Accident Visions
Accident Visions
By: Louise E. Wright, For The Bulletin
"My career is accidental," admits Tobin Rothlein, co-artistic director of Miro Dance Theatre. "It's hard to describe the path."
Finding a way to define himself proves just as difficult. Rejecting "filmmaker" and "performance artist," Mr. Rothlein finally settles on "video and visual artist."
"Miro through the Lens," this month's offering in the company's Open Studio series, focuses exclusively on Mr. Rothlein's work. In addition to screening early films rarely seen in Philadelphia, the program will take a look at experimental "video sketches," as well as works-in-progress.
Inspired by early music videos, Mr. Rothlein began making movies while still in middle school, using an old Super-8 camera that belonged to his grandfather. Putting a favorite tape on the 8-track player, he would project his efforts onto a sheet and enjoy those rare, magical moments when the visual and the music just happened to fuse.
Mr. Rothlein traces his involvement with dance to his years at Kalamazoo College, where he studied theater and film. Experimenting with projects that did not involve dialogue, he cast dancers, rather than actors, in his works.
Although Mr. Rothlein does not deal with dance exclusively, he has created a number of dance films. They include "A Song of the Body" (1997), a documentary about the impact of HIV/AIDS on the dance community, and "Swan" (2000), an interpretation of the Michel Fokine classic as a quest for perfection.
In addition to these, Mr. Rothlein plans to show "Playground Suite" at the Open Studio. An upbeat video in which a group of kids choreograph on classically trained dancers, "Playground Suite" reflects Mr. Rothlein's attitude toward outreach programs: He objects to the elitism inherent in taking ballet into the schools without giving students the opportunity to share their own, equally valid forms of dance.
As his career has progressed, Mr. Rothlein has adopted a less-is-more philosophy. Striving for immediacy and genuineness, he uses natural light as often as possible.
"There's beauty in the reality of the human body," he believes, "in its veins, muscles and wrinkles. I don't want to romanticize it."
A recent video sketch typifies this minimalist approach. Wanting to explore dance "from the inside out instead of vice versa," Mr. Rothlein asked Miro Co-Artistic Director Amanda Miller and company member Paul Struck to describe 30 seconds of movement from the dancer's point of view. Using their ideas as dialogue, Mr. Rothlein then filmed an "extreme close-up" of an ankle, the muscles contracting and relaxing over and over again.
The Open Studio will also feature footage from "Civilian/Warrior," a work-in-progress inspired by Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. Intrigued by the shifting perceptions of reality presented in the drama, Mr. Rothlein thought it would be a "fun thing to incorporate film and live performance."
As he worked on "Civilian/Warrior," he wove elements of the Indian Kali myth and interviews with Iraqi war veterans into Büchner's tale of a mentally unstable soldier. The result, Mr. Rothlein maintains, is neither anti-war nor pro-war. Instead, it recognizes war as "an element of the universe that needs to be turned off at times because it gets out of control."
The project evidences the complexity of Mr. Rothlein's creative vision and the challenge of finding venues for nonconventional works. As previewed in Groningen, the Netherlands in 2006, "Civilian/Warrior" combined a walk-through gallery installation with theater, dance and video. Snippets of dialogue and photographs immersed viewers in the experience even before the performance began. Whether "Civilian/Warrior" will premiere in a comparable form depends on the producer and the performance space.
"The reality of the business," Mr. Rothlein acknowledges, "is that people want less."
Because of the difficulties involved, not just in presenting "Civilian/Warrior," but also in explaining it to those interested in doing so, Mr. Rothlein is making a film version of the work.
Award-winning filmmaker Maria Teresa Rodriguez will be on hand to lead an open discussion of the pros and cons of putting dance on film. Ms. Rodriguez is perhaps best known to local audiences as the co-director and co-producer of "Mirror Dance," a documentary about Pennsylvania Academy of Ballet's Margarita de Saá and her twin sister, Ramona.