Posts Tagged ‘NYC’

Here are few screendance events in September that we recommend if you happen to be in these parts of the world.

In New York City:

White Box

by Noémie Lafrance/Sens Productions

The site-specific choreographic phenom, Noémie Lafrance is back with a new production, this time set inside the confines of a white gallery space. Over the course of three weeks, the performance will “evolve” and “mutate” based on audience responses during and after each show. Revolving around the social interplay between the audience and the performers, Lafrance takes the concept of site-specific to a whole new level. Oh, and each performance will also be followed by screenings of select dance films by Lafrance and her collaborators.

Dates
Gallery Opening: ‘White Box’ performance Teaser
Friday, Sept. 9 @ 7:00-9:00pm (free)

Performance: ‘The White Box Project’
Saturday, Sept. 10, 17 & 24 @ 4:30, 5:30, 6:30pm

Screening: Selected Dance Films by Noémie Lafrance
Saturday, Sept. 10, 17 & 24th @ 8:00pm (free)

Site
Black & White Gallery
483 Driggs Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11211

In Finland and on Twitter:

Alone or Not

Social Improvisation through Twitter.

Organized by Susan Kozel

13 September – 4 October 2011
www.aloneornot.org

Anyone can take part in this event in which participants send short SMS messages or tweets about their movement, actions and perceptions to each other to create a social network of bodily movement. The project will be documented as a shared choreography on Twitter. Check out the project website to learn how to participate. SMS is only available to people with Finnish mobile phones.

In Boulder, Colorado:

Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema

From their humble beginnings in a trailer park screening local dance videos, Sans Souci Festival has evolved into a world class film festival with a strong curatorial vision. The line up for this year’s festival includes work by the aforementioned Noémie Lafrance (Melt), Alla Kovgan (New London Calling), Marta Renzi (Year, Make & Model), and Mitchell Rose (Advance). This is a great festival if you love highly kinetic dance film shorts (as I do).

Dates

Boulder Public Library
Mondays, October 3 & 10
Wednesdays, October 5 & 12

Ann Robideaux, Sternberg Park Dances

August 22, 2011, 8pm

Sternberg Park (map)

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Local park-goers of all ages, encouraged by choreographer Ann Robideaux, participate in a community dance collaboration resulting in a montage of movement and other talents for the camera. Open to everyone, this site-specific dance film celebrates Sternberg Park’s unique personalities and social community in one of Williamsburg’s most historic parks.

Full details on the MovieHouse website.

OurGoods.org - a bartering network for creative communities, and recipient of a 2011 NYC CIF award.

This year’s Rockefeller NYC Cultural Innovation Fund recipients have just been announced, and I was very excited by the number of awards going to projects that support New York City dance, media and performance artists. The grants of up to $250,000 are some of the largest that non-profit arts organizations can hope to get, and they go a long ways towards getting more progressive and experimental projects off the ground.

One of the most fantastical projects being funded is for the “Dance Films Association to produce, market and distribute high definition and 3D films of NYC dance companies’ performances in partnership with TenduTV.” For companies barely able to afford multiple camera documentations of their work, let alone in HD, this proposal is akin to Kennedy proclaiming we will walk on the moon. Now with this grant audiences in Peoria could experience a performance of DanceBrazil as if they are actually sitting in the Joyce Theater, or better yet, up on stage with the dancers. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the medium that will help artsy dance enter into the mainstream cultural consciousness.

Misnomer Dance Theater has received their second CIF award this year for an intriguing project that will “utilize behavioral science for a stakeholder-engagement program for NYC’s performing arts organizations in partnership with strategy and marketing firm Orcasci.” Seeming to flow from their previously awarded project, the online “Audience Engagement Platform,” Misnomer continues to explore how artists can market their work more effectively and tap into new audiences. Their approach raises the question, can the performing arts be marketed like big media, with their focus groups and huge research budgets? Can small independent artists mine niche markets and come up with huge followings in unexpected places? Misnomer claims they can, and hopefully with this funding they will prove it is possible.

