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CLARA GIBSON MAXWELL BIOGRAPHY: CLARA GIBSON MAXWELL
Clara Gibson Maxwell is one of the most audacious and autonomous choreographers of her generation. Inventor of multiarts, "site-responsive," and often ambulatory performance with public participation in premier international architectural spaces, her choreography draws its inspiration from the deep roots of the American modern dance tradition and from the lively and stimulating atmosphere of contemporary Parisian dance. Maxwell studied philosophy, dance, and film at Harvard University (1976-1979), where joined the Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company and performed works by Remy Charlip among others. In what would prove to be a life-changing event, in 1978 Clara attended a master class gven there by choreographer Anna Sokolow. Leaving Harvard early the next year to pursue a dance career in New York City, Clara initially danced with Satoru Shimazaki (works by Michio Ito). While Clara was apprenticing with Mary Anthony Dance Theater in New York City, Sokolow recommended Clara to apply to the Juilliard School and successfully helped her gain admission. There, she performed the choreographic works of her friends Antony Tudor (Soirée musicale) and Anna Sokolow (Dreams, Los Marranos, Four Preludes [Premiere]), as well as those of Martha Graham, José Limon (Missa Brevis), and Bob Fosse (Sweet Charity, in this last instance from the dance notation score). Sokolow also prepared a solo excerpt from Ballade for Maxwell to dance for Maxwell's Juilliard graduation jury, which she later authorized Maxwell to dance in Paris as a solo, "Désir ardent [Longing]," for the Fifth Salon de la danse (1987), in the Salle des fêtes de la Mairie du 13e arrondissement. Her Juilliard teacher Hanya Holm, who introduced the German dance of Mary Wigman to the United States, wrote: "Clara has the capacity to extract essential values for the dance." Following her 1984 graduation from the Juilliard School, Clara briefly joined the Brooklyn Dance Ensemble and performed with the group in various venues. Moving in 1985 to Paris, where she had completed her high-school studies a decade earlier at the École actif bilingue, Clara danced with the Buto choreographer Ko Murabushi; the expressionist Marilen Breuker; the Baroque company of Christine Bayle (L'Éclat des muses); and the American Andy de Groat. For her former Juilliard School teacher, Ruby Shang, in 1986 she helped coordinate and dance in Shang's Dance for Liberty, a Paris / New York Transatlantic Simuldance (music performed by Marcus Stockhausen) on the Palais de Chaillot's Esplanade des Droits de l'homme (Paris, France) and on the front steps of the New York Public Library. The next year, she performed as Guest Artist in Ruby Shang & Dancers' Reflections, another outdoor, site-specific group dance, this time for the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival (NYC). Her Entr'acte Ballets' trio for women, commissioned by the Paris American Academy and set to a musical collage evoking different eras, was performed during a 1986 historical fashion show at the Théâtre de la Ville (Le Havre, France). Also, from 1985-1988, Clara performed with Cirque Magicville as a traveling circus clown and kick-line chorus girl (France). For her choreographic debut in Parisian dance studios during 1987-1988, Clara created the sextet work Sweet, Hot 'n' Stompin', Girouette, and Rite (music: Duke Ellington, Vivaldi, and Australian Aborigines, with space-age costumes), which was awarded the Prix Chorégraphique Marcelle Bourgat, thus affording her ongoing rehearsal space in the same Rue Spontini dance studio where Brigitte Bardot had studied ballet. Performances followed at Forum du Mouvement in Paris. A solo excerpt, Ellington Solo, was shown at Studio Gulliver in Paris. Maxwell also choreographed Tsigane (1985), a Gypsy solo for the touring Romanian folk dance company, Danse de Roumanie (music: traditional Romanian). Tsigane was reprised in 1987 as a solo performance during the Ve Salon de la danse in the Salle des fêtes de la Mairie du 13e arrondissement, where she also danced, on the same program, a solo excerpt from Anna Sokolow's Longing, which Sokolow had prepared for Maxwell while at Juilliard. In 1988-1989, Clara also returned to the United States for a New York State Tour as Guest Artist with Mark DeGarmo & Dancers and as a Soloist for Mark DeGarmo & Dancers' holiday show at the Jewish Museum (NYC). She also