30 Nov DOC Journal: September/October 2011, 3rd Article
Promising Times Ahead
by Terry Sprague
If the University of Utah’s 8th International Dance For the Camera Festival with Katrina McPherson was any indication about the ways in which screendance is evolving, we’re in for promising times ahead. Filmmaker/professor Ellen Bromberg and her students collaborated with the Departments of Modern Dance and Film & Media Arts to host three days of workshops and screenings that revealed an increasing mastery of the art and craft of screendance-making. The event was a refreshing celebration of dance as an expression of the human spirit and a gathering of artists and teachers who are developing new screendance courses and programs at universities around the country.
Internationally acclaimed Scottish dance filmmaker and author, Katrina McPherson, led two days of discussions, exercises and activities that honed in on identifying what successful moments in screendance look and feel like, and what we can do to increase the odds of creating such moments! Her approach is particularly effective for shooting improvisational dance. In fact, for her, the camera borders on being another player in the improvisation. As we saw in her selection of screendances, she creates a particularly kinetic effect with this shooting technique.
Most notable were There is a Place, McPherson’s collaboration with Chinese dancer/choreographer San Jijia and screendance artist Simon Fildes; and Force of Nature, her collaboration with improvisational artist Kirstie Simson. There is a Place featured brilliant moments such as when McPherson’s camera captured Jijia’s percussive arm and hand movements along the surface of a table in an abandoned, high-ceiling building with exquisite light, which were masterfully edited by Fildes into a commanding, rhythmic climax. McPherson described Simson as doing in dance what she is doing in dance filmmaking. Indeed, their simpatico is evident in Force of Nature, which underscores Simson’s visceral, intuitive approach to making dances in the moment.
Another valuable aspect of this Utah festival was having the opportunity to spend days with a roomful of people who not only share a passion for screendance, but many of whom are making work, teaching screendance courses and inventing university-level screendance programs. Since there are few models available for these endeavors, we appreciated the opportunity to compare notes and share information. Interestingly, the demand for screendance programs is only increasing! It was no coincidence that this festival was directed by Ellen Bromberg who is responsible for creating one of the first Graduate Certificate programs in Screendance.
A surprising highlight of the festival turned out to be the opening night screening of Juried Student Films From Around the World. The program featured a selection of refreshing screendances including Sabrina Cavins’ Stranger Dances, Hamish Anderson’s Shadowed, James Gould and Kristen Lucas’ Whirligig and Tanja London’s Lost Horizon. These screendances favored content over flashiness, demonstrated artful uses of technology/special effects and unfolded with sophisticated senses of composition/editing.
Three of the strongest pieces were created by Luis Ernesto Donas, Jerman Catalan and Tristan Castilla, who are students at Cuba’s Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV which received the festival’s Jury’s Choice Award. Donas’ Vivir es Vivir lulled us with images depicting everyday pleasures such as bare feet caressing toes and rubbing skin to skin. The glorious, velvety voice of a female opera singer accompanied the images until the end at which point an abrasive, loud car horn interrupted with alarming images of a body hit by a car on a street and another body face down after having fallen from a window. Whether Donas is asking us to not take life for granted, or to consider that death hovers right around the corner from life, his addressing these subjects was admirable, and all too rare.
Castilla’s Panal had us peeping at night into lit rooms of multiple apartments where dancers were each performing different domestic “dances.” One couple was reaching, turning and bowing to each other as if they were sharing re-caps of their days. A woman buzzed from room to room as we would if each of our daily tasks were performed as a dance. A man strolled outside to lounge, roll and bounce on a couch. Witnessing the comings and goings of others in Panal evoked the pleasurable, distinctive voyeurism of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the parallel slices of life seen in Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament.
The screendance ended with a woman going outside to see the man on the couch. They lingered in the hallway for a moment, went upstairs to the upper room, then drew the curtains. The rest is left up to our imagination.
The program ended with Catalan’s Dancion, which featured a motley crew of gypsy and clown-type characters, a ballet dancer and an Indian dancer who frolicked in a bar-like space one might experience during Brazilian Carnival. A woman and a man gazed at each other from across the room much like two characters in Black Orpheus. The piece ended with a Fellini-esque promenade where the characters appeared at the top of a hill and danced across a field toward the camera. Each dancer performed his/her individual, slightly eccentric, expressive movements such as cart-wheels, twists, hops and turns that, with the others, brought to mind a performance of humanity on parade.
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