Bronx gothic
By: a film by Andrew Rossi ; directed and produced by Andrew Rossi ; produced by Okwui Okpokwasili
Contributors: Lemon, Ralph, performer, interviewee; Grasshopper Film (Firm); Abstract Media; Red Hook Post
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Format: [videorecording] /
Number of pages: 91
Subjects: Art; Interviews; Political aspects; Choreographers; Bronx gothic (Choreographic work : Okpokwasili)
Description: Bronx Gothic is a portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili as she stages a final tour for her one-woman show. Although the play within the play of Bronx Gothic is set in the 1980s, Okwui's piece is timely. She explains in the film that her depiction of a "vibrating brown body" is political insofar as all "black and brown bodies" have been inscribed with a history of violence in our culture. She says in the film that Americans have become "acculturated to seeing brown bodies in pain" and she hopes that "Bronx Gothic" will allow audience members to grow their empathic capacity while seeing her in a radical dance that presents the brown body from a new perspective. We follow Okwui as she tours "Bronx Gothic" around the country and conducts talkbacks with her audience. During these sessions, she interrogates both the formal elements of her show (e.g. durational performance, fragmented storytelling) and the political ramifications of her characters' actions and environment. This leads members of her audience to share emotional stories from their own lives, during some of the talk-backs.
Notes: Based on the stage performance of "Bronx Gothic" created and performed by Okwui Okpokwasili ; directed for the stage, visual and sound design by Peter Born ; original songs by Okwui Okpokwasili ; lighting design by Peter Born with Carol Mullins.

Special features: The alphabet song; Okwui Okpokwasili master class; theatrical trailer.

Wide screen.

Director, Andrew Rossi ; Producers, Okwui Okpokwasili and Andrew Rossi ; Editor, Andrew Coffman ; Co-editors, Thomas Rivera Montes and Andrew Rossi ; Cinematographers, Bryan Sarkinen amd Andrew Rossi ; Additional cinematographer, Erik Ljung ; Original score by Ian Hultquist.

Okwui Okpokwasili, Ralph Lemon.

DVD, widescreen.

In English.