Movies: Performance art

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Struct...

McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is r...

A ritual of transformation and awakening within the walls of the only existing original ‘diorama’ building in London...

Documentary that profiles Mark Pauline, the machine performance artist of Survival Research Laboratories. As the Title suggests, Pauline lost most of one hand during experimentation. 'Maimed Artist' explores the often destructive world of such perfor...

The definitive documentary that reviews the enormous career of Esther Ferrer, one of the great Spanish creators in the performance genre. A "hybrid" between the documentary and the discipline of performance itself, between recording and creation, whi...

A sincere portrait, and in first person, of the multifaceted Andalusian artist José Pérez Ocaña....

A disparate group of dancers, preferring to express themselves through dance rather than speech, clash with each other and members of the local community....

"As a contribution to Gerry Schum's 'Identifications', Beuys adapted for television the 'Felt TV' action previously staged for a live audience at a Happening festival in Copenhagen in 1966. It was the only Beuys action executed specifically for the c...

A collaboration between filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira and performance artist Thomas Pinnock, who performs his "immigrant folktales" using traditional lore of his native Jamaica to dramatize his migration to New York in the 60's....

Purfled Promises was a work of expanded cinema. Two neo-drag entities entered the cinema and held a screen in front of the auditorium's red curtain on which a video was shown that consisted entirely of zooming shots of veils revealing more veils, inc...

"What we were trying to do was the ultimate form of architecture, which was predicting how society would use space, land and time." Curtis Schreier, ANT FARM Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm is the first film to consider the...

Welcome to the temple of fear and eroticism, as a monstrous madman slowly mutilates poor young girls! See the sensual act of voodoo performed on an innocent bar patron! View the lustful bite of a vampire!...

A documentary edited from ORLAN's seventh surgery in the The Reincarnation of Sainte-ORLAN series which aired live, vis satellite from New York in 1993....

Turtle Dreams, produced for WGBH-TV, originally aired September 2, 1983. Shot by Ping Chong. Composed by Meredith Monk, performed by her and her Vocal Ensemble....

No Contract is a visceral video that combines elements of performance, sculptural cinema and documentary to explore themes of urgency, isolation and escape, as well as the notions of torment and renewal, desire and destruction....

Raphael Montañez Ortiz tells a story about an elderly Jewish couple that didn't watch television or listen to the radio. Instead they used to talk lovingly to each other for every day of their long marriage. And in a sense there was a glow around the...

The rehearsal of a future play. Through the movement of the body, the protagonists form a structure full of tension and try to evoke past stories....

A selection of Survival Research Laboratories early performances, a must for those interested in how such an enterprise ever got started in the first place....

Daniel Cockburn’s exuberantly cerebral, filmically deconstructionist work defies easy categorization, and this program of new work is no exception, from a short that interrogates “things that mean other things before becoming a thing that means other...

A hybrid feature film that investigates contemporaneity through the body and its countless possibilities of expression and meanings. The film puts the body and the idea of the body in evidence, through metalanguage, articulation and confrontation of ...