - Meredith Monk: Inner Voice (US, 2009) 30 minutes excerpt
Using a wealth of resource material including her personal archive the film illuminates the role that Buddhism pays in the artistic practice of Monk's life and work as a composer, singer, director, and choreographer.
Chiemi Karasawa - Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me (US, 2013) 80 minutes
Plagued by medical issues and memory lapses, the Broadway icon Elaine Stritch (19250-14) contemplates retirement and mortality as she approaches her 87th birthday and rehearses for a new show.
David Weissman & Bill Weber - The Cockettes (US, 2002) 100 minutes
An homage to the gender-bending San Francisco performance group that became a pop culture phenomenon in the gay San Francisco of the '70s-a flamboyant ensemble of hippies that created for just four years the now legendary midnight shows at the Palace Theater.
Arnon Goldfinger - The Komediant (Israel, 2000) 90 minutes
The life and careers of the members of a royal family of Yiddish theatre, The Burstein-including rare archival footage and interviews with Yiddish stage veterans. A homage to the lost world of Yiddish Theatre.
Festival Producer: Joy Arab Festival advisors are Christopher Hibma, Lisa Dent, Claire Bishop, and Bonnie Marranca
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