Posts Tagged ‘festivals’

Dance Camera West announces its 11th Annual Festival with Dance Media: An Active Spectrum.  The event will bring together artists, innovators, educators, and others in the entertainment industry to discuss the increasingly active spectrum of dance media on screen.

Dance Camera West is now accepting submissions for its festival to be held in Los Angeles at the end of June.  Entries must be on DVD. Festival screening formats will vary depending on venue and will be communicated via email upon acceptance to the festival.  To be considered for the festival, the following are required:

• DVD submissions and entry fees must be postmarked by January 30th, 2012.
• Entries must never have screened or broadcast in Los Angeles. University or showcase showings allowed; local cable broadcast allowed.
• Upon acceptance into the festival, your film cannot be withdrawn.

Entry Fee:
$50 fee; $40 Members before December 15, 2011
$60 fee; $50 Members after December 15, 2011
$25 fee, Students

Early Deadline: December 15, 2011
Final Deadline: January 31, 2012 (postmarked)

For more information,visit dancecamerawest.org
Contact festival@dancecamerawest.org with additional questions.

Performa 11, one of two new festivals in NYC that defy artistic boundaries post-9/11

Like many people, the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11 brought up many “What if’s” for me. What would my life be like now if 9/11 hadn’t happened? What would my art look like? What would the fields of dance and dance film look like? And then after being baffled by those questions, I started to think about what actually did happen. How did September 11th, 2001 change my views of my artistic work, and my chosen field of dance?

For me, I wonder if I would have become obsessed with dance for the camera. Without the traumas of 9/11 and the political and cultural awakening it inspired in me, I might not have felt such an urgent need to seek other outlets for artistic expression. In an uncertain world, film and new media gave me hope that my artistic work could make a difference in the world. The feelings of mortality that were triggered by 9/11 made me desperate to be able to create work that would last (ie be able to be watched repeatedly) and the rage and violence that has surrounded the event (and still does to this day) gave me an urgent need communicate with people outside of my tiny circle of acquaintances. I felt that if we were to reconcile with our enemies and restore stability to our lives, then we had to start communicating and learning about each other. Live performance was too limiting for me, I needed to tap into media, and thankfully with the rise of broadband internet that became more possible than ever before. Read the rest of this entry »

Moment by Katrina McPherson

The University of Utah’s Departments of Modern Dance and Film and Media Arts are offering two opportunities to work with award-winning Scottish dance filmmaker, Katrina McPherson, in her first American residencies. Set in the beautiful mountain city of Salt Lake this two-week workshop offers in-depth experience for choreographers and filmmakers in shooting and editing dance for the camera. Ms. McPherson will hold screenings, discussions, demonstrations, and will oversee the creation of screendance studies by each participant. Editing facilities and personnel will be available, as will dancers for choreographic projects.

Weekend Workshop: September 15 – 17 — Weeklong Intensive Workshop: September 19 – 24

An evening of student works will be presented on Thursday, September 15, 2011 in conjunction with the International Dance for the Camera Festival.

For more information and to register for the workshops go to the Festival website.

Submissions are open for DANCE:FILM 11. Short and feature length films are invited in the following categories:

Dance for Camera – Films featuring choreography made specifically for camera

Dance with Camera – Films featuring dance/movement where the medium plays a significant role (e.g. cinematography, editing, effects etc)

Is it Dance? – Films featuring dance/movement with a more experimental edge and a visuals arts focus

Installations - Films suited to being presented as an installation instead of part of a programme

DANCE:FILM are accepting submissions through Withoutabox.

Early Bird Deadline – 15 August 2011

Regular Deadline – 5 September 2011

Late Deadline – 12 September 2011

Extended Withoutabox deadline – 19 September 2011

I am juiced about Jacob’s Pillow’s innovative new Dance Interactive in which 70 years of archival footage from the festival is now available for viewing anywhere.

This ground-breaking video collection, just launched on March 28th, has been designed to draw users into the Jacob’s Pillow Archive and make it easy and fun to navigate through the site. One can start out looking at Kyle Abraham, and then a few clicks later be watching Shantala Shivalingappa and Anna Duncan from 1942. For a dance lover, this site could start to consume as much of your time as Facebook or Twitter.

From a technical point of view, the site is surprisingly sophisticated behind its clean and simple looking design. Users can access videos via four main pathways: Artist, Genre, Era, and Guess (a fun quiz that tests user’s dance literacy). Each video is only one minute long, which provides just enough time to make you want to see more (while keeping them within Fair Use Law and avoiding a lot of legal hassle). For now, there is no advanced search function where you can type in an artist’s name or key word and get results, but this will most likely be added when more content has been uploaded. For now, the site functions to give users a taste of the archives and encourage them to visit them in person on site if they want to really delve into the artist or the material.

Dance Interactive started as a physical kiosk on-site at Jacob’s Pillow for people to be able to peruse the archives without having to go in and bother an intern to get out the works. The original Dance Interactive was designed as a touch screen, and the site today has kept that tactile feeling so it translates well to the iPad and other tablet and mobile devices. As one can imagine, selecting a one minute clip from each artist would be difficult, and Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow Director of Preservation is responsible for selecting all of the excerpts and writing thoughtful text descriptions that help contextualize the content. Given the vastness of the task, for now the Virtual Pillow Team is aiming to upload a video a week as well as include all current and future programming as it happens at the Pillow.

The video content itself is beautifully shot and looks great on screen. Many of the clips are viewable in HD and can be projected for a classroom presentation without looking too pixelated. On the backend, the site was built on Drupal and designed by ClearMetrics, NYC. All the video is hosted by Vimeo, which gives it stability and flexibility for customizing the player and changing the files easily.

In an era when to exist at all means to exist online, Jacob’s Pillow’s Dance Interactive has breathed new life into dance history for audiences everywhere. Although this collection only represents dance that has passed through Jacob’s Pillow, I hope that it inspires many other dance institutions to dust off their vaults and open up their archives to become part of the living networked world.