There are at least 7.7 billion ways to dine. This is one of them. On a winter night in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven friends meet to share a meal and one another’s company. The story is told through gestures and text, without dialogue, and no faces are shown. Text interrupts the narrative, including the derivations of some really old English words that relate to food and to gathering in the evening.
The short film, Exordium (co-written, co-directed, and co-produced by VCFA Writing graduate, Kevin McLellan (1999) and Laura Knott, graduate of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT) will appear in the Cadence: Video Poetry Festival run by the Northwest Film Forum. Due to the COVID-19 crisis the festival has been moved online. The film will show on Saturday, April 18th at 10:30 pm EST in the “Better Left Unsaid” showcase, https://nwfilmforum.org/films/cadence-2020-better-left-unsaid-video-poetry-showcase-online/?fbclid=IwAR3ubjjvxHdDM8ZDh40JHe7g_XV7NGQ3bvJ0-XF0I0QXFi4o8yE1CMygkGU
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Laura Knott is a curator, editor, and author, Laura Knott specializes in work created at the intersections of art and technology. She has had an active art career as well, with presentations of her work at the documenta exhibition, on public television, and in venues ranging from the California desert to a revolving door on the MIT campus. A graduate of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Laura studied environmental art and performance with Otto Piene and took every film and video course offered at the Media Lab by Ricky Leacock and Glorianna Davenport. Laura was trained as a choreographer. She was the first dance graduate of Duke University, where she also studied political science and international relations. In 1998, she created Worldwide Simultaneous Dance, in which dancers danced at the same time in 11 countries around the world, live streamed.
Kevin McLellan is the author of Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, 2019), Ornitheology (The Word Works, 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems appear in numerous literary journals including Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, and Witness. Also, with Laura Knott, he co-wrote and co-directed the short experimental film titled, Exordium which was selected for Cadence: Video Poetry Festival 2020. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and you can find out more about him here: https://kevmclellan.com/