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Thursday – Friday, February 25 -26
Segal Theatre All Day Screening
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center announces the second annual Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP). The film festival will take place all day on Thursday, February 25 and Friday, February 26 at The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, located at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. The program includes a roster of more than 30 features, shorts, documentaries, advance screenings, and meet-the-artist Q&A sessions with leading international theatre artists from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Syria, UK, and the US.
4:30pm Ty Flowers/People Get Ready – Physiques | César Vayssié & Boris Charmatz – Levée | Carlos Soto – close your eyes up tight; you will not sleep tonight
5:30pmEleanor Fogg and Vivianna Chiotini/johnsmith – what it feels like for a girl | I AM A BOYS CHOIR – demonstrating the imaginary body|Sylvan Oswald & Maria Cataldo –Outtakes
3:00pm Dorota Masłowska – Mister D x Anja Rubik – Chleb + Mister D – Haj$|Half Straddle/Tina Satter – Secret Notebooks: Half Straddle Rap + Free the Skull: Music video for Moon Duo
3:00pm Lucien Bou Rjeily –About 66 Minutes in Damascus
3:30pm Temporary Distortion/Kenneth Collins – Only the Hand That Erases | John Jesurun – Snow | AutomaticRelease/Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty – Why Why Always |Daniel Fish & Jim Findlay – The Source
6:30pm Back to Back Theatre –The Democratic Set: North Melbourne + Edinburgh | Hugo Glendinning & Tim Etchells/Forced Entertainment – Uncertain Fragments
6:30pm Evan Husney & Emily Wilson – The Making of Mirror Heart| Mukunda Angulo – Mirror Heart
7:30pm Romeo Castellucci – Brentano | Jan Fabre – The Problem | Robert Wilson – Winona Ryder Video Portrait
11:00AM Evaldo Mocarzel – BR-3 Documentary (Brazil, 2009) 76 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Portuguese with Spanish subtitles
BR-3 Documentary records the testimony of actors and technicians involved in the staging of BR-3 at Rio Tiete in Sao Paulo. The plot of the play follows the saga of three generations of a northeastern family. The play begins when Brasília was still a construction site in the 50s, and then moves to the traffic on the outskirts of the 90s. The film also shows director Antonio Araújo’s process in the mounting of the play.
11:00AM
Frank Castorf – Dämonen
178 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats) German with NO subtitles
Life, death, God, salvation, terrorism, revolution? Whoever lives close to the edge, has the worst behind him. Frank Castorf, the internationally renowned German artistic director of the Berliner theatre Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz for almost two decades, staged in 2006 his very first film—based on his own stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons and Camus’s The Possessed. Castorf created a haunting post-Soviet pan-slavistic panopticon, which takes place around the very last Russian house before the western border. For the
film, the late legendary stage designer Bert Neumann created within the barren landscape of Berlin’s provincial Mecklenburg-Vorpommern county, a simple set: a dacha, an old garden shack next to a “swimming pool”—an imaginary landscape inspired by Wim Wender’s Paris/Texas, the tiny hamlet Korleput on Berlin’s country side, Russia’s Duma 2000, Cindy Sherman and the Danish avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogma 95.
12:30PM Gob Squad – Live Long and Prosper(Germany/UK, 2008-2009)
20 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
English and German
What: Seven film sequences are re-staged by seven performers across the city of Berlin. Shown on two screens, the devices of narrative film are doubled up and reflected back on themselves in a cinematic game of ‘spot the difference’.
Where: The mountains of the Wild West become escalators in the central station, a battlefield from a historic war becomes a city fairground and the interior of the Starship Enterprise is played by Pfennigland – a discount shop.
The intertwined sequences and their doppelgangers weave simultaneously towards their inevitably tragic ends. Performers prepare and play-out their scenes with tender seriousness, leaving a trail of pretend corpses, extracted from their borrowed sources and abandoned in cinematic pull backs that reveal everyday urban life continuing around them.
1:00PM Wunderbaum/Mijke de Jong – Stop Acting Now (The Netherlands, 2016)
82 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Dutch with English subtitles
The Rotterdam Actors group, Wunderbaum, will stop acting and will switch over to REALaction. We will follow the actors’ frantic efforts to radically change the world. The actors,who have created socially orientated theatre for years, will set up various world-improvingprojects in ‘real’ life. The differences in approach, vision, and effectiveness are puttingthe group under considerable pressure. The central issue is the extent of our personal
engagement for the common cause.
Wunderbaum is a Dutch-Flemish actors’ group that makes new theatre about current issues. In 2013, Wunderbaum started building The New Forest: a four-year project involving numerous partners, volunteers and spectators. It consists of theatre performances, seminars, a film project, context programmes and online content.
2:00PM Sibylle Dahrendorf – Crackle of Time: Christoph Schlingensief and His Opera Village in Burkina Faso (Germany, 2012)
106 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Christoph Schlingensief, the German film, theatre, and opera director, had a vision for an opera village in Africa. Despite his battle with cancer, he made frequent trips to Burkina Faso–such was his devotion and conviction. Crackle of Time tells the story of his impossible project: to build an opera village in Burkina Faso, a space which would combine art and life, with a school, theatre, hospital, living quarters, a football field, and a lunchroom. Schlingensief wanted to include everything one needs to live and survive in one place. Everything changed when Christoph Schlingensief died in August 2010.From the initial location search in May 2009 and the groundbreaking in February 2010 to the emergence of the school, the documentary takes us up close to the German artist, Christoph Schlingensief, and his architect, Diébédo Francis Kéré, who originally comes from Burkina Faso. The documentary gets behind the vision of the ‘opera village’ and witnesses its struggles and hurdles. In October 2011, the school celebrated its opening.
