NYC Day #3: Dance, Dance, Otherwise We Are Lost

My third day in NYC was quite a memorable one. It was a day all about the beauty of performance and what performance can mean to both a community and to those doing the performing.

The first highlight was a trip to the historic Apollo Theater for a tour led by Billy Mitchell, who's been there pretty much his whole life. He got his start as a young boy running errands for the stars, and now he essentially runs everything. Some of us even got to perform! It's a beautiful theater, and filled with its share of quirks, from old-fashioned dressing rooms to a golden stump that sits on a pedestal on the stage. It's from a tree in Harlem that several performers used to hang out around before a show, thinking it gave them good luck. When it was cut down, the manager of the Apollo kept the stump and it's tradition to rub it before facing the Apollo's notoriously opinionated audience.

That evening, I decided to use some of my free time to check out a couple films. The best thing about New York City is that independent/arthouse theaters actually do really well there, and there are plenty of opportunities to check out documentary and foreign films. First I went to see Ceylan's Once Upon A Time in Anatolia at Film Forum, a non-profit film society that was also screening a retrospective of the work of Robert Bresson. If only I'd had another week to go check it out! Anatolia is a very intriguing film - I'll be posting a brief review shortly - and it made me want to see more of Ceylan's work. It's a very quiet film about investigators searching for a body in the hills of the Turkish countryside, and while it's so deliberately paced it might put some viewers to sleep, there's a meditative atmosphere about it that I found refreshing. There's also a sequence about halfway through the film involving a young village woman that is so incredibly done that I can nearly forgive the film its few flaws for that scene alone.

A scene from Pina.The best part of the evening, though, came when I headed down to the IFC Center for a screening of the documentary Pina in 3D. I'd been anticipating the film for quite some time, based simply on the fact that it's directed by Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) and the trailer  made it look fantastic. The film began as a documentary about legendary dance choreographer Pina Bausch but turned into a tribute to her and her work when she suddenly died in the middle of filming. The movie is essentially an hour and forty minutes of dancers who worked with her offering the occasional insight about what she taught them and then performing - sometimes outside in the modern world as opposed to on a stage - a routine dedicated to her memory.

By the end of the film I was nearly weeping. It's just that beautiful. For the first time I actually came away from a dance performance feeling like I actually "got it" and understood why people choose to dance rather than perform in other ways. If you have a chance to see the movie on the big screen, don't hesitate, just go. When the credits faded, I could barely resist the temptation to dance my way out of the cinema back to the hotel.