All Hands on Deck: Dance, Metamorphosis, and Surreal Labor in Silent Cinema with Live Music featuring Dreamland Faces
Tue, Nov 14, 7:00 pm CT
In-person / Livestream
On-demand through Nov 26
Curated by Maggie Hennefeld (UMN, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature)
Hands give us metaphors for the urgency of collective labor, but they also appeared as surreal and uncanny images across the silent film archive. In this playful program, laboring limbs fall in love, catch fire, metamorphose into toy animals, chop wood, cut films, smoke pipes (while pregnant!), hypnotize circus dancers, and build zoomorphic shelters from the storm—all accompanied by Dreamland Faces’ live original score that includes Northrop’s historic pipe organ.
The seven films in this program include Stella Simon's rhythmic choreography of disembodied hands, Zora Neale Hurston's fieldwork footage shot in the 1920s, Alice Guy-Blaché's voracious comedy of maternity cravings, Ladislaw Starewicz's stop-motion fable starring dead bugs, Segundo de Chomón's phantasmagoric animation, a grotesque German puppet film, and a social satire about gendered labor and the disastrous results of editing film newsreels on a too-tight deadline!
If you need assistance with your tickets, please call 612-624-2345, email umntix@umn.edu.
The content below derives from the Northrop Across Campus Program that supports Northrop's mission towards intersections between performing arts and education for the benefit of all participants now and for generations to come.
Find ways to make thematic connections to these suggested topics:
Take a deeper dive with these resources that provide additional information about the performers, the history of the artform, and the artistic process.
Links:
Start a conversation about the performance, or encourage reflection, using these questions as inspiration.
In her interview with the How do you like it so far? podcast, University of Minnesota professor and silent film curator Maggie Hennefeld references the “historical amnesia” that excludes women from our collective memory of silent cinema. She says modern audiences are often surprised to find out how many women were involved in film, and how radically they behave on-screen.
One film in this collection, The Dragonfly and the Ant, is considered a pioneer of stop motion animation. According to Vox, the filmmaker, Vladislaw Starewicz’s animation of real bugs was a “combination of wild invention and obsessive detail (that) created a new art form.”
Dreamland Faces, who will be providing music for this event, have a history of composing live accompaniment for silent cinema. In a list the duo created of reasons modern composers should consider scoring silent films, they note, “like a poem, silent films don’t typically have ‘official’ scores and can be re-scored over and over.”
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