2:00PM Rimini Protokoll – World Climate Change Conference (Germany)
55 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
German with English subtitles
Berlin’s groundbreaking experimental theatre ensemble Rimini Protokoll, made up of Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel, work in many realms: theatre, sound and radio plays, film, and installation. In 2014, for the theatre Schauspielhaus (Hamburg), the ensemble created a mammoth-scale “drama of diplomacy“ — a simulation of the 2015 Paris UN Conference on Climate Change. Rimini asked audience members to divide into 196 national delegations and to reenact proceedings of international climate diplomacy. Documentary filmmakers Sandra Trosel & Lilli Thalgott documented the process.
4:00PM Krzysztof Garbaczewski – A Memoir (Poland)
50 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Polish with English subtitles
Albertyna, Marcel, a couple, Charlus, Morel, Lea and others are living their dream together in a 19th century mansion. By following your imagination as closely as possible and motivating your neural networks and memories, you produce a story of your own choice. It is an experiment in understanding the biography of the other. Based on the novel, The Captive, by Marcel Proust, a masterpiece that asks if a human being could be discovered as a utopian project–a definition of his own life and memories and a sensual model of behavior in circumstances that are given only for a particular time period. A Memoir is a story that has been lost.
4:30PM – MOVEMENT
1. Ty Flowers/People Get Ready – Physiques (US, 2014)
3 minutes and 35 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Physiques is an experimental video collaboration between video artist Ty Flowers and performance/music collective People Get Ready. People Get Ready’s Steven Reker choreographed a dance to the song, written by the goup, at 2.5x the normal speed. The video was shot at 2.5x the normal frame rate and, when played back, the dance stays in sync with the music, while all other background elements are surreally out of place.
A labyrinthine performance, constructed on the basis of an extensive canon of derivative gestures, Levée des conflits is impossible to recreate in its totality: it is a snapshot of 25 simultaneous gestures that the eye cannot take in with a single glance. Rather than try to capture something of this perceptual experience, César Vayssié opted for an unclassifiable film, something between an abstract bird’s eye view, a documentary, and a genre film. Filmed on August 23, 2013 in Halde Haniel, Bottrop, Germany (with the kind permission of Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts and of RAG Aktiengesellschaft), on the “Halde Haniel” mining site — an immense plateau shaped like a spiral — Vayssié’s film propels the dance into an indeterminate zone, somewhere
between science fiction and anthropology.
3. Carlos Soto – close your eyes up tight; you will not sleep tonight (US, 2013)
17 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
The piece utilizes a 1965 Mustang as a mobile mount for a camera that catalogues nighttime streets in the countryside surrounding Willem de Kooning’s Long Island studio. Accompanied by the blues-infused drawl of an electric guitar, the visuals transition slowly from shots of treetops passing overhead to lyrical images from within the car. Utilizing keen frame-rate manipulation and prolonged dissolves, the viewer is pulled in the direction of the car’s motion.
Persona is a provocative and artistically complex opera-theatre depiction of human frailty, cruelty, and identity. The libretto has been adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s original screenplay for the 1966 classic film, which has been described as a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth dealing, with ontological subjectivity
and the gaze of cinema itself. The film is based on Makan and Scheib’s 2015, Beth Morrison Projects produced, production of Persona at National Sawdust in Brooklyn.
5:30PM – QUEER
1. Eleanor Fogg and Vivianna Chiotini/johnsmith – what it feels like for a girl (UK, 2015)
6 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
johnsmith is a whatever being. Channeling Patrick Bateman and Madonna, john gets something off their chest in this razor sharp and revealing cabaret performance.
2. I Am A Boys Choir – demonstrating the imaginary body (US, 2015)
27 minutes 51 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
demonstrating the imaginary body is a work that exists somewhere between a gender studies lecture and an ice skating competition. Powered by the queer imagination, I AM A BOYS CHOIR investigates the body myth of the female athlete and the process of earning institutional validation by conforming to specific identity markers in regards to class and gender. There is also a lot of Tonya Harding.
Outtakes is a lo-fi web series based on the genre of the transition video. People in the process of transitioning their gender create these raw journal entries on cell phones and webcams to share experiences and information, and to feel less isolated by reaching out and building community online. Outtakes blurs the lines between what is real and what is imagined. The show is about what it means when a very private journey has to happen in public.
7:00PM Adam Soch – Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary (US, 2015) 112 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The impact of wunderkind theatre director Reza Abdoh’s explosive work is finally brought to light twenty years after his death from AIDS, with live performance footage and interviews with those closest to him. Reza Abdoh; Theatre Visionary, directed by Adam Soch (Abdoh’s long-time collaborator and video archivist) is an intimate portrait of the world and work of Abdoh and his company, Dar a Luz. It features excerpts from Abdoh’s most important productions alongside interviews with Abdoh himself, his collaborators, critics, friends and family. These elements combine to illuminate his legacy; his groundbreaking work and his visionary, theatrical genius.
7:00PM
Jörg Jeshel & Brigitte Kramer – Passion – Last Stop Kinshasa (Germany, 2009) 90 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats) French with English subtitles
Alain Platel’s les ballets C de la B was founded in 1984. The company keeps to its principle of enabling artists from various disciplines and backgrounds to take part in a dynamic creative process. les ballets C de la B was on tour for one year with the piece pitié! from director Alain Platel and musician Fabrizio Cassol. The tour took them to major capitals including Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo. After more than 100 performances, pitié! concluded in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Following several years of unrest and political instability, the country is aspiring to new cultural horizons. For filmmakers Jörg Jeshel and Brigitte Kramer, this was the starting point for the documentary Passion – Last Stop Kinshasa. This documentary focuses not only on the breathtaking show, but on the reactions in Congo as well.
