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Performance Studies

Adventures in Assimilation
Richard Dean Moss
1992, 8 min., Color, US
In this engaging performance video, Moss experiments with his own choreography and dance, using movement within a fixed frame to express self-discovery and the aesthetics of identity....

All the Ladies Say
Ana Garcia
Producer: Ana "Rokafella" Garcia
2010, 45 min., Color, US
Veteran b-girl Ana "Rokafella" Garcia's first documentary film ALL THE LADIES SAY features the work of female breakdancers in the United States, including Aiko, Baby Love, Beta, Lady Champ, Severe and...

Anomaly: A Documentary Film about Multiracial Identity
Jessica Chen Drammeh
Producer: Jessica Chen Drammeh & Sharon K. Smith
2013, 47 min., Color, US
ANOMALY is an award-winning documentary film that provides a thought-provoking look at multiracial identity by combining personal narratives with the larger drama of mixed race in American culture. Th...

Asian Boys
Angel Velasco Shaw
1994, 19 min., Color, US
This documentary was produced in collaboration with performance artist Nicky Paraiso for his critically acclaimed multi-media performance at P.S. 122. Eleven different interviews with "Asian Boys" are...

Body and Soul (De Corpo e Alma)
Matthieu Bron
2011, 54 min., Color, Mozambique
Victoria, Mariana and Vasco are three young Mozambicans with physical disabilities living in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital city. The film explores how they see themselves, raising questions about self-...

Border Brujo
Isaac Artenstein
Producer: Cinewest
1989, 60 min., Color, US
Border Brujo is a ritual-linguistic journey across the U.S./Mexico border written and performed by artist Guillermo Gómez Peña. In the guise of a cross-cultural shaman, Gómez Peña shifts into 15 diff...

Calypso Dreams
Geoffrey Dunn and Michael Horne
2004, 85 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
An intimate portrait of some of the true calypsonians in Trinidad & Tobago, in performance and in conversation. Shot over three years in Port of Spain, Trinidad, the documentary includes such legendar...

Claiming Our Voice
Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel
Producer: Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel & Chitra Aiyar
2013, 21 min., US
CLAIMING OUR VOICE follows members of Andolan, a Queens-based organization founded and led by South Asian domestic workers as a means to support each other and collectively organize against exploitati...

Color Schemes
Shu Lea Cheang
1989, 29 min., Color
COLOR SCHEMES uses the cycles of a generic laundromat washing machine as a metaphor to tackle misconceptions about racial assimilation. Twelve writers and performance artists from various cultural bac...

Gershwin & Bess: A Dialogue with Anne Brown
Nicole Franklin
Producer: EPIPHANY Inc.
2010, 36 min., Color, US
In 2004 at her home in Oslo, Norway, soprano Anne Wiggins Brown sat down with tenor Dr. William A. Brown (no relation) of the Center Black Music Research for an on-the-record conversation about origin...

Graffiti Verite' 1: Read the Writing on the Wall
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 45 min., Color, US
An award-winning documentary that explores the eclectic world of Hip-Hop and the urban graffiti artist. GRAFFITI VERITE’ is the first up-close and personal expose’ into the graffiti art world as exper...

Graffiti Verite' 10: Hip-Hop Dance: Moving in the Moment
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 75 min., Color, US
Whether you call it breakin’, bboyin’, bgirlin’ or simply Hip-Hop dance, what we witness here is authentically funky and soulful. These dancers strive to be “in the moment.” When it’s good, what’s exp...

Graffiti Verite' 11: Don't Believe Da Noize!: Voices from Da Hip-Hop Undaground
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 55 min., Color, US
This documentary is an exploration of the creative expressions in contemporary American Hip-Hop. It focuses on the innovation, movement, and the raw and unfiltered personalized “truth” of some of the...

Graffiti Verite' 2: Freedom of Expression?
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 57 min., Color, US
Flying high above Los Angeles, GV2 looks down on the streets, introducing us to the artists who “tag” the walls of our cities with spraycans while we sleep. GV2 features 19 graffiti artists and rev...

Graffiti Verite' 3: A Voyage Into the Iconography of Graffiti Art
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 54 min., Color, US
This experimental documentary probes the socio-political context that distracts the average person from appreciating the significance of graffiti’s historical and artistic impact. In GV3, Bryan for...

