Continue playing

(Time remaining: )

Play from beginning

Continue playing "{{ controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].segmentParentTitle}}"

{{controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].title}} has ended.

{{ currentTime | date:'HH:mm:ss':'+0000' }} / {{ totalTime | date:'HH:mm:ss':'+0000' }}

{{ currentTime | date:'mm:ss':'+0000' }} / {{ totalTime | date:'mm:ss':'+0000' }}

Add to watchlist

Remove from watchlist

Video unavailable

Choreographer Helen PickettLaurie Simmons

Extended Play

November 26, 2008

Choreographer Helen Pickett describes the physical demeanors of the characters in Laurie Simmons’ 2006 film The Music of Regret at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio in New York.

Simmons’ first film, The Music of Regret features characters such as the Dress, the Cupcake, the Book, and the Pocket Watch. “She really wanted the different objects to have their own personality,” Pickett recalls. “It’s every object’s little story.” Simmons extends her photographic practice to performance within this forty minute “mini-musical,” incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep.

More information and credits

Credits

Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Mark Sutton. Artwork courtesy: Laurie Simmons. Thanks: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian

Translate this video

Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.

Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Laurie Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Simmons’s work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to art making—transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. Mining childhood memories and media constructions of gender roles, her photographs are charged with an eerie, dreamlike quality.