‘Daytripper’ Is A ‘Lyrical Modern Silent Film’ By ABT’s James Whiteside
The film, to be streamed online, is part of April's 3rd Annual ALL ARTS Festival, which also includes work by Diana Oh.
Two men serendipitously meet and fall in love on a beautiful summer day in Fire Island Pines. That’s the dream of many a visitor to New York’s famous out-of-the-way gay getaway.
It’s also the premise of Daytripper, a new “lyrical modern silent film” created by James Whiteside, the gay American Ballet Theatre principal dancer and choreographer also known as drag performer JbDubs, who developed the work in collaboration with Korean-American filmmaker Kylie Juggert.
Daytripper stars Lloyd Knight, principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, and Jake Tribus, artistic associate with Gibney Company.
The film will have its national premiere when it streams through ALL ARTS on Sunday, April 23, at 10:55 p.m.
Daytripper is the last of four film projects debuting in April on the streaming platform, launched in 2019 by New York’s WNET Group of PBS stations to provide broader access to, and build new audiences for, the arts, with a special focus on art and artists deemed innovative, avant-garde, or experimental.
The works were all developed as part of the 3rd Annual ALL ARTS Artist-in-Residence Festival in collaboration with the New York City performance space HERE.
The festival, says ALL ARTS senior director James King, “allows us to support emerging and established artists as they expand their practice and experiment with new mediums. We are delighted to partner with HERE to bring these four films from our talented 2023 cohort to a national audience this spring.”
Apart from Daytripper, the remaining works all debut at 8 p.m. on respective Sundays, with the series kicking off with Oh Family Concert, an intimate concert of original music from Diana Oh.
Known for their genre-defying work celebrating queer, trans, and nonbinary people and as a member of the indie-rock band The U.S. Open, Oh performs in front of seven decades of their family in this concert film, directed by jb and Sarah Shin with assistance from Oh, characterized as a moving tribute to their mother June, and showing how their latest music, art, and personal storytelling projects deepened their relationship to the woman who came to the U.S. after the Korean War. (Now streaming)
The series also includes:
Whiteness, an experimental work, written, composed, and performed by multidisciplinary musician Paul Pinto with video and direction by Kameron Neal and cinematography by jb/Zanni Productions, described as an “inner dialogue on self-identification [that] features a series of chants, rants, and songs reflecting the silliness, severity, and anxieties of skin color performed by a chorus of harmonizing floating heads.” (Now streaming)
A Meal Dream Portraits, a film by the Colombian-Japanese duo of multimedia artists Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya and featuring music by Nao Sakamoto, described as “a personal meditation on food through a visual poem of enigmatic landscapes, ambiguous bodies, and mythical characters [that] hints at society’s post-industrial relationship to food.” (4/16)
Works from the first two seasons of the ALL ARTS Artist-in-Residence series are also available for streaming anytime to subscribers of the platform, including the work that launched it all in 2021, Whitman in the Woods, a drag performance film exploring Walt Whitman’s poetry from the contemporary queer iconoclastic artist and performer Taylor Mac.
Other notable films in the series include Matthew Whitaker: About Tomorrow, an autobiographical film from the eponymous jazz pianist; The Roll Call: The Roots to Strange Fruit, a “sonic opera” from Obie-winning artist and performer Jonathan McCrory, who is also a queer Black D.C. native; There is no movement without rhythm, an exploration of music from the African diaspora by multimedia artist Le’Andra LeSeur; and Volvo Truck and the Girls from Up the Hill, an impressionistic performance film from DonChristian Jones.
Visit www.ALLARTS.org, search for the ALL ARTS app on all major platforms, or see @ALLARTSTV on social channels.
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