| Choreography by Robert Morris - Film
By Babette Mangolte
With: Site: Andrew Ludke, Sarah Tomlinson (Original Cast
1964 Robert Morris, Carolee Schneeman) – Arizona: Andrew
Ludke (Original Cast 1963 Robert Morris) –
21:3: Speaker Michael Stella Voice Robert Morris (Original
Cast 1963 Robert Morris) – Waterman Switch: Pamela Weese,
Susan Blankensop, Michele Pogliani (Original Cast 1965 Lucinda
Child, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris)
The film is a reconstitution of the seminal performance
work done in the early Sixties by the sculptor Robert Morris.
The filmmaker’s problematic was to create a film which,
in the Nineties, can give a sense of the aesthetics of another
generation without debasing it by transforming it. In particular
the modernism concerns of the Sixties performance artists
and dancers were centered on casual gestures and duration.
Several of those preoccupation’s have been integrated
in today’s dance vocabulary (like casual movement and
untrained bodies), but some remain elusive, like the concept
of theatrical time, which at the time was totally renewed
in the performance work of the period due to John Cage’s
enormous influence. Film is the medium of duration, but what
we call duration is historically determined. Film spectatorship
expectations greatly change in different generations. My biggest
question was how to represent the sense of time of another
generation. I gambled that if I could create a sense of heightened
presence of the performer on screen by restructuring the sound
space of the image, I could use the distended time-duration
of the Sixties to my advantage and emphasize the importance
of the performer’s body. The film premises rest on maintaining
the concept of art as displacement / art as a frame which
I thought was at the center of the impact of the performances
at the time when their making revolutionizes the new dance
in the New York art scene of the early Sixties. - BM 1994
Permanent Collection:
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Major Festival and shows:
Anthology Film Archives, New York City, New York, 1994
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994
The National Gallery, Washington, DC, 1994
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1995
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