Dance Film Artists
Alma Har’el
Born and raised in Israel Alma Har’el began her work as a photographer and a video jockey in electronic-music dance clubs. Working on live video-art per- formances with different musicians led her to directing music videos and her frequent collaborations with singer Zach Condon of the band Beirut brought her several nominations in film and music video festivals around the world. Beirut’s “Elephant Gun” was chosen as one of the best music videos of the dec- ade in 2010 by several publications and “Fjogurr Piano” for the band Sigur Ros starring Shia Labeouf is currently showing in film festivals as part of the Valtari Film Experiment. Her first feature doc “Bombay Beach” won the Tribeca film festival and was nominated for the “Indie Spirit Awards”. It was taught in several universities including Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab and Film Center, as a genre redefining work.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
If dance is movement through the air, photography is a kind of movement through the mind. Filmmaking retains the motion of dance and the air space, through which it happens, but the still camera fixes everything, all motion included, in the moment the shutter fires. Obviously. With photographs, the joys or sorrows of what just happened or the surprise or delight of what comes next is completely erased. We can only imagine the before and after, invent them in our minds. The actions that might have been and could follow are unknown as they are unseen. But that erasure of past and future is exactly where the excitement of photography resides, the lock-down in the present, leaving the viewer to invent the bookends of any single moment’s before and after. In A Dance of Light, I trust the viewer to provide his or her own choreography. How did the hands come up out of the snow? Did the cliff edge crumble and give way after the shutter clicked? Well, I’m here so that, thank God, didn’t happen. In all of the works, as the surrounding light shapes and holds the moment and place still in time, I try to discover the posture through which magic might happen. I can never be sure because I am never behind the camera. For me, for these last 42 years now, it always has been a dance of happenstance. © Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 2013
Clara van Gool
Appeared courtesy of Consulate General of The Netherlands at the 2012 Dance on Camera, Dutch filmmaker Clara van Gool (ENTER ACHILLES, NUSSIN, BITINGS AND OTHER EFFECTS) has had a steady stream of winning dance films, including the premiere of COUP DE GRACE at Dance on Camrea. Curator Deirdre Towers interviewed van Gool about her approach, her philosophy, and her collaborators.
Danièle Wilmouth
Danièle Wilmouth is fascinated by the weird science of movies and the possibility of conjuring up a soul from the cinematic machine. Her works are hybrids of performance art, dance, installation and cinema, which exploit the shifting hierarchies between live and screen space. In 1990 Wilmouth began a six-year residency in the Kansai region of Japan, where she studied Butoh dance with Katsura Kan, Maro Akaji, Yoshito Ohno and Byakko-sha. She also co-founded Hairless Films, a multi-national independent filmmaking collective.
Her award winning films – Curtain of Eyes (1997), Containers (1999), Tracing a Vein (2001), ROUND (2002), Hula Lou (2007), A Heretic’s Primer on Love & Exertion (2007), Eleanore & the Timekeeper (2010) and FANFARE for MARCHING BAND (2012) have screened in festivals, museums, and on television worldwide —including at the Kunst Museum (Bonn, Germany); the National Gallery of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia); Television Canal+ (Argentina); Kino Arsenal (Germany); Tampere Short Film Festival (Finland); Impakt Festival (Holland); Anthology Film Archives (New York); Black Maria Touring Film Festival; Dance Camera West (Los Angeles); Cambridge Film Festival (UK); Antimatter Media Arts Festival (Victoria, BC); Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan); and the Margaret Mead Film Festival (New York).
Wilmouth is the recipient of a 2010 – 2011 EMPAC Dance MOViES Commission, and a DFA Post-production Grant. In 2012, a retrospective of her work was featured at EXiS Experimental Film & Video Festival at the Korean Film Archives in Seoul, South Korea. Her award winning documentary feature, ELEANORE & THE TIMEKEEPER screens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in May of 2013. She currently teaches film, video, new media and performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. More info Hairless Films.
David Hinton
David Hinton is a director who has made many documentaries for British television. His subjects have included artists of all kinds, including painter Francis Bacon, film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, writer Alan Bennett, and choreographer Karole Armitage. He has also made films about Dostoyevsky, rock and roll, visual comedy, and the Cultural Revolution in China. He is best known in the dance world for DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN and STRANGE FISH, his film versions of stage shows by DV8 Physical Theatre. He has also made performance films with Adventures in Motion Pictures, the Alvin Ailey Company and the Royal Swedish Ballet, and he has collaborated with several choreographers to create original dance works for the screen. He has twice won British Academy awards for his documentaries, and his dance films have won many awards, including a Prix Italia, an Emmy, and the IMZ Dance Screen Award.
