Opening Program Program I  Program II  Program III Program IV Program V Program VI Program VII   Program VIII  Program IX Program X Program XI Russian Dance Film Competition Closing Program

Program XI: Common Ground: Between the Lines of Sport, Kinetics, Surrealism and Music Video

Imagine by John Lennon, 3 min, 1986
The Original Wrapper by Lou Reed 4.5min, 1987
Director: Zbigniew Rybczynski

Imagine: A choreographed life cycle wherein the movements of characters are meticulously timed with the endless tracking shot that not only sets up the rhythmic score but also serves as a visual metaphor.

The Original Wrapper: A sarcastic illustration of American life during the Reagan Administration. Created in the spirit of phantasmagoric tradition found in Eastern European Literature and Cinema, this piece painfully resonates with the current situation in the United States.

Zbig Rybczynski was born in Poland in 1949 and has been working as a film director in Europe and the United States since the early 1970s. His work has received many prestigious industry awards in the United States, Japan and Europe. The awards include an Academy Award® in 1983 for Tango, an Emmy® in Special Effects in 1990 for The Orchestra, the Prix Italia, the Golden Gate Award in San Francisco and awards at the Electronic Cinema Festival Tokyo/Montreaux. Numerous other awards include MTV, American Video Awards, Monitor Awards and the Billboard Music Video Awards. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he works for the Ultimatte Corporation as a member of their R&D team www.ultimatte.com and runs his own company, Zbig Vision Ltd.

Gold 9 min, 2004, United Kingdom
Director/Choreographer: Rachel Davies
Loose in Fight 5 min, 1999, United Kingdom
Director: Rachel Davies
Choreographer: Akram Khan

Photo by Rachel Davies

Gold: The adrenaline-fueled world of the teenage girl is full of promise, friendship, magic and attitude. This experimental dance film explores the skills and playful competition of two gymnasts in the local suburban gym club.

Photo by Rachel Davies

Loose in Fight: A short interpretation of a stage piece made for Channel 4 television, British sensation Akram Khan mixes classical Indian Kathak with contemporary dance, interpreted against the backdrop of an industrial and animated landscape.

Rachel Davies directs film, video and animation for stage, gallery and screen, mixing up genre and technique. She studied animation and film at Royal College of Art in London. She has made numerous TV shorts with performing artists as well as her own personal films which have toured to international festivals. Last year she was Associate Artist at The Place in London, specializing in film/video work with choreography and dance.

When Dancers Go Bowling 17 min, 2000, USA
Director: Michael DeMirjian
Choreographer: Amanda Rabin

Photo by Steve Andrich

Eight despondent dancers converge on a bowling alley and have their way with the facility. A deadpan 1961 bowling instruction record placidly narrates the wryly humorous ruckus. Michael DeMirjian, an Emmy Award winning editor turned director for this debut, provides the concept, rhythmic cutting and dry wit. Amanda Rabin, a Volinine Award winner and accomplished choreographer of stage and film, turns the entire bowling alley into a unique performance space. And Emmy Award winning Director of Photography Steve Andrich, one of the United States' premiere sports cinematographers, displays his mastery in capturing movement on-the-fly and understated lighting. (http://constellation-change.co.uk/pages/festival_films/bowlingfilm.htm)

On a Wing and a Prayer 5min, 2003, Australia
Director: Narelle Benjamin
Producer: Huey Benjamin

Photo by Narelle Benjamin

A Powerful duet for two women, featuring yoga influenced virtuosic movement. It depicts the private meditations of a young nun. Her reverie begins when her secret music box opens.

 

Line Dance 5min, 2003, UK
Director: Alex Reuben

Photo by Alex Reuben

A sultry Brazilian song gets two stick figures to dance, then multiply and explode into colors.

Alex Reuben's background spans from DJ'ing to Arts and Design. He has directed and produced music, drama, commercials and documentaries. Reuben has recently been appointed Head of Post-Graduate Studies in Dance for the Camera at London Contemporary Dance School and he is an Associate Lecturer at the Central Saint Martin's School of Art.

image/Word.not_a_pipe= 8min, 2002, USA
Director: Evann Siebens
Choreographer: Yannis Adoniou

Photo by Evann Siebens

A lone man in an overcoat and bowler hat is obscurely displaced as he dances on a deserted windy beach, over a grassy knoll and through a crowded street. The figure represents Magritte’s familiar symbol of the “Everyman.” The film is a single channel exploration of Magritte’s seminal image and Foucault’s ideas transposed into code.

