AMERICAN CORNER BUDAPEST
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Tuesday, May 1, 7:30pm
Proteus Gowanus: an interdisciplinary gallery
543 Union St. (entrance down alley off Nevins)
Brooklyn, New York

$8 admission

http://proteusgowanus.org/2012/04/your-day-is-my-night-an-interactive-film-performance/

This month, the Proteus Migration Film & Video Series will host a unique cinema-performance event which enacted throughout our various project spaces. Brooklyn-based filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, will bring us a specially designed evening of film and integrated movement pieces based on her recent work with a group of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers. The Your Day is My Night Collective will explore “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions, and multi-format film loops. A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, the collective has worked for the last year on a series of performance workshops centered around such a bed – experienced, remembered, and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints. The audience will be encouraged to engage with the characters while walking through the gallery as a “shift-bed” house, witnessing their stories of life before and after immigration to the United States.

Film loops excerpted from the upcoming feature-length film, “Your Day is My Night.”

More information can be found at Facebook.com/yourdayismynightfilm

Performers: Yi Chun Cao,  Linda Hwa Chan, Che Chang-Qing, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho,  Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres and Pedro Sanchez Tormes

Directed by Lynne Sachs
Images by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass
Writing by Rojo Robles and Lynne Sachs
Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chan
Co-editing and co-producing by Sean Hanley
Production Assistance by Madeline Youngberg, Amanda Katz & Jeff Sisson

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Zeitgeist Multi-disciplinary Arts Center
presents

“The Last Happy Day” by Lynne Sachs
Wed., April 18 8:15 to 9:15

1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.
New Orleans, LA 70113-1311
(504) 352-1150
http://www.zeitgeistinc.net/

The Last Happy Day by visiting New York Filmmaker Lynne Sachs.  A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran. The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs.  In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers.  Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame.  Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.

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Kam Yin Tsui in Your Day is My Night

As you may know, the production of my film Your Day is My Night has turned into a series of three live performances in New York, each one designed for a specific location.   You are invited to our two final Spring 2012 events on April 21 at the Chinatown Library and on May 1 at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn. You’ll find all of the information below.  We hope you can join us at one of our shows.

Lynne Sachs
Your Day is My Night
Director

You can see the film and performance as it has evolved on our Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/yourdayismynightfilm

The New York Public Library presents:

“Your Day is My Night”
performance, screening and conversation
Saturday,  April 21, 2012  2:00 – 4:00  p.m. (free)
Chatham Square Public Library in Chinatown
33 East Broadway, New York
A reception to follow the performance.

http://www.nypl.org/locations/tid/15/node/161924?lref=15%2Fcalendar

A collective of Chinese performers living in New York City explores “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions and an integrated movement piece.  A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, the collective has worked for the last year on a series of performance workshops centered around such a bed – experienced, remembered, and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints. Including a 20 minute excerpt of the feature length film.

Performers: Yi Chun Cao, Yueh (Linda) Hwa Chan, Che Chang-Qing, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho,  Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres and Pedro Sanchez Tormes

Directed by Lynne Sachs
Images by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass
Writing by Rojo Robles and Lynne Sachs
Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chan
Co-editing and co-producing by Sean Hanley
Production Assistance by Madeline Youngberg, Amanda Katz & Jeff Sisson

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She forgot to send her payment –

a single check to the company

never put in the envelope

hidden under a stack of worthless

receipts, appointment cards, electricity bills.

Everything matters

but this one more, at least today.

And because the check did not arrive,

her policy was canceled.

She who had given up her ovaries

came face to face

in the ring, with illness

and had emerged the winner, now had no bar

to hold onto, no pillows to fall back on

no parachute

no net below.

We two old friends of more than twenty years

sit at a table in a cafe

talking of our lives, our homes,

books we’ve read

people almost forgotten,

purses with zippers

jump ropes

kitchen counters

projects abandoned.

“How’s your health now, Lucy?”

