Her next two projects were commissioned for TV as dance films. While
some of her earlier films were shown on television after they were
completed, The Reunion (1997) and The Whirlpool (1997) were conceived
for broadcasting. In The Reunion, Donald MacLeary and Lynn Seymour dance
an imagined aftermath (choreographed by Ian Spink) to their roles as
young and doomed lovers in the 1966 ballet 'The Invitation'. Here, the
ageing body and the theme of time are paramount. Shot in the as yet
unrefurbished Hackney Empire, the film is framed by an objective
placement of the viewer in the theatre, before the camera enters the
imaginary field of the dance. The Whirlpool, a 'dance spectacle' (JP),
is a short lyric psychodrama in which a swimmer is lured into danger by
the magic of light and water.
Further collaborations emerged from these projects, with Lynn Seymour in
The Reprise, 2000, and with Katharina Wolpe, the pianist seen in The
Whirlpool. A stunning result was Thinking Twice (1997), in which
Katharina Wolpe plays three pieces for piano by her father, the composer
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), the first of which is called "Piece of
Embittered Music", (from the Zemach Suite). The sardonic title is
characteristic of this experimental, argumentative and influential
musician. In parallel with the stripped and spartan music, and its
fierce intensity, Parker strips the rich colour sequences of her TV
films down to black and white in deep tones. In its lucid editing of
piano keys in motion, and especially in close up shots of the pianist's
hands and face, Parker "attempts to reflect the rigour of the music"
(JP). Although she is a highly subjective filmmaker in her personal
themes, and in linking ideas that are embodied in the physical world,
Thinking Twice seems to draw out her classicism in its formal shaping of
visual concepts.
Wolpe's music evokes directly the world of radical modernism in which he
spent his life as an itinerant avant-garde composer and refugee, in
Europe, Palestine and the USA between and after the two world wars.
Along with John Cage he was a formative figure in the rise of the 'New
York School' of composers in the 1950s and 1960s. In a series of short
films made with the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, Parker took further the
filming of post-serial music based on this legacy.
