Saturday 9 March – 9:00 PM – Nite Owl Theater
Introduced by assistant curator Caitlin Storrie
This program focuses on the coming-together of dance (or, more precisely, choreographed movement), clothing and cinema. It draws attention to the unique ways in which these art forms explore, magnify and shape one another. At the same time, Choreography of Movement is a celebration of both fashion and cinema as collaborative media par excellence, featuring shorts by the filmmaking collectives Tell No One and Lernert & Sander, as well as a collaboration between the fashion designer Iris van Herpen, choreographer Russell Maliphant and image-makers Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
The program concludes with Hail the New Puritan, Charles Atlas’s fictionalized documentary of British dancer Michael Clark. The film has become notorious for featuring the sublimely outrageous ’80s club icon Leigh Bowery, who designed costumes for several of Clark’s ballet productions. Bowery’s unique position of dandy-meets-clown-meets-sculpture defied established categories of creative practice (he once quipped that he liked to ‘appeal to maybe one or two people’). Yet, his influence across fashion, costume design, art and music has been enormous. Equipped with a sewing machine, endless fabrics, scotch tape, sequins, wigs, prosthetics and plenty of make-up, Bowery was among those who utilized body adornment to fashion themselves as self-made originals – the kind of extreme and uncompromised stance that eventually lead to Bowery’s entrance into the world of fine art.
Mine
UK 2014. Dir. Tell No One for NOWNESS. Styling by Agata Belcen.
Spatial Reverse
UK 2015. Dir. Warren du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones for AnOther. Fashion by Iris van Herpen.
Fantastic Spins
Netherlands 2012. Dir. Lernert & Sander. With Lawrence Evans & Thomas Naylor. Styling by Jodie Barnes.
Hail the New Puritan
USA 1987. Dir. Charles Atlas. With Leigh Bowery, Nicola Bowery, Les Child, Michael Clark, Anthony Doughty, Mark E. Smith, Brix Smith, Sue Tilley.
Total running time c. 90 mins
Caitlin Storrie
Caitlin Storrie works in art, design and film exhibitions. As well as working with the Fashion in Film Festival, she has curated and designed exhibition projects for fashion designer Phoebe English, London’s Maison Mais Non, NOW Gallery and Hubbub. She is also a freelance Illustrator and Graphic Designer and has worked in that capacity with Penguin Vintage Children’s Classics, Rebecca Salter RA and GRAD Gallery for Russian Arts and Design.