Screening: Ocean

Charles Atlas; Merce Cunningham. “Ocean,” 2008. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Friday, October 19, 2012 - 5pm
UWM Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd., 2nd level, Milwaukee, WI 53211
This screening is free!

OCEAN (Charles Atlas, 100min., 2011)

The Lynden Sculpture Garden is delighted to partner with the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival on a screening of Charles Atlas’s Ocean. A pas de trois of cinema and dance and music, and a particular performance of circles and time, Ocean is video artist Charles Atlas’ stunning documentation of Merce Cunningham’s dance piece, staged at the bottom of a quarry. In 2008, Merce Cunningham shared, in the Rainbow Granite Quarry in Minnesota, Ocean – his celebrated dance, a tribute to his partner John Cage and to James Joyce (who Cunningham and Cage were told was to make the ocean his next topic after Finnegans Wake). Cunningham’s long time video collaborator Charles Atlas taped three performances of the piece and his video Ocean, a stunner at this year’s Whitney Biennial, is his video con brio: compilation, documentation, and vivid mirroring of the performance and its spirit, Atlas working with the movement of multiple cameras and split-screen to capture the particular dynamism of this legendary occasion.

Join us at the UWM Union Theatre to celebrate the tradition of dance performed out of doors.

Watch a video about the making of Ocean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBJdHnv5tM