if The shoe fiTs

Chris Scherer

2008, Australia, video, color, sound, 9 min.

A young man confronts his identity in a public restroom as devilish creatures, represented by two divergent drag queens, pas de trois with him as he relinquishes his inhibitions and paints the facility with his body. With the innovative use of lighting and projections, Scherer transforms the cruising ground into an arena for the tormented psyche of the striking protagonist. If the Shoe Fits took the Dance On Film award this year at the Australian Dance Awards.

This pleasanT and graTeful asylum

Arthur Aviles

2009, USA, video, color, sound, 8 min.

Performed for the first time in 1999, and now brought to the screen. “There is nothing vague about This Pleasant and Grateful Asylum, an unflinching duet [that] at first seems a silly nod to Martha Graham’s ‘Lamentation,’ as two shapes tussle inside a stretchy purple sack. Then two knives rend the fabric and Neil Totton and Brandin Steffensen emerge naked, juxtaposing politely formal dance moves with insistent kisses.” —Claudia la Rocco, New York Times [Music: J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto—played by Glen Gould]

eric moe’s idyll

Suzie Silver & Hilary Harp

2008, USA, video, color, sound, 7 min.

Phalloi Phaerie emerges from the wood. Forest nymphs with carnivorous flowers begin their mating rituals in a playful, olymorphously perverse return to Arcadia. A meeting of Jack Smith and Sid & Marty Krofft in an early Kate Bush music video on a sylvan summer day in southwestern Pennsylvania.

burning palace

Mara Mattuschka & Chris Haring

2009, Austria, 35 mm on video, color, sound, 32 min.

A stage, marble columns, the red curtain closes: “You only have a split second of a pose to multiply your transgression.” This first statement introducing the opening sequence sounds like provocative instructions. The game of five figures ensnared in erotic innuendos is more appearance than reality: the pornographic poses can be interpreted as sexual simply by the shadows they cast. In the glowing light, they are actually five protagonists warming up for a night in the Burning Palace Hotel.

Precise physical work with the body has seldom experienced such a condensed cinematic counterpart as it does in Mattuschka & Haring’s new film. In subtle tableaux vivants sweaty bodies awake from a turbulent, dream-filled night at the hotel, loll male and female bodies out of grotesque poses into a scene of border transgression: between objects and bodies, sounds and melodies, and genders arise those categorical transgressions and shifts so typical for Mattuschka. A mimetic communication takes place between the beings (are they really people?) populating this palace in an urgency of gestures entirely characteristic of the filmmaker, which is seemingly produced through the immense, yet astonishingly discrete proximity of the camera to the bodies. The alienated soundscape of breathing, singing, and speaking provides the logical architecture for the visual development, and determines the chronology of the events, the carnivalesque of the gestures, and the materiality of the bodies with an increasing uncanniness (the palace as hotel, as heterotopia). From Paris is Burning to this Burning Palace: it’s just a stone’s throw.”—Andrea B. Braidt [as translated by Lisa Rosenblatt]