Starfish Aorta Colossus
poem by Paolo Javier
film by Lynne Sachs with Sean Hanley
5 min. 2015
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys.
NYC poet Paolo Javier invited filmmaker Lynne Sachs to create a film that would speak to one of his poems from his newly published book Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books). Sachs chose Stanza 10 from Javier’s poem “Starfish Aorta Colussus” and then traveled through 25 years of her 8 mm films — including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt from the late 1980s, a drive from Florida to San Francisco, and a journey into a very untouristic part of Puerto Rico. Throughout the process, Sachs explores Javier’s celebration of nouns and the haunting resonances of Javier’s poetry.
“Sachs’ latest, “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (made with Sean Hanley), is based on a poem by Paolo Javier. An eerie, fractured meditation on loss, the poem is visualized with another foray into multiplied imagery. Although formally “Starfish” echoes “Drawn and Quartered,” the new film features striking footage of the AIDS quilt, as well as partial, disrupted portions of bodies and landscapes. The structural play that enlivened Sachs’ film from 30 years ago is now mournful, staggered. This speaks not only to Sachs’ inevitable maturity as an artist, but no doubt to her assessment of the three decades we have collectively traversed to arrive where we are now.” – Michael Sicinski, Nashville Scene
Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image; Anti-Matter Media Arts Festival (Vancouver); Haverhill Experimental Film Festival; Anthology Film Archives, Spectacle Theater; Black Maria Film Festival Third Place Jury Award; San Francisco Film Festival; Bay Area Book Festival; Images Contre la Nature (France); Los Angeles Center for the Digital Arts; Korean Society of Media Arts Seoul; Festival Experimental Rio de Janeiro; Kino Palais & Lumiton Museo del Cine Buenos Aires; Camera Lucida, Cuenca, Ecuador; Enguage Festival, San Francisco; Revolutions per Minute Film Festival, Boston.
‘We really did not want to say goodbye to this brilliant, imaginative and totally committed group of actors and media artists.’
September 19, 2015
Editor’s note: Fandor recently announced the expansion of its FIXshorts film initiative, featuring four original short film projects as well as a short created from Tombstone Rashomon, to be directed by legendary filmmaker Alex Cox. Fandor is again partnering with crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, contributing half of the initial budget and providing reward benefits for the Kickstarter campaigns. Here, we introduce two of those filmmakers, Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker, who are raising funds for Every Fold Matters, a hybrid experimental film that looks into the charged intimacy of washing clothes in a neighborhood laundromat.
Keyframe: What first inspired you to make films?
Lynne Sachs: What other medium could allow me to throw together my love of poetry, investigative reporting, musique concrète, street theater and abstraction?
Lizzie Olesker: I come from a theater background, and this is actually my first experience making film, though I’ve worked in film a bit as an actor (and stuntwoman) on independent and larger commercial films. I never thought I would direct a film but now that I have, I feel more inspired about this process.
Keyframe: What inspired you to make this (FIXshorts) film?
Sachs: There was an incredible collective spirit that was part of our series of live performances. We really did not want to say goodbye to this brilliant, imaginative and totally committed group of actors and media artists. So we said, ‘Let’s make a movie!’
Olesker: It’s because of Lynne who brought her singular cinematic sensibility to our theatrical collaboration. The film segments she made for the performance were particularly rich and evocative. It made me want to explore in a more purely visual way, moving into places that are very different from what can happen in live performance.
Keyframe: How are you going to film it?
Sachs: Sometimes we shoot in a laundry using a documentarian’s observant eye. Other times we integrate our script into a wildly expressive sliver of fiction. We are working with cinematographer Sean Hanley, editor Amanda Katz and composer Stephen Vitiello to create an edgy, impressionistic work of hybrid cinema.
Olesker: When we started shooting, I was amazed at the intense combination of high organization and playful spontaneity that making film demands. There’s a sense of performing and not performing that I really loved. Decisions and changes can really evolve as you go, with the creative imagination happening in a very collective way. One needs to have a strong vision and at the same time, a willingness to shift and let go of things that aren’t working.
