In Wheeler Auditorium
Admission $4:00 general, $3.00 students

Merce Cunningham, who has had a critical role in assuring modern dance's preeminence in 20th-Century art, has collaborated with Charles Atlas in the creation of film and video works for more than 10 years. Whereas dance films are typically translations of works originally choreographed for the stage, Cunningham has taken on the challenge of creating dances specifically for the camera and then re-choreographing them for the stage.

Channels/Inserts
"One of my concerns as a filmmaker working with dances has been to integrate elements of the ‘language' of film with the dance-making process. With each new collaboration we have shifted both the kind of dance and the media (film or video) concerns. We have attempted to follow an experimental approach, going beyond what we know, to try to add new ingredients to our media and dance mix.
"The conception of Channels/Inserts suggested we make use of crosscutting, a classic film device developed by D. W. Griffith, to indicate a simultaneity of dance events in different spaces, such simultaneous presentation is particularly well suited to Cunningham's choreographic aesthetic. In addition, I have designed animated traveling mattes as transitions between some scenes as a rhythmically irregular alternative to a straight cut. These serve as another way to show, however briefly, different simultaneous events in a precise way that is related to the dance movement (as opposed to the more generalized device of a ‘dissolve.').
"As in Cunningham's work for the stage, the musical score by David Tudor was composed without reference to the particulars of the choreography; it is a simultaneous yet distinct sound accompaniment to the film." --Charles Atlas
"Channels/Inserts is the most recent film/dance that Charles Atlas and I have made. I was interested in the possibility of placing the cast and the scenes in a way as to give the sense of dual events happening concurrently." --Merce Cunningham
• Directed by Charles Atlas. Choreography by Merce Cunningham. Music: "Phonemes," by David Tudor. Assistant Director: Elliot Caplan. Photographed by Charles Atlas, Elliot Caplan and David Kendall. Dancers: Karole Armitage, Louise Burns, Ellen Cornfield, Susan Emery, Lise Friedman, Alan Good, Neil Greenberg, Catherine Kerr, Chris Komar, Judy Lazaroff, Joseph Lennon, Robert Remley, Robert Swinston, Megan Walker. (1982, 30 mins, Color, Print from Cunningham Dance Foundation)

Blue Studio: Five Segments
"Extensive utilization of chromakey as well as mirrors in real time allowed Cunningham's movements to be transposed against various realities: Caracas, a solid blue background, among members of his company, and, near the tape's end, several images of himself dancing among, though not with, each other. Throughout Blue Studio Cunningham developed a vocabulary of movement; from walking, to intimate hand gestures, to large movements of the body. By the end the vocabulary could be demonstrated simultaneously by the same performer, concentrated, in total silence. Now and then a frog, a monkey, and a small dog, each moving in its own way, were chromakeyed in-surprising as Cunningham doesn't work with untrained dancers." --Barbara Baracks, Art Forum
• A Film by Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham. (1975, 15 mins, Color, Silent, Print from Cunningham Dance Foundation)

Locale
"Locale is the most serious and expansive attempt we have yet had to put dance on film so that it stays vivid as dance with real physical and kinetic force." --Arlene Croce, New Yorker
• Directed, Photographed and Edited by Charles Atlas. Choreography by Merce Cunningham. Music: "Interspersion," by Takehisa Kosugi. (1979, 30 mins, Color, Print from Cunningham Dance Foundation)

Roamin' I
Roamin I, 1979-80, is the first part of what will be a 4-part film, based upon the outtakes of Locale's color footage, plus additional black and white footage shot during the filming of Locale. Roamin' I reveals the complex landscape-composed of camera personnel and their equipment, dancers and choreographers-that is created during the creation of a film dance, and the humorous "off camera" reality of dancers adapting to the equipment in their midst
• Directed, Photographed and Edited by Charles Atlas. With outtakes from Locale, choreographed by Merce Cunningham. (1979, 15 mins, B&W and Color, Print from Cunningham Dance Foundation)