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 26
11:00AM
Frederick Wiseman – La Comédie-Française ou L’amour joué (France/US, 1996) 66 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
La Comédie-Française is the oldest continuous repertory company in the world, founded in Paris in the late 17th century. This is the first time a documentary film-maker has been allowed to look at all the aspects of the work of this great theatrical company. Sequences in the film include sections of plays, casting, set and costume design, administrative meetings and rehearsals, and performances of four classic French plays, Don Juan by Molière, La Thebaide by Racine, La Double Inconstance by Marivaux and Occupe-toi d’Amelie by Feydeau.
12:00PM Kazuhiro Soda – Theatre 1 [ORIZA HIRATA]
172 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Japanese with English subtitles
Theatre 1 (Observational Film Series #3) is a feature length documentary, which closely depicts the world of Oriza Hirata, Japan’s leading playwright and director, and his theatrical company, Seinendan. By depicting them, the film leads the audience to revisit fundamental but timely questions: What is theatre? Why do human beings act?
This film is the first of a two-part (5 hour, 42 minute) observational documentary.
3:00PM – MUSIC VIDEOS
1. Dorota Masłowska – Mister D. x Anja Rubik – Chleb + Mister D. – Haj$ 4 minutes 37 seconds + 3 minutes 13 seconds| Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Polish with English subtitles
Mister D. is the stage name for Dorota Masłowska. She has recently released her debut album Społeczeństwo Jest Niemiłe (The Society Is Not Very Nice) which has immediately become a major talking point in the Polish media.
Chleb (Bread) is an abstract music video inspired by 1990s TV aesthetics and video games, featuring world-renowned super model Anna Rubik. A kaleidoscope of psychedelic scenes portrays the life of a Polish neighborhood, revealing a grand love story with a bread making machine in the background.
The song Haj$, in which Mister D. demands a money sandwich in a shrill voice, was illustrated with a music video inspired by 90’s style. Produced using conventions from video games, it presents characters from rap videos passing through the style of a Polish housing project. This video is to promote Hardkor disco, a film by Krzysztof Skonieczny.
2. Half Straddle/Tina Satter – Secret Notebooks: Half Straddle Rap + Free the Skull: Music Video for Moon Duo (US, 2012/2015) 3 minutes 44 seconds + 3 minutes 57 seconds| Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Secret Notebooks: With a few months off one summer, and amazing collaborators, Half Straddle set out to make their first-ever rap song and video. Playing off the idioms of the genre, Half Straddle’s girl rappers drop push-ups with no knees, late nights with Soledad O’Brien, and references to their bangs as a knowingly ridiculous vocabulary for throwing shade, all set in a lusciously drenched visual realm and accompanied by deep beats.
Free the Skull: Sanae Yamada of the band Moon Duo commissioned Half Straddle to make this video. Tina was inspired by the sort of noir detective sound she heard in the song and an instinct to filter this sensibility through the dreamscape of young girl detectives who could serve as portals to an unexpected idea of what “freeing the
skull” could mean. Moon Duo’s sound can feel excitingly hard, as well as dreamy and ritualistic and the girls bowing down to this alien force seemed a natural narrative to reflect that.
3:00PM Lucien Bou Rjeily –About 66 Minutes in Damascus
20 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Lucien Bou Rjeily gives a short presentation about his site-specific play, 66 Minutes in Damascus. Inspired by the descriptions of Syrian detention centers from foreign journalists and local activists arbitrarily incarcerated by the autocratic regime, 66 Minutes in Damascus puts the audience in the place of a group of tourists who visit the Syrian capital, only to be arrested by the Syrian secret service.
3:30PM – NEW YORK
1. Temporary Distortion/Kenneth Collins – Only the Hand That Erases (US, 2016)
14 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Purely imagery and yet pure of image, moments previously captured on celluloidare erased and revisited as ideas inside the mind.
This film was created specifically for the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2016.
A toxic American cocktail of death, desire, technology, and television. Jesurun’s four screen mixdown of the original 2000 performance launches four “characters” and twenty-two shifting POVs through the unforgiving eye of one virtual actor. During the presentation of an original four screen live edit of the 2000 piece, that audience experienced this work similarly on four screens. The secluded live performance was transmitted and edited live to four screens in the audience area. There were four live actors and one “virtual actor”–a computerized camera POV with attached “character” voice.
Featuring Valerie Charles,Peter Crook, Mary Ewald, Peter Sorensen, and Jojo Abaoag.Music by Black Beetle And Rebecca Moore.
Why Why Always is a live, multimedia performance installation that re-envisions Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal film Alphaville. This multi-platform project offers a dynamic interplay between theater, dance, installation art, technology, and media by integrating live performers, multi-screen projections, live-feed cameras, sculptural set elements, and a vibrant tapestry of sound. These short films, inspired by Alphaville, feature Jim Fletcher as the character Lemmy Caution. These sequences will be integrated into the live performance.
4. Daniel Fish & Jim Findlay – The Source (US)
8 minutes and 11 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
This video is based on the oratorio with four channel video, The Source with music by Ted Hearne and text by Mark Doten that had its World Premiere at BAM 2014 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL. The Source concerns Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army private responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The text is an assemblage of Twitter feeds, chat log transcripts, court testimony, and Iraqi and Afghanistan war logs. For this piece, Jim Findlay and Daniel Fish filmed nearly one hundred people, one at a time, as they watched an eleven minute US military video of combat from the Iraqi War. For the original live performance, the footage of the people watching the video was projected on four large screens that surrounded the audience and the singers, placing them alone and together in one shared space.
