The Party
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Sister Spell
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Alpha Dance
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The Party 〰️ Sister Spell 〰️ Alpha Dance 〰️
The Party
2018
Made & Screened at New Museum, NY April 2018
2018
These three short stop motion videos are embedded in longer films that are documentaries of the making-of the stop-motion films. The longer films operate as self-portraits of Rawls directing film, and the overall process of choreography within a film production, within the body of the New Museum (where the film was shot).
Sister Spell
2018
Made & Screened at New Museum, NY April 2018
Sister Spell is one of three films Rawls made juxtaposing the labor of taking hundreds of photographs with their compressed result: a fleeting stop-motion film. It sandwiches the stop-motion animation between “making of” footage, and depicts a surreal, intimate story of black female companionship. As two women dancers pose, idle, and chat, the photographic process around them becomes a metaphor for the “capture” of black bodies in mass media, and for how the fantastical transformations of motion pictures are always temporary.
Alpha Dance
2018
Made & Screened at New Museum, NY April 2018
Alpha Dance is a stop-motion animated film depicting four live performers (instead of claymation figurines) moving through a landscape populated by letters that are printed on sheets of paper which the performers displace and rearrange around themselves. This piece focuses on the nature of dance, movement and black performance and its elusive relationship to language, naming and visual capture.