Healing Waters Film and Dancing Without Steps: The Art of Improvisation with Margaret Beals – Online for 24 Hours and In-Person at 5PM

Saturday, June 10, 2023 @ 5:00pm

NJ Film Festival
71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

After this content becomes available June 10th at 12:00 am EDT, you'll have 23 hours 59 minutes to start watching. Once you begin, you'll have 24 hours to finish watching.

Healing Waters Film – Derek Johnson and Ali Scattergood (

Linda Troeller is an art documentarian who is known for creating sensual images inside sublime water environments that were inspired by her childhood exposure to the healing powers of water. In this biographical film, we discover the intimate relationships between water, the female gaze, and a resident artist from the Hotel Chelsea. Healing Waters explores Linda's work with key figures in the art industry who examine her as a valued contributor to the first-generation feminists movement. This film depicts the journey of a world-renowned artist from conception to discovery and the manifestation of major works of art that have had a profound influence on social ideologies concerning water and healing around the world. Linda Troeller has lived for over two decades in the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. Her work has appeared extensively in galleries and in print. In Healing Waters, we will discover how she found success as an artist and come to understand the journey she has undertaken - a journey that continues today. 2023; 70 min.

Dancing Without Steps: The Art of Improvisation with Margaret Beals – Adriana Davis (New York, New York)

Join acclaimed dance innovator, Margaret Beals, in her exploration of the art of improvisation. In this short documentary, Ms. Beals demonstrates the power and authenticity of improvisation as performance and also as a tool of discovery for any creative endeavor. Throughout Dancing Without Steps, audiences are offered glimpses of Ms. Beals’ extensive career in improvisational dance. One of the first solo dancers to perform whole concerts without steps, she started her early career in the free-wheeling atmosphere of the 1960's club and cabaret scene and continued her pioneering journey through five more decades. In this film, Ms. Beals draws from various artists to give fuller context to her thoughts on improvisation. Keith Jarrett, renowned jazz pianist, reveals insights into his own creative process. The action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the powerful black and white abstractions of Franz Kline are used to further illustrate Ms. Beals’ ideas and techniques. Also included are brief excerpts from the works of the great modern dance choreographer Martha Graham and the celebrated dance/theatre choreographer Valerie Bettis. Meredith Monk, award-winning composer, singer and creator of music-theater-film works, gives an insightful introduction to this latest documentary from Impulses Dance Theatre Arts, Inc. The company's previous award-winning film, Impulses (1974) gave audiences their first experience of a collaborative concert featuring improvisational artists from the different fields of music, dance and theatre. Dancing Without Steps expresses the principles that animate Ms. Beals’ art while offering her experiences of improvisation to a new generation of dancers and artists from all disciplines. 2022; 25 min.