June 24, 2008

A Review of the 'Worse of the Best' at Kinetic Cinema

The Worst of the Best:
Kinetic Cinema Gets Down

by Latika Young

Before taking a hiatus for the summer, Kinetic Cinema, the dance films screening series curated by Anna Brady Nuse, went out with a bang! "The Worst of the Best," a night of "bad" dance film, as selected by guest curator Kriota Willberg, featured an array of clips and excerpts that had the audience at Tribeca's Collective:Unconscious in stitches. With everything from undulating nude males to jete-ing serial killers to an over-the-top 80s spandex extravaganza, there was something in the selection to please even the most well-versed bad dance connoisseur.

The night began with a little live dance, as Nuse exploded onto the stage in a frenetic version of the classic dance from "Flashdance" complete with gold metallic hot pants and matching shoes. A perfect entrance, it warmed up the audience's belly laughing muscles and set the tone for an evening of the dance cliché as encapsulated on film.

Willberg, co-director of THE BENTFOOTES, which premiered at Dance on Camera Festival 2008, has been interested in bad dance for some time. She used to host bad dance film screening parties at her apartment for fellow dancer and choreographer friends (what better way to build a supportive dance community--we may be struggling in our own careers, but at least we are not making dance like that!).

Willberg developed somewhat tricky criteria that determined her selections for this "tour of surprisingly bad dance films from the early 1900s to the present." As she explains, there is a difference between "bad" dance and just "boring" dance. Bad dance necessarily "provokes a strong emotional reaction" in the audience, and, as Willberg points out, these are more often than not the dances people end up discussing fervently with friends. Boring dance, on the other hand, "is just dull" and is easily forgotten. Where it gets tricky is with the question of production values. For Willberg, even boring dance, with a big enough budget, becomes bad dance by virtue of the unrealized potential of its grandiosity. Any otherwise boring dance film with a large enough budget enrages Willberg to the point that it has elicited a strong emotional response and thus qualifies as a truly bad dance.

The screening began with a video montage of clips culled from the internet of dances intended to demonstrate "boring." All low production value, the clips may have come from YouTube or artists' personal websites, but they certainly were not from Hollywood blockbusters. The original videos likely go on for what must feel like many very long minutes, but edited down into a quickly paced montage, they were not really that boring after all. Instead, the curatorial process of cramming them side by side and positing them into humorously crafted sub-categories, such as "Women and Their Hands," "Semi-Clad Undulating Duets," and my personal favorite, "Nude Men Kinetically Recumbent," highlighted their humor rather than their boredom. Fortunately, though, the audience was saved from having to watch any of the clips in their entirety. Anyone who has sat on a dance film festival pre-screening committee can undoubtedly understand.

The bulk of the offerings, however, were clips from films released on the big screen and each example was selected to provide a more nuanced understanding of Willberg's definition of bad. The gem of the night, glittering in decadent ridiculousness, was Ben Hecht's 1946 film SPECTRE OF THE ROSE. Choreographed by Tamara Geva, Balanchine's first wife, the two dance scenes presented were performed by Ivan Kirov. An attempt to combine a murder mystery with classical ballet, the result, at least to modern eyes, comes across more as camp than refinement. In the first scene, the male ballet superstar (Kirov) has been confined to bed for two years after killing his first wife. Suddenly feeling better, he is inspired to dance, performing ebullient feats of jete and pirouette that are made that much more incredible (and farcical) considering his extended period of inactivity (perhaps, instead, we should feel relieved he did not join the ranks of the "kinetically recumbent nude male" as we witnessed earlier). The second scene has our star re-entering a state of insanity and struggling with his desires to kill his second wife. Fortunately, derangement does not deter our protagonist from his dancing tour de force and, with knife in hand, he catapults about the room, balletically crashing into walls, before leaping with pointed feet through a glass window, to his certain death below. This is a bad dance film made so by both its delicious anachronistic ballet moves (likely quite magnificent for the time but which seem highly dated to the modern viewer) and its equally ridiculous backstory.

Other choices from the evening included THE MOTHERING HEART, the 1913 D.W. Griffith film that features background dancers, undoubtedly quite common on the vaudeville stage of the time, who appear as gallivanting Isadora-nymphettes and a leopard skin toga-ed couple who awkwardly perform Lindy aerial moves, STAYING ALIVE, the sequel to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, as directed by Sylvester Stallone (and, yes, Travolta does wear a very Rambo-eque headband), and scenes from the film everyone loves to hate, Paul Verhoeven's 1995 SHOWGIRLS, which is just bad in so many divine ways.

Willberg wants to know, "What is the worst dance film ever?" To share your favorites, or most hated, e-mail her at info@duramater.org and be sure to tell her why. After a summer break, Kinetic Cinema returns in October. E-mail Anna Brady Nuse at mtf@straighttothehelicopter.com to get on the mailing list.

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