The women inmates of Lebanon’s Baabda Prison mine the depths of personal experience and confront patriarchy as they prepare and present the first theatre performance staged inside an Arab Women’s prison. Filmed during, and after, the ten-month drama therapy/theatre project run in Baabda prison, in 2012, by drama therapist and director Zeina Daccache, this gripping and tragicomic documentary features the women inmates who, through their unprecedented theatre initiative entitled, Scheherazade in Baabda, challenge societies that oppress women.
5:00PM Steven Soderbergh – And Everything is Going Fine (US, 2010) 89 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The late Spalding Gray was a brilliant playwright and actor, known for his dazzling, distinctive monologues, an art form all his own. Here, master filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who collaborated with him on King of the Hill and Gray’s Anatomy, takes Gray’s own words–captured over 25 years—to craft a profound, insightful and wonderfully entertaining portrait of this quintessential American artist.
6:00PM David Levine & David Conison – THEATR
30 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
An app that brings theater to you.
6:30PM – FILM BLOCK
1. Back to Back Theatre – The Democratic Set: North Melbourne + Edinburgh
6 minutes 33 seconds + 8 minutes 30 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
THE DEMOCRATIC SET Edinburgh was presented at the Edinburgh International Festival with Lung Ha’s Theatre Company and Indepen-dance.
THE DEMOCRATIC SET is a residency model for creating short films and performances, to explore the belief that all people are, in principle, equal and should enjoy social, political and economic rights and opportunities. THE DEMOCRATIC SET uses a custom‑made film set, a neutral room with two opposing doors. Disturbingly obvious and tantalizingly strange, THE DEMOCRATIC SET is a rapid series of short live performances and screen‑based video portraits created in collaboration with communities. THE DEMOCRATIC SET is a cavalcade of portrait, soapbox and drama.
2. Hugo Glendinning & Tim Etchells – Uncertain Fragments (UK, 2016)
39 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Film essay reflecting on the work and process of the world-renowned UK performance ensemble, Forced Entertainment, combining interview fragments, performance excerpts, backstage, and rehearsal room material from diverse projects, focused around an excerpt from the group’s 2001 performance, First Night.
6:30PM – FILM BLOCK
1. Evan Husney and Emily Wilson – The Making of Mirror Heart/The Wolfpack Brothers
16 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The Angulo brothers are the subjects of the award-winning documentary THE WOLFPACK, which chronicles their isolated childhood where they were locked away from society in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They discovered the outside world through the films they loved and elaborately recreated with handmade props and costumes.
VICE engaged the brothers to make their first original short film on a soundstage, Mirror Heart–– this is the making of that film.
A short film of dreamlike characters coming together in unity to overcome their differences. Mirror Heart was conceived by Mukunda and his family. They worked with him to make it and they also starred in it.
7:30PM – FILM BLOCK
1. Romeo Castellucci – Brentano (Italy, 1995)
25 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Italian with English subtitles
Visionary theater director Romeo Castellucci’s rare venture into film: a theatre of mental mysteries. Inspired by a 1913 short story of Swiss novelist Robert Walser about the death wish of German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano (1778-1842).
2. Jan Fabre – The Problem (Belgium, 2001)
30 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
German with English subtitles
In this work Jan Fabre compares himself to his fetish animal, the dung beetle, and considers that his goal as an artist is similar to the role of insects in life evolution. A performance with the German star philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Dietmar Kamper. The film is an homage to the latter.
3. Robert Wilson – Winona Ryder Video Portrait (US, 2004)
17 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Winona Ryder channels the character Winnie from the Samuel Beckett play, Happy Days. Buried to her neck in sand, with a Carmen Miranda headdress, an open purse, toothbrush, and gun, the play unrolls in her head, not the stage. Musical score: Michael Galasso
7:30PM
Sascha Just – Heirs (US/Germany, 2015) 88 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
New Orleans, city of jazz and Mardi Gras at the shores of the Mississippi river, is the setting for Heirs. Between French flair and African rhythms, ballrooms and street parades, Heirs explores the Crescent City’s heritage of racist injustices–and the roots of its famous (performance) arts. Heirs follows three New Orleanian artists, percussionist Jason Marsalis, theatre artist/Carnival Ball Queen Lisa D’Amour, and Black Indian Chief Darryl Montana, on journeys to their families’ artistic histories.
Festival Curators: Festival founder Frank Hentschker (Executive Director and Co-Director of Programming at MESTC), Antje Oegel (AO International and Co-Director of Programming at MESTC), and Nina Segal (Playwright and Producer).
(Untitled)
Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance
« Back to EventsThursday – Friday, February 25 -26
Segal Theatre
All Day Screening
FREE + Open to public. First come, first served.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center announces the second annual Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP). The film festival will take place all day on Thursday, February 25 and Friday, February 26 at The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, located at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. The program includes a roster of more than 30 features, shorts, documentaries, advance screenings, and meet-the-artist Q&A sessions with leading international theatre artists from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Syria, UK, and the US.
