My Talented Friends: An Evening of Short Documentaries by Marta Renzi

My Talented Friends:
An Evening of Short Documentaries by Marta Renzi

With Brief Performances by Special Guests:
     Arthur Aviles
     Doug Elkins
     Cecil MacKinnon

Thursday, December 15 at 7:00pm
Free to the public (space is limited and reservations are suggested)

Join us for a film screening of rarely-seen documentaries by filmmaker and choreographer, Marta Renzi. A series of documentary films featuring talented artists who just happen to be filmmaker Renzi's friends and colleagues. Each has graciously agreed to appear in a brief live performance, and /or exhibit their art. Films include: Arthur & Aileen, Dancing is an Old Friend, The Circus According to Cecil, Where the Dance Is, and Cathy & Harry. This event is in partnership with Rivertown Films.

Arthur Aviles is a BRIO- and Bessie Award-winning dancer and choreographer of Puerto Rican descent. After graduating from Bard College, he was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, and toured for eight years 1987 to 1995. In 1998, he co-founded BAAD!—The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance called by the New York Times "a funky and welcoming performance space."

Doug Elkins is a two-time New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award-winning choreographer who began his career as a B-Boy. Doug is a recipient of significant choreographic commissions and awards from the NEA, National Performance Network, Jerome Foundation, Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation, Dance Magazine Foundation, Metropolitan Life/American Dance Festival, Hartford Foundation, Arts International and The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. He is currently on the faculty of Wesleyan University.

Cecil MacKinnon has worked extensively in New York in downtown theater companies such as the Manhattan Project, Section Ten, the Shaliko Company and the Working Theater. She also works in the circus, was a member of the Pickle Family Circus, and is now a white-face clown, ringmaster, and director of Circus Flora, based in St. Louis Missouri.

Marta Renzi has made more than 50 dances for her Project Company, as well as creating work for groups across the U.S. and abroad. Site-specific pieces in locations such as the Guggenheim Museum, Union Station, and the Staten Island Ferry, drew her to work in video and film. In 1981, You Little Wild Heart, set to music by Bruce Springsteen, was Marta’s first half-hour for television, followed by Mountainview, a 1989 collaboration with filmmaker John Sayles.

In 1992, Marta received a New York Dance & Performance Award (a “Bessie”) for her dance ‘‘Vital Signs”, and in 1995 was the first recipient of a Dancing in the Streets award as “a fearless explorer of all manner of unconventional sites, integrating art into everyday life.” She was a 2013 Bogliasco fellow at the Liguria Study Center for Arts & Humanities and received a 2015 CSA grant from Rivertown Artists Workshop.

As part of a continuing commitment to making dance accessible to a wide audience, Renzi helped inaugurate the “Inside/Out” program of public performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, while her company made frequent appearances at Central Park SummerStage, Bryant Park and Lincoln Center Out of Doors.

In 2017 she directed her debut feature film, Her Magnum Opus, and in 2020 she directed and edited two short films for broadcast on Rhode Island PBS of Newport, Rhode Island; Out of Ruin and Through Her Eyes: A Newport Nutcracker Reimagined.

Marta has served on the Board of Advisors for the New York Foundation for the Arts and was a consultant for the New England Foundation for the Arts’ program, “Building Community Through Culture.” In 2008 she joined the Board of Directors of New York City’s Dance Films Association.

Through the International Linkages program of the American Dance Festival, she taught in Chile and Paraguay, and is a seven-time recipient of Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

During the same two decades she was making films, Marta Renzi has also worked part-time at the Family Resource Center in Nanuet, first as an early literacy specialist through the Parent Child Home Program; now, she is a Community Liaison at the FRC, advocating for immigrant parents and their children.

For more information or to register, call (845) 358-0877 or visit www.rocklandartcenter.org