Performance
see all genres ›A major attraction from cinema's earliest days was bringing to movie audiences live spectacles they might never be able to witness first-hand, from famous stage acts to world-class athletes and traditional ethnic dances.
Watch Performance Films
Genres / Short / Performance
-
Take Off
Freaky and not a little transcendent, TAKE OFF takes the strip tease well past its usual climax. By sprinkling a little Georges Melies magic over the peep show motif, Gunvor Nelson simultaneously revels in cinema's earliest forms while exploding the medium's customary reliance on (and...Watch Movie
-
Christmas Cracker
This Academy Award®-nominated short consists of three animated segments (by three different directors) that take a playful look at Christmas: a rendition of "Jingle Bells" in which paper cut-out figures dance, a dime-store rodeo of tin toys and a story of decorating the...Watch Movie
-
A Chairy Tale
In this Academy Award®-nominated short film, a chair (animated by Evelyn Lambart), refuses to be sat upon, forcing a young man to perform a sort of dance. The musical accompaniment is by Ravi Shankar and Chatur Lal. This virtuoso film is the result of a collaboration between Norman McLaren and...Watch Movie
-
Meditation on Violence
Haunting Chinese flute and Haitian drums accompany a graceful, elegant dance performance by Chao-Li Chi in Maya Deren's MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE. The film was released following the publication of her book, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film", and her winning the Grand...Watch Movie
-
A Study in Choreography for Camera
"If I did not live in a time when film was accessible to me as a medium, I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or a singer," the filmmaker Maya Deren once said. "But this is a much more marvelous dance. In film, I can make the world dance!" After college, Deren landed her first...Watch Movie
-
Pressures of the Text
Integrating direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language and simultaneous translation, PRESSURES OF THE TEXT investigates the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critspeak, educational...Watch Movie
-
Orange Trill
Technology sees our corporeal existence as burdensome, resulting in the body's dissolution and disconnect from the very ground beneath our feet. Hand-processed sixteen millimeter film and the electronic flicker of an old CT computer monitor create degrees of purity, traversed by the dancer's...Watch Movie
-
Place
PLACE is a sensational dance film, especially created for world-famous dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna by an outstanding team of international artists. Staged by Mats Ek, considered to be one of the world's best choreographers, and directed by Grammy, MTV and Cannes Grand Prix...Watch Movie
-
Cet air-là
Cet Air là is a famous french song from 1963, sung live by NY singer April March in acapella with Julien Gasc. The couple is singing while flying over a superimposed 16mm projection of a stop motion animation of a series of clouds, birds, bubbles, smoke machines and glitter, the song has the...Watch Movie
-
Dickson Experimental Sound Film
This short film is the world's first known experiment in producing a motion picture with a recorded synchronized soundtrack. Although the kinetophone combined recorded sound with moving pictures, even approximate synchronization was elusive. Still, William K.L. Dickson and his...Watch Movie
-
Imperial Japanese Dance
With the continued popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan's THE MIKADO (which debuted in 1885), Japanese dancing girls enjoyed a certain caché in New York's theatrical world. This film featuring the Sarashe Sisters was shown in Japan as NIPPON MAIKO NUNO SARASHI (JAPANESE DANCING...Watch Movie
-
Annabelle Butterfly Dance
Annabelle Whitford, known as Peerless Annabelle, had her debut at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago. Although hardly a stage star on the order of Carmencita, films of her performances proved popular and the negatives wore out quickly (meaning that she appeared frequently...Watch Movie
-
Bubble Dance
Famous exotic dancer Sally Rand does her signature routine in this classically scored short: a graceful, toga-clad dance with a buoyant balloon bigger than she is. Finally, we get the payoff when backlighting obscures her sheer dress, revealing the voluptuous naked form beneath. Rand's act was...Watch Movie
-
Buffalo Dance
Sioux Indians from Buffalo Bill's Wild West dance in Thomas Edison's Black Maria motion picture studio. The Edison Manufacturing Company took numerous films of dancers from different nations and cultures. These could be shown in a bank of kinetoscopes, creating a miniature ethnographic museum.Watch Movie
-
Sioux Ghost Dance
"Buffalo Bill" Cody and members of his Wild West traveled from Ambrose Park in Brooklyn to appear before Thomas Edison's camera. In this short, the Sioux Indians performed "in full war paint and war costumes," according to Edison catalogs. These films were taken for Franck...Watch Movie
