Monday 20 November 2006, 19.00

Programme duration 80 min

SSS
Marina Abramović and Charles Atlas, 1989, 6 min
Marina Abramović collaborated with video maker Charles Atlas on this striking work of autobiographical performance. Abramović delivers a monologue that traces a concise personal chronology. This brief narrative history, which references her past in the former Yugoslavia, her performance work, and her collaboration with and separation from Ulay, is intercut with images of Abramović engaged in symbolic gestures and ritual acts: scrubbing her feet, staring like Medusa as snakes writhe on her head. Closing her litany with the phrase ‘time past, time present’, Abramović invokes the personal and the mythological in a poignant affirmation of self.

Rainer Variations
2002, 42  min
Employing archival film clips and new video, Atlas's self-described 'video montage' is a documentary sous-rature. In his portrayal of filmmaker/choreographer Yvonne Rainer, Atlas undermines genre conventions to pose some of the same questions that have long concerned her. While an extended interview with Rainer runs throughout the piece, Atlas's editing takes up the four 'performers' (Rainer herself among them) who enact and re-enact the interview, shuffling and superimposing image and voice tracks to yield a video palimpsest of theatricality and ambiguity.

Channels/Inserts
1981, 29 min
Merce Cunningham and Atlas divided the studio into sixteen possible areas for dancing and used chance methods based on the I Ching to determine the order in which these spaces would be used, the number of dancers to be seen and the events that would occur in each space. The film features music by David Tudor.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£4, booking recommended