Keyframe: What three directors or artists have most influenced you (and why)?
Sachs: I have been deeply moved by the intuitive observations of Chris Marker, the hard-hitting clash of images in the collage films of Bruce Conner and the very personal cutting of Gunvor Nelson. Over the course of my life as a filmmaker, I was able to work with each of these artists.
Olesker: Because my background is in theater and playwriting, I’ve been inspired by people like Anton Chekhov, Euripides, Bertolt Brecht, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy and Caryl Churchill. But there are artists who also inspired me like Louise Bourgeois and the pioneering portraitist Alice Neel. Film directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman and Mike Leigh are among my favorites.
Keyframe: What was the last film you saw in a theater?
Sachs: Last Tuesday afternoon, I went to the IFC theater in Manhattan to watch Wim Wenders’ The American Friend. I want to savor cinematographer Robby Müller’s sense of color for a long, long time.
Olesker: My eighty-seven-year old mother really wanted to see Trainwreck, with Amy Schumer, and so we did at her local neighborhood theater.
Paradoxically, though the coin-operated laundromat is designed to replace the labor of hand-washing, as with many other modern conveniences, the workers remain necessary, though erased.
Nestled in the crevices between corner bodegas and twisted alleys, the corner laundromat is the town square of the postmodern city. It’s where neighbors gather to gossip and strangers gather to check help-wanted ads as their dirty underthings mingle. And nowhere is the laundromat a more central institution than in New York City, where the premium on urban space makes it difficult to fit washing machines inside apartments that are barely big enough for the tenant to turn around in, much less a spin cycle.
It’s in this churning admixture of the personal and public that filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker stage their documentary-fiction-performance piece, Every Fold Matters.
The project foregrounds the often-ignored workers who wash drop-off loads and manage the self-service machines. Paradoxically, though the coin-operated laundromat is designed to replace the labor of hand-washing, as with many other modern conveniences, the workers remain necessary, though erased (just as vacuum cleaners are still operated by housekeepers, and mechanized agriculture still relies on “stoop labor”).
Sachs, who has also chronicled the lives of migrant workers and Vietnam War protesters, tends to explore the overlooked corners of civilization, and the people who fold your sheets are among the least visible in the city. Still, the stories of laundry workers can’t be done justice just by depicting them as exploited laborers; they speak before the camera about both what they love and what they hate about their jobs. And often the workers emerge as spectators of the quotidian drama of the city, as they seek to scrub out people’s hidden stains.
Sachs and Olesker constructed the script out of real interviews with laundry workers in New York over a period of months. In one scene, performers act out the methodical steps of shirt-folding in a percussive drum-dance ensemble. In another, an actor playing a laundry worker reflects on how she falls into an imaginative trance as she fingers strangers’ sordid secrets:
All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff—you write it on a tag—a tag for all that sweat, coffee, period stains, and… whatever. … you can tell someone’s story just by what they’ve worn, how it’s dirty—you know?
The actors “playing” customers among the machines and countertops may elicit confused double-takes and chuckles from passersby (The production was originally commissioned as part of “Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose,” a series of laundromat readings and performances organized by Emily Rubin, now in its tenth year.)
Sachs has arranged with local laundry businesses to stage and screen the show during business hours. “Ideally,” Sachs says, “the laundromat doesn’t even close, so we catch people as they’re doing their personal domestic work, cleaning their clothes. But then we have other people come in intentionally to see it. I kind of like the ambiguity around what’s a spectator.”
But finding a willing venue is a challenge; Sachs notes that some owners are uncomfortable about possibly disrupting business by hosting a seated audience among the regular launderers.
As documentary-fiction, Every Fold’s actors voice narratives composed from interviews with workers, in actual laundry settings, blending real and fictional scenes to evoke the common experiences of urban laundering: Between the clicks of quarters, quiet courtships are sparked in shy tussles over misplaced lingerie. Ethical dilemmas spiral out of a dryer that drops a carelessly crumpled $20 bill into an anonymous fist. The workers’ stories mediate between the public aspect of the business—serving impatient, sometimes mentally unstable customers—and the private realm as they poke through snatches of strangers’ lives, from loose change to bloodstained tank tops.
