Pleasure Dome & Images Festival presents:
Hail the New Puritan (1985/86 84:47) +
Charles Atlas live with Alan Licht
April 9, 11 @ Joseph Workman Theatre
By Leandra de Valois-Franklin
With his trademark orange carrot-shaped sideburns disconnected from his silver hair, and a bright yellow SpongeBob t-shirt covering his slight physique, NYC video pioneer Charles Atlas does little to resemble the famous bodybuilder that shared his name. Atlas made his inaugural visit to Toronto last week for the 21st Images Festival, which showcased contemporary moving image culture from April 3-13. Audiences were granted not only with a rare glimpse of the Canadian premiere of Hail the New Puritan (1986), Atlas’ cinéma vérité style film revolving around the Scottish-born post-punk dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, but were also provided with the opportunity to attend a lecture and discussion with the filmmaker in person, as well as witness a world premiere media experiment with composer/guitarist Alan Licht in an intensely visceral live performance.
The dynamic diary film, Hail the New Puritan, inspired by the Beatles’ dancing movie A Hard Days Night, documents the daily life of Britain’s bad boy of ballet Michael Clark in a pastiche of narrative, performance and fantasy. It follows his professional life as director of his anarchic dance company, and also offers a glimpse into his personal life as he lustily mingles with numerous London scenesters including bi-sexual clubgoer and original party monster Leigh Bowery. “What I was trying to do was put Michael’s work in a context where you wouldn’t need an explanation,” Atlas explains, acknowledging the ethics involved in collaborating with dancers (one must not upstage them).
Clark’s dancers flaunt bare bottoms, fake bosoms, platform shoes and bizarre make-up, embodying a decadent subculture of androgyny and absurdity juxtaposed by a dispossessed, Thatcher-era landscape; all this to a wicked soundtrack of music by Glenn Branca, The Fall, and Wire’s Bruce Gilbert. It is Clark’s solid base in classicism which allows him to maintain a purity of form while challenging and redefining his outrageous combination of high art and pop culture, exhibited through the lens of Atlas’ camera.
The live screen segment of Atlas’ last day in residency with the festival comprised of a collaboration among Atlas and electronic musician Licht, in which both artists improvised to create a collage of image and sound. Atlas worked at one end of the large screen at the Theatre, mixing and manipulating sampled stock footage and prepared loops of various Stanley Brakhage video processed through numerous laptops, DVD players and a mixer. Psychedelic shapes and colours initiate transitions from footage of a body builder layered over a damsel in distress to cameos of a crazed Bugs Bunny and Mariah Carey, deriving new meaning from Brackhage’s already experimental work. At the other end Licht sat with his electric guitar surrounded by half a dozen distortion pedals, generating minimalist noise into waves of volume, feedback and drone to create a sensual, sometimes violent audio accompaniment to the visual content. The two artists interacted in a loose partnership, playing off each other’s techniques in a non-specific manner, resulting in a layered, dreamlike atmosphere of visual music.
Atlas is a scientist at merging performance and media art, having created a prolific body of work that spans four decades and includes a long list of international collaborators. From his beginnings as a Super 8 filmmaker in the 1970s, Atlas has gone on to create 114 films, many of which have been exhibited at festivals and institutions around the world. Video performance has been an integral part of his practice since his early days with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1974-83 where he produced ten works in collaboration with the choreographer-musician John Cage. He recently admits to becoming a Cagean, having accidentally developed a more chance-driven methodology from what he considers to be his classical training with the Cunningham Company.
Lately Atlas has worked within the live concert setting, in which he brings laptop computers into the theatre to create video montages. He recently collaborated with the New York-based band Antony and the Johnsons in Turning (on which he’s currently completing a documentary), and is also in the process of creating a film version of Cunningham’s ambitious work Ocean. At fifty, Atlas continues to challenge the possibilities of technology using both controlled and spontaneous techniques, constantly striving for variety and newness. His work remains inspirational to contemporary artists in multiple fields, proving indeed that media art matters.
