Screening and Discussion of Night Sky

As you know, Christine Sun Kim will be joining our class on Thursday, and we're attending the opening of the exhibit, What Can a Body Do? @ HC's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery on Friday evening. I'm writing to tell you about a screening event that's part of WCaBD?  Filmmaker Alison O'Daniel will visit on November 7th and 8th.  Her film Night Sky will screen Wednesday night in Chase Auditorium at 8pm.  The next day, Thursday, she will visit John Muse's Visual Studies class, which meets at 10am in Stokes 102.  Both of these events, the screening and John's class are open to the public. As students of "silence," you are all most welcome @ both.

Here's a blurb from http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/alison-o-daniel-night-sky/2644
Night Sky was conceived and produced in collaboration with a cast of performers, artists, filmmakers and musicians, half of whom are deaf and half of whom are hearing/non-signing.  O’Daniel worked closely with Jules Dameron, who started Deaf Women In Film in order to locate her collaborators from that community.  This film centers on two women, Cleo (played by Deaf actress Evelina Gaina) and Jay (played by Jeanne-Marie Mandell). Cleo is deaf, Jay is hearing and they take a road trip to the California desert near Joshua Tree, where they receive a cosmic message by touching vibrational surfaces during the course of a sound bath. Simultaneous to their travels, there is a dance contest happening in a parallel universe, where wherein the touch of dancers’ hands affects the music being played by the Los Angeles duo Lucky Dragons. A deaf dog is the only character that traverses both planes of existence -- through a membrane delineated by a hula hoop. The overall story of the film is understood differently by different audience members, depending upon whether or not they are fluent in ASL, which is not subtitled in the film.

NIGHT SKY  borrows some tropes from buddy films, science fiction, and 1980s dance competition films, as well as queer narrative, and operates very much like a silent film wherein the overall structure is keenly affected by the performance of a live score. The narrative  consists of such deliberately fragmented pieces of information, that the characters of sound and visual language truly take over the audience experience -- and it is an engaging pleasure.