I attended a performance in May as part of the Workers Unite! Film Festival. Held at the old lithographic workers’ union hall in New York, it had a different feel, since it was set in a real auditorium with no washing machines. But the setting allowed the labor ethos of the project to shine through. In one scene, performer Jasmine Holloway recites the manifesto of the 1881 Atlanta washer woman’s strike in the voice of a black 19th-century laundress: “We will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this!”
Cut to another scene, generations removed from the barrels sloshing with lye and starch: Holloway plays a contemporary laundry workers, recalling tenderly how her mother taught her how to fold, pressing each crease with care, even knowing it will be soiled again in minutes: “Take your time. Make every fold matter. Put yourself into it. Like you mean it.”
Holloway, whose grandmother worked in a laundry center, exudes proud rage when channeling the protesting washer woman, but puts just as much passion into the hypnotically rote folding of a simple swatch: the same pair of hands, reaching across generations and between the screen and real life.
For the last scene, the actors speak in their own voices about their own memories of doing laundry—or not being able to, as when one man discovered one day that his old neighborhood laundromat had closed:
But when I got to the corner, the laundromat was gone… It was one of the only places where you still can talk to strangers.
Laundromats are shuttering across the city, following the trend of gentrification and the growing prevalence of laundry facilities in building basements or apartments. But Every Fold Matters drives home why such community spaces remain irreplaceable: As they mill through the liminal space between machines and aisles, customers become both spectators and performers—just as on any given day at a laundromat, the collapse of public and personal space creates the perfect stage.
Sachs’s last film shone light on a different crack in the cityscape: the shift-bed apartments in Chinatown where men share a mattress with strangers. Every Fold continues to rub its nose in the seams of the urban landscape, exploring how scarce space in a Malthusian social crucible draws us together in a statically charged bond.
Every Fold Matters is a work in progress, and the filmmakers are planning to schedule more on-site performances and complete a film version.
Michelle Chen
Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times, a contributor to Working In These Times, and an editor at CultureStrike. She is also a co-producer of Asia Pacific Forum on Pacifica’s WBAI. Her work has appeared on Alternet, Colorlines.com, Ms., and The Nation, Newsday, and her old zine, cain. Follow her on Twitter at @meeshellchen or reach her at michellechen [at] inthesetimes [dot] com.
A Road Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration June 9 and 10, 2015
Introduction by Lynne Sachs
After looking at Jacob Lawrence’s haunting “Migration Series” painting exhibition upstairs here at the museum, watching the movies that are part of A Road Three Hundred Years Long: Cinema and the Great Migration makes me feel as if Lawrence’s canvases have come downstairs and started to breathe. Tonight we will experience the cinematic “tributaries” that come together to articulate our understanding of life in the South – particularly for African Americans – during the early to mid part of the 20th Century.
In 1989, I made a pilgrimage to Eatonville, Florida to participate in the first ever ZORA! Festival celebrating the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston, an African American writer and folklorist I had recently become aware of through her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. I remember driving in the vicinity of Eatonville, which is a bit like the back yard of Disney-dominated Orlando, and spending – without the assistance of a GPS of course – what seemed like hours trying to find this little village that was not even on the map and almost no one in Orlando had ever hear of. Eatonville was incorporated in 1887 and was one of the first self-governing all-black municipalities in the United States.
This was the town where Zora Neale Hurston grew up and a museum had just been built in that town in her honor.
