MARILYN RIVCHIN
Media
Media Collaborations
and Documentation
for Artisans, Dancers, Musicians,
Performers & Artists
Trailer for Ithaca Ballet's "Virtually Spring Dance, 2021"
NOW PLAYING!
Full 1-hour performance video premiere: APRIL 16-25, 2021 Tickets at www.Cinemapolis.org
May, 2021 Now available directly from Ithaca Ballet at: https://ithacaballet.org/
RECENT WORK
During the pandemic, performances on video to watch online has made for many new dance video filming and editing projects for me. Most recently I directed, filmed and edited this online performance for the Ithaca Ballet company, including five new pieces filmed in March 2021 on the Hangar Theater stage, and including choreographers' conversations about their work. Camera assistance by MeeAe Caughey.
ARTISANS/Crafts
My documentary work has been predominantly focused on art, artists and social and/or political issues. Between 2015 and 2017 I made numerous videos for artisans at the Handwork Cooperative, Ithaca, New York. As short “process” videos displayed as a loop at Handwork’s store, they visually detail specific handcrafting by: local potters Julie Crosby and David Kingsbury; weaver June Szabo; wood turners John Chamberlain and Stephen Landau; glass workers Bonnie Scott and Julia Bonney; woodworker, Michael Parkhurst; fiber artist Mary Beth Larsen; and jewelry maker Charlotte Walsh.
"BY HAND & FIRE: JULIE CROSBY POTTERY" is the larger project with potter Julie Crosby to explore further her wood-firing process, her kiln designing and construction, and her work with a community of regional potters. The 1-hour video premiered in Ithaca, New York at CINEMAPOLIS movie theater on May 5, 2019.
NOW ON YOUTUBE at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDKefUPiJpU&t=43s
Julie Crosby Pottery
This clip is a "process" sequence of a full-length documentary "By Hand & Fire: Julie Crosby Pottery" about the extraordinary wood-firing potter. Julie is also a professional kiln designer/builder and has worked with potters all over the country.
Original music is by Ithaca jazz pianist and composer, Molly MacMIllan
Link to the 15-minute version on Vimeo
or on youTube:
Click in this corner for audio
DANCE & PERFORMANCE
RECENT WORK: DANCE, THEATRE, PERFORMANCE
In April, 2018 I directed, filmed and edited a three-camera performance video, Portrait, choreographed by Ithaca College dance professor Amy Walker O’Brien. This 25-minute site-specific dance was performed at the H. F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.
At Ithaca’s 2017 Spring Writes Literary Festival I documented "Moving Words" dance performances by Jim Self, Forty Years a New Yorker: 8 Episodes, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYgXqOno5UY&t=622s],
and Lindsay Gilmour and Chris Seeds’ two pieces, Los Pajaros and Tiny Rebel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJByk913p04].
PORTRAIT
Excerpts here are of the 25-minute piece choreographed by
Amy Walker O'Brien, Assistant Professor of Dance at Ithaca College. It was performed at the H.F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in April, 2018.
See the first 10 minutes of the performance on youTube.
I filmed Rik Daniels’ Dichotomy and his previous movement performance piece, How I Learned to Swim (2016), as well as editing compilations of his work.
Video for Stage Projection
Media Collaborations/Projections
For many years I've collaborated with dancers, choreographers, theatre directors, and musicians to make projection pieces for live stage performance. Among these are Long Ago in May (dir. Melanie Dreyer-Lude, 2012), and Bernstein’s Mass (dir. David Feldshuh, 2009), both for the proscenium stage at Cornell’s Schwartz Center.
With physicist, Jane Wang and electronic violinist, Ritsu Katsumata I produced multi-channel video projection for The Elegance of Motion presentation on dragonfly flight for the Ithaca “Light in Winter Festival,” (January, 2005). Among the choreographers I've worked with are Jim Self, Merce Cunningham and the Shrine of Dancing Iguana Consciousness... (1995); The Ennead (2001); and with Jumay Chu, Planes (2007).
Planes , 2007
For several years I collaborated with choreographer Lonna Wilkinson to create film and video projections for Slippage (1987), Makimono (1986), Thinking Through the Body (1985), and Point of View (1983), dance pieces which toured nationally, including at Theatre Artaud’s Centerspace Studio Theatre in San Francisco, and at The Dance Place, Washington, D.C.
Selected SOCIAL/POLITICAL Documentary work
I directed and edited two documentaries for the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation: The Contractor’s Contract (2014) and What the Parents Know: A Transformative Mediation (2011).
