Saturday 18 November 2006, 19.00

Blue Studio: Five Segments
Nam June Paik in collaboration with Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham, 1975–6, 15 min
This is a groundbreaking work of video-dance by postmodern master Merce Cunningham and his then filmmaker-in-residence, Charles Atlas. In a series of short pieces choreographed and performed specifically for video space, Cunningham is multiplied, overlaid and transported from the studio to a series of unexpected landscapes. Cunningham's gestural dance is manipulated to the accompaniment of a disjunctive audio collage that includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.

From an Island Summer
1983–4, 13 min
Charles Atlas's hip homage to a specific time and place – New York, August 1983 – is a dance 'home movie', a quasi-documentary that follows choreographer Karole Armitage and her dancers along the boardwalk of Coney Island and through the streets of Times Square. Atlas's energetic hand-held camera finds dance in the visual cacophony of Coney Island's flashy signs and swirling rides, and in Times Square's neon blaze. He spontaneously choreographs the lights and rhythms of these ‘islands’ to samba and punk-inspired music; the virtuosic editing is a dance in itself. Atlas's witty ‘docu-narrative’ format, Armitage's exhilarating choreography, and the vibrantly tacky visual milieu vigorously capture the garish, streetwise magic of a New York summer. Choreography by Karole Armitage.

Parafango
1983–4, 27 min
Magnetic performances by Karole Armitage, Michael Clark and Philippe Découflé are the focus of this French production, an intricate and quintessential Charles Atlas pastiche of provocative dance, new music, pop design and costuming, narrative, documentary and media references. Armitage's eclectic, often frenetic choreography is performed with a postured insouciance. The kinetically shot and edited dance segments are intercut with an ambiguous narrative involving the performers, TV news footage and other appropriated images, colour bars and other formal video devices. Atlas punctuates the physicality of the dance with an artificial media reality. By rupturing the performance illusion with deconstructive devices, Atlas subjects this radically postmodern dance to an inquiry into the tension between the fictive and the real.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£4, booking recommended