Case Studies from the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders

A collaboration with BodyVox dance company.

Director, Writer, Editor: Mitchell Rose

Choreographers: Ashley Roland, Jamey Hampton

Producers: Ashley Roland, Jamey Hampton, Mitchell Rose

Performers:
Mitchell Rose
Leslie Braverman
Eric Oglesbee
Ashley Roland
Jamey Hampton

Director of Photography: C.E. Courtney

Composers: David Dorfman, Robert Een, John Smith

Screenings:

New Orleans Film Festival—First Prize
WorldFest Houston—First Prize
Ashland Independent Film Festival—First Prize
International Short Film Festival Berlin—Audience Award
AFI Fest 2002
South by Southwest
Atlanta Film Festival
Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center, NYC
Hamburg International Short Film Festival
interfilm Berlin
Munich International Short Film Festival
Short Cuts Cologne
Dances With Films
Maryland Film Festival
Woodstock Film Festival
American Choreography Award—nominee

Director's Statement:

Though I had segued from choreographing to filmmaking in 1991, a grant two years ago allowed me to revisit dance and create a series of dance-films called Modern Daydreams with Portland, OR-based dance company BodyVox. “Case Studies” is the sixth film I have now made with BodyVox.

I remember a friend of mine years ago participating in a sleep study in which he was photographed every fifteen minutes from a camera above. I thought the photographs, and the series I saw of other participants in the study, was intriguing and the images stayed with me.

When BodyVox called me earlier this year to commission a new piece, they said that the theme of the performance in which the film would be featured was animation. Various artists from the world of animation, Matt Groening and others, were going to all contribute elements. Somehow those sleep study photographs leapt from my unconscious and combined with the notion of animation. I immediately envisioned a stop-motion animation of a bed dance, the final “case study” of the film, and the rest of the piece was constructed around that idea.

The bed dance is a series of 500 photographs that change at the rate of six per second, with the performers adjusting position by a few inches in each shape. (They both got skin burns from their silk pajamas as they slid to a new shape 500 times.)

Another highlight is ''Case Studies From the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders,'' a hilarious film by Mr. Rose in which he plays a subtly deranged doctor investigating the ties between disordered sleep patterns and early childhood experiences. The men and women in each of the three cases end up thrashing about through witty quasi dances filmed from above the clinic bed.
— The New York Times