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Dancer Greg SinacoriLaurie Simmons

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March 27, 2008

The Music of Regret,(2006) Laurie Simmons’ first film, extends her photographic practice to performance; incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep within her three-act “mini-musical.” Forty minutes long, the work features an ensemble of dancing objects, including a pocket watch and a gun.

In this film, dancer Greg Sinacori, who plays the role of “The House,” discusses the effect of the costumes’ weight and form on his dancing and movement. “At first, I didn’t know what being a house was going to entail,” Sinacori confessed during preparations for the performance.

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

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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.