Charles Atlas From An Island Summer and Hail the New Puritan

This two-part screening dedicated to American video artist Charles Atlas focusses on his collaboration with Karole Armitage and Michael Clark, two befriended postmodern dancers, who shared an affiliation with (post-)punk culture.

From An Island Summer
Dir. Charles Atlas 1983-84 13:04 min US
From an Island Summer is part of what Charles Atlas at that time conceived of as “time capsules”. Shot on Coney Island, in the streets of Times Square and a studio on lower Broadway in “guerilla style”, this video offers not just a quasi-documentary of dancer Karole Armitage, the so called “punk princess of the downtown scene” in New York; it also turns editing into a choreography itself, combined with samba rhythms and punk-inspired music.

Hail the New Puritan
Dir. Charles Atlas 1985-86 84:47 min UK
“Just exaggerate who you are”, was what Charles Atlas told everyone who appeared in this video dedicated to the “enfant terrible” in the 1980s dance world, Michael Clark. Produced for Channel 4's series of art documentaries, this soon turned into something else – an anti-documentary, as Atlas put it, where everything is fake. Hail the New Puritan fictitiously portrays one day in the life of Clark, his dance rehearsals as well as private encounters, and thereby draws the viewer deep into London’s nightlife and subculture of that time, with appearances of now cult-figures like Leigh Bowery and music by Glenn Branca, The Fall, Bruce Gilbert and Jeffrey Hinton.

The screening will be introduced by Berlin based art historian and writer Fiona McGovern.