March 29, 2024

WE ARE ALREADY DANCING: The Return of Marta Renzi

Showing: Wed., Auguest 24, 8:00 PM (Rain Date 8/26)
Title: WE ARE ALREADY DANCING: An Evening With Marta Renzi
Year: 2007 - 2022
Country: USA
Genre:
Director:

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This program was originally scheduled for July 13 but had to be cancelled a few hours before it was to begin. We are pleased to be able to reschedule it for Augst 24, or August 26 in case of rain.

Award-winning short films spanning 2 decades
. Since 2006, choreographer, filmmaker, and Rockland County neighbor Marta Renzi has made over 40 films that have played in at least 400 festivals in 39 countries, an accomplishment that places her in rare company in the filmmaking community. All this followed an equally fruitful career with her dance company, which earned her one of the highest honors in contemporary dance, the “Bessie” award. On July 13, Marta will take us on a tour through two decades of filmmaking, featuring long-time friends and associates, family, work, children, history, and movement, always movement, the essence of both film and dance. Whether they are choreographed or improvised, with professional dancers or untrained dancers, or even without people, these films remind us that we are already dancing.

After the films, stay for a discussion with Marta Renzi and Laura Harrison, President of the Bagliasco Foundation. Scroll down for their bios.

Community Partner: Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center

 

 

 

This screening will be at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center, 82 N. Broadway, in Nyack, in their back yard. Seats will be available, but bring your own lawn chair for more comfort. The rain date, if needed, will be Friday, August 26.

Tickets are limited, so please purchase in advance.

About Marta Renzi

Before she made films, Marta Renzi made more than 50 dances for her Project Company, as well as creating work for groups across the U.S. and abroad,  Her site-specific pieces in locations such as the Guggenheim Museum, Union Station and the Staten Island Ferry, led naturally to her work in video and film. In 1981 YOU LITTLE WILD HEART, to music by Bruce Springsteen, was Marta’s first half-hour for television, followed by MOUNTAINVIEW, made in 1989 in collaboration with independent filmmaker John Sayles.

In 1992, Marta received a New York Dance & Performance Award (a “Bessie”) for her dance VITAL SIGNS, and in 1995 was the first recipient of a Dancing in the Streets award as “a fearless explorer of all manner of unconventional sites, integrating art into everyday life.” She was a 2013 Bogliasco fellow at the Liguria Study Center for Arts & Humanities and received a 2015 CSA grant from Rivertown Artists Workshop.

As part of a continuing commitment to making dance accessible to a wide audience, Renzi helped inaugurate the Inside/Out program of public performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, while her company made frequent appearances at Central Park SummerStage, Bryant Park and Lincoln Center Out of Doors.

In 2017 she directed her debut feature film, HER MAGNUM OPUS, and in 2020 she directed and edited two short films with Island Moving Company of Newport, Rhode Island; OUT OF RUIN and THROUGH HER EYES: A NEWPORT NUTCRACKER REIMAGINED, for broadcast on Rhode Island PBS.

Marta has served on the Board of Advisors for the New York Foundation for the Arts and was a consultant for the New England Foundation for the Arts’ program “Building Community Through Culture.” In 2008 she joined the Board of Directors of Dance Films Association, a 50-year-old member-supported institution based in New York City.

She has taught in Chile and Paraguay through the International Linkages program of the American Dance Festival, and is a seven-time recipient of Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

During the same two decades she was making films, Marta Renzi has also worked part-time at the Family Resource Center in Nanuet, first as an early literacy specialist through the Parent Child Home Program. She is now Community Liaison at the FRC, shamelessly speaking her imperfect Spanish as she advocates for immigrant parents and their children.

Visit https://martarenzi.blogspot.com/

About Laura Harrison

Based in NY, Laura Harrison is the executive director of the Bogliasco Foundation. An American nonprofit with a program in Italy, the Bogliasco Foundation awards one-month Fellowships to individuals of all ages and nationalities who are developing significant new work in the arts and humanities. Fellows live and work in bucolic surroundings on the coast near Genoa, where natural beauty combines with an intimate group setting to encourage inquiry and transformative exchange across all disciplines.

A graduate of Harvard and Stanford Universities, Laura is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Laura launched her film career in France, where she worked for eight years as an editor on French feature films before returning to the US to make her own films. A prevailing interest in non-mainstream communities has guided her creative trajectory throughout the years. Her first documentary, Thurmond, W Va, a portrait of a “ghost town in the making,” was a finalist for the Student Academy Awards.  She co-directed Secret People (2000), a chronicle of the past and present of leprosy in America, which was broadcast nationally on PBS’ Independent Lens series and won a silver medal for Best Feature Documentary at the SXSW Film Festival. In 2010, Laura co-directed and produced Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm, about the radical architecture collective best known for Cadillac Ranch, which went on to win the Grand Festival Award in Documentary at the Berkeley Film Festival in 2011.

Since 2012, at the Bogliasco Foundation Laura has focused on facilitating the creativity of gifted makers and thinkers, expanding diversity and access, and encouraging conversation across boundaries.