This inaugural showing of screendance by both established and emerging artists boasts a collection of provocative works from around the globe, ranging from playful explorations to statements that center social justice and the human condition.
In addition, on Monday July 17 at 13:30, we will have a Q&A with Dance Italia Film Festival artist Silvia Giordano at Motore592.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC – *BROWN BAG LUNCHES WELCOME!
*no oranges please, we have an allergy in our Dance Italia population
This event is funded in-part by an award from The College of Arts and Sciences International Initiatives, Indiana University. Curation: Elizabeth Shea, Professor and Director of Contemporary Dance, Indiana University
FRESH ORANGES INTO THE OCEAN
Concept, choreography, direction: Silvia Giordano (Italy)
While merging and intertwining with nature, three young girls create a metaphorical and visionary narrative of their present condition and their projections towards the future. Through their lightness, disorientation, vitality, and strength, they embark on a choreographic journey facing high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil. Guided by absurd questions the oranges reflect the path of the protagonists in their delicate passage to adulthood and guide us in a poetic reflection on our lives.
Silvia Giordano is an italian choreographer, author and director. She graduated in Choreography from Codarts & Fontys in The Netherlands and she holds a Phd in Management of Cultural Heritage. Her research deals with practicing intuition in the choreographic practice and she navigates between controlled craftsmanship and playful responsiveness from visual scores. She moves beyond divisions and across disciplines, combining writing, dance and opera, storytelling and cinema, paradoxes and reality. She is also active in the field of cultural management and dance curatorship and she funded her own project La Cap | Re-Hub, a thought and movement aggregator for creatives and professionals based in Tuscany.
Dancers: Eduarda Santos, Noemi Calzavara, Reiko Ohta"
Video Director: Nuanda Sheridan
Dop & Filmmaker: Sofia Quercetti
Color grading: Sofia Quercetti
Music: Giorgos Gargalas
Text: Silvia Giordano
Editing: Silvia Giordano & Nuanda Sheridan
Production: La Cap | Creative Re-Hub
Ph: Nuanda Sheridan & Sofia Quercetti
WHIRLING LADDER | BETWEEN
Direction: Maurits Boettger (Germany)
WHIRLING LADDER | BETWEEN is a dance production from YIBU DANCE. It not only shows the compelling interaction of human bodies, but also the indissoluble connection between body and space-time and ultimately between dance and viewer, by interweaving the principles of Chinese martial art--Wing Chun and the geometry of DNA base pairs with artistic precision. The movie captures the details of this stage performance with taste and excitement, showing its own character and statement in a clear and minimalist way.
Maurits Boettge The central topic of my work is time, which for me is both content and medium. In my mostly conceptual work, I approach the subject from a variety of perspectives: Sometimes economically, for example through the sale of time. Sometimes sensually by changing the perception of time through the synchronization of the pulse with other people. Sometimes in denial of progress by waiting or cracking sunflower seeds and currently especially in researching the temporality and finiteness of the resulting works. I am driven by the question of my responsibility towards the world and posterity, which arises through my (artistic) interventions.
Choreography, dance, costume, light: Chun Zhang and Kai Strathmann
Composition: Kai Strathmann
Concept and videography: Maurits Boettger
Special note from Chun Zhang: Maurits is missing since 03.2023 on a Spanish Island called El Hierro. After this tragedy, we are even more happy that his work could still be seen and spread.
https://www.instagram.com/yibudance/
https://www.facebook.com/yibudance
ICE FLOW
Direction, choreography, and performance: Jody Sperling (USA)
Direction, choreography, and performance: Jody Sperling (USA)
In 2014, I had the unique opportunity to participate in a polar science mission to the Chukchi Sea as the first-ever choreographer-in-residence aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy icebreaker. I was invited by Woods Hole oceanographer Dr. Robert Pickart as part of an outreach team on climate science communication. During the journey, I danced on sea ice at a dozen ice deployments. The footage from these onsite performances was edited into this short film by other WHOI team members. My motions are designed to suggest a timelapse morphology of ice formation and dissolution. The music remixes early sub-ice recordings from the polar regions. The costume is patterned after a photograph of early-stage ice formation in the same region where I was dancing.
An NYC-based dancer-choreographer, Jody Sperling is the Founder/Arc Director of Time Lapse Dance. She has created 50+ works and is the leading exponent of the style of early performance technologist Loïe Fuller (1862-1928). Sperling has expanded Fuller’s genre into the 21st century, deploying it in the context of contemporary and ecological performance forms. Sperling is developing an inquiry called ecokinetics that cultivates the relationship between human movers and ecological systems while forging strategies for climate-engaged artmaking.
