Tickets: $10 Presale / $15 Day of Show / $20 at the Door
In evoking liminal states of consciousness through the use of custom-made screens, elaborate projection arrays and multi-planed, layered imagery, the works on this program explore imagined histories, the nature of memories, literal and metaphoric travel and motion. Kerry Laitala’s The City Luminous: Electric Salome (featuring dancer/choreographer Jenny Stulberg and with live soundtrack by Voicehandler) celebrates the groundbreaking light/costume/dance innovations of Loie Fuller (1862–1928) as a progenitor of Performance Cinema itself while imagining the fantastical Panama Pacific International Exhibition presented in San Francisco in 1915. The Tehran-born, Brooklyn-based Raha Raissnia—in her first ever Bay Area appearance—performs Mneme-3 and Litany, two performance works for 16mm film, projected slides and hand-painted screens. “In Greek mythology Mneme-3 is one of the three muses. She is memory personified. Mneme-3 puts together bits and pieces from the past and forms new meaning in the present.” Raissnia’s projections are accompanied by live soundtrack by by Panagiotis Mavridis, performing on hand-made instruments—Tetraphono, Violautomato (Bass and Cello)—each “automated members of the Viol family”—and Three String Cymbal, incorporating, variously, contact microphones, brass piping, human vocalizations and strings. Finally, John Davis’ The Dreaming Skull activates Gray Area’s Proscenium with four spatialized quadrophonic film/audio channels representing the four points of the compass, exploring the concept of navigation. Building on personal and psychological narratives, The Dreaming Skull canters on parallels between the known and the unknown, the conscious and the subconscious, the corporeal and the metaphysical, the banal and the ecstatic.
Performance Cinema: an exciting and emergent genre of avant-garde moving-image art which represents a crucial attack on the sterility of the contemporary, digitally-located media environment, arguing for the embodied, collective consideration of real-time, site-specific media experiences. Through mis-used or modified analog film projectors, live video synthesis and physical interaction with the media interface, performance cinema practitioners variously burn, etch, mutilate and destroy projected film, machinery and the image itself. Performance Cinema practitioners create immersive spectacles of sight and sound, opening a space for questioning and contemplating visual culture through direct activation of the senses. As a dynamic, regenerating and resurrecting media experience, Performance Cinema exists only in the moment of perception and is truly an art of its time. Full series information available here.
Perpetual Motion is a presentation of San Francisco Cinematheque in partnership with Gray Area and is supported by generous funding from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and by generous donations from Cinematheque’s individual donors and members.
