New DVD: A Last, A Quartet a collection of films by Lucy Cash and Goat Island

Lucy Cash (UK) and Goat Island (USA) began making moving image works together in 2001 and have since made four uniquely cinematic films which explore different kinds of choreographies for the camera: It’s Aching Like Birds, Dark, Daynightly They re- school you The Bears-Polka and A Last, A Quartet. Shot on S16mm film in Chicago and the UK, each work is both independent of and a companion to the last three live performances by Goat Island: It’s An Earthquake In My Heart; When Will The September Roses Bloom / Last Night Was Only A Comedy and The Lastmaker.

Two of the works in the DVD collection are single screen films and two are moving image works for gallery spaces which have been specially edited as split-screen films for the DVD.

The DVD package includes a booklet of photographs by Chicago-based photographer John W. Sisson and essays by David Williams and Theron Schmidt.

Goat Island / Lucy Cash, London, DVD 49 minutes; with booklet 32 pages. ISBN 978-0-9565621-3-5


U.S. ORDERS:

DVD available by mail order. Please send check made out to “Goat Island” to Goat Island, 1144 North Hoyne, Chicago IL 60622, USA $17.50, plus postage Institutional orders: $75, plus postage.

Please email gtislnd at interaccess dot com to confirm postage costs. Sorry, we don’t take card payments.

U.K. AND INTERNATIONAL ORDERS:

Order by card from: Artsadmin Bookshop: http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/bookshop Unbound: www.thisisunbound.co.uk £12.50 Institutional orders: £50.

Please contact us if you would like information about the gallery installation requirements for Daynightly They re-school you or A Last, A Quartet: gtislnd@interaccess.com

A Last, A Quartet (2009)
23 minutes

Taking material from Goat Island’s final work, The Lastmaker, this four-screen installation folds the material into a new work that explores the continuities and discontinuities of film and performance, unravelling the seams between the two mediums.

Shortlisted for the EMPAC award, 2007, A Last, A Quartet has been funded by small awards from the Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster; Dance4, Nottingham and by the generosity of donations from numerous individuals.

Daynightly They re-school you The Bears-Polka (2005)
A double film
9.5 minutes x 2

In 2004 we premiered our eighth performance work, when will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy. Among its inspirations, the poetry of Paul Celan – his poetics of compression, collision, and miniaturization – particularly informed the performance’s shape and rhythms. After a substantial 2004/2005 tour, Lin Hixson (Goat Island director) and Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn) (Goat Island associate member) worked to distill the performance into 9 minutes and 30 seconds, the safe length within a roll of S16 mm. film, and to split that duration in two. The idea was to construct two films that screened simultaneously on opposite walls of the same gallery, to balance movement and stillness as a single interwoven experience for a viewer positioned in the space between the screens. We worked to translate performance to film the way poetry translation selects and migrates meanings across the gaps of languages. We decided on two constraints: 1) no editing – both sequences run the entire length of the film roll, forcing us to choreograph performers and camera in unbroken theatrical time; and 2) each performer only appears on one screen at a time. We located the film in an adjacent classroom and hallway on the uppermost floor of the Chicago Academy for the Arts high school. (We discovered the building when we taught a workshop there in early 2005.) The hall thoroughfare terminated in a kind of emptiness: a down staircase (exit) and windows. The classroom box had its chalkboard backdrop. These spaces now contained and framed our performance. On the chalkboard as a lesson we wrote out one of the Celan poems around which our performance had always orbited. May the poets and translators forgive us for detaching two of the lines and rearranging them. Like struggling pupils fishing for the right answer, we copied the words on the cover of our extracurricular activities notebook, as a double title for our double film.

Dark (2003)

A one minute film to a track by Low.
A falling duet which unravels – made with Goat Island and screened at Tate Modern as part of the Live Culture international performance symposium in 2003.

It’s Aching Like Birds (2001)

It’s aching like birds draws on a very American sense of landscape and space. Through fragments of movement and story Goat Island and Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn) have explored the curious dislocation of memory as four characters perform ‘postcards’, remembering a world they learned to love. The newly devised choreography reflects the funny ache at the heart of memory.