Ives 101 (Warren Auditorium)  

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“Starting from the modest premise of documenting several months of Pina Bausch’s performances and rehearsals in the summer of 1983, the director Chantal Akerman realized one of the greatest of all syntheses of dance and cinema. She films the performers with a poised camera; her incisive angles and smooth pan shots emphasize the dances’ visual counterpoint and overlapping rhythms. In Bausch’s stagings, as in Akerman’s dramas, ordinary gestures are emphasized and formalized into dances, and Akerman films Bausch’s dancers as she films the actors in such movies as “Jeanne Dielman” and “Toute une Nuit.” Observing the dancers behind the scenes and in their dressing rooms as they dress, smoke, apply makeup, and sing, Akerman sees their preparations and meditations as continuous with their public performances; her interviews with members of the company are echoed in their dancing. If Bausch’s choreography no longer existed, Akerman’s films could be excerpted to convey something of its essence—and Bausch herself, serenely avowing her poetic aspirations, becomes one of Akerman’s characters.” 

Richard Brody, The New Yorker (1983, 57 min.). For more information, go to https://sfi.sonoma.edu