Video Editing: Ben Harden & Amanda Kowalski
Camera: Frank Bahr, Pierre Coupel & Jody Sperling
Music: Beo Morales & Brooks Williams
Costume Design: Mary Jo Mecca & Gina Nagy Burns in collaboration with Jody Sperling
Costume Construction: Mary Jo Mecca | Costume Painting: Gina Nagy Burns
Special thanks to the National Science Foundation and the entire HL1401 crew and science party, especially Robert Pickart, Chris Polashenski, the Takuvik team, BMCM Tim Sullivan, Executive Officer Stanclik and Captain Reeves.
ALIENATION
Concept and performance: Ssempijja Robert (Uganda)
To be able to understand his project thoroughly, it is crucially important to gain a deeper understanding of the city of his birth: the Ugandan capital of Kampala. The city has over 4.4 million inhabitants and is the economic heart of a country that is home to no fewer than 56 tribes and whose population is growing lightning fast. The city is sprawled across 176 km2 north of Lake Victoria. Before the colonization the seven hills in this area were the hunting grounds of the king of Buganda. Under British rule, German urban planner Ernst May was commissioned in 1945 to design a city, for which he drew inspiration from the garden city model. He created a city in which each of the hills had its own center and was surrounded by spacious agricultural lands. Although Kampala has long outgrown the name of ‘city of seven hills’, they are still crucially important to the city and they also have unique landmarks that are of religious, cultural and colonial value. As in many other modern African cities, Kampala was designed against a background of racial segregation, with a clear separation between the colonial rulers, the Asian population and the indigenous peoples.
Ssempijja’s film is part of his research project ‘Alienation’, which consists of four chapters: a dance film, an art installation, an essay and he is developing performance. The project is a search for the true meaning of the word ‘home’. The circle in the film symbolizes the city, whereas the red soil represents the land and the people who live there. The surrounding walls are the border. The street names refer to Ernst May’s design of Kampala. In the center is a hill that symbolizes the place where the colonial rulers lived. The dance film records how the public moves between the walls and the circle. The projection on the walls makes them the ones who are excluded from the city’s central circle.‘Alienation’ is about artificial or imposed borders and structures, and by extension about exclusion in all its forms. Because of the colonial origins of Kampala’s urban architecture, Ssempijja has never truly felt at home there. After all, how can people feel at home in a city that wasn’t built by or for them?
Robert Ssempijja is a Ugandan contemporary artist and dance researcher who has developed a career both through formal and informal setting experiences. His practice is marked by the eras of post-colonialism and decolonization. Ssempijja’s work is composed of research projects that translate into dance films, installations, and performances that exhibit works in traditional and non-traditional spaces. He is searching for “a regenerative art practice” that moves away from exploitative relationships. Through his creation, he makes a bridge between the distorted past and the digital present. Creating expression through the interplay of various elements, such as internal and external experiences that connect the physical body, the psychological world of the mind, human emotions, and the soul, is his artistic aesthetic. Honors and Fellowship Pick-of-the-Fringe Award 2020 by Jomba! Contemporary Dance Experience (ZA), Tuzinne Award 2017 by Mambya Performing Arts Foundation (UG), PACT residencies 2022 (DE), Camargo Fellowship 2022 (FR), and Pina Bausch Fellowship For Dance And Choreography 2022 (DE) 2018 Artist in residency Denison University, Ohio, US.
Direction: Director Teflon
Set Design: Ssempijja Robert and Tebandeke Joseph
Music: Öz Kaveller (Germany)
Costume: IGC fashion (UK/Uganda)
YURODIVY
Direction: Ryan Renshaw (Australia)
Based upon the legend of Sisyphus and using the voice of the late-philosopher Alan Watts, Yurodivy explores contemporary humankind's relentless pursuit for wealth and happiness.
