Alive from Off Center

Hosted by Laurie Anderson and her male double, a computer-generated clone, this program features comic artist Bill Irwin. Trying to find a calm oasis at a tense audition, Irwin wanders into an empty rehearsal space and becomes tangled in the cords and wires of a camera and video monitor. Plunged into a modernist nightmare, he becomes trapped in the television in a kaleidoscopic, channel-hopping odyssey. While trying to escape his electronic prison, he enters the action of a soap opera, takes center stage with a Joffrey ballerina, comes face to face with Sesame Street Muppets Bert and Ernie, bumps and grinds in an MTV video, and weaves in and out of the colored test pattern.

This program is devoted to puppet animation by The Brothers Quay, based on stories by the Polish writer Bruno Shulz. The program opens with a prologue by performance artist Laurie Anderson, who introduces Shulz's work. She converses with a small computer-altered version of herself, and then reads some of Shulz's writing. "Street of Crocodiles" is set in a dark mechanical world-within-a-world inhabited by porcelain puppets, some with open, hollow heads; dusty, dirty machinery parts; animated screws and pins; and, occasionally, a piece of raw, red meat amidst the sepia, monochromatic tones of this industrial microcosm. This is followed by short segments from another work by The Brothers Quay featuring a similar style of animated puppetry, entitled "The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer -- Prague's Alchemist of Film." Segments are entitled "Metaphysical Playroom: A Tactile Experiment" and "The Migration of Forms."

Exploring the frontier of 1980s state-of-the-art technology, Steps (1987) by award-winning music video director Zbigniew Rybczynski takes off in an unexpected direction from the famous Odessa steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Soviet masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. Using a process he developed to combine found film images with new video, Rybczynski causes all sorts of unexpected things to happen as a group of Americans tourists show up at the Odessa steps just as the Cossacks are about to fire on the striking workers.

Operation X (1987) highlights a comedic collaboration between performance and video artists Mitchell Kriegman and Teddy Dibble. Conceived in the tradition of television pioneer Ernie Kovacs’s humor, Operation X presents a series of short comic vignettes woven together using the unique attributes of the television medium. Relying on conceptual and visual puns, associations, and various sound and image tricks, Kriegman and Dibble create a freshly updated homage to the early innovations of television.

In this program, Robert Craft conducts the Columbia Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a performance of Igor Stravinsky's musical drama "The Flood," which is based on the Book of Genesis and the York and Chester Miracle Plays of 1430-1500, and was originally commissioned for television by CBS in 1959. In this version, real and electronically manipulated images are blended to create a surreal effect. Cast members mime their roles, accompanied by voice-over narration and dialogue by Sebastian Cabot, Laurence Harvey, John Reardon, Robert Oliver, Richard Robinson, Elsa Lancaster, and Paul Tripp. The program begins with a prologue by performance artist Laurie Anderson, who discusses Stravinsky and gives a brief history of "The Flood." The story of Noah -- briefly preceded by the stories of Creation, the fall of Lucifer, and Adam and Eve -- unfolds in segments entitled "Melodrama," "The Building of the Ark," "The Catalogue of the Animals," "The Comedy," "The Flood," and "The Covenant of the Rainbow." In preparation for a great flood sent by God to destroy all of the creatures on Earth who have become corrupt, Noah is instructed by God to build an ark to save himself, his family, and pairs of animals from all species.

Five Dances on Video (1987) showcases modern dance pieces made for television and film that push the physical boundaries of performance. In Air Dance Landings, Elizabeth Streb wears a white leotard and is filmed against a black background as she appears to dance through the air. In New Puritan’s Dance, Michael Clark and others dance to the songs “Ludde Gang” and “Copped It” performed by the British post-punk band the Fall and filmed by filmmaker Charles Atlas. The Daytime Moon, which was produced by Sandy Smolan and Ethan Hoffman for the Minnesota Opera Company, features choreography by Japanese Butoh choreographer Min Tanaka and soundtrack by composer Libby Larsen.

This 1987 episode of Alive from Off Center opens with a prologue by performance artist Laurie Anderson followed by artist-choreographer Meredith Monk’s film about Ellis Island. Set to haunting music and vocals, Ellis Island features present-day color footage of the site combined with black-and-white shots that take viewers into its past, as the experiences of American immigrants are expressed through dance and re-created in a manner that merges imagination with history.

This energetic 1987 program features the Women of the Calabash, an all-female percussion and vocal ensemble who perform with calabashes. Reviving traditional African rhythms infused with contemporary Latin American, Caribbean, and African American sounds, the group creates a blend of melodic harmonies to express the beauty of a rich and vital cultural heritage. Skip Blumberg, an early video artist, directed this episode that includes short dance pieces by choreographers whose performances take place in unusual environments: Pooh Kaye and Elizabeth Ross Wingate’s Sticks on the Move and Dee McCandless and Gene Menger’s Aquamirabilis.