Thanks to the hard work of author Alice Walker, American readers at that time were beginning to discover the passion, sensuality and artistic virtuosity of Hurston through her fiction, her folklore investigations and more recently, her films. In tonight’s digitized 16mm film, you will watch her 1928 anthropological documentary footage which will give you a chance to see how inspired she was by the richness of the culture she so appreciated in the area of the South where she grew up. Like Rev. L.O. Taylor, the subject of the film I will be screening tonight, Hurston had an uncanny appreciation for what we might call the “familiar”, a very different approach to a visual anthropologist who must travel afar to make a “discovery.” She recorded stories, songs, and traditions from African-Americans in small Florida communities like her own hometown. As we all know, these were images that generally never made it into the history books. Like Taylor, the act of filming for Hurston is not simply an act of witnessing but rather engaging, seeing and being seen.
Filmmaker Pare Lorentz’s documentary “The River” received support from the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. The film was shot in “spectacular” black and white by the renowned cinematographer Willard Van Dyke. The film was made in 1938, the same year that Billie Holiday sang and recorded “Strange Fruit” her searing interpretation of the experience of seeing a lynching of a Black man, which you can also experience upstairs. While Lorentz expresses a bold economic and environmental critique of agrarian life in the US during a period of struggle, he does not address race issues. Nevertheless, this is the troubled South from which the people in Lawrence’s paintings are escaping. In contrast to Taylor and Hurston’s images, there is a polish to the film – the fingerprints of the makers themselves are subsumed by the good intentions of the documentary project as a whole. The voice over narration is authoritative, its intention persuasive.
Next, we will take a look at Fox Movietone’s “Itinerant Negro Preacher” which was made by a documentary movie team in 1925, the earliest period that is represented today. Here you will see a far less personal but certainly enthralled lens. The Fox camera man follows a traveling preacher revealing the word of God to anyone who will listen.
Now I will talk a little bit about my film “Sermons and Sacred Pictures”.
I first saw Reverend L.O. Taylor’s films and heard his audio recordings when I was 17 years old in the late 1970s
he’d recently died and his wife had given his entire movie collection to the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis for safe keeping
As a high school student in Memphis, I became part of a folklore team that took a cumbersome 16mm film projector around to Rev. Taylor’s churches in order to identify who the people were in his films
Early on, I realized the novelty of someone like Taylor who was committed to “shooting from the inside out” in what he called his Taylor Made Pictures
Eight years later, I returned to Memphis, after I too discovered I wanted to be a filmmaker, and not a “director” in the traditional sense of the word, to walk around Rev. Taylor’s neighborhoods where had preached and filmed – with my own 16mm Bolex
Like Taylor, I issued my own unofficial license, I didn’t work with a bona fide news agency – I had the freedom to explore, ask questions and engage with a part of town that was, honestly, new to me – one that was quite different from the Memphis I had known
As I began to intertwine my new color material with Taylor’s images, I felt as if we were in the process of creating something together. Throughout the making of the film, I had guidance from three filmmakers who were living in San Francisco where I was currently studying.
1) I interned with Bruce Conner — avant-garde film’s found footage impresario and a devoted gospel music fan — for a year and he helped me to jump into the film images with reverence and spunk
2) Trinh T. Minh-ha — filmmaker and cultural theorist — helped me to grapple with my own distance and difference from the people in the images but also to find a comfort in my connections to the story
3) Experimental filmmaker and early film enthusiast Ernie Gehr showed me how to see each frame in Reverend Taylor’s films as a photograph with a specific history and composition
Over my two years of shooting and editing, I discovered that it was in the sound that I felt that the people in these films most “came alive” – it was in the voices and the splash of the water that I felt the miracle of the medium as it “journied” through time and space. As film curator Josh Siegel noted in his introduction to this series, perhaps what is most startling about these films is that we have a window into the “interior worlds” of African Americans living in early to mid-century America. We as a 2015 audience are able to see what mattered most to these artists of long ago.
My first screenings of “Sermons and Sacred Pictures” were in Rev. Taylor’s very own church. We had hundreds of people from Taylor’s community and far beyond there to celebrate a man who had given so much of his life to his people. Like Spencer Williams in his now legendary “Blood of Jesus” and Hurston in her moving image documents, Taylor was a filmmaker who realized that through the lens of his camera he could preserve and convey significant strides in Black American history as well as dramatic, deeply spiritual moments that somehow brought those of us on the earth a little closer to something he called God or heaven.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lynne Sachs and Nina Menkes are among the women directors featured on Fix
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lynne Sachs and Nina Menkes are American independent, experimental filmmakers who have been making movies for three decades. Their films have been showcased at international festivals, and they’ve won numerous awards.
