Break out some wicked moves
We Have Decided Not to Die
Get your fill of dance on film at ReelDance 2010.
In need of a wife? Try stealing one from the neighbouring village. According to Ancient Roman mythology, the first generation of Roman men pillaged themselves a fine set of homemakers from the Sabine tribe next door.
The whole sordid episode became known as The Rape of the Sabine Women (although 'rape', in this instance, means 'abduction') and its psycho-sexual resonance has echoed down through ages, through various titillating Renaissance paintings and onto the silver screen.
MGM's yee-haw musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) is loosely based on this dark Roman legend, but the lust and violence were scrubbed out of that particular story.
When director Eve Sussman made her own version of The Rape of the Sabine Women in 2004, she put them right back in again. Her 80-minute improvised dance film re-imagines Ancient Rome as 1960s Greece, idyllic and indulgent, with a cast of hundreds poised to tear each other apart in an operatic clash of power and desire.
After screening at the IFC in New York and Berlin's famed Hamburger Bahnhof Contemporary Art Museum, Eve Sussman's The Rape of the Sabine Women is coming to ACMI, screening next weekend as part of the ReelDance 2010 film festival.
Every two years, ReelDance brings you the best dance-on-film and dance-on-video works from around the world, and Sussman's piece is just one of the treats in store in 2010.
Check out Paris is Burning for a funny and affecting glimpse at the drag queens who invented 'vogueing' in the early nineties, a retrospective on the superb UK video artist Shelly Love (director of Ladyhawke's Magic clip) and two dance shorts packages: You're Not From Here Are You? and You're Not From Here Are You Too?
Hot foot it over to the ReelDance page for session times.
Published Thursday, 20 May 2010
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