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M+, Hong Kong, © Charles Atlas/EAI
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Mediatheque
Charles Atlas 查爾斯．阿特拉斯
Hail the New Puritan 新清教徒萬歲
1985–1986
Blending documentary and fiction, this film follows the Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark as he prepares his 1984 work New Puritans. Directed by filmmaker Charles Atlas, it weaves together a series of staged interviews with Clark and his circle, the dance company’s rehearsals and performances, and glimpses of London’s daily life and vibrant subcultural scenes. With occasionally surreal sequences and no narration or other framing device, the film drops viewers into the middle of the dynamic collisions of creative energy that characterised much of British artistic and popular culture of the 1980s. Mirroring the personalities mixing onscreen, Atlas collaborated with a range of punk and electronica musicians on the film’s soundtrack, while its production design was overseen by performance artist Leigh Bowery.
Atlas’s career as an artist and theatrical designer formed in relation to avant-garde dance. In the 1970s, he moved from his childhood home of St. Louis to New York City with the aim of becoming a filmmaker. An initial job as an assistant stage manager with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—run by one of New York’s most innovative and important choreographers—led to his later role as the company’s lighting designer and, by 1974, its filmmaker-in-residence. In concert with Cunningham, Atlas developed an approach he called ‘media dance’, where the camera became an active part of the choreography and the audience’s experience alongside the dancers themselves. Atlas left the dance company in the early 1980s and continues to make independent film work exploring the intersections between dance, art, and urban subcultures.
Atlas’s career as an artist and theatrical designer formed in relation to avant-garde dance. In the 1970s, he moved from his childhood home of St. Louis to New York City with the aim of becoming a filmmaker. An initial job as an assistant stage manager with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—run by one of New York’s most innovative and important choreographers—led to his later role as the company’s lighting designer and, by 1974, its filmmaker-in-residence. In concert with Cunningham, Atlas developed an approach he called ‘media dance’, where the camera became an active part of the choreography and the audience’s experience alongside the dancers themselves. Atlas left the dance company in the early 1980s and continues to make independent film work exploring the intersections between dance, art, and urban subcultures.
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