danced De Garmo's No Strings Attached solo work during DeGarmo's 1989 performances at Café de la Danse (Paris), coproduced by Maxwell's production company, Mon Oncle D'Amérique. The 1989 world premiere of Antoine Campo's Ophélie Song at the Café de la Danse met with a public acclaim and critical success in Paris and led to a tour to New York's La MaMa E.T.C. and the Edinburgh Fringe. The Village Voice praised "the remarkable physical articulation of the dancer's fluid body" and "the rich, bewitched, otherworldliness of Maxwell's singing voice," while the Paris fashion magazine, Joyce, said simply that she had "danced and sung to perfection." In the early 1990s, a new stage began when she met jazz musician/classical composer Ornette Coleman . Maxwell continued her music-dance collaborations during an intense period of studies and creation with Coleman. The fruit of this collaboration: CHOROS. In order to create a movement vocabulary consonant with the "Harmolodic" music of Mr. Coleman--which gives equal value to harmony, motion (or rhythm), and melody--Clara spent long hours experimenting alone in her Paris studio and improvising live with Ornette in his Harlem studio . With another jazz composer, Alan Silva (collaborator of Cecil Taylor), she created Celtic Baby Disco at the Düren, Germany Freien Kulturgruppen Festival and Equine Geometry, a duo for dancer and horse in the Haus Schönblick Sculpture Garden, for the Heimbach, Germany Avant-Garde Festival in homage to Frank Wright . The premier of Bubbeh's Grace, in collaboration with composer Jessica Krash, took place at the New Music Series of the University of Maryland--College Park. Buried Oak, a homage to her friend and late dance teacher Jerome Andrews (colleague of Graham, Wigman, and Joseph Pilates), was presented at the Palazzo Bardi in Florence, Italy, Dance Theater Workshop in New York, and Tanz Tangente in Berlin. Maxwell returned to the United States for Creation Myth, a ballet for children integrating children's choir, saxophone, viola, and harp at National Park Service's Glen Echo Park in Maryland. Certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, she occasionally conducts movement, improvisation, and lighting workshops in the United States and Europe with her Mon Oncle D'Amérique team of artists, musicians, and technicians. In tandem with certification in the Alexander Technique, Clara broached in 1995-96 reflections on the possibility of a unity of body, mind, and soul. Cartesian Studies, then La Cartésienne and Cartesian Women are based on the correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the philosopher René Descartes. She choreographed and danced in this trio of women dancers, accompanied by harpsichord, cello, and bagpipes, in Paris at the Théâtre Dunois and in Newburyport, Massachusetts at the Firehouse Center for the Arts. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst projected La Cartésienne as part of a conference on "Seventeenth-Century Women Philosophers." The Maison des Cultures du Monde in Paris offered Maxwell in the Spring of 1997 her first French commission. She was asked to explore Western eros today. Le Corps-éros closed out the first-annual Festival de l'Imaginaire . This performance was followed by a two-hour round-table discussion of her dance by anthropologists, sociologists, and writers. "In an immanence situated here and now," wrote Jean-Marie Brohm regarding Le Corps-éros, "Clara poses in fact the question of aesthetic and ethical transcendence. From the site of her body, she invokes a horizon of values and positions taken in favor of political freedoms, the free disposition of one's body, the affirmation of the permanent necessity of challenging every form of power and every institution, including, of course, the institutions that dominate the body." In June, Maxwell presented at the Studio de l'Ermitage her new creation, Corparole/Bodytalk, with the world premiere of two dances based on music by Coleman. In March 1998, she was invited to participate in a colloquium at the Centre Thomas More in l'Arbresle on "The Body and Art in the 20th Century," along with writer and art critic Marc Le Bot, painter Ernest Pignon Ernest, and art historian Claude Frontisi. There, in the church of Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, a monastery designed by Le Corbusier near Lyon, she unveiled Corpus, still another volet of her active philosophical-choreographic meditations on the body. Corpus was followed in February 1999 by