Graffiti Verite' 4: Basic Techniques for Creating Graffiti Art on Walls & Canvas
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 68 min., Color, US
This documentary is the ultimate step-by-step program on spray can art. Outsiders get a rare glimpse into the outstanding art and eclectic personalities behind the controversial graffiti art movement...

Graffiti Verite' 5: The Sacred Elements of Hip-Hop
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2005, 42 min., Color, US
GV5 is a portrait of the educational value and therapeutic aspect of the four elements of contemporary Hip-Hop: DJing, break-dancing, rappin’ and graffiti art. “Hip-Hop, if used creatively, can giv...

Graffiti Verite' 6: The Odyssey: Poets, Passion & Poetry
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2006, 78 min., Color, US
GV6 features 31 multi-ethnic, award-winning, published and highly respected poets. Their creations are a seamlessly woven, uniquely honest, visual tapestry that synthesizes one-on-one poetry readings,...

Graffiti Verite' 7: Random Urban Static: … Spoken Word
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2008, 120 min., Color, US
GV7 probes the reality of spoken word poets, or, poets that write for the stage. Spoke Word poetry, often flavored with Hip-Hop, connects with today’s youth because the poetics of this art form speak ...

Graffiti Verite' 8: The Fifth Element: The Art of the Beat-Boxer
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 45 min., Color, US
Combining throat-based effects that create a “wall of sound,” the job of the human beat-boxer is to compose a flawless soundscape. GV8 explores the history of beat-boxing and its claim as its own ...

Graffiti Verite' 9: Soulful Ways: The DJ
Bob Bryan
Producer: Bob Bryan
2010, 45 min., Color, US
Watching a great DJ spin is analogous to watching a professional musician perform. As composer and producer Glenn Towery says, “DJs have to understand the dynamics of music to understand the beat”. ...

Herstory (Newsreel #61)
Newsreel
9 min., BW, US
Through the use of a cranky, songs, rhythm, music and narration, the San Francisco Women's Street Theatre gives a short history of women's struggles from prehistory to the early 1970s....

History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself
Stéphane Gérard
2014, 85 min., Color, France/US
Forty-three years after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, filmmaker Stéphane Gérard travels to New York City in an attempt to find the activist community that was born out of this historical moment and to ...

Indian Having Coffee With Kerouac, Ginsberg and Hemingway
James Luna
1994, 23 min., Color, US
Visual and performance artist James Luna takes these famous American writers and parallels their spiritual, political and emotional state to the American Indian community. The icons are played by Indi...

The Insatiable Season
Mariel Brown
2007, 52 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
It’s January 2006 and Brian Mac Farlane’s carnival workshop is quiet and practically empty – littered with left-over costumes and a couple of hangers-on from last year’s carnival. The atmosphere begin...

JAB! The Blue Devils of Paramin
Alex DeVerteuil
2006, 47 min., Color, Trinidad & Tobago
Isolated in the mountains of Trinidad, the district of Paramin, once a year at Carnival time sheds its rural languor and erupts into an inferno of blue-painted ‘jabs’ or devils. This 46-minute documen...

Juggling Gender: Politics, Sex and Identity
Tami Gold
1992, 26 min., Color, US
A loving portrait of Jennifer Miller, a lesbian performer who lives her life with a full beard. Miller works as a performance artist, circus director, clown and as the "bearded lady" in one of the onl...

The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks (76 minutes)
Camille Billops & James Hatch
1994, 76 min., Color, US
Write Billops and Hatch: "Even as late as a hundred years ago, discrimination on the basis of race was considered a natural and even desirable trait for humans to possess. We Americans have tried to i...

The KKK Boutique ain't Just Rednecks: A Docu/Fantasy about Everybody's Racism
Camille Billops & James Hatch
1994, 60 min., Color, US
Write Billops and Hatch: "Even as late as a hundred years ago, discrimination on the basis of race was considered a natural and even desirable trait for humans to possess. We Americans have tried to i...

L’Esprit Prêt-à-Partager
Jamika Ajalon
2009, 28 min., Color, Germany/Senegal
Documents an art workshop held in Dakar, Senegal, in 2008, where artists from Africa and Europe explore issues surrounding fashion, sport and diasporic art and identities. The artists collaborate with...