Ryan Renshaw is an accomplished multi-award-winning film and television director based in Brisbane, Australia. His career began in the 1990’s where he worked as a director for MTV in Australia, the United States and in Latin America. He has completed more than 80 music videos and worked as creative director for INXS. Over the past 5 years he has turned his attention to Screendance. His 7 screendance works have been screened at over 100 international film festivals including the prestigious San Francisco Dance Film Festival and Screendance International in Stockholm, and won the Jury Prize at the 2020 LA Dance Film Festival, the Grand Prix Nuria Font, Best International Film at Spain’s 2021 Fiver International Dance Film Festival, the Jury Prize for Best Film at 2020 Zinetika Festival in Pamplona, San Sebastian and Bilbao, Best In Show at Inspired Dance Film Festival, Sydney, Best Film at the NoWhere Festival in Seoul and the Audience Prize for Best Film at the 2020 Inshadow Festival, Portugal. Renshaw’s most recent film ‘Sapient’ is an ambitious film crafted over a 6 month period and involving many hundreds of hours of visual effects work. It recently was the winner of Best Visual Effects at the acclaimed La Jolla International Fashion Film Festival in San Diego, USA.
Choreographer: Kyle Page
Dance Company: Dance North, Australia Production Company: KIOSK
GHOSTLY LABOR
A dance film by John Jota Leaños and Vanessa Sanchez (USA) Ghostly Labor is dedicated to the essential work of migrant farmworkers who tend the land and provide sustenance for our communities.
WE HONOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE, SKILL, AND PERSERVERENCE.
John Jota Leaños is a Mestizx (Chicanx/Chumash) media artist and animator focusing on critical convergences of history, memory, social space, and decolonization. Leaños’ animation, installation, opera, performance and public media fuse traditional practices and aesthetics with new technologies and contemporary reconfigurations. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Short Corner, PBS.org, the Whitney Biennial, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Lincoln Center, and various other art and public contexts. A Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Leaños is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital Foundation Grantee who has received the United States Artist Fellowship, National Association for Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) Master Artist Award, the San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grant, the MAP Fund Award and the Creative Work Fund Award. He has been an artist-in-resident at the Center for Chicano Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, the Center for Arts in Society, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is currently a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA 100 Fellow. Video works by Leaños can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/user2750627
Vanessa Sanchez is a Chicana dancer, choreographer, educator and producer who focuses on community arts and traditional dance forms to emphasize voices and experiences of Latina, Chicana, and Indigenous womxn and youth. Based in San Francisco, she is a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow and the founding Artistic Director of La Mezcla, a rhythmic ensemble that explores history and collective resistance through tap dance, Mexican zapateado and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Her NEFA-Funded production “Pachuquísmo,” an all-womxn Tap dance and Son Jarocho performance about Pachucas and the Zoot Suit Riots, received the Isadora Duncan award for Outstanding Production and is touring nationally through 2023. Her new work “Ghostly Labor,” funded by the Hewlett Foundation and NPN, explores the legacy of labor in the US-Mexico borderlands and the joy of collective resistance. With the full theater production premiering in November 2023, “Ghostly Labor: a Dance Film” is currently being screened at national & international film festivals.Sanchez has been featured as a guest artist and lecturer at venues and organizations including UC Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, Arizona State University, and the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy. Sanchez is currently an artist in residence at Brava! For Women in the Arts and a Dance Lecturer at UC Santa Cruz.
Choreography: Vanessa Sanchez
Performance: La Mezcla: Vanessa Sanchez, Sandy Vazquez, Kirsten Millan, Diana Aburto, Micah Sallid, Javier Navarrette, Pedro Gomez, Elena de Troya, Tanya Benítez, and Sharon Benítez
Production: Harry Gregory & Sharon Benítez
Editing: John Jota Leaños & Harry Gregory
Director of Photography: Elie M. Khadra
Sound Mix: Greg Landau:
ABRACAVALA
Direction: barbara malavoglia and bianca turner (Brazil)
Abracavala is a celebration of freedom, of the wild feminine. A film to open the roads:
she opens ways•opens the doors•opens the heart, opens the roads
she dances free,she beats the hooves•she winds the mane,she shoots the arrows go open mare•her heart is blue•all that she fights with•is deep within she comes so bright•as rays of light•she comes so strong•as faith in love
Barbara Malavoglia is a dance artist from Brazil. She works with creation, Indian classical dance (bharatanatyam) and yoga. She currently interweaves and shares these universes in her workshops “Vitality Practices” and in the creation of works like Matakala, Abracavala and Asa. Barbara dances as war, prayer, celebration, and medicine.
