Rehearsal Behavior. I: Chantal Akerman and Shirley Clarke

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, September 17 at 7pm for a screening of Chantal Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked… (1983), preceded by Shirley Clarke’s A Moment in Love (1956).

This event is part of Rehearsal Behavior, a screening series guest-curated by Andrea Torres and Charlotte Strange tracing a capacious lineage of choreographic moving-image works: from the dance-for-film pioneers of the 1940s–60s, to experimental video of the late 1970s, '80s, and '90s, to contemporary acts of self-expression through direct camera performance. Featured artists inspire, reference, and collaborate with one another, evidencing the accumulative effect of intergenerational exchange on this hybrid form. 

Rehearsal Behavior takes its title from a phrase by American choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, coined in the early ‘70s. Rainer’s expression juxtaposed the generative looseness of the rehearsal space with the clear hierarchy of directed live performance, as dancers’ spontaneous responses deliberately reshaped the work and, in the process, pushed toward a more democratic social structure.

The series situates expansive definitions of choreography within a broader filmic tradition, drawing connections across generations of artists who engage the moving body as both subject and form. Films by artists including Chantal Akerman, Shirley Clarke, Amy Greenfield, and Rainer reflect developing feminist perspectives on movement, performance, and cinematography as contested sites of bodily autonomy. These pieces amplify and respond to prominent scholarship of the 1960s and '70s that applied psychoanalytic concepts to the dynamics of spectatorship, self-perception, physical exertion, and erotic labor engendered by film and video. Where Rainer worked to dissolve the choreographer's authority within a dance, subsequent artists in the series have taken up collaborative and often explicitly queer, feminist frameworks to formally employ the social relationships that usually remain backstage. These practices, separated by decades, share a refusal to let the finished performance eclipse the unruly process that produced it.

Rehearsal Behavior runs from September 17-20. Two screenings at e-flux are complemented by screenings at Spectacle Theater on September 20 at 7:30pm, and at other venues to be announced.

Films

Shirley Clarke, A Moment in Love (1956, 9 minutes)
A collaboration between director Shirley Clarke and choreographer Anna Sokolow, A Moment in Love portrays a couple, performers Carmela Gutierrez and Paul Sanasardo, dancing together across lush outdoor landscapes. Clarke’s filmic experimentation animates the piece as she syncs the dancers’ performances to the natural motion of their surroundings. Background projection and color effects emphasize the physical and emotional connection between the couple and the scene transforming around them.

Chantal Akerman, One Day Pina Asked… (1983, 57 minutes)
Originally commissioned for French television, Akerman follows the then-rising German choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal on a five-week tour through Milan, Venice, and Avignon in the summer of 1983. By then, Bausch had arrived at her singular method: building pieces not from fixed steps but from collage, repetition, and fragments of autobiography drawn directly from her dancers, often by posing a single question to the company and shaping work from their response. 

The film's title names one such question as a company member recalls on camera that Pina once asked the dancers what came to mind when they heard the word love. Answers were by turns comic, profound, wounded, and startlingly bare, and would resurface on stage in pieces like “Nelken (Carnations)” and “1980.” Akerman follows this thread of searching rather than focusing on any single production, turning her camera—observational and poised, cinematographer Babette Mangolte composing shots in overlapping rhythms as long takes give way to short, snappy fragments—toward interviews, rehearsals, and backstage preparation to trace a journey through Bausch's world and her unwavering quest for love. Instead of seeking to be a complete or definitive portrait, One Day Pina Asked… accumulates like a diary built of candid and sincere fragments.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
 – Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
 – For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave, a garage door, leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
 – e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.