ROMANCE

Set in an auditorium on a Saturday morning, a group of women are learning to be romantic. Based on Miranda July's short story "It was Romance", Romance creates an illuminating meeting point between the works of July and Pina Bausch. Resulting from filmmaker Samantha Shay's Fulbright Scholarship at Tanztheater Wuppertal, and in collaboration with one of the company's youngest and first transgender dancer, Romance also centers around how Naomi Brito’s transition was inspired by her encounter with the roles of women, as she observed them, in the repertory of Pina Bausch.Shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch's iconic and aging Lichtburg rehearsal studio, this piece walks the line between fiction and reality, dance and documentary, in the same way Bausch's deeply cathartic, and often autobiographical work did. Romance is a fertile intergenerational dialogue between past, present and future, and, through a fresh and powerful encounter, assures that the power of an aging legacy is never ending.