Snowy Bing Bongs

Snowy Bing Bongs across the North Star Combat Zone” is the kind of film words cannot possibly describe. Not because it’s bad, or because there’s nothing to say, but doing so feels inadequate. It’s a film that is simultaneously overflowing with ingenuity and talent that is constantly teetering dangerously close to the maligned qualities of what we might call twee, and yet that is only half of it.

The brilliant and bizarre Cocoon Central Dance Team presents their totally batshit feature film at this special Brooklyn Comedy Festival screening. This blissfully bonkers whatzit from unclassifiable dance-comedy trio Cocoon Central Dance Team is part psychotropic performance art spectacle, part absurdist sketch show. The three Bing Bongs—Tallie Medel, Sunita Mani & Eleanore Pienta—lounge about, pass gas, and periodically break into wondrously strange dance routines, with outer space interludes, a serious consideration of doctor boners, and a 90s-style girl group meltdown along the way. It all plays like a live action cartoon piped in from a cotton-candy-colored alternate universe.

Three years before they set Sundance abuzz with Swiss Army Man, the duo known as Daniels made their name with a much-watched video for "Turn Down for What," in which Sunita Mani (GLOW, Mr. Robot) had something of a dance-battle with Daniel Kwan's puppet-animated erection. No stranger to unconventional dance routines, Mani was already part of a trio called the Cocoon Central Dance Team, friends of Daniels from back in college. Now the gents have exec-utive produced CCDT's big-screen debut, Snowy Bing Bongs, in which directors Rachel Wolther and Alex H. Fischer adapt the New York troupe's stage show (full title: Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone) for unsuspecting moviegoers. Hard to define but made for the Adult Swim generation, the film will find admirers on the fest circuit and should lead to more offbeat opportunities for performance artists who, among other things, have already been responsible for the kickoff of the 2013 New York Marathon.

“Snowy Bing Bong” co-director Alex H. Fischer also went to Emerson with the Daniels and the Cocoon Central Dance Team and loved the insanity of their work. “They were all in the improve comedy troupe and made these bizarre videos, all of which were shitty except the one Daniel Scheinert made,” said Fischer. “I use to think, ‘man I wish I could just let them do their insane stuff and I could find a way to shoot it well.”

There’s also a stop motion sequence, a montage through an asteroid belt, and a fourth wall breaking denouement in which the lights come up and the Bing Bongs hold a Q&A with an audience, and even Spice Girls-esԛue dance musical performance.