Thursday, February 25
11:00am Evaldo Mocarzel – BR-3 Documentary
11:00am Frank Castorf – Dämonen
12:30pm Gob Squad – Live Long and Prosper
1:00pm Mijke de Jong – Stop Acting Now [Wunderbaum]
2:00pm Sibylle Dahrendorf – Crackle of Time: Christoph Schlingensief and His Opera Village in Burkina Faso
2:30pm Rimini Protokoll – World Climate Change Conference
4:00pm Krzysztof Garbaczewski – A Memoir
4:30pm Ty Flowers/People Get Ready – Physiques | César Vayssié & Boris Charmatz – Levée | Carlos Soto – close your eyes up tight; you will not sleep tonight
5:00pm Keeril Makan/Jay Scheib – Persona
5:30pm Eleanor Fogg and Vivianna Chiotini/johnsmith – what it feels like for a girl | I AM A BOYS CHOIR – demonstrating the imaginary body | Sylvan Oswald & Maria Cataldo – Outtakes
7:00pm Adam Soch – Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary
7:00pm Jörg Jeshel & Brigitte Kramer – Passion – Last Stop Kinshasa [les ballets C de la B]
Friday, February 26
11:00am Frederick Wiseman – La Comédie-Française ou L’amour joué
12:00pm Kazuhiro Soda – Theatre 1 [Oriza Hirata]
3:00pm Dorota Masłowska – Mister D x Anja Rubik – Chleb + Mister D – Haj$ | Half Straddle/Tina Satter – Secret Notebooks: Half Straddle Rap + Free the Skull: Music video for Moon Duo
3:00pm Lucien Bou Rjeily – About 66 Minutes in Damascus
3:30pm Temporary Distortion/Kenneth Collins – Only the Hand That Erases | John Jesurun – Snow | AutomaticRelease/Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty – Why Why Always | Daniel Fish & Jim Findlay – The Source
3:30pm Zeina Daccache – Scheherazade’s Diary
5:00pm Steven Soderbergh – And Everything is Going Fine [Spalding Gray]
6:00pm David Levine & David Conison – THEATR
6:30pm Back to Back Theatre – The Democratic Set: North Melbourne + Edinburgh | Hugo Glendinning & Tim Etchells/Forced Entertainment – Uncertain Fragments
6:30pm Evan Husney & Emily Wilson – The Making of Mirror Heart | Mukunda Angulo – Mirror Heart
7:30pm Romeo Castellucci – Brentano | Jan Fabre – The Problem | Robert Wilson – Winona Ryder Video Portrait
7:30pm Sascha Just – Heirs
Festival Program is subject to change.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 25
11:00AM
Evaldo Mocarzel – BR-3 Documentary (Brazil, 2009)
76 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Portuguese with Spanish subtitles
BR-3 Documentary records the testimony of actors and technicians involved in the staging of BR-3 at Rio Tiete in Sao Paulo. The plot of the play follows the saga of three generations of a northeastern family. The play begins when Brasília was still a construction site in the 50s, and then moves to the traffic on the outskirts of the 90s. The film also shows director Antonio Araújo’s process in the mounting of the play.
11:00AM
Frank Castorf – Dämonen
178 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
German with NO subtitles
Life, death, God, salvation, terrorism, revolution? Whoever lives close to the edge, has the worst behind him. Frank Castorf, the internationally renowned German artistic director of the Berliner theatre Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz for almost two decades, staged in 2006 his very first film—based on his own stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons and Camus’s The Possessed. Castorf created a haunting post-Soviet pan-slavistic panopticon, which takes place around the very last Russian house before the western border. For the
film, the late legendary stage designer Bert Neumann created within the barren landscape of Berlin’s provincial Mecklenburg-Vorpommern county, a simple set: a dacha, an old garden shack next to a “swimming pool”—an imaginary landscape inspired by Wim Wender’s Paris/Texas, the tiny hamlet Korleput on Berlin’s country side, Russia’s Duma 2000, Cindy Sherman and the Danish avant-garde filmmaking movement Dogma 95.
12:30PM
Gob Squad – Live Long and Prosper (Germany/UK, 2008-2009)
20 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
English and German
What: Seven film sequences are re-staged by seven performers across the city of Berlin. Shown on two screens, the devices of narrative film are doubled up and reflected back on themselves in a cinematic game of ‘spot the difference’.
Where: The mountains of the Wild West become escalators in the central station, a battlefield from a historic war becomes a city fairground and the interior of the Starship Enterprise is played by Pfennigland – a discount shop.
The intertwined sequences and their doppelgangers weave simultaneously towards their inevitably tragic ends. Performers prepare and play-out their scenes with tender seriousness, leaving a trail of pretend corpses, extracted from their borrowed sources and abandoned in cinematic pull backs that reveal everyday urban life continuing around them.
1:00PM
Wunderbaum/Mijke de Jong – Stop Acting Now (The Netherlands, 2016)
82 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Dutch with English subtitles
The Rotterdam Actors group, Wunderbaum, will stop acting and will switch over to REALaction. We will follow the actors’ frantic efforts to radically change the world. The actors,who have created socially orientated theatre for years, will set up various world-improvingprojects in ‘real’ life. The differences in approach, vision, and effectiveness are puttingthe group under considerable pressure. The central issue is the extent of our personal
engagement for the common cause.
Wunderbaum is a Dutch-Flemish actors’ group that makes new theatre about current issues. In 2013, Wunderbaum started building The New Forest: a four-year project involving numerous partners, volunteers and spectators. It consists of theatre performances, seminars, a film project, context programmes and online content.
2:00PM
Sibylle Dahrendorf – Crackle of Time: Christoph Schlingensief and His Opera Village in Burkina Faso (Germany, 2012)
106 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Christoph Schlingensief, the German film, theatre, and opera director, had a vision for an opera village in Africa. Despite his battle with cancer, he made frequent trips to Burkina Faso–such was his devotion and conviction. Crackle of Time tells the story of his impossible project: to build an opera village in Burkina Faso, a space which would combine art and life, with a school, theatre, hospital, living quarters, a football field, and a lunchroom. Schlingensief wanted to include everything one needs to live and survive in one place. Everything changed when Christoph Schlingensief died in August 2010.From the initial location search in May 2009 and the groundbreaking in February 2010 to the emergence of the school, the documentary takes us up close to the German artist, Christoph Schlingensief, and his architect, Diébédo Francis Kéré, who originally comes from Burkina Faso. The documentary gets behind the vision of the ‘opera village’ and witnesses its struggles and hurdles. In October 2011, the school celebrated its opening.