“I’m crossing my fingers,”

she says.

“That’s all I have until they pass that bill.”

Lynne Sachs

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A birthday party snapshot I found in an antique shop.

Reflections on a Crackerjack World

In the crackerjack world of default birthday parties

A five-year-old boy plays pyrotechnical

With the soft air of his little lung.

Flames dance like zoftig gogo girls

On the parapet

Of a cake purchased yesterday

At the industrial bakery in the A&P.

Our children

Perform split-second happiness for the camera

As we watch their wide eyes and their hunger tongues

Hold forth

On clandestine birthday wishes

We vow will only come true

If.

Lynne Sachs
February, 2012

Also found at the Saint Lucy Photo and Essay website:

http://saint-lucy.com/one-picture-one-paragraph/lynne-sachs/

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To Mark: On awaiting our child

On a summer day,

Warmth on my skin,

Droplets of wetness dancing across my brow,

I walk from the vertebrae to the outer limbs

From Broadway to the Hudson.

Reeling from a shift in my body that neither of us can yet name.

In the crevices of a tomorrow mystery

Delight in the glow of the dark,

Feeling our way

The hold-on-for-dear-life-ness.

How do we explain the sensation of a shared thirst on a rainy day?

A twin hunger for joyous fear that lands on lips.

We spin around and around

Dizzily landing, hands grasping,

You as my anchor, my compass, my wings, together

We wait.

Lynne

March 30, 2011

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Kam Yin Tsui in Your Day is My Night

The Round Robin Artist Collective has invited the cast and crew of my film “Your Day is My Night” to perform a live theater improvisation and interactive conversation at their Arts@Renaissance space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on the evening of Thursday, March 8. We’ll also be screening a sneak preview excerpt of the film. At least four of our performers as well as our translators will attend, including:  Che Chang-Qing, Yi Chun Cao, Yueh Hwa Chan (Linda), Kam Yin Tsui, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho, Sheut Hing Lee, Catherine Ng and Jenifer Lee.  Here is the information below.   Just in case you are in town, we hope you can join us!

Hospitality: A Round Robin Collective Production at Arts@Renaissance presents

“Your Day is My Night”  dir. by Lynne Sachs
preview performance, conversation and screening
Thursday, March 8, 2012  7 pm (free and open to the public)
2 Kingsland Avenue, Garden Level
(the garden floor of an old hospital)
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY

http://roundrobinbrooklyn.blogspot.com/p/hospitality.html

In “Your Day is My Night”, a collective of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers living in New York City explores the history and meaning of “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions and integrated movement pieces. A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. From sleeping to making love, such a bed is a locus for evocative personal and social interactions. With male and female non-professional actors, director Lynne Sachs creates a film which looks at issues of privacy, intimacy, privilege and ownership in relationship to this familiar item of furniture. A bed is an extension of the earth — embracing the shape of our bodies like a fossil where we leave our mark for posterity. But for transients, people who use hotels, and the homeless a bed is no more than a borrowed place to sleep. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, Sachs has conducted numerous performance workshops centered around the bed – experienced, remembered and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints.

Here is a piece recently published in the Washington Post about “Your Day is My Night”:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/lynne-sachs-and-your-day-is-my-night-at-the-national-gallery/2011/10/19/gIQA0OreyL_story.html

At Art@Renaissance on March 8 at 7 pm, you will see a live improvisation on a single bed-stage along with a preview screening.   Five performers will engage with the public as if the audience were visiting them in their apartment – a recreation of a shift-bed house in Chinatown.  Sachs will provide two translators so that the interaction between actors and audience can be fluid and vital.

“Your Day is My Night:  Performance and Video” directed by Lynne Sachs;  written by Sachs and Rojo Robles; with images by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass, performances by Yi Chun Cao, Yueh (Linda) Hwa Chan, Che Chang-Qing, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho,  Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa and Pedro Sanchez Tormes . Translations by Catherine Ng, Jenifer Lee and Bryan Chang.

