Video stills from the closing night - Part 3

Video stills from the closing night - Part 2

Video stills from the closing night - Part 1

I'll try to load some video clips in the near future. In the meantime, here are some stills:

Show opens tonight

Tonight's when it starts; here are a few video captures from a rehearsal a couple days ago:

The Mapping Project: Animation

This is an animated loop that will be projected as part of the show. It looks pretty good at full wall-size:

The Mapping Project: Digital Prints

As a part of "The Mapping Project" performance, I'm creating some digital prints that illustrate stories that come from some of the dancers. We've interviewed the dancers about the experiences of their grandparents, relating to the second world war. Going back two generations, the family lines of these Bay-Area based dancers get flung pretty far, geographically: the stories touch on, among other things, the bombing of Frankfurt, the Japanese occupation of China, a kind of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the Japanese internment Camps at Rowher and Tule Lake.

Most of the maps that form the backgrounds of the prints were scanned from the collection of the Prelinger Library, an absolutely wonderful resource on 8th street. Anyone who's even remotely bookish is bound to have a great time there.

The below posts show the five prints (click on the images to see larger versions), along with the text of the dancers' stories.

The prints will be displayed in the exhibition area of CounterPulse during the performance, and through much of June. I'm limiting each to an edition of ten, and unframed prints will be sold for $150 (the originals are roughly 11" by 15"). Please contact me at chrislanier2001 (at) yahoo (dot) com for details.

-- posted by chris lanier

Anna's story

My family lived in Frankfurt while it was being bombed. There was an air raid and the family went down to go to the shelter. But my dad, he was about seven, he didn’t want to go. He got absolutely hysterical about it, screaming that he didn’t want to go. They gave up, and went back to their house. And found out, the next day, that the shelter had suffered a direct hit. Everyone in it had died. Dad doesn’t like to talk about this. Whenever Oma talked about it, her voice would get full of emotion, quivering, almost crying. That seemed to be one of the reasons Dad didn’t like to bring up the war – it would make Oma very emotional. He didn’t want us to learn German.

I didn’t understand all the implications. I knew my grandfather was in the army, but Oma said he wasn’t in the Nazi army, he was in the “other” army. It wasn’t until much later, somehow this came up with my boyfriend, who was Jewish. I told him my Opa was in the other army, and he said “Anna, there was no other army.” And a little light went off in my head.