Platform

With movement and image, Catherine Galasso pays dual homage

Roy Sullivan was inordinately familiar with occupational hazards. The late Shenandoah National Park ranger (and Guinness record-holder) was zapped by lightning seven (!) times. This weirdly tormented figure is the inspiration for Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice, a performance piece by rising choreographer, dancer and video artist Catherine Galasso that integrates live movement with projected images. Attracted by our vibrant dance community (touted by fellow Cornell grad Chris Black) and experimental film scene (ditto, per close friend and filmmaker Sam Green), Galasso began her professional career in San Francisco. Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice plays Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 12 and 13 at SOMArts Cultural Center under the San Francisco Film Society’s cross-platform and new-technology umbrella, Kino-Tek. In honor of her father, award-winning composer Michael Galasso (Séraphine, In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express), who passed away in September. Glasso will perform a new solo dance, Simmer, as the curtain raiser. We caught up with the artist via email in the midst of her intensive rehearsals.

topics: avant-garde, bay area, dance, documentary, experimental film, music, world cinema

Take Two

"Fados" finds Saura on his toes

It is a typical complaint amongst older people that they miss most the passions, the fervent enthusiasms of their youth. Some folk, however, discover some new passion late in life that they pursue with unprecedented ardor—possibly to the bewilderment of those (including grown offspring) who now miss the more level-headed, more single-minded person they used to be.

One might conjecture something like that happened to Carlos Saura, the Spanish director who from the late 1950s onward made frequently striking films like Peppermint Frappe (1967) and Cria! (1977). Both of those starred his wife Geraldine Chaplin, who quickly became fluent in Spanish and had just the right sort of grave delicacy to inhabit his alternately sorrowful and caustic portraits of life in Franco’s Spain—a muzzled world whose strictures he (mostly) managed the artist’s trick of criticizing just slyly enough to avoid censorship.

topics: dance, directors, music, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Platform

SFIFF52: Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and a "New Muslim Cool"

Award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, who’s worked as a staff producer at KQED-TV for the past decade, on and off, has investigated the territory between the personal and the political in a range of documentaries, broadcast segments and short films. Her latest documentary, New Muslim Cool, focuses on Hamza Perez, whose life is a crucible of disparate urban influences. Though raised as a Puerto Rican Catholic, Perez, a Pittsburgh-based hip hop artist and former drug dealer, converted to Islam and turned his life around. The film follows him as he interacts with his community and family and offers up the occasional hip hop performance. New Muslim Cool screens in the Documentary competition during the San Francisco International Film Festival (Sat., April 25, 2 p.m., PFA, Sun., April 26, 3 p.m. and Mon., May 4, Sundance Kabuki). It also airs June 23 as part of the POV series on PBS.

[SF360.org editor’s note: This is the first in a series of interviews with Bay Area filmmakers featured in SFIFF52.]

topics: bay area, dance, digital filmmaking, diy, documentary, san francisco international film festival

The List

Contemporary Jewish Museum's DAWN

Looking for something meaningful to do Sunday morning at 2 a.m.? SF360.org offers key notes of the all-night Dawn festival—art, film, ideas—at the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s new digs.

topics: art, dance, jewish cinema, music

Experience

SFIAF: "Mordake" and week two -- reviewed, previewed

Bay Area composer Erling Wold’s new solo chamber opera, starring acclaimed tenor John Duykers, is enjoying a thrillingly intimate world premiere this week under the banner of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Based on the deeply weird story of 19th-century scion and medical curiosity Edward Mordake (driven to suicide by the residual visage on the back of his head of his female "evil twin"), Mordake packs a multisensory punch inside a tightly knit, highly portable production—one clearly unwilling to sacrifice opera’s theatrical grandeur to avant-garde budgets.

Thanks, in part, to Mordake’s use of some contemporary video technology and an exquisite design concept, it doesn’t have to. Sets, properties, costumes and lights are all kept to a lean but choice minimum in a production that takes supreme advantage of a prerecorded electronic score as well as a striking interactive visual panorama featuring a video motion-sensing program designed by German engineer Frieder Weiss.

topics: bay area, dance, digital filmmaking, experimental film, opera