Corpsensus. This multimedia work integrating dance, music, painting, incense, spices..., was performed with another female dancer, piano, cello, and violin at Paris's Théâtre du Renard. Accompanying each evening's performance--which included the live European premiere of Coleman's Trinity composition for solo violin--was a Chautauqua from several French art critics, art historians, and philosophers. They took the themes of Corpsensus, "social body, political fabric, philosophical passion," as points of departure for their own talks. In the year 2000, Maxwell danced for the year-end gathering of the local Greens Party (Les Verts) in her 14th arrondissement. She also was awarded a residency that year at Workspace for Choreographers in Sperryville, Virginia, prior to D.C. dancer Nancy Havlik performing Serious Joy, Clara's piece set to music by African-American classical composer Jeffrey Mumford, at Dance Place. Maxwell returned regularly to the nation's capital to participate in The Field and to collaborate with D.C. Fieldworker and Dance Specialist Laura Schandelmeier. A rigorous procedure for giving constructive feedback for artists' work in progress, The Field is a unique and original approach to mutual mentoring not found in France. Clara has performed Trinity in Fieldwork showings in 2000 and 2003, bringing in Coleman's concert Master, the violinist Tom Chiu. In 2004, she premiered there Keeping Still/Mountain, choreographed for her by her old Juilliard School partner, Robert Garland (Dance Theater of Harlem's resident choreographer). She has performed Laura's solo, Annabel in The Field, while Schandelmeier has performed Clara's solo L'Aimable in The Field (assisted by Clara's dance collaborator Isabelle Pierre), on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, as well as for salon performances in New York City and elsewhere. At the invitation of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Maxwell and her artistic-technical collaborators created The Banquet in February 2001 while in residency at the architect's desert home, Taliesin West, near Scottsdale, Arizona. This multi-arts, site-responsive event performed in Wright's theater and hosted in part by Spirit of the Senses brought together dance, music, spoken text, painted decor, lighting, and projections on dancers' bodies of the films of experimental film maker James Edward Davis, a Wright colleague from Maxwell's native West Virginia. Her company returned to Paris to inaugurate the March exhibit of José Ferreira's "copy-art" works at the Centre des Arts Vivants. Maxwell's innovative, developing work is often shown as part of informal café discussions. Intrinsic to the exploration of new ways of experiencing the unity of movement and music is the need felt by Clara and her collaborators to test such experimentations in a setting where there is direct contact with an uninitiated audience. Maxwell collaborated with Gale Prawda's Café Philo group, dancing at the famous Café de Flore as introduction to the evening's scheduled discussion topic: "What do we as spectators learn from the experience of watching a performance? Can it deepen an experience of dance and music to talk about it?" Especially poignant after the September 11, 2001 events, which had unexpectedly occurred just a week earlier, the audience made up largely of expatriate Americans was moved to talk about art and life and Clara's dance late into the night, well after the performance and conversation were scheduled to end. Maxwell was then sponsored by the Mayor of the 14th arrondissement's "Journées Portes Ouvertes" program and L'Entrepôt in May of 2002. Se plaire à Plaisance animated street ambulations and public visits to artists' studios in her local Paris neighborhood, departing from a home base on the Entrepôt café's stage. She danced in response to the artists' paintings, some of them being created while she danced. Clara and Café Philo returned to Café Flore in 2003, and she also organized another Café Philo evening at Les Sept Lézards jazz club, along with Chiu and jazz pianist Bobby Few, around the theme of improvisation. Owner Catherine Volcovici enthusiastically declared that it was one of the most imaginative and creative evenings Les Sept Lézards had ever programmed. Maxwell, Few, and saxophonist Noah Howard inaugurated a new performance space, Tour & Taxi, in Brussels in March of the following year. Also in 2004, Paris Deputy Mayor in charge of New Technologies and Research and former Socialisme ou Barbarie member