I worked as a film editor for Borderline: The People vs. Eunice Baker (2003/2005), a pilot for Saved by Deportation, and other projects by Emmy-award winning producer/director Slawomir Grunberg.
AIDS in the Southern Tier: SEVEN STORIES (1999; NY PBS stations).
I directed and edited Never Done: The Working Life of Alice H. Cook (1993), a one-hour film on the life of the labor organizer, activist and educator, with Sandra Pollack and Diane McPherson).
As a collective member of Women’s Media, I contributed work on Stronger Than Before (Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment, 1983).
Bernstein's Mass, 2009
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Selected ART DOCUMENTARIES,
PHOTOGRAPHY AND INSTALLATION work
In 1969 -- Filming 16mm documentation during Cornell's Earth Art
exhibition with guest curator, Willoughby Sharp. All of the film footage
is now in the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
In 1969, while working at Cornell's A. D. White Museum of Art,
I had the remarkable experience as a young filmmaker
to film several hours of footage for Earth, documenting Cornell’s
pioneering Earth Art exhibition, including the works in progress
of Robert Smithson, Hans Haake and Dennis Oppenheim and others.
In November, 2019, as a guest speaker, I presented the segments of this film and participated in a symposium panel sponsored by the College of Architecture at Cornell:
EARTH: Projections 50 Years After Earth Art
I worked as editor for Its Own Sac, (formerly Rescued Earth, 1985) about New York feminist artist Heléne Aylon, exhibited at the Jewish Museum, NYC.
With co-filmmaker Kells Elmquist, I filmed and edited the biopic of the American surrealist painter, Kay Sage (1978, Museum of Modern Art collection).
Other films and videos about visual artists include Ithaca artist
Mary Shelley, Woodcarver (2001), and an experimental film,
Frida Kahlo: The Knife and Fork of God (1998, with text
by Diane McPherson, performed by actress Maria Dizzia).
In 2013-14 I edited numerous theatrical trailers for the Readers’ Theatre of Ithaca, and its 45-minute anti-bullying film, Easy Prey, screened at Cinemapolis movie theater in Ithaca, New York.
I also directed, filmed and edited Brothers in Arms, the official music video, for the Christopher Gerard Band (2014)
Chute,
A dual-channel video
projection/installation on
a suspended parachute,
Schwartz Center for the
Performing Arts, Cornell
2008
Haiti, Market Photographs
1970's
While living in Haiti from 1974-76, I co-directed and edited
with Frederick Mangones, St. Soleil: Art for a New Life,
about an artists’ village (Haiti/United Nations HABITAT Conference, Vancouver, Canada, 1976).
Photography and video installations/exhibitions
While I've often shown my photography locally
in Ithaca (Petrune Gallery, 2018, CSMA 2018
& 2017, Smedley’s Gallery, 1980 & 1986, etc.), I've also exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City: Thousands, a collaborative book-photo/sculpture with book artist Kumi Korf, exhibited
in A Survey of Book works by Photographers; also
at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, N.Y.;
in the permanent collections of the Women’s Museum, Washington, D.C., the Rare Book Collection/Olin Library, Cornell University, and Mills College.
In Haiti I exhibited at the Musée d’Art Haitien,
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Reflections/Réflexions: Three Foreign Photographers, 1975). In 1976 I mounted these
photographs for a one-woman show at the Stills: The Photography Gallery where I was a collective member.
In 1980 my photographs and video installation titled Dancing and Design, made in collaboration with dancer Jane Desmond, filled a gallery at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell.
BIO
I am an independent filmmaker, photographer and videomaker and also taught filmmaking and digital media at Cornell University from 1979 to my retirement from teaching in 2012. Living in Ithaca, New York, I continue to create digital media work as a producer, director, and/or editor of video documentaries; photography; and experimental work including projections for multi-media live-performance dance, theatre and music.
I received a B. A. from Barnard College in Art History, then did graduate work in the History of Art at Cornell. While working at the Cornell art museum I studied in an intensive summer program in 16mm Filmmaking at U.C.L.A. for professionals in other fields. Much later, while teaching filmmaking, I completed an M.F.A. at Cornell in Fine Arts, in Photography and Cinema Theory.
As a public arts administrator in the early '70's, I served as Assistant Director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, while more recently I served as President of the Board of the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts (2002-06), and as Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the Community School of Music and Arts in Ithaca (2016-18).
