Exeunt, Chased By A Polar Bear...And Cut!

Frank Hayes (no, not that Frank Hayes) is a solo dance work from Amelia Reeber featuring a foggy arctic landscape, a person rowing a small boat, and a polar bear. The piece was performed at On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival (which is currently headed into its second weekend, the 16-18, by the way) and in Portland at TBA, back in 2004.

Now, after Cthulhu, it will be the second film produced by Grant Cogswell and Daniel Gildark's Cascadia Film Collective. Cthulhu and Police Beat's cinematographer Sean Kirby and production designer Etta Lilienthal will join director Gildark to document her performance as a 15-minute-ish short film.

We ran into both Grant and Amelia while trying to catch happy hour at Liberty on Tuesday night. They were hosting a fundraiser, aiming for $6,000 to cover the film's production costs. Donors got two free drinks, choice of wine or an "arctic" guava-and-gin concoction. (If you'd like to mogul it up with some financing, call 206-599-9845 or email cfcseattle (at) yahoo.com.)

Reeber got the idea for Frank Hayes from reading a Barry Lopez book called Arctic Dreams. A theme is resiliency in the face of disaster, or change. She's also dreaming up a new project -- her plan is to recruit random people with no necessary connection to dance to tell her what they'd like to see in a dance piece, create it, and dance it for them alone. Later, she'd like to pull the stand-out pieces into a show of their own.

Cogswell, resplendent in a black suit, fingerless green gloves, and black-plastic-framed glasses, told us that while Cthulhu was in post-production, he and Gildark had been itching to get up to something new. Fans of Reeber's, they decided to keep the CFC studios at 14th and Madison humming with a filmed production of Frank Hayes. About to see a rough cut of Cthulhu, writer/producer Cogswell was sanguine about his film's prospects: "It'll make millions." Next up is a host of submissions to film festivals to snag distribution. A long way from Zioncheck for President.