Last Man at Willow Run

Last Man at Willow Run is an elegiac tone poem for the post-industrial age, shot in the Willow Run Bomber Plant just months before its demolition. A lone figure maps the cavernous spaces of the abandoned plant with his dancing body. The camera charts his progress down mile-long corridors, as he wrestles with forgotten spirits and is cloned into assembly lines of workers past. Set to Richard Strauss's dramatic yet non-narrative orchestral score, Death and Transfiguration, the work has a tragic, ironic edge. It embodies the final throes of an American Dream. Sparling, former principal dancer with Martha Graham and award-winning screendance maker, edits his own performance into an epic-scale memorial.