Daniele Auffray invited Clara and her artistic/technical team to perform in the Salon des Arcades at the Hôtel de Ville, Paris's City Hall. Hundreds had to be turned away from this major event that brought James Edward Davis back to the city where he had studied art. Video projections on dancers' bodies of Davis's experimental films, a moving décor made of an experimental high-tech material, Luminex®, dance, and live music (including accompaniment by master djembe player Guem) combined with a reflection on the utility and purpose of new technologies in relation to artistic creativity. The year 2005 was a subdued year, professionally and personally, for Maxwell. After beginning an extended performance residency at Les Sept Lézards jazz club in Paris in an April collaboration with Bobby Few, she was called back home to attend to family health problems. Yet she managed to find the time to teach the Alexander Technique to graduate students in the Theater Department at West Virginia University during the Fall semester, publishing an account of her experience in ExChange, the trade journal of Alexander Technique International. She also returned to Washington, D.C. at the invitation of her collaborator there, Laura Schandelmeier, to participate in the "Arts on Foot" kick-off event for the upcoming annual Capital Fringe Festival. Maxwell and Schandelmeier took over an empty downtown D.C. storefront to perform an unusual duo in conjunction with Tom Chiu, connected from Brooklyn via a Skype internet hookup. As Maxwell continued to deal with family-health-related matters in 2006-2008, she was able during those years to publish "Team Teaching the Alexander Technique at My Home-State University," in ExChange; have a residency at Centre National de la Danse; project a video recording of her dance performance of Jeffrey Mumford's Serious Joy at the Philadelphia Music Project's "New Frontiers in Music" Symposium; and offer live showings of her Trouble in Mind solo at Studio Opinioni and Atelier Grangousier in Paris. On June 20, 2009, Clara choreographed and danced, at hourly intervals, a series of four Multiarts Site-Responsive Performances of Lire aux cabinets for the Urbanisme & démocratie neighborhood association's Summer Solstice event, in their Jardin partagé des Thermopyles. The texts incorporated into this ecologically-minded solo dance set near this community garden's flushless or "dry" toilet were: Henry Miller's Lire aux cabinets (Reading on the toilet); Cornelius Castoriadis's "La Force *révolutionnaire de l'écologie" (The Revolutionary Force of Ecology), from Une société à la dérive (excerpt about Victor Hugo and the sewers Paris); and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with music: Patti Smith, "25th Floor," Easter ("The transformation of waste/Is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man"). 2009 also saw the publication of another article for ExChange, "A Conversation with Paris Ballet Master Wayne Byars, by Clara Gibson Maxwell," and guest teaching of Modern Dance and the Alexander Technique for Shellie Cash's class in the Dance Division of the University of Cincinnati, as well as the presentation of the first of two Multi-Arts Lecture Demonstrations, "Louis A. Johnson" (about her great-uncle-by-marriage, who was the architect of the Military-Industrial Complex), at The Waldomore, a National Register of Historic Places venue in her hometown of Clarksburg, West Virginia. A second Multi-Arts Lecture Demonstration at The Waldomore, "Marcel Breuer and the Building of the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library" (about her father, Frank J. Maxwell, Jr.'s successful efforts in the early 1970s to replace the old Waldomore Library with a new one designed by Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer), followed the next year. Clara also created for her ballet teacher Wayne Byars and Alexander Technique teacher Luigia Riva a documentary video of Byars's and Riva's 2010 Paris workshop: "Images du stage de la Technique Alexander/danse classique Wayne Byars/Luigia Riva." Encuentro-Encuentro, a major new Multi-Arts Site-Responsive Ambulatory Performance, was commissioned for the 2011 "Encuentro Internacional: La creación humana" colloquium organized by the Cátedra Interinstitucional Cornelius Castoriadis. This quartet for dancers (Clara and Isabelle Dufau, accompanied by two "Shadow Doubles," Laura Schandelmeier and Stephen Clapp) was set to the music of Ornette Coleman's classic composition Trinity, as