About “Hospitality and the Arts@ Renaissance” Project:

Hospitality draws on the Latin origins of the word hospitalis: relating to hosting a guest.  Over time the word hospital has meant: charitable organization, a lodging for travelers, and a shetler for the poor.  Throughout the months of February and March, Round Robin Collective artists and invited guests will occupy the former Greenpoint Hospital (now Arts@Renaissance) where they will explore different aspects of hospitality through collaborative artworks, installations, performances, and events.

In a common space, around a constructed and borrowed communal table, Round Robin will present a series of events that invite artists and members of the community to join us as guests and participants.

Hospitality  is not an exhibition in the traditional sense; it is an invitation to participate in a public practice and an incubator for art production, and the friendships and experiences that sustain and nurture it.  By connecting disparate communities and cultivating new relationships, we seek to foster an exchange between not only artists and viewers, but also between art practice and social relationships.

This project is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (www.NYSCA.org – www.eARTS.org).

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Seut Hing Lee, Linda Chan, Ellen Ho and Veraalba Santa in Your Day is My Night by Lynne Sachs

Your Day is My Night (work in process), directed by Lynne Sachs
60 min., color, sound, HD video, 16mm, and Super 8mm film

“In Your Day is My Night, my collective of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers living in New York City explores the history and meaning of “shiftbeds” through verité conversations, character-driven fictions and integrated movement pieces.  A shift-bed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. From sleeping to making love, such a bed is a locus for evocative personal and social interactions.  With male and female non-professional actors, I am creating a one-hour film which looks at issues of privacy, intimacy, privilege and ownership in relationship to this familiar item of furniture. A bed is an extension of the earth — embracing the shape of our bodies like a fossil where we leave our mark for posterity. But for transients, people who use hotels, and the homeless a bed is no more than a borrowed place to sleep. Inspired by theater visionaries Augusto Boal and the Wooster Group, I have conducted numerous performance workshops centered around the bed – experienced, remembered and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints.

Throughout 2011, I  did approximately 40 in-depth interviews through a series of actor auditions.  The material I garnered through these conversations is the basis for the narratives that I wrote with my co-writer Rojo Robles. In production, I  guided my performers through visual scenarios that reveal  a bed as a stage on which people manifest who they are at home and who they are in the world. During our shooting in an actual shift-bed apartment located in NYC’s Chinatown, the Puerto Rican and Chinese participants (several of whom have actually slept on shift-beds) exchange stories around domestic life, immigration and personal-political upheaval.  They speak of  all manner of things in their lives: family ruptures during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, nightclubs, weddings,  four men on one bed in Chinatown.”  (Lynne Sachs)

2011 article on YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT in Washington Post

Cast: Che Chang-Qing, Yi Chun Cao, Yueh Hwa Chan  (Linda), Kam Yin Tsui, Yun Xiu Huang, Ellen Ho, Sheut Hing Lee, Veraalba Santa Torres, Pedro Sanchez Tormes

Crew: Lynne Sachs (director); Sean Hanley (camera, co-produing and editing assistance); Rojo Robles (co-writer); Catherine Ng (translations); Jenifer Lee (translations); Ethan Mass (camera); Jeff Sisson (production assistance)

Kam Yin Tsui and Yun Xiu Huang in Your Day is My Night by Lynne Sachs

Kam Yin Tsui in Your Day is My Night

Your Day is My Night Cast and Crew

Yun Xiu Huang , Veraalba Santa and Sheut Hing Lee

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Lynne Sachs and Your Day is My Night at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
By Ann Hornaday,  Published: October 19 in the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/lynne-sachs-and-your-day-is-my-night-at-the-national-gallery/2011/10/19/gIQA0OreyL_story.html

Test screenings are par for the course in Hollywood, where studios regularly show their movies to audiences in order to get feedback during editing. The process is less common in the experimental world, where filmmakers can usually be found zealously crafting intensely personal expressions in what amounts to an insular aesthetic bubble.

