“an astonishing level of visual invention”
“my face hurts from smiling”
from executive producers DANIELS
starring COCOON CENTRAL DANCE TEAM
directed by RACHEL WOLTHER & ALEX H FISCHER
“pure genius vision; brilliantly executed and deeply hilarious”
“a film that doesn’t immediately adhere to the laws of gravity”
It’s hard to know how to start talking about Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone, a 40-minute film of an indescribably comedic ballet of sorts that is about farts and beach balls and the business of show, and is possibly the most funny and delightful thing I saw all year. So about halfway through my conversation with Cocoon Central Dance Team, the trio that are its creative driving force, I do what anyone does in a moment of doubt, and invoke Beyoncé.
The comedy-dance troupe Cocoon Central Dance Team stars in this perplexing, joyous short film. It’s mostly madcap vignettes — Adult Swim-tinged sketches, some far-out dance routines, some vaguely psychedelic interludes, some animated segments. It’s hard to tell if it’s surrealism or a satire of surrealism, but it doesn’t much matter.
When locating an appropriate setting to open “Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone,” it was only natural that co-directors Alex H. Fischer and Rachel Wolther would settle for nothing less than outer space.
Hard to define but made for the Adult Swim generation, the film will find admirers on the fest circuit and should lead to more offbeat opportunities for performance artists who, among other things, have already been responsible for the kickoff of the 2013 New York Marathon.
Opening with a brassily out-of-tune rendition of Thus Spake Zarathustra and another 2001 nod or two, the film announces its eagerness to puncture pomposity, often through self-mockery. The three dancer-comedians — Mani, Tallie Medel and Eleanor Pienta — take the screen languidly in white bikinis, but moves that would usually be sexualized (applying sunscreen; rolling over, ass-toward-camera) are made grotesque with cartoonish sound FX.
Sunita Mani, Tallie Medel and Eleanore Pienta are Cocoon Central Dance Team. For the past 10 years, the comedy-dance trio has been living the dream of every young and boobless girl who rushed home from school, locked her bedroom door, stood in front of the mirror and danced her brains out to the sound of mom and dad’s weird CD collection, preferably wearing something sequin-y.
What is “Snowy Bing Bongs?” As with most projects involving “Swiss Army Man” co-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — aka “Daniels” — you kind of have to watch it. Originally performed as a stage play by the dance-comedy trio Cocoon Central Dance Team, the 40-minute film that’s “part psychotropic performance art spectacle, part absurdist sketch show” premieres at Brooklyn’s BAMcinemaFEST. Its path to that point was as unpredictable as the movie itself.
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