Several years ago, Maurice Sendak and the Pilobolus Dance Theatre collaborated on a piece about the Holocaust called "A Selection." "As the artistic director of his own theater company, the Night Kitchen, Mr. Sendak, the author, illustrator, costume and set designer, is a spinner of dark visionary fairy tales that are at once wondrous and scary. His starkly expressionistic style of storytelling is much more blatantly illustrative than the semiabstract, mime-influenced, acrobatically virtuosic work of Pilobolus. One of the thrills of the movie is watching the improvisatory trial-and-error process as the dancers explore psychological themes, contorting their graceful, amazingly limber bodies into visual representations of relationships and emotional states.... The final scenes of [this intimate documentary] are excerpts from a finished work that is so strong that it renders such [stylistic] debates moot. They show how the synergy of movement, lighting, costumes, scenic design and music (much of it composed by Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas, who were interned in Terezin and died in the Holocaust), blend into a moving dance-theater experience that transcends theoretical quibbles. Pilobolus will be performing live at the State Theatre on Friday night as part of the Light in Winter Festival.
2002, color, 1 hour 24 minutes, USA