Bianca Turner is an artist, currently working on installations, actions and audiovisual interventions, developing video projection and video mapping for theater, performance, music and dance, always inspired by the subjectivity of memory and timelessness. She explores the documentation of the ephemeral, the immaterial of an object or a place; the invisible, the subjective and the unspeakable.
dance: barbara malavoglia
edition and sound design: bianca turner
photo: azul serra
soundtrack: oniros
costume: claudia schapira
jewelry: chrissie barban
color: luisa cavanagh
AS.PHYX.I.A.TION
Written, directed, and performed by Nadav Heyman (USA)
Through dance and installation, Nadav explores the relationship between mental and physical isolation. A collaboration with Studio 1750 (South Korea) and S.A.C. Art Lab (Thailand).
Nadav Heyman is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His award-winning dance film, “as·phyx·i·a·tion” was published by Dance Magazine and commissioned by the Correana Museum of Art in South Korea. In 2023, he completed his dance film, “Old Man at the Corner Store”, which took home the Audience Award at both Dance Film Festival Prague and Dances With Films. Most recently, Nadav founded a global platform for dance films at dancefilmmaking.com with the goal of creating a new home for dance cinema.
IG: @nadavheyman
Website: nadavheyman.com
dancefilmmaking.com
installation art: Studio 1750
production: S.A.C. Art Lab
camera operator: Parinda Mai
drone operator: Suwijak Deeyai
production coordinator: Poy Wongyimyong
VFX: Nick Conroy
music and editing: Nadav Heyman
special thanks to Sachin George and Erez Heiman
THE WILYABRUP PROJECT
Producer and Movement Director: Brenna Day (Australia, UK) Video Direction and Editing: Steven Alyian (Australia)
Above the waves, beneath the sky, against the rock. Moving against a staggering vertical cliff face, suspended above wild crashing ocean, two artists dance with the roaring wind and each-other in a celebration of human connection, our experience of nature and the vast wilderness that is the Wilyabrup sea cliffs. A choreographed performance of two bodies in gravity-defying motion tethered to the rockface, this vertical dance frames the artform against truly wild nature that shows the beauty, fragility and resilience of the human body and the environment. Filmed on Wadandi land in the southwest of Western Australia.
Suspended above the ocean, two artists dance with the wind and each-other in a celebration of human connection and the wilderness of the Wilyabrup cliffs.
Brenna Day is an aerialist and acrobat specialising in aerial hoop and standing on their friends. She draws inspiration from her background in science, the world around her, and the connections that can be created between performers and the audience. Brenna started circus in Fremantle at Circus WA before finally completing the running away part of joining the circus in 2015 when she moved to the UK to study at Circomedia. Since then Brenna has been based between Australia and the UK, performing, teaching and learning. Despite 3 months of compulsory classes she is still a terrible juggler.
Steven Alyian is a film director, video artist, musical composer and live performer. Founding member of film production company Blue Forest. As a director, editor and visual effects artist Steven has worked on countless internationally recognised productions. His artistic works are interactive and performance based experiences using dynamic video projection, three dimensional mapping and reactive sound. Working closely with Biological Art group SymbioticA, Steven is a frequent collaborator with famous Australian performance artist Stelarc. Steven hosts large scale public events that challenge political norms and encourage positive interaction with the natural environment. He enjoys collaboration and performing live for audiences on stages, in the wild and in the suburban spaces where we are told not to go. Steven is co-founder of music festival Camp Doogs and writes, records and performs music as Injured Ninja, Usurper of Modern Medicine, Selfless Orchestra, Doublethink Prism and many more.
Performers: Brenna Day and Bonnie Blewitt
Editing: Steven Alyian
Rigger: Ben Kotovski-Steele Camera: Ben Berkhout and Steven Alyian
Music: 'Walich' by Steven Alyian
AND SO SAY ALL OF US
Director: Mitchell Rose (USA)
52 seminal international choreographers link together on a chain love letter to dance. Featured artists include Ohad Naharin, Mark Morris, Elizabeth Streb, Bill T. Jones, Meredith Monk, William Forsythe, and Lucinda Childs. Commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Mitchell Rose was a choreographer. His company toured internationally for 15 years. He then entered The American Film Institute as a Directing Fellow. Since A.F.I., his films have won 100 festival awards. The New York Times called him: “A rare and wonderful talent.” The Washington Post wrote that his work was “in the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati—funny and sad and more than the sum of both.” Mr. Rose recently retired from being a professor of dance-filmmaking at Ohio State University. He’s working on three films now while teaching online screendance-making workshops.
Editor: Mitchell Rose
Composer: Robert Een
Producer: Pomegranate Arts
Executive Producer: Brooklyn Academy of Music