Which makes it all that more frustrating — to these filmmakers and their fans — that much of their work received little or no commercial distribution. Enter Fandor, the 4-year-old streaming service that specializes in independent, experimental, foreign and cult films.
Last summer, Fandor started Fix, a platform on the site that allows indie and experimental filmmakers the chance to connect with potential audiences. Fix features the work of 140 filmmakers with more being added. (Fandor is available by subscription for $6 a month.)
Leeson, Sachs and Menkes were filmmakers chosen for the initial Fix platform, part of an effort to spotlight female directors. Forty-eight women are featured, including such young filmmakers as Anna Frances Ewert and Penny Lane. Amanda Salazar, a spokeswoman for Fandor, said the hope is to showcase the wide spectrum of work done by female directors.
Leeson, the subject of several retrospectives on the site, has received emails from “younger people who are just discovering these pieces” on Fandor. “It reaches new audiences, and it kind of revives these works that otherwise would be difficult to see.”
Among her features and shorts streaming on the site are 1997’s “Conceiving Ada,” starring her muse Tilda Swinton, the 2002 sci-film drama “Teknolust” with Swinton and 2010’s “Women Art Revolution,” her documentary on the history of feminist art in the late 20th century that took 42 years to complete.
Leeson said she turned to filmmaking because “it combined all the elements of time and space and manipulating colors. It was a way to use all the compositional points of making art, but doing it in this fluid fashion that would reach a completely different and wider audience, even though the messages were the same.”
Despite her international acclaim, Leeson struggles to get her films produced. “I’m older, so I think if I were female and younger, it would be easier,” said Leeson, in her early 70s. “I think being my age, there are kinds of discrimination that one faces being able to do their work. It’s never been easy to make a film. ”
Or have one released.
“Teknolust,” she said, was picked up by a distributor at the Sundance Film Festival who didn’t honor the contract. Instead, “I opened it myself in New York,” she said.
But she never got discouraged, “I think art is all bred out of optimism, and you have to believe in what you are doing,” said Leeson, who’s planning a film with Swinton on genetic mutation in which the Oscar winner plays a cat.
Sachs’ films featured on Fandor include the 1994 documentary short “Which Way Is East,” a travel diary of Sachs and her sister Dana’s trip to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, 2006’s “States of UnBelonging,” about an Israeli filmmaker and mother who is killed in the West Bank, and 2010’s “The Task of the Translator,” an homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name.
Sachs, 53, was a photographer, painter and poet before she began to make films. “It wasn’t until I was in college and had my two years abroad in Paris that I discovered Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman — all of these women filmmakers who had this semi-poetic approach to film,” said Sachs, the sister of director Ira Sachs (“Love Is Strange”).
“This was in the ’80s,” she said. “I had never seen any film by a woman director.”
Though Sachs noted that “there are more women in the experimental universe” than when she began, she is surprised how few female directors there are working in indie and commercial cinema.
Sachs, who has taught experimental film and video at New York University and the New School for 20 years, always asks her students to name their favorite director. She noted that none of her students has ever named a woman as their favorite filmmaker. And the sad truth, Sachs added, is that a few — even the young women in class — have difficulty naming any female director unless it is a high-profile actress-turned-director such as Angelina Jolie.
“It’s kind of shocking,” she said.
Two of Menkes’ seven features are on Fandor — 2007’s “Phantom Love” and 2010’s “Dissolution,” which was shot in Tel Aviv and is loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
Described by The Times as “one of the most provocative artists in film today,” Menkes’ films are complex, dark, disturbing — and not surprisingly often met with hostility.
