A choreographer and videomaker, Lerner—together with Rosane Chamecki—has been the co-artist director of chameckilerner. During the 25-year collaboration, chameckilerner has created a body of work that includes dance performances, video, and installation pieces; chameckilerner started experimenting with film in 2008. Their first short video, Flying Lesson, won the Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center. Other videos include The Collection, commissioned by Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center; Conversation with Boxing Gloves between Chamecki and Lerner, commissioned by PERFORMA 09; Samba#2 and Eskasizer (a four-channel installation) through a residency at EMPAC, Troy, NY; among others. Their video work won a series of prizes at international film and dance festivals around the world. Lerner is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA, NYSCA, NEFA, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller MAP Fund, among others. Most recently, she was a 2019 artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, a Gibney DiP Residency Artist, and finished a commission to Barnard College students in spring 2019. SLC, 2019; 2023-
Previous Courses
Dance
Moving Bodies in Frame
Component—Spring
This course will focus on “why and when” to convey a choreographic idea into a video. The significant dilemma that artists run into when taking dance out of the real world and onto the screen is how to maintain the corporeal and visceral aspect of the experience of feeling a body in action: its sweat, dynamic, and energy. In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses the physical reality: “To be a body is to be tied to a certain world….our body is not primarily in space, it is of it.” So how do we keep the flesh, the breath, the space of this body on screen? Or do we need to maintain those qualities to succeed? In our experience, the vital question relies on these basic questions: When does one’s concept ask for the language of video making? What are the tools available in the video that would not only facilitate the work but demand that the work be done explicitly for the screen? This course will introduce the students to the history of video/experimental film, analyzing a variety of works, from the early experimental films made in the ’20s and ’30s, to the early video artworks for the ’60s and ’70s, to contemporary videos and installations of our time. During the semester, students will have a series of hands-on exercises that explore concepts of framing, camera movement, planes, deconstruction of space and time, and the relationship between camera movement and body movement, to name a few. Students will create a final assignment, a project where they define a concept, shoot the video, address postproduction decisions like sound, and editing, and, finally, how the work will be presented. The class welcomes dancers, performers, video makers, photographers, or anyone interested in this process.