transcribed for cello and performed by Romain Garioud. Encuentro-Encuentro perambulated between two different floors and into the central courtyard of the early 16th-century Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América (House of the First Print Shop in the Americas) in Mexico City. After the World Premiere projection of the Encuentro-Encuentro videodance the next year at the "art et essai" Cinéma Chaplin-Denfert in Paris, there have so far been fifteen additional showings: *Rotterdam, Brussels, APEX Theater Kabarett (Göttingen), Universidad de Guadalajara, Mehringhof (Berlin), Loughborough University, Ex-Asilo Filangieri (Naples), Université de Sherbrooke à Longueuil (Montreal), Colegio de San Luis, la Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, the Cinemathèque Québécoise (Montreal), CIESAS Unidad Regional Occidente (Mexico City), Center for German and European Studies (ZeDES) at Chung-Ang University (Seoul), Seoul Museum of Art, and in the "Thinking About Architecture" course 4.607, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Clara received another commission, this time from the Verein für das Studium und die Förderung der Autonomie, for their 2012 Cornelius Castoriadis colloquium. She choreographed a new piece, Lou Andreas-Salomé, at the APEX Theater Kabarett in the hometown (Göttingen, Germany) of this favorite of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The performance, a dance trio consisting of Clara, Laura Schandelmeier, and Stephen Clapp, with Critical Theory Professor Helmut Dahmer playing Freud, incorporated a dream-projection in German of Encuentro-Encuentro. Clara also published two additional articles in 2012: "Should Clarksburg Build New Cultural Center or Renovate Rose Garden Theater?," in the Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram, and "My ATI Experience," again in ExChange. She also taught the Alexander Technique the next year to students, most of them from Eastern Europe, at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna, Austria. In 2014, France's Musée de la Poste (French Postal Museum) commissioned Maxwell to create Soul Kitchen, a double duet with Clara and Isabelle Dufau as dancers and Clara and Charlotte Lequeux as singers, for the Opening and Closing of the L'Art fait ventre ("Bellyful of Art") exhibition, respectively at Paris's Musée du Montparnasse and the Espace Pierre Cardin. Soul Kitchen was a coproduction between Mon Oncle D'Amérique Productions and L'éclat des gestes. The food-related songs consisted of Robert Johnson's "Come On in my Kitchen," Ben Jonson's "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," and Jim Morrison's "Soul Kitchen." Three "Chefs-musicians" providing musical accompaniment were cellist Romain Garioud, keyboardist Dave Bryant, and percussionist Chris Bowman, with Georgette Happi as "Saucière" (saucemaker). Christelle Westphal's Spontaneous Public-Participation Photographic Installation, "L'itinérare en portraits végétaux," was created by asking audience members, as they entered the Espace Pierre Cardin, to be photographed wearing plant-hats, previously sown-sewn by Westphal, and by inviting them to review the resulting images of themselves and others wearing these vegetal crowns during Intermission. Soul Kitchen was Maxwell's deepest and most extensive creation in her three-decades-long effort to incorporate Ornette Coleman 's "Harmolodic" musical theory into a multiarts performance.
The founding of this arts-and-educational organization has made it possible for ASF, with Maxwell as its Artistic Director, to support in the United States and around the world the kinds of activities and projects Mon Oncle D'Amérique Productions has been instigating and sustaining in France since its inception as a Paris-registered "Association 1901" nonprofit organization in 1987. The US Internal Revenue Service granted ASF 501(c)3 nonprofit status the next year. Maxwell celebrated this 2015 administrative achievement by mounting an ASF Gala Dance Duo with Isabelle Dufau at the Oral Lake Fishing Club in Clarksburg, West Virginia while ASF supported the recording and release of The Garden of Equilibria, an album by the keyboardist-composer and Ornette Coleman collaborator Dave Bryant. ASF also began formal funding of the Cátedra Interinstitucional Cornelius Castoriadis (CICC) in 2015. The CICC is an informal public-educational project addressed to nontraditional, including Native Mexican, students with or without previous academic experience. Its