MINOTAUR
Daria Martin
(2009)

Minotaur is a love letter to an elder artist’s work, tracing its resonances with youthfulness and sensuality, specifically with my own, as a younger artist.  The film will center on Anna Halprin’s newest dance based on an erotic Rodin sculpture, 'Minotaur'.  The film, though highly sensuous, takes on a rhythmic, almost structuralist form, jumping from two dimensions (photographic images of the sculpture) to three dimensions (the sculpture itself) to four dimensions (the dance in time).  Anna Halprin herself presides over these transformations, a returning figure of power.

Halprin is a vivacious, electrically alive woman at the age of 87, widely acknowledged as the ‘mother of postmodern dance.’  She is also an artist who has haunted my personal imagination since my childhood.  I grew up on the base of Mount Tamalpais, in suburban Marin County, California, a place of both natural beauty and of cultural insulation, just around the corner from Halprin’s studio.  Perhaps it was Halprin’s nearby artistic storm that first stirred in me the desire to become an artist.

Anna Halprin began her career long before I was born, however, and created an enormous impact on the direction of 20th century dance, largely through multidisciplinary workshops of the 1960’s which drew participants from around the world.  Some of her most prominent students -- Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Robert Morris—went on to form the iconic Judson Church Group in New York, carrying forward Halprin’s teachings in what has become known as the creative engine of postmodern dance.  Beginning in the 1970’s, Halprin’s work took a turn towards the social/ political, and she formed a method of working with communities which emphasized the expression of personal and collective desires and made room for self-created rituals.  There is no doubt that her work, as a teacher, dancer and choreographer, has had a profound impact on many lives.  For more information about Halprin’s work please see her website at http://www.annahalprin.org.

“Minotaur” will be set in Halprin’s Mountain Home Studio and in the adjacent woodlands. The Mountain Home Studio itself, designed by her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, is visually stunning, an excellent example of Northern California modernism moving seamlessly through a verdant natural landscape, utterly disguised from neighbors.  It is in the freedom and privacy of this environment that Halprin creates.  Out of this natural/ architectural environment emerged a dance, “Minotaur,” that merges animal instinct and human feeling.

This new choreographic project represents a fresh direction for Halprin’s work and at the same time a return to past themes.  It also resonates especially strongly with some of the themes in my own past works.  Halprin’s project focuses on two dancers with whom she has worked to create dances based on sculptures by Rodin.  These dancers were asked to empathetically embody an existing sculptural pose, and then to elicit movement imaginatively inherent in that pose.  I am especially interested in enhancing the ways that an 87 year old choreographer has worked with erotic material.

“Minotaur” will capture this dance, using the camera as an active, moving ‘dancer;’  the piece will take advantage of  film’s special capacity to capture bulk and movement onscreen.  The camera will often move, handheld, an active participant. This feeling of being ‘physically part of the action’ will be contrasted to more contemplative moments in the film focused on the daydreaming mood inherent in looking at photographic images of Rodin sculptures in a book.   (Halprin’s approach of working from images of sculpture is oddly resonant with work of my own in the past which created movement out of fantasies about static photographs of sculpture: “In the Palace” borrowed from images of  Giacommetti’s “The Palace at 4am” and “Wintergarden” was made in response to images of Charles Dobson’s Persephone statue at the De La Warr Pavilion).  Visually, I will explicitly contrast a static, contained depiction of flat, still photographs, with a moving, dimensional depiction of dance in space.  Bridging the way between these two modes, we will also observe imagery of the sculpture itself, and of Halprin’s lively eyes, watching.

Cast

Joy Cosculluela, Anna Halprin, and G Hoffman Soto

Crew

Line Producer: Tom Dingle

Choreographer: Anna Halprin

Composer: Matmos

Director of Photography, Jon Else

Editor, Guy Ducker

Production Manager: Shylah Hamilton

Production Services: Complex Corporation

Additonal Photography: Michael Chin

1st Camera Assistants: John Gazdik and Paul Marbury; Gaffers, Peter Thomas and Dave Cherry;

Sound Recordists: Colin Blackshear and Nick Rupiper Sound Editor: Quentin Chiapetta;

Additional Music: Lisle Ellis

Stills Photographer: Sean Donnelly

Costume Designer: Emily Hagen

Production Assistants: Donna Chung, Jennifer Connelly, Melissa Howden, Job Piston, Chadwick Rantanen, and Merav Tzur

Thanks to: Bernard Barryte, Cantor Arts Center, Stephanie Earle, David Martin, Dominic Molon, Mountain Home Studio, and Len Thornton

'MINOTAUR' is part of The Three M Project, a series organized by the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, to commission, organize and co-present new works of art.

This project was made possible by the generous assistance of Maureen Paley, London.