Actor Tami Stronach said making The Neverending Story when she was 10 inspired the rest of her artistic career, including her new film, Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps, in theaters Sunday and Tuesday only.
Man and Witch is a fantasy adventure like the 1984 film in which Stronach played the Childlike Empress of Fantasia.
“I really credit The Neverending Story for inspiring me to be an artist, for inspiring me to make things,” Stronach, 51, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “It was a story that said, ‘Go make things. Go be creative.’ I really took that mandate seriously.” Stronach has been mostly off-screen in the 40 years since The Neverending Story was released. She danced with Neta Pulvermacher and Monica Bill Barnes dance companies before starting her own Tami Stronach Dance Company.
She also performed theater with Flying Machine Theater Company in the Soho section of New York City. Stronach’s husband, Greg Steinbruner, wrote Man and Witch to encourage her to return to film acting.
Stronach plays the witch, who assigns a goatherd (Steinbruner) three impossible tasks in return for her love spell. She said it was fitting to return in another fantasy film like Neverending Story and her favorite film, The Princess Bride. “Fantasy is this genre where we can tackle big philosophical questions in a whimsical way that’s full of hope,” she said. “So we can examine dark things, but there’s always light alongside of it.”
In Neverending Story, Bastian (Barrett Oliver) reads the story of Fantasia while hiding from bullies. The story of Atreyu’s (Noah Hathaway) quest to save the kingdom bore lessons about coping with Bastian’s life struggles.
Forty years later, Man and Witch uses a kingdom full of ogres and talking animals to address issues of love and social status. Stronach wanted viewers to know that Man and Witch presents a diverse kingdom with people of color and LGBTQ characters.
“We’re just trying to present a fantasy world the way the real world is,” she said. “It’s full of lots of people.” The central story is about the goatherd looking for love. The witch purports to help, but the quests on which she sends him range from lifting legendarily heavy objects to learning The Dance of a Thousand Steps. The Dance of a Thousand Steps enabled Stronach to apply her choreography skills, with help from choreographer Chase Brock. The dance in Man and Witch is far different from her professional dance days.