Welcome to Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman's Dance Film Productions page, which includes information on their short films Rubberman Accepts the Nobel Prize , A Dancer Drops Out Of The Sky , No Surrender , What I Did On My Nervous Breakdown and Down Time Jaz and the new Short Feature Thursday's Fictions.
Please visit the Catalogue of Physical TV Productions at our new website.
No Surrender
Choreographed and directed by Richard James Allen, with a fiery performance by acclaimed Indigenous dancer Bernadette Walong and a brilliant music score composed by Michael Yezerski and performed by the incomparable Synergy, No Surrender tells the story of a young Indigenous woman who is invaded, terrorised and physically attacked by an unseen intruder wielding a camera. As she nears the point of surrender, the woman’s spirit separates from her body and, through the language of dance and spiritual movement, she finds the strength to fight back and overcome her attacker. A few sentences cannot do justice to the tremendous energy and dedication of every member of the cast and crew in creating the production. But its success so far is a testament to the intensity of the commitment every collaborator brought to the project.
Rubberman Accepts the Nobel Prize
Rubberman Accepts The Nobel Prize in his native language of dance, which is simultaneously translated for broadcast worldwide. This stretchy comedy is a fantastical display of super heroic feats through which Rubberman shows us why action figures deserve more respect.
Rubberman was shortlisted for Best Dance Film at the 2001 Australian Dance Awards and shortlisted for Best Short Film at Shepparton Shorts Short Film Festival in Victoria.
It won the 2001 AFTRS Critic's Circle Award for Best Production Design for Kate E. Wills. It featured in Dance,Camera, Action2, Dennis Alexander's trailer for the 3rd Constellation Change Screen Dance Festival in London, which won the DPA Award in Germany for Best Editing in a promotional trailer.
A Dancer Drops Out of the Sky
In A Dancer Drops Out of the Sky, digitally generated choreography allows our hero to slide from Italy via Sydney to Poland and back to the clouds in one extended phrase.
Duration: 1’40" © 2000 Karen Pearlman and Richard James Allen
Click the Dancer Video button to view this video in Realmedia format - requires the free Realplayer plugin.
What I Did On My Nervous Breakdown
What I Did On My Nervous Breakdown is a lateral look at the usual start of term school report on fun activities during the break(down)
Screenings and Awards
Winner, People’s Choice Award, 2002 Australian Poetry Festival.
Screened in 2003 as the opening film of FLEXIFF (The First and Last Experimental International Film Festival) Sydney, and at Il Coreografo Elettronico, Festival Internazionale di Viddeodanza, Naples (Napolidanza).
Down Time Jaz
A delightful and infectious animated dance film, Down Time Jaz is a ferris wheel ride through family life from the point of view of the second child who must save the rest of her family from itself.
Down Time Jaz is a fantastical portrait of a family of dancers, trapped inside their image of themselves as living out a public performance. They are watched anxiously through their windows until a new child arrives to break their 'routine'. She sees them as 'a family of genies suffocating in a bottle', and decides to 'unstop the cord and let the air in and the dance out'. This frees them to flights of kinetic fantasy and adventure, but ultimately it all becomes too much. Her new task is then to find 'a home, where, at the end of the day, we can all sleep happily' - thus liberating the dancers from their need to always be on display and allowing them to relax into the loving interaction of family life.
THURSDAY’S FICTIONS
Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman, directors of the award-winning and internationally acclaimed Sydney-based Physical TV Company, have just finished shooting a new full-length dancefilm called Thursday’s Fictions.
Thursday’s 24 hours are almost up. In a world in which people live only for the length of a day, she is running out of time. But Thursday has a plan. She finds out that she will be reincarnated as Tuesday and packs all that she has created into a trunk in an effort to continue her work when she comes back in her next life…
Thursday’s Fictions has the raw intensity, epic dimensions and fantastical imagery of legend or myth. Director/Choreographer Richard James Allen has created a rich world filled with intriguing ideas and stunning imagery. Thursday’s Fictions follows the plight of seven characters as they each come into contact with the mysterious trunk Thursday has left in their care. They grapple with the passion, beauty, dreams and nightmares which it contains, embarking on a magical journey encompassing sumptuous dance, original orchestral music and lavish design. It is a film whose images, sounds and ideas will resound far longer than the seven days its story traces.
Thursday's Fictions is based on a book of the same name by Richard James Allen which was nominated for one of Australia's most prestigious literary prizes - the NSW Premier's Literary Award.
Four recent videos - Sam in a Pram, The Frightening of Angels, 13 Acts of Unfulfilled Love, and The Hope Machine - are now available through Marcom Projects
Last updated 2nd May 2007
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