Another Telepathic Thing (2015)

March 24, 2017 · Regal Riviera · 11:15 A.M.

“Who but Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar could combine elements of Mark Twain’s story ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ with transcripts from auditions and create an enigmatic dance theater fable about faith, temptation, and transformation?”–Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice

Founded in 1991, and led by Co-Artistic Directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Big Dance Theater creates works that combine dance, music, text, and visual design. In 2000, Jonathan Demme captured a performance of their Obie award-winning show, Another Telepathic Thing. Working with early handheld digital video cameras, Demme’s documentation here is endearingly raw and is as handmade as anything in his entire catalog.

As The Public Cinema assembled the program of Life is Performance / Performance is Life we aimed to strike a balance between screening indisputably classic Damme films (The Silence of the Labs, Stop Making Sense) and shining a light onto lesser known, hard-to-see works. Another Telepathic Thing falls decidedly into the second category, having screened at only a handful of film festivals and being (at least for now) commercially unavailable. We are thrilled to have this opportunity to screen one of Demme’s most rare and most personal performance films.

Another Telepathic Thing screened as part of our 11-film Jonathan Demme retrospective, Life is Performance / Performance is Life, at Big Ears.