Archive for the ‘Kinetic Cinema’ Category

ICA KINETIC CINEMA SCREENING  

Eko & Sen Hea: A Journey Beyond

The 2010 Kinetic Cinema series kicks off with a night of dance on film curated by renowned filmmaker Carmella Vasser-Johnson.    

Wednesday, February 24 @ 7:00pm · FREE   

Institute of Contemporary Art · University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289 · 215.898.5911   

Victoria Marks & Deborah May: Mother's and Daughters

Kinetic Cinema  

is a New York based screening series that explores the intersection of dance and the moving image.  Organizer Anna Brady Nuse invites a special guest from the dance and film communities to share the films and videos that have inspired and influenced their own work.       

Note on Program from Carmella Vasser-Johnson:     

When I was first approached about sharing a program of dance films that influence and inspire the work that I produce, I was immediately reminded of a pivotal point in my career: in 1999 I joined a group of dance-media makers from across the country and Canada for a fellowship program mentored by a prestigious group of leaders in the field. Over the course of many months I worked with pioneers of dance film like Jac Venza, Merrill Brockway and Girish Bargava (of Dance in America) and with the talented and culturally diverse dancers of the UCLA community. I was enriched by the beauty of California’s ocean and mountains. My cup runneth over. I had only recently changed hats from being a dancer myself to working on the other side of the lens as a videographer/editor/producer. Through this program, I was immersed in a milieu that allowed me to see work from my colleagues and other artists from around the world, stretching my perspective on how to capture dance in two dimensions. I could not get enough of watching and dialoguing with other creators on how they approach their work.  

The films that I share with you in this program represent images, ideas and relationships from that time that remain vital for me today. My work now, as at the beginning, takes an archival or preservational approach. But I also long to see dance in everyday spaces, done by all kinds of people. Some of the selections here satisfy that wish as well.    

Photo: "Dancing Camera Girl" by Flickr user geishaboy500, used under Creative Commons License.

Attend the ‘Dance with Camera’ Exhibition before Kinetic Cinema at The Institute of Contemporary Art.

An exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features art works in film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. Screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films.  

The exhibition’s curator, Jenelle Porter, offers more than a century of filmed dance and dancing film, from the Lumière Brothers in 1896 to Flora Wiegmann dancing beside an LA freeway in 2007.  

Carmella’s Bio: 

Carmella Vassor-Johnsons’ connection to dance began as a performer having been a member of the Philadelphia Dance Company, Civic Ballet Company and Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Co.. Through her video production company Wild Child Productions, Carmella lends her sensitivity and knowledge of the craft to the arts community through the documentation of dance and the integration of media in stage works. Ms. Vassor-Johnson was awarded a Pew Fellowship for the National Dance/Media Project at the University of California (Los Angeles) and began her relationship with Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2000 as resident videographer and editor. She has produced four educational documentaries for this prestigious organization. She co-directed, with Marlene Millar and Philip Szporer, the documentaries Eko & Sen Hea: A Journey Beyond, World Tea Party, part of the feature-length World Festival of Sacred Music for PBS-Los Angeles, Creating Across Cultures, commissioned by the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, and Standing at the Edge, We Dance for WYBE-PBS Philadelphia. Her other credits include the experimental video, Endangered Species, an adaptation of the stage work created and performed by hip hop pioneer Rennie Harris, and Quasi Normal, which follows choreographer Susanna Linke as she creates a new work for Jeanne Ruddy Dance. Her documentaries and experimental work have been broadcast on public television and have screened throughout the country including at the Festival of Independents (Philadelphia) and Dance and Camera Festival (New York).  

Announcing Movement Media’s YouTube Channel: FilmingDance4web Video Dance Channel

Featuring Artistic Video dances made by amazing choreographers, dancers, video artists, film directors, dance companies, and beginning film makers interested in making dance for camera.   

Join Our Videodance Community of Artists by sharing your work with us.

Choreographer, Christine Soriano. Photo by Rex Miller

Types of videos featured on Video Dance Channel: 

• Dance Installations from Museums 
• Works created for Video Art Festivals
• Dance Films featured in Dance Film Festivals
• Urban Dance Projects
• Dance Company Artists: Choreography and Movement for Camera
• Creative Stories and Video Art developed by Artists from across the Globe.  
• Flashmob Dance Videos
• Dance ‘Webisodes’
• Silly, ‘Just for fun videos’
• Videos by Emerging Artists within the Videodance Community

Movement Media helps Emerging Film Artists develop creative projects.  

