Relatives. Three dance films
A cooperative event by Studio K77 and the Critical Dance Studies Program at Freie Universität Berlin
17 October, 18:00 | Kastanienallee 77 — Kunst- und Kulturprojekt
Kastanienallee 77, 10435 Berlin
Followed by a discussion and refreshments at K77
As seating is very limited, please reserve here:
Reservation Form
Dance has always been shaped by relations—between bodies, generations, and histories.
This evening brings together three films, spanning more than a century of cinematic practice, that work through dance as a difficult expression of kinship, intergenerational memory, and inherited gestures.
As a part of a troubling series of late nineteenth-century fantasy films on a baby-selling trade for the wealthy, pioneering filmmaker Alice Guy presents a dancing fairy plucking new lives from a cabbage patch in the bizarre early film La Fée aux Choux (1900). In Relatives (1989), directed by Julie Dash, improvisational dancer Ishmael Houston-Jones carries his complaining mother Pauline into a space of performance that he will share with her. He explores the family photo as a well of lost time and life stories from which he must nonetheless account for his own existence. Shown for the first time in Berlin, Tatyana Tenenbaum’s Everything You Have is Yours (2025) centers on the artistic research of dancer Hadar Ahuvia, who grew up learning folk dances practiced in the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn Amer, and who now rethinks what it means to be accountable to one’s heritage and history. In the film, a web of artistic portraits emerges— Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian dancers living in New York City grappling with the questions of what we inherit and what we embody to carry forward.
