Charles Atlas

In 2006 ANOHNI and the Johnsons and Charles Atlas took their collaborative performance TURNING to major cities in Europe. This documentary film explores the heart of that performance.

The confluence of words and movement propels this multi-layered collaboration by Atlas, choreographer Douglas Dunn, and poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye. Dunn's athletic choreography is performed to the rhythms, cadences, and associative meanings of the poets' "cascade of words," which function as music. Atlas introduces narrative references, ironically staging the dance in unexpected locations, including domestic interiors and vehicles. In a self-referential deconstruction that punctures the theatrical illusion, the poets are seen reading their texts and interacting as self-conscious performers within the dance. Atlas and his collaborators intersect the language of words with the language of the body.

Welcome to the over-the-top, extravagant world of Leigh Bowery, a key figure in New Romanticism and London nightlife in the 1980s. With his bizarre outfits, a mix of kitsch and fetish, and his eccentric performances, he influenced artists, musicians and stylists like Boy George, Lucian Freud (of whom he became the muse), Vivienne Westwood, Anthony and the Johnsons, John Galliano and David LaChapelle. Born in Australia into an intensely religious family and brought up in a Melbourne suburb, Leigh moved to London where he worked as a fashion designer and a promoter, and started the legendary disco club night "Taboo", the first outrageous polysexual party in London. The documentary offers a fully rounded portrait of this artist, including interviews with the people who knew him, who describe a complex, extreme, and ironic personality, a performer, actor and designer ahead of his time, from his difficult early life to international success, up to his death in 1994.

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John Cage’s original concept of Ocean, in 1991, was for a dance to be performed in a circular space, with the audience surrounding the dancers, and the musicians (112 of them) surrounding the audience. The last performance was in the Rainbow Quarry in Minnesota, September 2008, at which time the piece was filmed by Charles Atlas.

This work was a dance shot for film at the Cunningham studio. Staging for Channels/Inserts was divided among the main studio, the small studio and the office area. Cunningham employed the use of chance operations to decide the order in which each space would be used, whether action would occur in more than one location at a time, and how many dancers would be involved. The piece was divided into sixteen sections, each varying in length. One of the most striking sections began with a series of brief, masterfully executed solos for the men of the company, filmed in the main studio, followed by a shot of the women in the small studio, laughing and chatting amongst themselves, then back to the main studio for a second round of male solos. Music was composed by David Tudor, and costume design was by Charles Atlas.

Check Your Body At The Door is a documentary film about some remarkable underground house dancers in NYC during the golden decade of the 1990s. It follows master free-stylists into the clubs, their jobs, and their everyday lives. Filmed in the studio as well, the dancers’ virtuosic moves are brilliantly revealed in silhouette or light pools. In their words they describe the importance of clubbing, why they dance, how they dance, and what it means.

A gay sex video, directed by Charles Atlas under the pseudonym ‘Jack Shoot,’ was created as part of a series featuring artists in porn, though it was the only one produced. The film was shot in a brothel on Staten Island and was nominated for Best Porn Comedy at the AVN Awards. The plot humorously ends with characters disappearing and leaving their sneakers, inspired by the Heaven’s Gate cult, The X Files, and the murder of Gianni Versace. Notably, the video includes women, which is unusual for gay porn.

Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments”, is a work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. The second part, produced by Paik and Shigeko Kubota, further queries the relationship between everyday gestures and formal notions of dance.

A video collage of filmed Mikhail Baryshnikov ballet performances edited with feature film clips in which all the characters refer to someone named ‘Misha’.

Blue Studio: Five Segments is a groundbreaking work of videodance by postmodern master Merce Cunningham and his then filmmaker-in-residence, Charles Atlas. In a series of short pieces choreographed and performed specifically for video space, Cunningham is multiplied, overlaid and transported from the studio to a series of unexpected landscapes. Cunningham's gestural dance is manipulated to the accompaniment of a disjunctive audio collage that includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.

