async presents The Dead Dance, Vol. I at Finch Community Cinema

The Dead Dance, named after Takashi Ito’s 2009 performance piece, is a series of curated film screenings in which spirits and ancestral memory are invoked through dance.

This inaugural programme brings together three radical and cinematic works of choreography from 1980s Germany, Japan and the United States. In these films, past witnesses of war and displacement are reembodied by silent, dancing figures — haunting the now-derelict spaces they once knew.

The centrepiece film of the evening is Pina Bausch’s Café Müller (1978), performed and filmed at Opernhaus Wuppertal in 1985. This foundational piece of ‘dance-theatre’ was inspired by Bausch’s childhood memories of her parents’ café, where she spent hours watching adults struggling to live in wartime and postwar Germany. The café is closed, and desolate; ghosts of customers begin stumbling blindly among scattered tables and colliding with each other. The figures on stage seem trapped in time, thrust into a pathetic afterlife — their impulsive gestures expressing a raw and desperate need for human connection, escape, and relief. Haunting, odd, and overwhelmingly beautiful, Bausch’s influential piece remains as exhilarating as ever, and is of course a perfect film to watch in a café.

The programme will start at 7:30pm, with a brief introduction by programmer Amos Levin. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and 15% of the proceeds will be donated to the Al-Jawad education camp in Gaza (@jawadcamp2)

PROGRAMME

7:30pm — Intro and mystery shorts (45min)

Interval

8:30pm — Café Müller (50min)