Evann Siebens recently directed and co-produced a documentary on hula dancers and the Hawaiian community that was broadcast on PBS around the US. Ms. Siebens studied at Britain’s Royal Ballet School and the National Ballet School of Canada before dancing and choreographing with the National Ballet of Canada and the Bonn Ballet in Germany. She has danced with DANZAISA in New York, Kunst-Stoff in San Francisco, Unterwegs Theatre in Heidelberg and recently Frankfurt Ballet member Amy Raymond. Evann also works as a dance cinematographer and videographer and has filmed dancers such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bill T. Jones, Jose Navas, Sara Rudner, Molissa Fenley, Peter Boal, Eiko, and Lucinda Childs.

Walkabout of Alices 3min, 2003, Italy
Director: Simona Da Pozzo

Photo by Simona Da Pozzo

Four girls in white underwear and black boots run around blond rolls of hay. 2 minutes and 42 seconds of inspiring lightness and joy in the height of an Italian summer under the famous notes of Vivaldi. (Honorable Mention Dance on Camera Festival 2004, New York)

 

Cantique #1 15min, 2003, Canada
Director/Choreographer: Marie Chouinard
Performers: Benoît Lachambre and Carol Prieur
Winner, Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film and Video, Toronto (2003)

Photo by Marie Chouinard

Emerging from the depths of a black space, a man and a woman choose to meet. A dialogue of their breath and tongues, like strange, independent entities exiting from their mouths to engage in a dance of copulation.
In 1978, the Montreal choreographer Marie Chouinard presented her first work, Crystallization, which immediately established her as an exceptional artist driven by an infectious search for the genuine.

After 12 years as a solo performer and choreographer, Marie Chouinard founded her own company in 1990, La Compagnie Marie Chouinard. Marie Chouinard has lived in New York, Berlin, Bali and Nepal. Her travels, her curiosity, her eclectic studies and her understanding of various techniques allow her to explore the body in different ways. She has created more than 50 works, that reflect the concerns of this surprising choreographer: her view of dance as a sacred art, her respect for the body as a vehicle of that art, her virtuoso approach to performance and the invention of a different universe for each new piece.

Body, body on the wall 6 min, 1997, Belgium
Director/Choreographer: Jan Fabre
Performers: W im Vandekeybus

Photo by Jan Fabre

"In the title of the short film Body, body on the wall, edited with great virtuosity and based on the dance performance Jan Fabre made with the dancer and choreographer Wim Vandekeybus in 1997, the word "mirror" was replaced by the word "body". Vandekeybus' body was actually so thoroughly rubbed in with gleaming colors that he formed a dancing mirror; the body
became the substitute for the mirror (and at the same time canvas), the meditation instrument par excellence. In a 1981 performance in Leiden, The bic-art room, Jan Fabre used his own body as a surface to draw on, and covered himself and the entire room with ballpen ink in the course of three days and three sleepless nights. The body as the drawable and reflecting surface of human existence, a striking image for his systematic investigation into the manifestations of the Foucaultian body: philosophical, desiring, dancing, thinking, toiling, inventorising, anatomic and spiritual." (Stefan Hertmans, "Loops, gaia scienza and sisyphean tasks", in: Jan Fabre.
Gaude succurrere vitae, Gent, 2002, pp. 321-322)

"Jan Fabre was born in the Belgian city of Antwerp in 1958. He studied there at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In the late seventies, while still very young, he created a furore with his solo performances, whose nature lay somewhere between theatre and art. For example, in his ‘money’ performances he set light to bundles of the audience’s money and did drawings with the ashes. In 1982 he exploded a bomb under the behinds of the then theatre establishment with Het is theater zoals te verwachten en voorzien was. This was confirmed two years later with De Macht der Theaterlijke Dwaasheden, at the invitation of the Venice Biennale. These two performances are chronicled in every book on the history of contemporary theatre and they toured the world. It is a mark of Fabre’s character that he opts for multidisciplinarity - as a stage director, artist, writer, choreographer and stage designer - and resolutely takes each of these art forms seriously.

The object of his explorations, from the early eighties, when this topic was not ‘fashionable’, to today, has been the body in all its guises. Fabre calls the course he follows a ‘one-man movement’, because he neither found nor sought shelter in any collective movement in art history. He has in several disciplines created a unique world that does not allow itself to become incorporated into any other: an unparalleled world with its own laws, language and symbols." - http://www.troubleyn.be/index2.html