Latino Poets Speakout
Renata Gangemi & Ruben Gonzalez
Producer: Third World Newsreel
2005, 10 min., Color, US
Three shorts featuring performances by some of New York City's vanguard Latino poets: KILLKILLKILL by Jesus Papoleto Melendez (5 Min) GOD BLESS AMERICA by Mariposa (2 min), and TAMALES IN JA...

Nailed
Angel Velasco Shaw
1992, 50 min., Color
A Filipina's exploration of the Catholic Church and 400 years of colonialism in the Pacific region is woven in a montage of images, sounds, stories and performances. Inspired by Lucy Reyes, a woman wh...

One People
Al Santana
Producer: Laura L. Fowler & Al Santana
2007, 30 min., Color, US
Is everything political? Against the backdrop of a gentrified Harlem community, the story centers on two sisters who have opposite views about social responsibility and the role of artists. Aliyah, a ...

An Opera of the World
Manthia Diawara
2018, 70 min., Color
Manthia Diawara’s film is based on the African opera Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, which recounts an eternal migration drama. The Bintou Were opera, filmed on location in Bamako, in 2007, serves as a mi...

Ori
Raquel Gerber
1989, 90 min., Color, Brazil
This documentary provides an overview of the Black Movement in Brazil during the 70s and 80s and tells the story of Beatriz Nascimento, an activist and historian searching for her African heritage. Be...

The Other Side of the Water: The Journey of a Haitian Rara Band in Brooklyn (72)
Jeremy Robins and Magali Damas
2010, 72 min., Color/BW, US/Haiti
Part carnival, part vodou ceremony, and part grassroots protest, Haitian “Rara” is one of the most breathtaking and contested forms of music in the Americas. The Other Side of the Water follows a grou...

Red Detachment of Women
People's Republic of China
Producer: People's Republic of China
1968, 105 min., Color, China
This film presents the famous ballet from China. It is a blend of traditional Western theatre, Peking opera, folk dance, calisthenics, and acrobatics. It tells the story of a women's military unit dur...

She's Beautiful When She's Angry (Newsreel #48)
Newsreel
1969, 17 min., BW, US
This film documents a play given at the March 28th, 1969 abortion rally by some very angry women. A beauty contestant is primed by her mother, her teacher, her boyfriend, an ad man, and a capitalist f...

Unspoken
Patrick G Lee
2020, 17 min., Color, US
Through letter-writing, a community discussion, and a drag performance, six queer and trans Asian Americans grapple with their queerness and consider what family acceptance might look like. UNSPOK...

Up Against the Wall Ms. America (Newsreel #22)
Newsreel
Producer: Newsreel
1968, 8 min., BW, US
"Here she comes…" At the 1968 Miss America pageant, demonstrators introduced a sheep as the appropriate winner. This entertaining short film shows how Women's Liberation activists used guerrilla thea...

Viva Eu! (Long Live Me!)
Tania Cypriano
1989, 18 min., Color, US/Brazil/Spain
This documentary is a tribute to Wilton Braga, a visionary artist who was one of the first people to be diagnosed with AIDS in Brazil. As Braga travels to Barcelona, New York and Sao Paolo, the film ...

Wave: A True Story in Hip Hop
Tony Wesley & Brian Bullock
Producer: Tony Wesley & Brian Bullock
2016, 46 min., Color, US
See how the legendary Tony "Mr. Wave" Wesley went from a kid in the Bronx to an international B-Boy superstar to entrepreneur and activist. This film includes never before seen archival pictures and i...

A Week with Azar
Tara Najd Ahmadi
Producer: Jurij Meden and Tara Najd Ahmadi
2018, 11 min., Color, US
A Week with Azar is a short experimental documentary film, based on a true story of Azar, an Iranian computer engineer living in the United States, who in the winter of 2017 failed to see her ill sist...

Women and Men Are Good Dancers
Arlene Bowman
1994, 6 min., Color, US
"Women and Men Are Good Dancers," is a translation from the Cree language of an intertribal pow wow song. Bowman was inspired to create this tape by the "nizhoni" (Dine) or "it is beautiful" of the Pl...


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