About five minutes into her dance film Holding This For You, Marissa Rae Niederhauser throws herself against the wall, slides to the floor, and begins trying to untie a key knotted to the front of her dress. But Ben Kasulke‘s camera stays trained to her face; she squints a little as she works, purses her lips before biting the lower one, and only when she’s mostly worked her way through the knot and closed her eyes does the camera trail down to her breast as she pulls the key off the ribbon. She holds it tightly in her hand for a long moment, her face, turned from the camera, slightly out of focus, and then drops it.
“Different stories work better onstage, and different stories work better on film,” explained Niederhauser last week at Smith, near her home on Capitol Hill. “And I’m particularly drawn to small facial gestures and physical details. Onstage, dance is great to have these big, sweeping spacial patterns and geometric forms, kind of like a kaleidoscope. But this was kind of more a psychological drama, so I feel like it’s more important to be able to focus the eye and show people what you want to show them instead of this big, watercolor wash of the entire stage.”
In person, Niederhauser, a 2002 Cornish College graduate with blonde hair, straight-cut bangs, and a puckish smile, doesn’t bear much resemblance to the tortured character in her debut film. Shot in 2006 in a Georgetown warehouse that was being renovated into artist lofts, Holding This For You, her first film, has shown at several festivals internationally since its debut at Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Festival last year, and is returning to Seattle for a showing this Monday at Bumbershoot, as part of a double-bill called “Dreamscapes” at 9 p.m. in the SIFF Cinema.
Niederhauser has danced for a number of Seattle’s most respected choreographers over the last few years, including Maureen Whiting, Zoe Scofield, and Dayna Hanson, and produces her own work, both for film and the stage, under the company name Josephine’s Echopraxia.
Her film work grew out of her struggle to find direction after graduating college. “I guess there was a while after school where I thought that you waited for somebody to recognize how great you were,” she said. “And then when that didn’t happen realized you have to it into your own hands to show people that you’re worth bothering with.”
The film centers on the idea of love as an act of control or oppression, she explains: “Sometimes when love is placed on a person, it’s not a positive thing. It’s more an act of colonization, and it can be kind of a trap. And it can also be given with the intent of changing a person, just like when you’re colonizing a country.”
Influenced by everything from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Patti Hearst’s Stockholm Syndrome to the fairy tale of Rapunzel, the film follows the central character as she struggles with issues of control. Shot in a small, red room, it’s claustrophobic and threatening, compounded by Niederhauser’s occasionally violent movement and a few filmic bits inspired by horror films.
One of the central images are keys, as many as 1,500 of which are eventually used as props in the film. “That was a big one,” Niederhauser admits, “the idea of keys entering or penetrating the body, both against the will of the character, and also when the character’s unaware of it.”
In one segment, Niederhauser collapses to the floor as though exhausted and asleep. Suddenly, keys start appearing all around her, crawling up her face and into her mouth. She awakes gagging and vomiting keys. It’s simple stop-motion animation, but it’s effective and demonstrates part of the appeal film has to dancers and choreographers.
Several years ago, Niederhauser began collaborating with Kasulke through opportunities at the NW Film Forum. Dance film has long been a major part of European experimental film, but in the US it’s been a minor trend except in Seattle over the last decade, where it’s commonplace. And almost every conversation about dance film here leads back to Kasulke, whose cinematography for Lynn Shelton’s Humpday has earned him wide exposure in the last year.
“He really has a good eye for following movement, and a really good instinct as to where energy is going to travel in the body next,” Niederhauser said. “So, a lot of camera people, when they follow dance, will kind of back up, to try to get the whole picture—which you totally need sometimes! But he’s also really good at just being able to follow the energy line.”
Niederhauser credits the Film Forum, along with 911 Media Arts, for most of the resurgence of dance film, as well as creating new opportunities for her as a dancer and choreographer.
“I think there’s a really amazing film community here that is open about working in experimental forms, that is open to working with dancers, that’s open to working with women,” she said. “I think we’re very lucky to have organizations like Northwest Film Forum and 911 Media Arts. I think it’s kind of scary because I think they’re both kind of struggling right now, everyone is. But one of the reasons there are so many dance films is there are these organizations that make it possible for people with little experience and not a huge budget to have the help and resources that they need.”
Kasulke also filmed her newest work, still in post-production, called Tracings. As for Niederhauser, she can next be seen performing with Degenerate Art Ensemble in Sonic Tales next month at the Moore Theatre.
