All Dead

SD Video
black&white
12 minutes
2012

Clara Saito: Performance

Exhibition:
Podium OCW (Rotterdam)
Wennekerpand (Schiedam)

The performance All Dead features a remix of sequences taken from the 1934 Hollywood classic Dames by Busby Berkeley and The Night of the Living Dead, a zombie film by George A. Romero from 1968. Clara Saito dances with and within the projection, thus connecting the opposite worlds of the two films.

In 2011, Doing gave a workshop ‘dance and camera’ at the amsterdam school for new dance development (SNDO). Clara Saito was one of his students. She filmed a selfportrait, in which she underwent the transition from sugar-sweet to fully deranged. Her personality, in which the opposites seemed to merge in a natural way and the impression of her film stuck in Doing's memory. When the CBK-Schiedam invited him to contribute a performance to the Suikerzoet film festival in november 2011, he immediately thought of Clara.

|KD| the performance is far from pretentious. It's rather a playful kick in the ass of Busby Berkeley. He's the one who ordered hundred women to spread their legs simultaneously in his musicals. He really made wonderful choreograpies, with precursory elements of the abstract art movies that were made later in the fifties. He's a true avant gardist in that sense. His movies look fantastic, but they're so hostile to women at the same time ||

Clara Saito was born in Brasil and grew up in Switzerland. There, she started performing with different street theatre groups. She graduated in choreography at the sndo (school for new dance development) in Amsterdam and performs regularly.

Arnold Schalks