2:00PM
Rimini Protokoll – World Climate Change Conference (Germany)
55 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
German with English subtitles
Berlin’s groundbreaking experimental theatre ensemble Rimini Protokoll, made up of Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel, work in many realms: theatre, sound and radio plays, film, and installation. In 2014, for the theatre Schauspielhaus (Hamburg), the ensemble created a mammoth-scale “drama of diplomacy“ — a simulation of the 2015 Paris UN Conference on Climate Change. Rimini asked audience members to divide into 196 national delegations and to reenact proceedings of international climate diplomacy. Documentary filmmakers Sandra Trosel & Lilli Thalgott documented the process.
4:00PM
Krzysztof Garbaczewski – A Memoir (Poland)
50 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Polish with English subtitles
Albertyna, Marcel, a couple, Charlus, Morel, Lea and others are living their dream together in a 19th century mansion. By following your imagination as closely as possible and motivating your neural networks and memories, you produce a story of your own choice. It is an experiment in understanding the biography of the other. Based on the novel, The Captive, by Marcel Proust, a masterpiece that asks if a human being could be discovered as a utopian project–a definition of his own life and memories and a sensual model of behavior in circumstances that are given only for a particular time period. A Memoir is a story that has been lost.
4:30PM – MOVEMENT
1. Ty Flowers/People Get Ready – Physiques (US, 2014)
3 minutes and 35 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Physiques is an experimental video collaboration between video artist Ty Flowers and performance/music collective People Get Ready. People Get Ready’s Steven Reker choreographed a dance to the song, written by the goup, at 2.5x the normal speed. The video was shot at 2.5x the normal frame rate and, when played back, the dance stays in sync with the music, while all other background elements are surreally out of place.
2. César Vayssié & Boris Charmatz – Levée
17 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
A labyrinthine performance, constructed on the basis of an extensive canon of derivative gestures, Levée des conflits is impossible to recreate in its totality: it is a snapshot of 25 simultaneous gestures that the eye cannot take in with a single glance. Rather than try to capture something of this perceptual experience, César Vayssié opted for an unclassifiable film, something between an abstract bird’s eye view, a documentary, and a genre film. Filmed on August 23, 2013 in Halde Haniel, Bottrop, Germany (with the kind permission of Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts and of RAG Aktiengesellschaft), on the “Halde Haniel” mining site — an immense plateau shaped like a spiral — Vayssié’s film propels the dance into an indeterminate zone, somewhere
between science fiction and anthropology.
3. Carlos Soto – close your eyes up tight; you will not sleep tonight (US, 2013)
17 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
The piece utilizes a 1965 Mustang as a mobile mount for a camera that catalogues nighttime streets in the countryside surrounding Willem de Kooning’s Long Island studio. Accompanied by the blues-infused drawl of an electric guitar, the visuals transition slowly from shots of treetops passing overhead to lyrical images from within the car. Utilizing keen frame-rate manipulation and prolonged dissolves, the viewer is pulled in the direction of the car’s motion.
5:00PM
Keeril Makan/Jay Scheib – Persona (US, 2015)
81 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Persona is a provocative and artistically complex opera-theatre depiction of human frailty, cruelty, and identity. The libretto has been adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s original screenplay for the 1966 classic film, which has been described as a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth dealing, with ontological subjectivity
and the gaze of cinema itself. The film is based on Makan and Scheib’s 2015, Beth Morrison Projects produced, production of Persona at National Sawdust in Brooklyn.
5:30PM – QUEER
1. Eleanor Fogg and Vivianna Chiotini/johnsmith – what it feels like for a girl (UK, 2015)
6 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
johnsmith is a whatever being. Channeling Patrick Bateman and Madonna, john gets something off their chest in this razor sharp and revealing cabaret performance.
2. I Am A Boys Choir – demonstrating the imaginary body (US, 2015)
27 minutes 51 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
demonstrating the imaginary body is a work that exists somewhere between a gender studies lecture and an ice skating competition. Powered by the queer imagination, I AM A BOYS CHOIR investigates the body myth of the female athlete and the process of earning institutional validation by conforming to specific identity markers in regards to class and gender. There is also a lot of Tonya Harding.
3. Sylvan Oswald & Maria Cataldo – Outtakes (US, 2015)
15 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Outtakes is a lo-fi web series based on the genre of the transition video. People in the process of transitioning their gender create these raw journal entries on cell phones and webcams to share experiences and information, and to feel less isolated by reaching out and building community online. Outtakes blurs the lines between what is real and what is imagined. The show is about what it means when a very private journey has to happen in public.
7:00PM
Adam Soch – Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary (US, 2015)
112 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The impact of wunderkind theatre director Reza Abdoh’s explosive work is finally brought to light twenty years after his death from AIDS, with live performance footage and interviews with those closest to him. Reza Abdoh; Theatre Visionary, directed by Adam Soch (Abdoh’s long-time collaborator and video archivist) is an intimate portrait of the world and work of Abdoh and his company, Dar a Luz. It features excerpts from Abdoh’s most important productions alongside interviews with Abdoh himself, his collaborators, critics, friends and family. These elements combine to illuminate his legacy; his groundbreaking work and his visionary, theatrical genius.
