the Last Film: Curtain Call (working title)

For our last film we intend to make a multi-screen work which will play performatively with space and time and which will not only draw on The Lastmaker performance but also open up new endings towards as yet unknown beginnings. The working title for our final film is Curtain Call and will involve shooting in several different locations on S16mm film beginning in early 2009. We invite you to support our last film by making a financial contribution.

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Daynightly They re-school you The Bears-Polka (2005)
A double film
9.5 minutes x 2

In 2004 we premiered our eighth performance work, when will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy. Among its inspirations, the poetry of Paul Celan – his poetics of compression, collision, and miniaturization – particularly informed the performance’s shape and rhythms. After a substantial 2004/2005 tour, Lin Hixson (Goat Island director) and Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn) (Goat Island associate member) worked to distill the performance into 9 minutes and 30 seconds, the safe length within a roll of S16 mm. film, and to split that duration in two. The idea was to construct two films that screened simultaneously on opposite walls of the same gallery, to balance movement and stillness as a single interwoven experience for a viewer positioned in the space between the screens. We worked to translate performance to film the way poetry translation selects and migrates meanings across the gaps of languages. We decided on two constraints: 1) no editing – both sequences run the entire length of the film roll, forcing us to choreograph performers and camera in unbroken theatrical time; and 2) each performer only appears on one screen at a time. We located the film in an adjacent classroom and hallway on the uppermost floor of the Chicago Academy for the Arts high school. (We discovered the building when we taught a workshop there in early 2005.) The hall thoroughfare terminated in a kind of emptiness: a down staircase (exit) and windows. The classroom box had its chalkboard backdrop. These spaces now contained and framed our performance. On the chalkboard as a lesson we wrote out one of the Celan poems around which our performance had always orbited. May the poets and translators forgive us for detaching two of the lines and rearranging them. Like struggling pupils fishing for the right answer, we copied the words on the cover of our extracurricular activities notebook, as a double title for our double film.

Dark (2003)

A one minute film to a track by Low.
A falling duet which unravels – made with Goat Island and screened at Tate Modern as part of the Live Culture international performance symposium in 2003.

It’s Aching Like Birds (2001)

It’s aching like birds draws on a very American sense of landscape and space. Through fragments of movement and story Goat Island and Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn) have explored the curious dislocation of memory as four characters perform ‘postcards’, remembering a world they learned to love. The newly devised choreography reflects the funny ache at the heart of memory.