Anne Waldman

Part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream, this film captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975 and the joyous music that Dylan performed during the fall of that year.

Outrider is a portal into fast-speaking poet Anne Waldman and her six decades birthing vibrant communities of poets, performers, and activists—from Greenwich Village, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and Naropa University 'Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,' onwards to Mexico City, Casablanca, and more. Guided by ancestors of the Beat generation and poetic kinships with radical female musicians—Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Cecilia Vicuña, Meredith Monk—Outrider celebrates Waldman's role as a visionary word-worker and a transcendent presence, singing out in the ancient, bardic tradition the thunderous power of poetry.

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making. Forced to confront the darkest moment in his life, he mines fractured and repressed memories for a way out. A woman is at the center of all the writer’s afterlife encounters. She is the subject of his life’s greatest regret, and she materializes everywhere in this Otherworld. The writer cannot detach any thoughts of his life from her.

A Buddhist anarchist detective thriller set in the shadows of the Lower East Side of New York City. Many greedy hands close a black market deal; a glamorous detective pursues a corporate agent with values containing danger; a rogue lab technician follows them with values containing hope; a chorus of anarchists brings sanity and peace to a world of strife and struggle. A drama of technology, erotics... and politics.

Step outside yourself, look back at yourself, whom do you see? That’s the question Bob Holman asks in his poem “Beside Myself.” A small band of Bob's friends voice the poem in alternating identities for this meditative reflection on A.I. and the life cycle of the creative process.

The confluence of words and movement propels this multi-layered collaboration by Atlas, choreographer Douglas Dunn, and poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye. Dunn's athletic choreography is performed to the rhythms, cadences, and associative meanings of the poets' "cascade of words," which function as music. Atlas introduces narrative references, ironically staging the dance in unexpected locations, including domestic interiors and vehicles. In a self-referential deconstruction that punctures the theatrical illusion, the poets are seen reading their texts and interacting as self-conscious performers within the dance. Atlas and his collaborators intersect the language of words with the language of the body.

Filmed in the autumn of 1975 prior to and during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour – featuring appearances and performances by Ronee Blakley, T-Bone Burnett, Jack Elliott, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Hawkins, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Arlen Roth, Phil Ochs, Sam Shepard, and Harry Dean Stanton – the film incorporates three distinct film genres: concert footage, documentary interviews, and dramatic fictional vignettes reflective of Dylan's song lyrics and life.

To celebrate the 100th birthday of America's most audacious writer, William S. Burroughs, Chicago Humanities Festival brings together a motley crew of poets, writers, and musicians. William Seward Burroughs (1914 - 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author whose influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs's needs took him across the United States, down into Mexico, to Europe and beyond. On his travels, he meets up with various members of the underground drug and "outcast" cultures.