The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller

So it’s official: we’re going to be screening/performing THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER as part of the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland this September.  TBA is the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s annual performance festival, and I’ve had a few conversations w/ the curators over the years about screening something there. This is the first time it’s worked out, and I’m really thrilled. The lineup is a very interesting mix of dance, performance, and Laurie Anderson! This is actually a dream context for me to screen LOVE SONG.

The night before TBA we’ll be screening the film in Seattle at the historic Moore Theater. This is a show we set up w/ a rock promoter there, so it’ll be a totally different vibe. One of the most interesting things about this ‘live documentary’ biz is getting to slide between genres with the piece and see how much the screening context shapes an audience’s expectations and experience.

I’m booking a lot of shows for the fall and will post details here as plans develop.

Images: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, John Wiseman via Flickr; Moore Theater Interior, Bob Cerelli via STG Presents

Photo by Pamela Gentile, Courtesy San Francisco Film Society

So the world premiere of THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER went super well—better than I could have hoped! We did two screenings of the piece on May 1st at the SFMOMA. Both were sold out and there was a lot of energy in the theater. Yo La Tengo and I had been running the piece for several days and had a pretty good handle on it, but still… I was nervous as hell. That’s one of the interesting things about live cinema, you never know how a piece is working until you do it for people. Do the music and images work together? Are the jokes actually funny? Does the timing feel right? These are all questions that only an audience can answer. I was really pleased and hugely relieved by the response. It seems like the piece works. Georgia and Ira and James were happy about it too.

Here are a couple of articles about LOVE SONG’s premiere: San Francisco Chronicle & Filmmaker Magazine

I’m excited to now start setting up screenings for the fall. The first one I can confirm is the TBA Festival in Portland, OR on September 12, 2012—looking forward to it already!

And then here’s another great response. One of the Facebook trillionaires posted these nice words about the film last week; I hadn’t known that he was in the audience!