Photo by Lois Greenfield

• Attend our Meet-up Groups to Practice Filming Dance (dates and locations to be announced in up-coming weeks).  
• Your videos can be featured on our channel for viewing, feedback, and discussion by artists in the videodance community.  

Your videodance may be:

• featured on our Video Dance Channel 
• chosen for our Kinetic Cinema Screenings,
• or showcased at our annual UMove Online Videodance Festival

 

Movement Media also offers services to help dance companies, choreographers and other artists develop work for film festivals, art installations, and other film projects. 

Urban Playground Quartet at the Awesome Arts Festival

• After the touring of your work, we would be happy to feature your work in Movement Media’s Kinetic Cinema Screenings or for other educational purposes. 

• If you would like to work with Movement Media on a dance film, contact us at movementmedia@pentacle.org  

For our final Kinetic Cinema on Wednesday December 9th, dance filmmaker Jody Oberfelder will present a humorous and provocative survey of the global impact of YouTube and how dance artists can best use this platform to showcase and further their art.

Makers and marketers alike have been fascinated with how to make videos massively popular and ‘go viral’ on the web since the birth of YouTube.  For her Kinetic Cinema program, Oberfelder will explore this phenomenon and hypothesize how dancers can make their videos be seen by thousands or even millions of viewers.  In her survey, Oberfelder will present an array of stunning clips ranging from hilarious “fail’ videos, bloopers, video-blogging, and a few dance-centric films, to explore content that captures our attention– what gets the most hits and why?

In conjunction with this Kinetic Cinema screening, Movement Media has posted a challenge to our audience and readers to create a viral video of your own (see our previous post: Viral Videos on YouTube!!). The person whose video receives the most hits on YouTube by December 9th will have their video screened at Kinetic Cinema and receive a special prize.

In addition to YouTube, Movement Media and Oberfelder will discuss how dancers and video artists can enhance the reach of their work by submitting their videos to blogs (such as MovetheFrame.com),  screenings (such as Kinetic Cinema), and online festivals (such as the UMove Videodance Festival).

About Jody Oberfelder’s Dance for Camera: Artistic Works
Jody’s dance films have been shown in New York City at HBO Studios, Dance Theater Workshop’s “Captured” series, Tribeca’s VisionFest, and at the Walter Reid Theater in the Dance on Camera Festival; elsewhere in the U.S. at the American Dance Festival’s “Dancing for the Camera,” Dance Camera West, and at the San Diego-Tijuana DANCEonFILM Festival 2009; as well as abroad at Cinedans (Audience Choice Award), EDIT2009 in Budapest, Milano Doc Festival, the Zodiac Center in Helsinki, and OUTVIDEO in Russia. This spring Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects mounts HEADS or TALES, an eccentric retrospective celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects, to be premiered at the Abrons Arts Center (Henry Street Settlement) March 11-13, 2010.

About Kinetic Cinema
Kinetic Cinema is a co-presentation of The Tank and Pentacle’s Movement Media project, and happens on the second Wednesday of each month. Kinetic Cinema explores the intersection of dance and the moving image. For each screening Anna Brady Nuse, Pentacle’s director of Movement Media, invites a different guest artist from the fields of dance and media arts to share a selection of films and videos that have inspired them. These could be works for screen that feature dance, are kinetic-based, or have been influential on their work in some way. The guest curators come from a range of backgrounds as performers, choreographers, critics, video artists, and film-makers.

For more info on Pentacle’s Movement Media Project and news about Kinetic Cinema, please visit our blog: Move the Frame and our website: http://pentacle.org/movement_media.asp

I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube for YouTube

Curated by Jody Oberfelder

Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 7:30pm
Tickets: $10
Reservations: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/91392

The Tank
354 West 45th Street
New York, NY 10036
212.563.6269
Directions

*A co-presentation of Pentacle’s Movement Media and The Tank

As an experiment in exploring what makes a video go viral on YouTube, Movement Media is offering a Viral Video Contest.

