Films from the 2000s

This video documents an historic two-day conference organized in March, 2003 by Bernard Tschumi, then Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture. The conference assembled some of the greatest minds in architecture. Most participants presented cutting edge concepts and ideas.

With the participation of:
Stan Allen, Wiel Arets, Michael Bell, Andrew Benjamin, Jennifer Bloomer, Karl Chu, Nigel Coates, Beatriz Colomina, Peter Cook, James Corner, Yolande Daniels, Kathryn Dean , Odile Decq, Elizabeth Diller, Evan Douglis, Peter Eisenman , Colin Fournier, Kenneth Frampton, Leslie Gill, Christian Girard, Elizabeth Grosz, Zaha Hadid, Laurie Hawkinson, Michael Hays, Steven Holl, Catherine Ingraham, Ed Keller, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sulan Kolatan, Sanford Kwinter, Sylvia Lavin, Fred Levrat, Greg Lynn, Winy Maas, Scott Marble, Reinhold Martin, Thom Mayne, Mary McLeod, Detlef Mertins, Victoria Meyers, Toshiko Mori, Farshid Moussavi, Enrique Norten, Joan Ockman, Gregg Pasquarelli, Wolf Prix, Mark Rakatansky, Hani Rashid, Jesse Reiser, Terence Riley, Yehuda Safran, Saskia Sassen, Michael Sorkin, Lars Spuybroek, Robert Stern, Mark Taylor, Bernard Tschumi, Nanako Umemoto, Ben van Berkel, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wigley, Gwendolyn Wright, Alejandro Zaera-Polo

To view the conference program, please visit: michaelblackwoodproductions.com/archs_conference.php

Filmed during Yoshiko Chuma’s 2009 staging of “Not About Romanian Cinema: POONARC” at Danspace in New York, a chapter from her on-going performance work “A Page Out of Order” which she started in 2001. It was inspired by “A Page of Madness”, a silent Japanese movie from 1926 by Teinosuke Kinugasa. Chuma sees a connection between the silent cinema and today’s performance art. Movement, beautiful and strange images, sounds and verbal fragments are the trademarks of her performance work.

When Yoshiko Chuma arrived in New York in 1976 from Japan, she was attracted by the postmodern dance innovators in Manhattan ’s downtown. By 1980 she presented her own vision of movement at the Venice biennale, adding visual artists, actors, filmmakers, sound design and musicians to her concepts.

Her company, “School of Hard Knocks”, meaning “learning the hard way” or “continuous experimentation”, is a unique creative force in New York ’s dance scene. Chuma sees herself by now as a citizen of the world, collaborating with artists in many countries in Asia and Europe, integrating aspects of their cultures into her performance work.

This documentation offers insights into the choreographer’s many-sided and far-reaching search for an abstract universal performance language, that will be understood everywhere.