New York City 1988. Raging homophobia. A killer on the loose. Disco dancing till dawn. Performers struggle to survive. Delilah seduces Samson in song. Gender illusionists go shopping. Samson and Delilah, 1991. This tape is an entertaining amalgam of cross-cut scenes featuring New York performance luminaries including John Kelly, Hapi Phace and DANCENOISE. It is a dark vision of an America where life is cheap and even the moments of tenderness have a life threatening edge.

A history of the work of Merce Cunningham.

A fictionalized portrait of the British dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, depicting a day in his life as he and his company prepare for a performance.

One of a trio of works Atlas made to celebrate downtown New York nightlife at the beginning of the 1990s, DISCO 2000 mixes footage of a crowded dance floor, homemade optical effects, and a dancing chicken. – Anthology Film Archives

PBS produced documentary in two parts: the first is dedicated to saxophonist and composer John Zorn; the second is about Sonic Youth at the height of their powers in 1988.

In 2006 ANOHNI and the Johnsons and Charles Atlas took their collaborative performance TURNING to major cities in Europe. This documentary film explores the heart of that performance.

The Michael Clark Dance Group perform to the music of T.Rex, Chopin, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground.

Atlas' 2013 film Exchange is based on the 1978 dance piece of the same name by legendary dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham. Atlas created the newly completed film from never-before-seen footage that he shot in 1978 and that was only recently rediscovered by the Merce Cunningham Trust (MCT). The film captures a performance of Exchange by Cunningham and his company, with costumes and backdrop designed by Jasper Johns and music by David Tudor.

The three short, low-tech works in this compilation celebrate downtown New York nightlife at the beginning of the 1990's. Set in a New York Meat Market restaurant after hours, Butchers' Vogue features a voguing waiter and waitress, two prostitutes on the run, and a cop. In The Draglinquents, the performances of two drag queens are superimposed over cliched images and intercut with 1950's muscle-boy movies. Disco 2000 mixes footage of a crowded dance floor, homemade optical effects, and a dancing chicken. Butcher's Vogue – Choreography: Richard Move. Music: Madonna. Featuring: Connie Fleming, Gina Vetro, Rebecca Weinberg, Keoki, Joseph Lennon. The Draglinquents – Featuring: Chucky, Shuck E. Music: "Maybe" by The Three Degrees, "Travelin' Man" by Dolly Parton.

Marina Abramovic collaborated with videomaker Charles Atlas on this striking work of autobiographical performance. Abramovic 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 Abramovic 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," Abramovic invokes the personal and the mythological in a poignant affirmation of self.

"For 'Floor' I was interested in the limits of the frame and the idea of what was “in” and what was “out” and working all the way to the edge. So I set up a particular frame that would allow for a play between flatness and depth, between representations of a partial body and a full body. Douglas’s task was to do the same sequence of movement both forward and backwards in time." - Charles Atlas

We Interrupt This Program (1991) was a live television broadcast presented by The Kitchen in association with Visual AIDS for Day Without Art 1991. The broadcast was directed by Charles Atlas and includes contributions from artists whose work addressed the AIDS crisis in diverse ways included performances by DANCENOISE, Richard Elovich, Karen Finley, Bill T. Jones and Estella Jones, John Kelly, Lavender Light, and Robbie McCauley.

Charles Atlas has been a pioneering figure in film and video for over four decades. Atlas has extended the limits of his medium, forging new territory in a far-reaching range of genres, stylistic approaches, and techniques. Throughout his production, the artist has consistently fostered collaborative relationships, working intimately with such artists and performers as Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Yvonne Rainer, Mika Tajima/New Humans, Antony and the Johnsons, and most notably Merce Cunningham, for whom he served as in-house videographer for a decade from the early 1970s through 1983; their close working relationship continued until Cunningham’s death in 2009.

In this futuristic danse macabre, Charles Atlas creates a fully realized cyber-gothic world, rife with both erotic and physical danger. We follow our heroine on her travels through a world inhabited by libidinal robots, human profligates, statuesque hairdressers and a bevy of other intriguing individuals. Her stylized and blank-faced nonchalance mirror the performative passion and violence which surrounds her.