Do you think you have what it takes to create a ‘video response’ to a popular dance video?

We challenge dance artists to try their hand at going viral on YouTube!

In case you’re not aware of the phenomenon of viral videos, this is an excellent opportunity to learn more.

Often, people who create ‘video responses’ attract THOUSANDS of viewers, and Movement Media wants to see how many ‘hits’ you can get with your video by participating in this contest!

We have chosen a dance video that has already gone viral, so you can make your own version of the video, to put up “side-by-side” online with the original version.  This means that you also have the chance to be viewed by hundreds or thousands of viewers…..possibly making your video as popular as the original video!!!

The winner of the contest will be announced and have his or her video screened at the “I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube for YouTube” Kinetic Cinema screening in NYC on December 9th.  Following the screening, Movement Media will also post the winner’s video on our blog, Move the Frame to help give your video even more exposure to viewing audiences.

The video we have chosen for Contest participants to create a video response to is:

YouTube Viral Video:  ‘Decale Gwada Blondinette (Vitesse Normale)‘

How to participate in the Contest:

• Make a 30 sec video response to this YouTube Viral Dance video.
• Upload your video response to YouTube, send the link and your contact information to:  movementmedia@pentacle.org by December 8th 2009.
• Whom ever gets the most hits with their video response between Thanksgiving (November 26th) and Dec 8th wins the contest!
• The sooner you upload your video response to YouTube, the easier it will be to increase the number of viewers or ‘hits’.

The winner is welcome to attend the Kinetic Cinema screening on December 9th, to discuss the results of this ‘YouTube experiment’.

The winner will also get free admission to our next Kinetic Cinema screening, and a handy book: “YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts” by Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean. 

When we post the winner’s video on our blog, Move the Frame, we will share what the winner did to help make his or her video go viral on YouTube.

Up Next at Kinetic Cinema:

I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube for YouTube

Curated by Jody Oberfelder

Wednesday, December 9, 2009, 7:30pm

Tickets: $10

Bring your friends and family to Kinetic Cinema!  Enjoy the Contest winner’s video and learn from dance film maker, Jody Oberfelder, about how videos become extremely popular and “Go Viral” online.

For her Kinetic Cinema program, LIQUID FILMS, cinedance pioneer, Amy Greenfield, takes dance into the water in a splash of amazing classic and neo cine-dance from 1903 to the 21st century, to transform the very nature of dance as only a screen medium can. Anna Brady Nuse interviewed Amy to find out why this theme, “Liquid”  excites her:

Liquid is sexy and always in motion and catches the light. It dances. And I found over the years so many liquid cinedances I love and feel connected to because of my own film “Tides”. And I thought how great it would be to see them all flow together.

Tides

They break boundaries which I feel still need to be broken in the field – there’s no way you can take dance and a camera into the water and not have kinetic cinema. And the definition of dance itself changes, becomes re-united with natural movement and at the same time transformed in the liquid flow, breaking totally with a tradition of dance vocabulary. All of these qualities are wonderful for cinematic material – they deal with color and light in relation to the body in motion on a cinematic level – a dynamic, unpredictable flow for both dance and camera. I feel that too much screen dance is static, and flat and unaware of the essence of cinema, which is light in motion, and how it can replace the third dimension with a transposed heightened plasticity.

“Nymph Of The Waves” was one of the first liquid cinedances, and is now an early film classic, and was perhaps the first use of a superimposition in the history of cinema. The connection was made right at the beginning, because it was a natural fit. One of Isadora Duncan’s great sources of inspiration was the movement of the ocean, but only with cinema could dance and the rhythms and motion and world of water come together and be communicated.

Your program spans the entire history of cinema. How have technological changes affected filmmakers’ treatment of this subject – water and the moving body?

To me what’s marvelous is what we do with the technology we have. Technology itself changes the kinds of films we can make but not the quality.

Yet it’s wonderful that now an individual filmmaker can successfully shoot with a light portable video camera of high enough quality underwater for a not staggering price tag. When Reifenstahl made the diving sequence from “Olympia” she had to invent technology to shoot it – gigantic cameras with a gigantic crew. But here are underwater dance films being made one-on-one, and we feel the intimacy, as in “Rapt”. And Elle Burchill can be the filmmaker and underwater dancer herself, an autobiographic cinedance. And Ben Dolphin shoots digitally with the high speed Phantom camera which can create slower than slow motion, a camera he uses for shooting TV commercials, here used for an experimental, personal cinedance.

