“Homecoming (Celebrating 20 Years of Dance at P.S. 122 – 1980-2000)” (2004) is a dance, documentary film by Charles Dennis. “Homecoming” chronicles the origins and evolution of Performance Space 122 in New York City, one of this country’s most active presenters of new dance and performance art and profiles ten leading choreographers, Ron Brown, Ann Carlson, Yoshiko Chuma, Dancenoise, Mark Dendy, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson, Charles Moulton, Sally Silvers and Doug Varone, whose careers were launched at P.S. 122. The film was shot in 2000 on the occasion of P.S. 122’s 20th season. To honor that achievement Charles Dennis, one of the co-founders of the space, invited the ten choreographers to return for a special taping of selected dances from their repertories. Combining new and archival performance clips, interviews with the artists, commentary by Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice, Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times, Joseph Melillo the Executive Producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, former P.S 122 Artistic Director Mark Russell and P.S. 122 co-founders Charles Moulton, Tim Miller and Charles Dennis the film illuminates a portrait of a fertile dance scene that was instrumental in expanding the boundaries of contemporary dance and performance. Performance photography by Dona Ann McAdams and original music by John Zorn are also featured in the film. This project was made possible with funds received from the National Initiative to Preserve America’s Dance (NIPAD), a grant program under the umbrella, SAVE AS DANCE underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trust and administered at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, by the Presentation Funds Program of the Experimental Television Center, Ltd. which is funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, a public agency and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Challenge Program. The running time of “Homecoming” is 56 minutes.
Archives: Archived Events
Archived Events From PS122 Pre 2018
Iceland
The Obie Award-winning duo of writer, director and actor Roger Guenveur Smith and composer Marc Anthony Thompson are joined by former Urban Bush Woman Treva Offutt to “navigate the bloodstream” of two lovers — a painter and a dancer — whose saga volcano-hops from the Arctic to the tropics and back home to Brooklyn. Featuring soundscapes by Thompson, this erotically-charged journey begins as “nothing special/just love as usual” but soon negotiates fire and ice and “bombs bursting in air/red white black and blue.”
Smith’s widely celebrated works for the stage include A Huey P. Newton Story, Frederick Douglass Now, Inside the Creole Mafia and The Watts Towers Project. Among his extensive range of screen credits are numerous collaborations with Spike Lee in films such as Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, He Got Game, Summer of Sam, and the telefilm version of A Huey P. Newton Story
WYSIWYG: Worst. Sex. Ever.
This was the wildly successful event that started it all. After getting a taste roar of the crowd and the heat of the spotlight, we decided to start a regular reading/performace series that would soon become the WYSIWYG Talent Show
with
Choire Sicha, Kiri, Paul Ford, Andy Horwitz, Blaise K, Jennifer Landry, Joel Derfner, Dori Mondon, Josh Bernstein, Brian Grosz, Chris Hampton
The Life and Times of Barry Goldhubris
Larry Goldhuber made his name dancing with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co. and subsequently went on to create a wonderful body of work with a collaborator Heidi Latsky. This season, he presents his newest work, a collaboration with filmmaker David Brooks entitled The Life and Times of Barry Goldhubris or How BIG can you get? The story of a man whose ego gets so big he explodes, Goldhubris is surround by film on all sides of the playing area. The environment shifts from the creation of the universe to inside the mind of Goldhubris as we follow this character through the highs and lows of his extraordinary life.
Instructions for Forgetting
Using home movies, letters and personal videotapes from friends in different parts of the world alongside fragments of movies and news items, Instructions for Forgetting explores video as an artifact, as a container of image and memory and as an occasion for speculation, fiction and interpretation. Etchells and a video operator sit at their tables in a performance space containing three video monitors on which images are continuously rewound and narratives fast-forwarded. Etchells draws the letters and emails donated by friends into an intimate-essay that includes fact and fiction, death, murder, the soccer legend George Best, hospital experiments, amateur striptease and whale detonation.