“The best example is to go back to my first feature, which was ‘Magdalena Viraga’ in 1986, which I made at the UCLA film school,” said Menkes, 49. “We actually got the L.A. Film Critics Assn. Award that year.”
But one student at the film school stood up after a screening and told Menkes that the story of an alienated prostitute was “the most violent movie I have ever seen. You do things Brian De Palma doesn’t do.”
The film, she said, “contains almost no actual violence at all. But it shows a woman having alienated sex, which maybe now is not as radical as it was at that time.”
And every distributor turned her down.
“Their official reason is that your film is too experimental. Indeed my films are experimental, but I think the thing that really made them say no was a gut reaction to this woman on screen not being aligned with their world view in terms of how women can be portrayed. I think that has remained an issue.”
-What are some of the major obstacles you’ve met as a filmmaker?Convincing my 103 year old grandmother that what I do is worthy. I don’t think she will ever understand that creative pleasure, dare I say artistic recognition, has any worth whatsoever. She measures success in $$. One day, I hope she will applaud the fact that I have found something I simply love to do.
-What are some awesome moments you’ve had as a filmmaker?Spending weekly Tuesday mornings talking with Bruce Conner in his San Francisco studio; introducing my crying baby to Stan Brakhage; learning to edit from Gunvor Nelson; recording sound and syncing dailies with Trinh T. Minh-ha; dancing with my boyfriend and now husband Mark Street in a George Kuchar movie; hanging out with Craig Baldwin in his editing cave; taking my young daughters to Paris to spend a day with Chris Marker.
-What are your views on women in film and how the industry can help solve the problem of diversity? Twenty years ago, I asked a group of college age students to name their favorite film directors. No woman was on the list. Then I asked them to name one woman director. They found that task very difficult. Then I asked them to name a single film made by a woman. That resulted in a very short list, and for the most part they only knew a few female movie stars who had tried their hand at directing. Not much has changed in the last two decades. Women filmmakers must make work that reflects their vision rather than embracing the point of view of a commercial industry ethos that, for the most part, refuses to recognize our view of the world.
-Tell us how Fandor’s FIX program has helped you! Fandor’s FIX program has put my work in a eclectic, unpredictable, thought-provoking context where people discover my work through direct search and absolutely hilarious randomness. My most popular Fandor film is A Biography of Lilith, an experimental documentary about Adam’s first mate in the Garden of Eden. Lilith was expelled from the Garden, and thus history, because she wanted to be on top in sex. Who knew that a feminist movie about gender politics, sensuality and the Bible would draw so much attention?
EVERY FOLD MATTERS
a site-specific performance about working in a laundry
by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs
“All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff- you write it on a tag. A tag for all the sweat, blood, food, coffee stains, and whatever….”
EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a collaborative, site-specific performance with film about the work of doing laundry by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs. With text developed from interviews with NYC neighborhood laundromat workers, EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the charged, intimate experience of cleaning other people’s clothes in a public workspace. Presented by Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions, performances of EVERY FOLD MATTERS unfolded at the New Lucky Laundromat on Lafayette Avenue in Clinton Hill Brooklyn, February 12-14, 2015. The Manhattan Community Arts Fund and the Brooklyn Arts Council awarded initial support for EVERY FOLD MATTERS, After the New Lucky Laundry performances, we will produce an EVERY FOLD MATTERS film, a hybrid work that will incorporate both our performance and documentary materials.
“Sometimes they hide the stains. They’ll put it in a bag and won’t tell you. Maybe they think you won’t take it?”
EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the seemingly mundane, everyday world of laundry through a personal and social lens, providing new insight into the way we take care of the things most close to our bodies. Stories around intimacy, clothes, dirt/stains, money, and time are revealed through heightened dialogue and gestural, choreographed sequences — all set amidst the washers and dryers of a working laundromat. EVERY FOLD MATTERS provides an opening into a historic form of domestic work which is mostly unseen, or at least unnoticed, tended to by those who go unrecognized and undervalued.
“My customers count on me. They think we do magic.”