7:00PM
Jörg Jeshel & Brigitte Kramer – Passion – Last Stop Kinshasa (Germany, 2009)
90 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
French with English subtitles
Alain Platel’s les ballets C de la B was founded in 1984. The company keeps to its principle of enabling artists from various disciplines and backgrounds to take part in a dynamic creative process. les ballets C de la B was on tour for one year with the piece pitié! from director Alain Platel and musician Fabrizio Cassol. The tour took them to major capitals including Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo. After more than 100 performances, pitié! concluded in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Following several years of unrest and political instability, the country is aspiring to new cultural horizons. For filmmakers Jörg Jeshel and Brigitte Kramer, this was the starting point for the documentary Passion – Last Stop Kinshasa. This documentary focuses not only on the breathtaking show, but on the reactions in Congo as well.
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 26
11:00AM
Frederick Wiseman – La Comédie-Française ou L’amour joué (France/US, 1996)
66 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
La Comédie-Française is the oldest continuous repertory company in the world, founded in Paris in the late 17th century. This is the first time a documentary film-maker has been allowed to look at all the aspects of the work of this great theatrical company. Sequences in the film include sections of plays, casting, set and costume design, administrative meetings and rehearsals, and performances of four classic French plays, Don Juan by Molière, La Thebaide by Racine, La Double Inconstance by Marivaux and Occupe-toi d’Amelie by Feydeau.
12:00PM
Kazuhiro Soda – Theatre 1 [ORIZA HIRATA]
172 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Japanese with English subtitles
Theatre 1 (Observational Film Series #3) is a feature length documentary, which closely depicts the world of Oriza Hirata, Japan’s leading playwright and director, and his theatrical company, Seinendan. By depicting them, the film leads the audience to revisit fundamental but timely questions: What is theatre? Why do human beings act?
This film is the first of a two-part (5 hour, 42 minute) observational documentary.
3:00PM – MUSIC VIDEOS
1. Dorota Masłowska – Mister D. x Anja Rubik – Chleb + Mister D. – Haj$
4 minutes 37 seconds + 3 minutes 13 seconds| Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Polish with English subtitles
Mister D. is the stage name for Dorota Masłowska. She has recently released her debut album Społeczeństwo Jest Niemiłe (The Society Is Not Very Nice) which has immediately become a major talking point in the Polish media.
Chleb (Bread) is an abstract music video inspired by 1990s TV aesthetics and video games, featuring world-renowned super model Anna Rubik. A kaleidoscope of psychedelic scenes portrays the life of a Polish neighborhood, revealing a grand love story with a bread making machine in the background.
The song Haj$, in which Mister D. demands a money sandwich in a shrill voice, was illustrated with a music video inspired by 90’s style. Produced using conventions from video games, it presents characters from rap videos passing through the style of a Polish housing project. This video is to promote Hardkor disco, a film by Krzysztof Skonieczny.
2. Half Straddle/Tina Satter – Secret Notebooks: Half Straddle Rap + Free the Skull: Music Video for Moon Duo (US, 2012/2015)
3 minutes 44 seconds + 3 minutes 57 seconds| Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Secret Notebooks: With a few months off one summer, and amazing collaborators, Half Straddle set out to make their first-ever rap song and video. Playing off the idioms of the genre, Half Straddle’s girl rappers drop push-ups with no knees, late nights with Soledad O’Brien, and references to their bangs as a knowingly ridiculous vocabulary for throwing shade, all set in a lusciously drenched visual realm and accompanied by deep beats.
Free the Skull: Sanae Yamada of the band Moon Duo commissioned Half Straddle to make this video. Tina was inspired by the sort of noir detective sound she heard in the song and an instinct to filter this sensibility through the dreamscape of young girl detectives who could serve as portals to an unexpected idea of what “freeing the
skull” could mean. Moon Duo’s sound can feel excitingly hard, as well as dreamy and ritualistic and the girls bowing down to this alien force seemed a natural narrative to reflect that.
3:00PM
Lucien Bou Rjeily – About 66 Minutes in Damascus
20 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
Lucien Bou Rjeily gives a short presentation about his site-specific play, 66 Minutes in Damascus. Inspired by the descriptions of Syrian detention centers from foreign journalists and local activists arbitrarily incarcerated by the autocratic regime, 66 Minutes in Damascus puts the audience in the place of a group of tourists who visit the Syrian capital, only to be arrested by the Syrian secret service.
3:30PM – NEW YORK
1. Temporary Distortion/Kenneth Collins – Only the Hand That Erases (US, 2016)
14 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Purely imagery and yet pure of image, moments previously captured on celluloidare erased and revisited as ideas inside the mind.
This film was created specifically for the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2016.
2. John Jesurun – Snow (US, 2000)
77 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
A toxic American cocktail of death, desire, technology, and television. Jesurun’s four screen mixdown of the original 2000 performance launches four “characters” and twenty-two shifting POVs through the unforgiving eye of one virtual actor. During the presentation of an original four screen live edit of the 2000 piece, that audience experienced this work similarly on four screens. The secluded live performance was transmitted and edited live to four screens in the audience area. There were four live actors and one “virtual actor”–a computerized camera POV with attached “character” voice.
Featuring Valerie Charles,Peter Crook, Mary Ewald, Peter Sorensen, and Jojo Abaoag. Music by Black Beetle And Rebecca Moore.
3. AutomaticRelease/Shaun Irons – Why Why Always
15 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Why Why Always is a live, multimedia performance installation that re-envisions Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal film Alphaville. This multi-platform project offers a dynamic interplay between theater, dance, installation art, technology, and media by integrating live performers, multi-screen projections, live-feed cameras, sculptural set elements, and a vibrant tapestry of sound. These short films, inspired by Alphaville, feature Jim Fletcher as the character Lemmy Caution. These sequences will be integrated into the live performance.