But when Lynne Sachs presents a 30-minute excerpt from her new film, “Your Day Is My Night,” at the National Gallery of Art on Sunday, she intends to pay close attention to how the audience responds. “I’m going to listen and I’m going to take notes on what they say,” Sachs said in a telephone conversation from her home in Brooklyn.

Sachs filmed “Your Day Is My Night” in New York’s Chinatown, using nonprofessional actors in a documentary-fiction hybrid that addresses dislocation, memory and identity. Most of the action happens in a “shift bed” apartment house, where Chinese immigrants rent beds for the day or night, often sleeping in rooms crammed with bunk beds and mattresses. Using beds as a metaphor for privacy, intimacy and power, the film also explores intercultural and trans-historical communication, topics by which Sachs has been consumed in recent years. (Two similarly themed short films, “The Task of the Translator” and “Sound of a Shadow,” will be shown before “Your Day Is My Night” on Sunday.)

“I’m planning to talk about the idea of translation, as in the translation of an experience, and a culture, and the film becomes a conduit for that,” Sachs continued, noting that “Your Day Is My Night” represents the culmination of 10 months of researching, writing and filming with her performers, each of whom is shown in the film grappling with his or her own history in a different way. “I’m curious to see how I’ve translated their experience to an audience — and it’s the first audience” to see the film.

Sachs began germinating the idea of a bed-themed film several years ago when speaking with a relative who had witnessed the 1960 crash of a jet in Brooklyn. When he said that there were a lot of “hot-bed houses” in the neighborhood, Sachs asked him what they were; he described housing for immigrants so poor they couldn’t afford an entire apartment, just a mattress within it. When Sachs sought out similar institutions in modern-day New York, she discovered a thriving “shift bed” culture in Chinatown.

“I got really interested in the fact that people live in these very small apartments, where the beds don’t have this sense of property, and started thinking about what our relationship is to . . . this mattress, which is like floating land.” She found her cast through the Lin Sing Association, a social and community organization in Chinatown, eventually working with seven performers to create a script based on their lives. “I did hours of interviews with them, then wrote a distillation of what they said that struck me as connected to these themes around beds. They taught me a lot. I didn’t realize I was going to learn so much about the Cultural Revolution.”

At one point in “Your Day Is My Night,” one of Sachs’s subjects, Chung Qing Che, recalls sleeping on a stone bed over a cooking fire in 1947 when he was roused by Maoist forces, who looted the family’s belongings and beat his father, who died shortly thereafter. Several scenes later, Sachs interweaves the documentary interviews into a dramatized narrative in which another character, Huang Yun Xiu, goes missing, having been urged to leave his comfort zone of Chinatown and visit the Manhattan Bridge. Like most of the material in “Your Day Is My Night,” the episode has its roots in a real experience, when Huang left Chinatown, panicked on the subway and vowed never to venture out of the neighborhood again.

“They can all thrive in their world and not speak a word of English,” Sachs said. “I did some shooting for the film at the Metropolitan Museum, at an exhibition they had from the Forbidden Palace, and I took two of the women up there; they had maybe been to that neighborhood once.”

For Sachs, who has made most of her films in such far-flung places as Cambodia, Israel, Japan and Argentina, making a movie set in the hermetic world of Chinatown has had the unlikely effect of opening up her own experience of New York. “This film is three subway stops from my house, and it’s expanded my world in such an amazing way,” Sachs said. “Just the other day I saw [one of the performers] from the film on the subway. I had seen him once before by chance, and both times we gave each other an enormous hug and he said, ‘I love you,’ because it’s one phrase he knows in English. All of a sudden we know each other, and we easily could have passed each other a hundred times.”

Your Day Is My Night

At the National Gallery of Art on Sunday at 2 p.m. Free admission. Call 202-842-6979 or visit www.nga.gov.

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