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Press About and From Dance Films Association

40th Anniversary Dance on Camera Festival Press
NYC Arts- Channel 13
Time Out New York
Dance Magazine
Wall Street Journal
CAPITAL
City Arts

Dance Teacher, on Capturing Motion NYC

The Dance Films Association, which cosponsors the festival with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, invites NYC high school students to submit their own dance videos for a chance to be featured in the 2013 festival, February 1–5. The only requirements are that students be in grades 9–12 and attend high school in one of NYC’s five boroughs, and that films run 1-5 minutes in length, addressing the relationship between dance and camera. There doesn’t even need to be actual dancing in the footage, so long as the film still evokes dance.
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Rural Intelligence, on our Show Boat Cruise

Friends and fans of legendary hoofer and star of stage and screen Marge Champion rocked the boat Saturday, September 13, at the Show Boat Cruise around Manhattan to celebrate the part-time Berkshire resident’s 93rd birthday. The evening was hosted by the Dance Films Association to honor Champion, who has starred in musical classics such as Show Boat, Lovely to Look At, and Three for the Show. Dancers, choreographers, film fans, and longtime friends of Champion boarded the two-story party yacht on the East River, enjoying light refreshments and cocktails before the ship set sail toward Brooklyn. Guests and crew alike gathered to admire the city skyline against a glowing pink sunset. DJ Alberto Denis cranked up the retro tunes and it didn’t take much more than that to draw guests to the dance floor, which was packed by night fall as the ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty and back to shore, where the celebration continued with a screening of classic dance films.
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Dance Magazine, on Capturing Motion NYC

Recently, Dance Films Association gave young artists the chance to try merging filmmaking and movement-making, with its inaugural student film competition, Capturing Motion NYC. The four finalists of the contest, which was open to New York City high school students, shared their one- to five-minute shorts at the Dance on Camera Festival in January. The winning selection, Anna Vomacka’s We Three, splices together scenes of a single dance phrase performed in various locations, like a city rooftop and a deserted road. It received the honor of opening for a much-anticipated screening of Sally Sommers’ Check Your Body at the Door, the festival’s final and perhaps most joyous program.
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Backstage Magazine, on Dance Film Lab

Sponsored by Dance Films Association, the DFL is supporting the surge of interest in dance films — and in the number of people making them — by helping artists gain skills and connect with others in the field. “The Lab is envisioned to embrace artists who are coming to the form at whatever level, from beginners just shooting off their iPhone to those making feature-length documentaries,” Morris says. The opportunity to have work shown and discussed at a DFL screening session is first-come, first-served, and priority is given to works in progress or very recently completed. The goal is not to showcase films but to give artists the constructive feedback they need to move forward in their process.
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The New York Times, on the 2010 Festival, by Alastair Macaulay

Another multimedia artist is the title subject of Babeth M. VanLoo’s always compelling, often ravishing 82-minute film, Meredith Monk: Inner Voice. Everything about Ms. Monk seems to lend itself to film: her odd face (she discusses here the eye peculiarities she has had from childhood and how they may have stimulated her); her readiness to talk calmly but with feeling of her passions and experiences as a citizen and as a private person; her work in music, dance, theater, film itself and site-specific ventures. This film attends to her music, especially her vocal music; but it makes clear why this is singing that it helps to see as well as hear. Her largeness of spirit becomes ever more apparent; you feel your own horizons grow as you watch and listen.
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W, on the documentary DANCING ACROSS BORDERS, by James Reginato

Anne Bass is well known as an arts patron and socialite, but on a recent afternoon, seated beneath Picasso’s The Drawing Lesson in the library of her palatial apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue, the petite, blond 67-year-old sounds more like a tech geek than agrande dame as she gives a reporter a tutorial in sound mixing. It’s one of many new things Bass learned to do while directing her first documentary.
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Newark Star Ledger, on the 2010 Festival, by Robert Johnson

For dance lovers who also crave adventure, the Dance on Camera Festival is just the thing. Opening Friday at the Walter Reade Theatre, the international series produced by the Dance Films Association and the Film Society of Lincoln Center offers several cutting-edge programs, alternating with traditional documentaries.
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City Arts, on the 2010 Festival, by Susan Reiter

The documentaries are a particularly strong selection. Two of them profile distinctive innovators who are more than deserving of the insightful, thorough examination these films give them. Ruedi Gerber’s Breath Made Visible profiles Anna Halprin, who turns 90 this year and has been a free-spirited, profoundly influential West Coast dance figure.
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Time Out, on DOC Touring Program, Chicago, by Zac Whittenburg

“There’s a dream-like quality to dance films in general,” says Dance for the Camera curator Jan Bartoszek. You can go into the psyche and create different environments than you can onstage. The sky’s the limit.”
Bartoszek’s love affair with dance cinema was ignited in a college media-studies class, where she saw Norman McLaren’s 1968 experiment, Pas de deux. In it, blunt side lighting and high contrast reduce two dancers to white outlines in a black void; McLaren used an optical printer to show them shedding and entering freeze-frames of their own movements. “It blew me away,” Bartoszek says.
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