A prominent filmmaker, choreographer, model, and dancer, Celia Rowlson-Hall is a power-packed artist and a Bessie Award winning performer.

Her short film, Prom Night depicts the story of a girl entering into a night filled with memorable moments from Prom. Audience members get to sit back and feel as if they are Celia’s prom date, while the entire film is shot from her date‘s point of view.

From the start, the doors open up revealing multicolor balloons and streamers covering the surfaces of the room. Inside Celia stands waiting patiently for her date in a light powder blue dress. The camera follows her to the refreshment table where Celia grabs a drink and lures her date to the middle of the dance floor. Extreme close-ups on Celia’s face shows her acting skills as she morphs between different famous characters. Images of Virgin Mary, Pamela Anderson, Lolita, Madonna and Carrie all transform and disappear within seconds. Finally she exits the room and reappears behind double doors. Now we are exiled outside the room, only able to watch her voyeuristically through the windows. Dancing by herself, the view from outside the double doors shows Celia sashaying across the dance floor evoking the phrase, “dance as if no one is watching.”  Stepping back from the windows, the prom night ends leaving nothing but Celia dancing aimlessly by herself to Be My Baby by The Ronettes.

Check out more videos of Celia Rowlson-Hall on vimeo and also check out her website.

On Sunday May 6th 2012, a crowd of 100+ people came out to The Wild Project in the East Village for a screening and dance extravaganza by the Girl Walk//All Day community.

Opening the show was a performance from by the flex group Street’s Finest with a guest appearance by Anne Marsen (star of Girl Walk//All Day). Sporting new pink hair, Anne danced fiercely along side the six guys in the group, who popped, locked, and dropped it as soon as they walked onto the stage. In black preppy outfits with red sneakers, they danced to some of today’s hottest songs including Ellie Goulding, Starry Eyed. In between each song mix, a comedic voice would transition into the next song keeping the audience members on their toes. Throughout the performance were movements of slow motion, acrobatics, tutting, and freestyle clumps. One particular moment that stood out was when one male dancer supported all of his weight from his arms while being on top of another partner’s back. The audience embraced the energy of this high energy group with their comedic styles and facial gestures. At the end everyone got to their feet to applaud this new crowd favorite. Who knows maybe we will see them on America’s Best Dance Crew?! Read the rest of this entry »

Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.

In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dance Film Association is offering its members post-production funding.

Guidelines
1. Deadline: July 1st, 2012
2. Notification: August 1st, 2012
3. Funding Available: Up to $2,500

Requirements
1. Applicant must be a member of Dance Films Association.
2. Only films that have completed shooting and are in production will be considered.
3. You may not apply if you’ve received a Post-Production Grant previously.
4. Applicants will be required to submit a link to a cut of the proposed project that is five minutes or under in length that expresses the project’s intent, scope, and aesthetic to the best of your ability at this stage. This sample may not necessarily be the first five minutes of the film.

Application
Please contact Brighid Greene brighid@dancefilms.org for access to the application.

Funding Panel

Greg Vander Veer was a cameraman for the recent film Sally Gross: The Pleasure of Stillness, about the revolutionary dancer and choreographer. He was also a cameraman on the upcoming film Lucky Dog.   For the Broadway musical,The Color Purple, Greg filmed behind-the-scenes activities for the two-year duration of the show. He is also a video contributor and co-editor of IndexMagazine.com. Greg attended Hendrix College where he received a BA for Interdisciplinary Studies: Historical Film.  He also spent one year at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia where he studied Documentary Film Production. Greg currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Check out Greg’s newest project, Keep Dancing.

A filmmaker, choreographer, and performer, Gabri Christa brings her roots from Curaçao, Dutch Caribbean to her directing and film work. Now based in New York, (via Havana, Amsterdam and Puerto Rico) she has received many distinguished awards for her Choreographies and Short Films including a Guggenheim Fellowship for her choreography.  In 2008, Gabri Christa was invited to the Pangea Day Film Festival as “One of the World’s 100 most promising Filmmakers” and her film “High School” received an ABC TV award for Creative excellence. For more info on Gabri Christa click here.

The 2nd issue of The International Journal of Screendance-Scaffolding the Medium is now available.
Scaffolding the Medium brings together a variety of historical texts within the context of screendance to both create a common knowledge base and also to support a kind of cantilevered interest. This issue opens with an edited transcript of a presentation by Professor Ian Christie in which Christie surveys a history of cinema under the title The Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented. This transcript is followed by five curated discussions on this initial idea as it relates to contemporary screendance.

Edited by Douglas Rosenberg and Claudia Kappenberg, this issue also features a report on the recent Screendance Symposium in Brighton by Claudia Kappenberg and Sarah Whatley.