Nora the Many (2022)
Poster design and illustration Lan Le Huong
Nora the Many is a film based on a novella of the same name, written collectively by Nora (dancers Stephanie McMann, Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley) and choreographer/performer Eleanor Bauer. It tells the story of Cindy’s Bar and its peculiar regulars: Divina the megalomaniacal performance artist, her child and faithful follower Tworden the Giant, Elba the Electric Child, and Tina the daydreaming bartender.
Zeena Parkins’ musical score and Bauer’s narration invite us on a non-linear trip through a multiverse of strange characters, with McMann, Sikorski and Wellesley Wesley’s dancing providing a polyphonic bed of rhythm and emotion. It is a surreal and humorous study of a tight knit group and the planet they live on: the vast, volatile body of a giant.
Read a review here.
CREDITS
Nora the Many
A film by The Something Sithers
Concept: Eleanor Bauer
Writing: Eleanor Bauer, Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley, Stephanie McMann
Cinematography and Direction: Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley, Stephanie McMann
Starring
Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley, Stephanie McMann, Eleanor Bauer, Fox Gill-McMann
Sound recording and editing: Michael Picknett
Music: Zeena Parkins
Film editing: Eleanor Bauer
Trailer: Eleanor Sikorski
Comissioned by: Sadlers Wells, London
Supported by: Arts Council England, South East Dance, Stockholm University of the Arts
Residencies: Chisenhale Dance London, Dance East Ipswich
Premiere: 29 September 2022 at Sadler’s Wells, London (Preview 24 May 2022 at Elverket, Dansens Hus, Stockholm)
If you would like to host a screening of Nora the Many please contact us.
Background
Nora invited Eleanor Bauer to work with them in2018. Bauer invited Nora into her research on choreography as the etymological-ontological relation between khoreia (dancing together) and graphia (writing).
Taking choreographic thought and structure into filmmaking, we write a screenplay from the dance studio outward. Sourcing our experiences of dancing for images, character, voice, and poetics, we go from dancing to writing. Culling from our polyphonic stockpile of phantasmagoric field notes, we compost/compose a nonlinear multiverse of narrative structuring and crumbling, through decomposition, recomposition, and swerve. In order to bring our experiences of dancing to the binds (body-minds) of our audience, the medium of film is chosen for its capacity to blur fantasy and reality, jump-cut and zoom between different times and places. In an effort to articulate and share how dance thinks, the movement of attention and the attention of movement is our dramaturg.
The processes of filmmaking allows for greater autonomy and therefore conversation and movement between the roles of the dancing bind and the writing bind, the performing bind and the directing bind, the creating bind and the editing bind, than we experience in more typical choreographic process where everything happens all at once and constantly, in the room with the people, in real time, in collective practice. Cross-polinating the procedural methodology and clarity of roles in filmmaking with the messy power dynamics and embodied wholisticism of dancemaking, the resulting film is, ultimately, a choreography, but one that invites the viewer deep inside the binds of its makers, rather than keeping you outside the fourth wall looking in.
Thanks to generous donations from our Kickstarter supporters:
Jim and Sarah Sikorski, James and Tizy Wellesley Wesley, Teresa McMann, Geoffrey de Jager, Mary Romanes, Lucy and Guy Davison, Martin Shenfield, Alasdair Romanes, Susannah de Jager, Anne Greene, Alexandra and Humphrey Carey, Henrietta Griffiths, Michael Wellesley-Wesley, Beth Franklin, Nick and Felicity Lyons, Lauren Wakefield, William Stevenson, Nigel Pantling, Alex Scott-Barrett, Chris and Sarah Vermont, Freda and Dave Gill, Richard Reynolds, Katy Wellesley Wesley, Fiona Walter, Sue Mayo, Darcy Jane Wallace, Elsa Petit, Mercedes Bevan, Fran Reader, Katie Sheldrake, Joanna Buckenham, Caroline Reekie, Georgina Hunter Gordon, Live Art Development Agency, Victoria Broackes, Jessica Griggs, Jenny Charker, Alison Henderson, Paul Burns, Robert Skepper, Maani Zakikhani, Philip Shelley, Sarah Reynolds, Tony Waterston, Jemima Yong, Barbara Stirrup, Malcolm Findlay, Theo Clinkard, Kochan Nogawa, Eleanor McAlister-Dilks, Kay McKechnie, Colin Ward, Martha Pasakopoulou, Lauren Wright, Gabriele Sabunaite, Susan Browne, Leah Marojevic, Clementine Barker, Barney White, Sue Bellamy, Greg Renwick, Jona Anderson, Jen Barbrook-Johnson, Inge-Vera Lipsius, Louise Tanoto, Susan Sentler, Andrew Read, Tom Baker, Maddy Costa, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot, Sarah Blanc, David Wilson Clarke, Joss Carter, Es Morgan, Gillie Kleiman, Jackson Bernard, Beckie Darlington, Laura Dannequin, and all anonymous donors.