Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s Trance and Dance in Bali + Neil Gordon Munro, Takeshi Kashiwagi, and Kyosuke Kindaichi’s Iyomande: The Ainu Bear Festival
Tuesday, February 10, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Trance and Dance in Bali, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, 1951, 16mm, 22 mins
Iyomande: The Ainu Bear Festival, Neil Gordon Munro, Takeshi Kashiwagi, and Kyosuke Kindaichi, 1965, 16mm, 26 mins

One of the foundational works of ethnographic cinema, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s Trance and Dance in Bali remains an emotionally gripping and formally inventive attempt to depict altered states of consciousness through cinematic means. In condensing and translating a mass ritual performed in the village of Pagoeton, many hours long, into a digest of under half an hour, the filmmakers employ innovative techniques of montage and slow motion to analyze the movements and expressions of performers as they dance ecstatically, each pressing the tips of sinuous kris daggers against their bare chests, and donning fantastical costumes depicting witches and dragons to act out legendary tales. Their film grew out of an unprecedented audio-visual survey undertaken in Bali, for which the couple generated tens of thousands of feet of 16mm film and a similarly staggering number of photographs; parts of this archive were featured in Bateson and Mead’s 1942 publication Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, as well as a series of short documentaries edited by Mead called Character Formation in Different Cultures, which includes Trance and Dance. The film has been critiqued extensively by later anthropologists: though the dance is presented as traditional and timeless, the filmmakers and performers altered and introduced many elements for the sake of the shoot—a nighttime ritual, for instance, staged during the day for lighting purposes—and the brutal Dutch colonialism that framed this social exchange is never acknowledged. Trance and Dance nonetheless had a profound influence on the American avant-garde, notably inspiring Maya Deren in her own development of the trance film; Deren approached the Balinese footage not so much as scientific truth but as a visceral exploration of choreography, chance, and the sacred. After watching footage that would become the film in the late 1940s, Deren wrote in her diary: “The minute I began to put the Balinese film through the viewer, the fever began.”

Far more obscure but no less delirious in its ultimate design, Iyomande: The Ainu Bear Festival provides a rare look at the emergence of Japanese ethnographic film before World War II, a period when numerous documentaries were made about the indigenous people of northern Japan, many by Western researchers. Iyomande was produced by Scottish physician Neil Gordon Munro, who lived in an Ainu-majority village in Hokkaido from 1930 to his death in 1942, operating a medical clinic, chronicling the local culture and, at times, denouncing the Japanese government for its harsh and condescending treatment of the indigenous minority. In 1930, Munro shot 35mm footage of one of Ainu culture’s most important ceremonies—the iyomante rimse, in which a bear is ritually sacrificed over a two-week festival. By the early 20th century, the rite seemed in imminent danger of extinction, and Munro carefully relayed its elaborate procedures, costuming, and dramaturgy. Several versions of his iyomante documentary exist, edited during and after his lifetime; the version screening this evening was compiled in 1965 by Takeshi Kashiwagi and Kyosuke Kindaichi on the occasion of the Tokyo Olympics, for which they added Munro’s previously unseen images of daily village life, a new English voiceover, and Munro’s recordings of Ainu songs not included in earlier cuts, music that induces, through its mesmeric repetition, an altered state of its own.

Image: Pagoetan, Bali; 8 February 1939; Gregory Bateson, photographer. Published in Balinese Character, plate 56, figure 8.

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Light Industry is supported by our members and, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as the Mellon Foundation through the Coalition of Small Arts New York. Public assistance is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

2026 Light Industry Benefit
Saturday, February 28, 6:30-10pm
Zoli, 312 Maujer Street, Brooklyn

Tickets available here.

Light Industry has the honor of hosting the debut performance by an extraordinary trio of: Zeena Parkins, Ikue Mori, and Ka Baird. This will be followed by another premiere of sorts: a preview dinner in Zoli’s private room, overseen by our generous host, Chef Ned Baldwin. The setting, for the music as well as the meal, is his ambitious new venture, soon to open as part of the Amant campus, right around the corner from our space. Many may already know Baldwin as the chef behind the beloved restaurant Houseman.

The proceeds from this event, as rare and special an evening as we could conceive, will support another year of screenings at Light Industry. And we encourage you to grab your tickets while you can, as seating is more limited than at some of our past gatherings.

6:30 - Drinks

7:00 - Performance

Zeena Parkins: Electric Harp
Ikue Mori: Electronics
Ka Baird: Voice, Flutes, Electronics

8:00 - Dinner

Special thanks to Jeff Preiss and Amy Sillman.

Above: Weegee, Elizabeth Taylor, c. 1950