Knowville

Knowville is the third experimental dance film choreographed, conceptualized, and performed by Elena Demyanenko. Knowville was developed in close collaboration with New York based Spanish visual artist Itziar Barrio, and electroacoustic composer Ivan Goff. Filmed in several abandoned industrial locations throughout New York City, Knowville is a 20-minute hallucinogenic, counterintuitive, and – at times – morbidly humorous look at a dancer whose personality becomes increasingly fragmented. In Knowville, the aesthetic of the American murder ballad provides an entry point into a world that conjures up tension, intrigue, and mystery. Death itself becomes decorative, lyrical, and aestheticized. A subgenre of the traditional ballad form, the murder ballad presents both the details and consequences of crimes of passion. The difference between this American genre and its older European model is that the former excludes supernatural elements of retribution. In Knowville, these elements of retribution are subtly reintroduced in the forms of fragmentation, estrangement, and ultimately; the self-destruction of the individual.