live and virtual programs, including international colloquia, are presented at UAM Xochimilco in Mexico City and in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, as well as in a number of other Central and South American educational settings. With the administrative support of The Resource Foundation and El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR), the current, two-year (2023-2025) ASF-funded CICC program is titled: "Instituyente, instituido e institución burocrática." Clara returned to Mexico City in 2017 for the Live Premiere of a choreographic/musical/video-projection/spoken-word creation, El halcón como símbolo (The Henhawk as Symbol), again commissioned by the Cátedra Interinstitucional Cornelius Castoriadis for another CICC colloquium, Encuentro Internacional: Castoriadis político: Academia y autonomía, at the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América. This new Multi-Arts Site-Responsive Performance centered around American Transcendentalist and Naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who had written the text that became known as "Civil Disobedience" as a protest not only against Slavery but also against the United States's actions in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Revolving around an 1859 excerpt from Thoreau's Journal, "What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own," El halcón como símbolo explored Thoreau's views on art, nature, native peoples, somatic practices (yoga), and social change while inviting student participation through their recital of Thoreau Journal excerpts in Spanish translation during the actual performance. Cátedra Interinstitucional Cornelius Castoriadis students wearing GoPro video cameras on their heads filmed the live performance from different angles and heights. This footage was incorporated into the initial version edited by Holly Sass that was projected the following evening at the Casa. Everyone then was invited to contemplate what these students had deliberately seen, thus exemplifying in action Thoreau's sayings: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately" and "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." The same year, ASF created the Thoreau Polymonophonic Journal Project, an online "World Participatory Vocal Project Open to All" that invites individuals to participate in a collective endeavor while retaining their own voice (thus the neologism, polymonophonics) by recording and uploading to this website their personal readings from Thoreau's two-million-word Journal, accompanied or not by a musical instrument. Listeners can then, each, create their own unique Ivesian Vocal Symphony by playing back the resulting recordings in whatever order they choose. After presenting her Encuentro-Encuentro videodance twice in South Korea in 2018, Maxwell flew to Japan to visit the Zuihō-in Zen Buddhist Subtemple in Kyoto associated with the First Zen Institute of America. FZI is where she had practiced Zazen since 1980 alongside Mary Farkas, who had danced in the 1930s with Clara's Juilliard School teacher Hanya Holm, and Antony Tudor, the creator of "psychological ballet" whose works Clara had danced at Juilliard. Told of these connections, the monks kindly invited Maxwell to play her Shakuhachi Japanese flute, which she had begun studying in 1980 with her teacher, Ronnie Nyogetsu Seldin, and which she has played publicly in such venues as the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, St. Joseph's Church, and the Juilliard School, as well as in the Paris Métro as an official musician and at FZI itself, where she performed for Leonard Cohen's children, Adam and Lorca. With the help of Video Editor Nathaniel Draper, ASF released Clara Gibson Maxwell Plays Shakuhachi at Daitoku-ji Monastery, which documented in creative fashion the historical links between the Daitoku-ji Monastery and FZI, Maxwell's own four decades of Zen practice, and this impromptu performance itself in which one of the Subtemple's nuns is seen gently shooing away an insect drawn to the sound of her flute playing ("All living beings alike possess the Buddha nature," says the Nirvana Sutra). Following the deaths of her father, Judge Frank J. Maxwell, Jr., in 2017 and of her uncle, William B. Maxwell III, in 2018, which demanded an increased attention on her part to family matters, and with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Maxwell, whose live performances call for and create public participation, temporarily