Other projects funded this year are aimed at increasing cultural and political awareness through the arts such as Casita Maria’s partnership with Dancing in the Streets to illuminate the cultural legacy of the South Bronx, and New York University and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ programs to support and train performance-based political artists. The Field in partnership with OurGoods.org has a particularly subversive project so that artists can get around the capitalist system entirely through an online barter network.

With each of these projects the ramifications for culture and the arts could be huge, or like any grand experiment, it may flop. By the time they get off the ground will they already seem passé? Will the media and technology involved be embraced by consumers or tossed aside as novelties? Time will tell, but at least artists will be able to try these pie in the sky ideas out. Whether or not the masses come flocking to see 3D productions of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in their local iMax theatre, or NYC dance companies find a significant following among NASCAR dads, at least they are in the arena and able to contend, instead of busking for change on the sidewalk outside.

For a complete list of this year’s Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund recipients and their projects, go here.

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.

"Outside In" by Victoria Marks, Photo by Mark Lewis

Kinetic Cinema with Victoria Marks

Thursday, October 22nd, 7:00pm. $10 (at the door)

University Settlement, 184 Eldridge Street, NYC

Kinetic Cinema explores the intersection of dance and the moving image both on screen and stage. For each screening Anna Brady Nuse, Pentacle’s director of Movement Media, invites a different guest artist to share a selection of films and videos that have inspired them. This month, award-winning choreographer and dance film-maker, Victoria Marks presents a program in which she weaves together her main cinematic influences with her own dance film work.

Workshop: Choreo-Portraits in Film with Victoria Marks

Friday, October 23rd, 10:00am-2:00pm

Chen Dance Center

8 East 1st Street, (btw Bowery & 2nd Avenue), NYC

In dance, trained and virtuosic bodies often stand in for the universal or human figure. How can cinematic movement studies capture the “who” of the performer, particularly as they move with another person? “Choreo-portraiture” is the name renowned choreographer and filmmaker Victoria Marks has given to dances she makes that are about the people who inhabit them. In choreo-portraits, Marks searches not for extraordinary feats, but for the small actions and interactions that communicate who these people are, alone and together. In this workshop, participants will consider this idea as they serve to design and shoot one another’s movements.

Open to dance and film professionals and students, registration is limited to 20 ppl. Workshop fee $35.00. Register online, or contact movementmedia@pentacle.org.

Movement Media in Philadelphia:

Presented by the Institution of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

Kinetic Cinema Wed. Oct. 21st at 6:30pm

Choreo-Portraits in Film Workshop Sat. Oct. 24th 10:00am-5:00pm

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA)

118 South 36th Street

Philadelphia, PA

Victoria Marks will also present her Kinetic Cinema screening and Choreo-Portraits workshop at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia in conjunction with their ground-breaking Dance with Camera exhibition.

Go to www.icaphila.org for more information and to register for the workshop.

"Not About Iraq" by Victoria Marks

Victoria Marks recent work considers citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. Marks has served as faculty in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA since 1995.  She is a 2007 EMPAC award winner for the creation of “Veterans,” a dance for the camera made with Margaret Williams.  “Veterans” won first prize in the Barcelona Video Dance Festival, 2008.  Marks is also a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and has received recent grants from the Irvine Foundation (Dance: Creation to Performance 2004 and DanceMaker 2002), the NEA (2005) and the Cultural Affairs Council (COLA 2001).  In 1997, Marks was honored with the Alpert Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.  Over the course of her career, she has been the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the London Arts Board, among others. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship in Choreography, and numerous awards for her dance films with Margaret Williams, including the Barcelona VideoDance Prize, the Grand Prix in the Video Danse Festival, the Golden Antenae Award from Bulgaria, the IMZ Award for best screen choreography and the Best of Show in the Dance Film Association’s Dance and the Camera Festival.