In your film, “Tides”, the choreography of the camera is as integrated as the movement of the body being filmed. How did you direct this duet and then shape it in the editing?

I’d worked with Hilary Harris before in my film “Element” which is the mate to “Tides”. By the time we made “Tides” we almost communicated by osmosis, because we had “Element” as a basis. In “Tides” I wanted him with the Lo Cam handheld, actually standing in the waves himself, experiencing the same movement I was subjected to. And unless the film ran out or I ran out of steam we couldn’t stop, so the communion could build. The physical set-up worked in relation to communicating some key kinetic concepts: the extreme slow-motion, the movement of the camera in flow and counterflow to the human motion, and never losing the essential kinetic point of tension, where the body and ocean met. After the first shoot, looking at and discussing the film rushes became paramount -my pointing out “I want more of that, but more like this” or “I don’t want that” etc. Sometimes I directed with my hands – one hand the human motion, the other hand the camera motion, moving the hands as I wanted the two to symbiotically relate. This sense came from the fact that I had a film image going on on automatic inside my head while I was performing. So when I saw some kind of correspondence in the actual footage to that imaginary ideal film, that’d be great. While Hilary could never be inside my head, sometimes he came close.

The artists on your program represent a great range of filmmaking styles and approaches. Which are most like yours and which are the most different? Have any had an effect on your filmmaking? How?

All the films on the program are different, yet united by the maker truly wedding the surge and flow and weightless state and viscosity to how the camera moves in relation to the mover moving through the water. In that sense I feel a commonness with all the films. I feel close to the daring to expose the nude body in Sara Joel and Jody Oberfelder’s “Rapt”, the kinetic tension combined with slow motion in Ben Dolphin’s “Arising”, the film-maker herself in a journey in the water in “Mother/Daughter”, and when I saw “Immersion” several years ago I felt I wished I could have made a film something like it and felt I’d show it some day.

Arising

But the film-makers which have had the greatest affect on my film-making are Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. Not Deren’s “Study In Choreography For Camera” except for the editing, but the beginning of “At Land”, which had such a direct influence on “Tides”, “Meshes Of The Afternoon” and “Ritual in Transfigured Time” for so many reasons, including the always inner drama coming from the silent language of movement, the border between metaphoric and real, natural movement and unnatural states, the woman’s silent journey, the strictness of structure, the mystery, the intensity. And her writing on film and dance. Kenneth keeps a great deal of this but does away with psychodrama. I hadn’t seen most of his work when I made a lot of my films but I know I was influenced by “osmosis”. He’s so powerful. Mystery and simplicity and the ‘dance’ totally part of the fabric of the film, and between the cuts, everything so cinematically visual/visionary, yet corresponding to some unknown invisible world and force. “Eaux D’Artifice” is a masterpiece. “Tides” was also influenced by Reifenstahl’s Diving Sequence from “Olympia”: the sculptural athleticism of the camera, the off axis turn of the camera, the dramatic point of intersection of body and water, the use of slow motion.

Coming up next at Kinetic Cinema:

Liquid Films

Curated by Amy Greenfield

Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 7:30pm

Tickets: $10

Reservations: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/87612

Films include: “Nymph Of the Waves“, by American Mutoscope and Biograph, one of the first dance films ever made, superimposes the dancer with the ocean waves, as well as Amy Greenfield’s primal “Tides”, with Greenfield and camera operator, Hilary Harris, both braving the ocean tides in their symbiotic camera dance. Kenneth Anger’s restored “Eaux D’Artifice”, with his “Water Witch” in the Tivoli fountain, is one of the great classics of the American avant-garde, and Ben Dolphin’s “Arising” has us flying joyfully with his dancers inside a waterfall, blurring an artificial screen world and the natural world. Jodi Kaplan’s “Immersion”, Jody Oberfelder and Sara Joel’s “Rapt”, Elle Burchill’s “Mother Daughter” and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s “Pulsion” all made recently, are original, daring, entrancing, lyrically beautiful new cine-dances envisioning women moving in real underwater worlds.