stepped back from active work. Nevertheless, beginning in 2018, ASF has aided in the creation of three additional "Harmolodic" albums, for which Dave Bryant has brought together a number of distinguished Ornette Coleman sidemen besides himself. The first recording, Night Visitors, which paired Bryant with Ornette Coleman bassist Charnett Moffett, along with percussionist Gregg Bendian, was released in 2020. A forthcoming second "Harmolodic" album created by Bryant features performances by Ornette Coleman bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, along with saxophonist George Garzone, percussionist Chris Bowman, and guitarist Eric Hofbauer. A major new ASF project led by Ornette Coleman collaborator/keyboardist-sideman Dave Bryant began in April 2022. "Third Thursdays" is a new monthly "Harmolodic" jazz music series featuring Bryant, who is joined each month by several of his many longtime collaborators hailing from the Boston area and beyond. Already, among the former Ornette Coleman sidemen and students who have participated in "Third Thursdays" concerts at the Harvard-Epworth Church on the grounds of the Harvard Law School near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts are: Tony Falanga, Matt Lavelle, Al McDowell, James Blood Ulmer, Kenny Wessel, Grant Calvin Weston, and Fred Williams. Each of these musicians has sat down with Bryant for an in-depth videotaped interview that has now been made available online as an integral part of this successful arts-educational project. ASF has renewed "Third Thursdays" funding for 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. Since 2018, ASF has also begun funding a number of innovative film projects. Nathaniel Draper's Anagram, an experimental film bringing Maya Deren's choreography-for-film investigations into the digital age, premiered in 2022 at the Bogota Experimental Film Festival and has since been shown in Belgrade as part of Kinoskop's 2022 "Bodies in Ecstasy" program and at the 2023 carte-blanche Enlève tes Chaussons Rouges/Festival de Films Dansés program presented at the Reflet Médicis cinema in Paris by the Collectif Jeune Cinéma. And In Vain, Anastasia Melia Eleftheriou's "poetic cinema" project using the Greek mythological figure of Tantalus to illustrate/dramatize immigrant, ecological, and water-access issues premiered in 2022 at the Drama International Short Film Festival in Athens, Greece as part of its "Short & Green" international competition and was projected again during the 2023 South East European Film Festival (SEEfest) in Los Angeles. Both Anagram and In Vain were featured at La Péniche Cinéma-Le Baruda on the canal de l'Ourcq by La Villette during the University of Kent's Paris Postgraduate "Sounds and Visions" Festival in 2023. That same year, ASF backed a Writing Project for Trouble at Bad Rock, a feature-film screenplay by Nathaniel Draper that will treat themes of "mineral extraction, popular resistance movements, and ongoing conflicts and political contradictions surrounding mineral and water resources in the face of competing land claims in the American landscape" while interrogating and reimagining the genre of the Western in American cinema. On July 11, 2021, the Virtual World Premiere of Thoreau's Henhawk Visits Mexico, a 39-minute videodance based on Maxwell's 2017 El halcón como símbolo (The Henhawk as Symbol) Multi-Arts Site-Responsive Performance at the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América in Mexico City, closed out The Thoreau Society's 80th Annual Gathering, whose theme was "Thoreau and Diversity: People, Principles, and Politics." This was the first time that The Thoreau Society had featured dance. One of the Cátedra Interinstitucional Cornelius Castoriadis colloquium attendees in 2017 was Ana Julia Cosquiahuitl Gómez Manzano, a Native Mexican who had worked with the Amuzgos, an indigenous people in Guerrero State, on their pirate-radio project in an area suffering from water-access issues. Ana Julia was particularly interested in Thoreau's involvement in native culture and civil disobedience. The audiovisual record of the postperformance student discussion with ASF's artistic-technical team about the relevance today of Thoreau's views forms the emotionally gripping and thoughtfully fascinating final section of this extended video, whose editing was completed by Anastasia Melia Eleftheriou. In turn, its projection at The Thoreau Society was followed by a discussion with the Annual Gathering's online viewers. |