4. Daniel Fish & Jim Findlay – The Source (US)
8 minutes and 11 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
This video is based on the oratorio with four channel video, The Source with music by Ted Hearne and text by Mark Doten that had its World Premiere at BAM 2014 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL. The Source concerns Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army private responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The text is an assemblage of Twitter feeds, chat log transcripts, court testimony, and Iraqi and Afghanistan war logs. For this piece, Jim Findlay and Daniel Fish filmed nearly one hundred people, one at a time, as they watched an eleven minute US military video of combat from the Iraqi War. For the original live performance, the footage of the people watching the video was projected on four large screens that surrounded the audience and the singers, placing them alone and together in one shared space.
3:30PM
Zeina Daccache – Scheherazade’s Diary (Lebanon, 2013)
80 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The women inmates of Lebanon’s Baabda Prison mine the depths of personal experience and confront patriarchy as they prepare and present the first theatre performance staged inside an Arab Women’s prison. Filmed during, and after, the ten-month drama therapy/theatre project run in Baabda prison, in 2012, by drama therapist and director Zeina Daccache, this gripping and tragicomic documentary features the women inmates who, through their unprecedented theatre initiative entitled, Scheherazade in Baabda, challenge societies that oppress women.
5:00PM
Steven Soderbergh – And Everything is Going Fine (US, 2010)
89 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The late Spalding Gray was a brilliant playwright and actor, known for his dazzling, distinctive monologues, an art form all his own. Here, master filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who collaborated with him on King of the Hill and Gray’s Anatomy, takes Gray’s own words–captured over 25 years—to craft a profound, insightful and wonderfully entertaining portrait of this quintessential American artist.
6:00PM
David Levine & David Conison – THEATR
30 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
An app that brings theater to you.
6:30PM – FILM BLOCK
1. Back to Back Theatre – The Democratic Set: North Melbourne + Edinburgh
6 minutes 33 seconds + 8 minutes 30 seconds | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
THE DEMOCRATIC SET Edinburgh was presented at the Edinburgh International Festival with Lung Ha’s Theatre Company and Indepen-dance.
THE DEMOCRATIC SET is a residency model for creating short films and performances, to explore the belief that all people are, in principle, equal and should enjoy social, political and economic rights and opportunities. THE DEMOCRATIC SET uses a custom‑made film set, a neutral room with two opposing doors. Disturbingly obvious and tantalizingly strange, THE DEMOCRATIC SET is a rapid series of short live performances and screen‑based video portraits created in collaboration with communities. THE DEMOCRATIC SET is a cavalcade of portrait, soapbox and drama.
2. Hugo Glendinning & Tim Etchells – Uncertain Fragments (UK, 2016)
39 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Film essay reflecting on the work and process of the world-renowned UK performance ensemble, Forced Entertainment, combining interview fragments, performance excerpts, backstage, and rehearsal room material from diverse projects, focused around an excerpt from the group’s 2001 performance, First Night.
6:30PM – FILM BLOCK
1. Evan Husney and Emily Wilson – The Making of Mirror Heart/The Wolfpack Brothers
16 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
The Angulo brothers are the subjects of the award-winning documentary THE WOLFPACK, which chronicles their isolated childhood where they were locked away from society in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They discovered the outside world through the films they loved and elaborately recreated with handmade props and costumes.
VICE engaged the brothers to make their first original short film on a soundstage, Mirror Heart–– this is the making of that film.
2. Mukunda Angulo – Mirror Heart (US)
6 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
A short film of dreamlike characters coming together in unity to overcome their differences. Mirror Heart was conceived by Mukunda and his family. They worked with him to make it and they also starred in it.
7:30PM – FILM BLOCK
1. Romeo Castellucci – Brentano (Italy, 1995)
25 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Italian with English subtitles
Visionary theater director Romeo Castellucci’s rare venture into film: a theatre of mental mysteries. Inspired by a 1913 short story of Swiss novelist Robert Walser about the death wish of German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano (1778-1842).
2. Jan Fabre – The Problem (Belgium, 2001)
30 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
German with English subtitles
In this work Jan Fabre compares himself to his fetish animal, the dung beetle, and considers that his goal as an artist is similar to the role of insects in life evolution. A performance with the German star philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Dietmar Kamper. The film is an homage to the latter.
3. Robert Wilson – Winona Ryder Video Portrait (US, 2004)
17 minutes | Segal Theatre (70 seats)
Winona Ryder channels the character Winnie from the Samuel Beckett play, Happy Days. Buried to her neck in sand, with a Carmen Miranda headdress, an open purse, toothbrush, and gun, the play unrolls in her head, not the stage. Musical score: Michael Galasso
7:30PM
Sascha Just – Heirs (US/Germany, 2015)
88 minutes | Elebash Recital Hall (180 seats)
New Orleans, city of jazz and Mardi Gras at the shores of the Mississippi river, is the setting for Heirs. Between French flair and African rhythms, ballrooms and street parades, Heirs explores the Crescent City’s heritage of racist injustices–and the roots of its famous (performance) arts. Heirs follows three New Orleanian artists, percussionist Jason Marsalis, theatre artist/Carnival Ball Queen Lisa D’Amour, and Black Indian Chief Darryl Montana, on journeys to their families’ artistic histories.
Festival Curators: Festival founder Frank Hentschker (Executive Director and Co-Director of Programming at MESTC), Antje Oegel (AO International and Co-Director of Programming at MESTC), and Nina Segal (Playwright and Producer).
Festival Producer: Joy Arab
Check out last year’s Segal Film Festival by visiting www.theSegalCenter.org/event/FTP/.