HORROR DREAM 1946

Marian Van Tuyl was founder of Mills College’s Dance Department (the second of its kind in the US) and the founder/editor of the IMPULSE journal, which was one of the first periodicals dedicated to dance scholarship. Van Tuyl met filmmaker Sidney Peterson (founder of the seminal SFAI film program) during the Art in Cinema screening series, which was foundational for catalyzing the creation and community of avant-garde film. 

Van Tuyl and Peterson collaborated on two films. The first was Horror Dream, a rework of a live work featuring an innovative use of camera placement which disorients the viewer in the space  and evokes a feeling of sleep paralysis (amplified by an early John Cage score).

The second collaboration between Van Tuyl and Peterson, Clinic of Stumble, experiments with the choreographic possibility of double-exposed choreography, highlighting movements that create a unique counterpoint between movement and showing the potential for choreography specific to the screen space.