Talks
Action! Futurism Projected + Performed
Sunday, Oct 18, 2009
7:30 p.m.
Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Thais (still), 1916: photo: courtesy George Eastman House Motion Picture Department Collection
Commissioned by Performa with SFMOMA. Presented by SFMOMA and Brava! for Women in the Arts. Curated by Lana Wilson of Performa with theatrical installations curated by Brava Artistic Director Raelle Myrick-Hodges.
In their manifesto “The Futurist Cinema” (1916), Marinetti and his cohorts sought an integration of art forms through the following equation: “painting + sculpture + plastic dynamism + words-in-freedom + composed noise + architecture = synthetic theater.” Brava brings futurist short plays and rarely viewed films together on stage to investigate this ideal of synthetic theater. The program includes Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thais (1916) — the only surviving futurist film — as well as Futurist Life Redux (2009), a remake of a lost film with contributions by George Kuchar, Michael Smith, Martha Colburn, Shannon Plumb, and Lynn Hershman among others.