EVERY FOLD MATTERS was originally commissioned by Emily Rubin as part of Wash and Dry Productions’ Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose series, with support from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, and presented on the Lower East Side at Gentle Wash Laundromat. In 2014, Lizzie Olesker was awarded $2200 from the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) to further develop and perform EVERY FOLD MATTERS. Lizzie then invited Lynne Sachs to collaborate on the project, bringing her innovative approach in creating hybrid documentary work. After early showings in Brooklyn at the Old Stone House and Atlantis Superwash Laundromat, Lizzie and Lynne continued developing the piece through further interviews and collaborating on a new script. Emily recently secured a new site-specific venue at the Lucky Laundromat in Brooklyn. Acclaimed, multi-talented performers Veraalba Santa, Ching Valdes-Aran and Jasmine Holloway have joined the production. Musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello will create a responsive sound design for the upcoming performance and film.
“My mother in Hong Kong, she showed me … no dryers. We would just hang them. I helped her with the easiest stuff, like folding underwear. And then you practice, practice, practice…”
Lead collaborating artists Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker have long admired one another’s work. Each has over 30 years experience making original performances and films, following their own path in making their projects happen. Taking the chance to bring a hybrid, experimental performance into a surprising, real-world environment inspires both artists and their audience.
“I remember each and every face of every customer.”
Through local press, social media, online publicity, and neighborhood flyers, the EVERY FOLD MATTERS team reached out to both NYC audiences at large and the Clinton Hill community.
“The laundromat is one of those places you think will be there forever. It’s one of the only places where you still talk to strangers.”
Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions has been producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose since 2005 when it started as an experiment in a laundromat in the East Village. Since that time, Rubin has presented more than 150 emerging and established writers and performers amidst the washers and dryers of neighborhood laundromats throughout NYC. EVERY FOLD MATTERS will be Wash and Dry Productions’ first event in the year-long 10th Anniversary Celebration of Loads of Prose.
Lizzie Olesker (co-director, writer) is a playwright, director, and performer whose work focuses on finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Plays and performances have been developed and presented at New Georges, HERE, the Ohio Theatre, Invisible Dog, Dixon Place, Old Stone House, Cherry Lane Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Intiman (Seattle) and Public Theater.
Emily Rubin (producer) founded Wash and Dry Productions in 2005 to produce Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Rubin is the author of the novel STALINA (Mariner Books) and is at work on another novel and memoir about urban homesteading. www.emilyrubin.net
Lynne Sachs (co-director, writer) is fascinated by the intersection between documentary film explorations and live performance. Her hybrid film works have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, the China Women’s Film Festival and the Vancouver Film Festival. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in the Arts. www.lynnesachs.com
Stephen Vitiello (music) is an electronic musician and media artist. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Whitney Biennial, and on the High Line in NYC. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto. www.stephenvitiello.com
Sean Hanley (film production), Amanda Katz (performance and film assistance) and Luo Xiauyuan (research and translation).
Our Performers
Jasmine Holloway (performer) is a singer and actress who has performed in productions at the Harlem Repertory Theatre as well as in the highly acclaimed GENERATIONS at Soho Rep. Jasmine was nominated for the Richard Maltby Jr. Award for Musical Theatre Excellence during the 2013 Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival.
Veraalba Santa is an actress and dancer and a member of Caborca Theater. She has degrees in Theater and Dance from the University of Puerto Rico and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. In New York City, Veraalba has worked with Sally Silvers, Rojo Robles, Viveca Vazquez and Rosa Luisa Marquez.
Tony Torn was last seen on stage in the title role of Ubu Sings Ubu at The Slipper Room, a rock opera adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which he created and co-directed. An actor and director known for his extensive work with Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony recently made his Broadway debut Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Ching Valdes-Aran (performer) is an Obie award-winning actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, including The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Mama, Women’s Project, CSC, Mabou Mines, Ma-Yi Theater Company, La Jolla, Center Stage, Yale Rep, and ACT. Her film work includes roles in Lav Diaz’s FROM WHAT IS BEFORE (Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Int’l Festival) and Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.
