Artists' Film Biennial 2014: Dance Transmissions: Selected by Vivian Ziherl + Q&A

If you want to become rich. If you feel sick. If you feel tired. 
Enter. See the Chinese wisdom, the missionaries, the dentists, the plague, the gold, the gongs. 
- Jean Cocteau, Parade, 1917. [Script for ‘American Manager’, not included in final production] 

Curator Vivian Ziherl has selected a programme of films for the Artists' Film Biennial that deal with themes of dance in translation to moving image, about figures and gestures transposed across media. Yet their images bear the trace of cinema’s imprint within the bodies of modern dance itself. Unspoken texts tremble in the interference patterns between these media, perhaps issuing Cocteau’s enticement of a concealed drama, ‘the plague, the gold, the gongs’. 

The screening is followed by a Q&A with artist Shahryar Nashat, choreographer Adam Linder and programme curator Vivian Ziherl.

The programme features the London premiere screening of two new works produced between artists and choreographer-dancers. Both, and both differently, undertake adaptations of historic dance pieces that are marked by trans-disciplinary collaboration and by a displacement of the stage. 

Programme: 

• Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne, Atlas/Inserts, 2014, HD video, colour, sound, 13 min
• Charles Atlas, Mrs Peanut Visits New York, 1999, SD video, colour, sound 6 min 5 sec 
• Shahryar Nashat, Parade, 2014, Alexa 2K/DCP 2K, colour, sound, 38 min

Shahryar Nashat’s Parade (2014) translates to video Adam Linder’s recent rendition of the 1917 Ballets Russes production of the same name, conceived by Jean Cocteau and realized with Léonide Messine, Pablo Picasso and Erik Satie. The camera's intelligence goes into dialogue with all elements of the performance. It underscores a matching of talents as simultaneously the piece itself traces a subtle critique of present-day constructions of virtuosity and of self-performance. 

Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne’s Atlas/Inserts (2014) transposes the labouring, performing and exuberant body from trained dancer to obdurate camel. The video locates segments of Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas’ 1982 collaboration Channels/Inserts within the edifice of the ancient - a deserted film set at the Atlas Studios in Morocco. Here the human persists as an ambivalent relic, transmitted through movements of a dance-footage fragment.  

Shuttling between virtuosic physicality, the empty event of advertising, archaic scenographies and orientalist fantasy, the two videos speak to the transformations of the body in the 20th Century. An intermission of Charles Atlas’ Mrs Peanut Visits New York (1999) plays, to quote the artist, ‘because we must’.

Vivian Ziherl is Curator at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam. Recent projects include Landings (with Natasha Ginwala) at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and partner organisations including Rietveld Academie Studium Generale, Rotterdam; Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Campo Adentro, Madrid; David Roberts Art Foundation, London, among others and StageIt! Part 1 & 2 (with Hendrik Folkerts) at the Stedelijk Museum, 2012/13. She was the editor of The Lip Anthology and was the founding contributing editor of Discipline Magazine. Her writing has appeared in periodicals including Frieze, e-flux Journal, Witte de With Review, Pages Magazine, LEAP Magazine, Metropolis M, Eyeline and the Journal of Art (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand).