| Alive from Off Center / Alive TV | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | various |
| Country of origin | USA |
| Language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 12 |
| Production company(s) | Twin Cities Public Television |
| Broadcast | |
| Original run | 1984 – 1996 |
Alive from Off Center, renamed to Alive TV in 1992,[1] was an American arts anthology television series aired by PBS between 1984 and 1996.[2][3][4]
Each week, the series featured experimental short films by a mixture of up-and-coming and established directors. Notable installments included As Seen on TV, starring comic actor Bill Irwin as an auditioning dancer who becomes trapped in a television, wandering among daytime dramas, MTV, and PBS's own Sesame Street, and the atmospheric puppet melodrama Street of Crocodiles, adapted by the Brothers Quay from the Bruno Shultz story.
Other installments included Dances in Exile directed by Howard Silver, a recorded dance piece with text by David Henry Hwang and choreography by Ruby Shang; and another directed by Jonathan Demme.
Arguably the series' best-known episode was What You Mean We? a short film written by, directed by, and starring Laurie Anderson and aired in 1986. Anderson later came back to host the final season of the series in 1987, assisted by "The Clone", a masculine version of Anderson created by digitally altering her image and obscuring her voice that had been introduced in What You Mean We?