Diego Aguda Pinilla
My artwork it is focused on making a Portrait of Movement in a handcrafted way. I consider that every person has a specific and unique way of move themselves: The way they walk, the expressions in their daily day… As I have grown on a dancing environment, I have assisted to numerous and diverse dancing performances. In the beginning, I felt frustrated as spectator trying to understand the plasmation of the plot. Once I had the chance of seeing Sylvie Guillem. I suddenly understood the deeper meaning of every movement on her performance as she would be talking to me without using any word. In the artwork that I am offering you, I have wanted to reflect every nuance that Sylvie transmits to each one of the different dancing styles that she dominates as I consider her as one of the most important summit in the world of Dancing. In the introduction of “Dance On Paper” I have portrayed some of the most important characters of the Twentieth Century, as Charles Chaplin or Michael Jackson, whose particular way of Movement defines them very clearly. As my artwork it is totally handcraft using only coloured pencils and paper as in the traditional animation filmmaking, I have wanted to accompany the projection of the film with a few pictures that reflects the work-in-progress of the animation sequences.
Donna Cameron
Donna Cameron is a noted American Artist. Cameron’s photography and films use a unique cinematic paper emulsion process (CPE) for which she was issued a U.S. Patent in 2001. Her films and videos are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY (MoMA) and are distributed by the MoMA Circulating Film Library, Canyon Cinema, CA, Film-makers’ Coop, NY and Light Cone, Paris, FR. CAMERON was exhibited in the MoMA’s 20th century retrospective of art, “MoMA 2000”, and in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s millennial “The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought,” in 2000. Her art, photography and films were repre- sented in the 51st and 52nd Venice Biennale of Art in 2005 and 2007, May – October. CAMERON holds an MPS in ART AND TECHNOLOGY from the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and a BFA in film/photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cameron’s art is anthologized in Cynthia Maris Dantzic’s “100 New York Photographers” (2009), Maureen Furness’ “The Animation Bible” (2008) and William Wees’ “Recycled Images” (1993). Her Ltd. monograph “Donna Cameron”, Spuyten- duyvil Press (2007), is sold at the MoMA store, Rizzoli Booksellers, NY and the NYU Bookstore. She teaches at New York University.
Douglas Rosenberg
Douglas Rosenberg is an EMMY nominated director and the recipient of the prestigious Phelan Art Award in Video. He was awarded the Direc- tor’s Prize at the International Jewish Video Festival for his film, “My Grandfather Dances” with choreographer Anna Halprin and received an IZZIE Award for his work on the intermedia project, “Singing Myself A Lullaby”, (a collaboration with Ellen Bromberg and John Henry). His films have screened internationally for over 25 years at venues including, The Contemporary Art Museum in Buenos Aires, Mostra de Vídeo Dansa de Barcelona, Spain, The Video Place, London, at Vdance – Inter- national Video Dance of Tel-Aviv at the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque and The Kennedy Center, Wash DC.
Nuria Font
Appeared courtesy of the Consulate General of Spain at the 2012 Dance on Camera, with support from the Institut Ramon Llull, filmmaker/producer Nuria Font has been running Mostra de VideoDansa, a Spanish biannual dance film festival for twenty years and her own production company Nu2 since 2003. She has been a galvanizing force for dance on camera, commissioning films from Spanish artists, exhibiting them internationally, and conducting research into the field.
Richard Daniels
Modern dance now has a new performance space: the iPhone, with a free app called Dances for an iPhone, created by choreographer/videographer Richard Daniels. At Dance on Camera 2012, Daniels presented four solos from Vol 4 to music by Scriabin, gave a demonstration of how the app works, which was followed by a conversation, moderated by Norton Owen with some of the dancers who appear in videos. Some of the participants included Risa Steinberg, Christine Wright, Molissa Fenley, Barbara Mahler and David Leventhal.
Richard James Allen and Karen Pearlman
The Physical TV Company is Australia’s premier company for the production and distribution of dance film, screendance, video dance, or dance for the camera, as well as being a leading provider of innovative choreography for music videos, musicals, new and transmedia projects. Artistic DirectorsRichard James Allen and Karen Pearlman make “stories told by the body”. Their award-winning shorts, feature films and new media projects combine the finest filmmakers, crews and production values with dance, dancers and ideas about making moving pictures that move. Bringing together the spiritual, physical and technological, thought-provoking, engaging and rich in rhythms and images, Physical TV’s award-winning physical films regularly screen nationally and internationally at film festivals and on television, and can be viewed on The Physical TV Channel on YouTube. Karen and Richard are also well known as writers, Karen for her film theory and criticism, Richard for his poetry. (Order Richard’s new poetry book, Fixing the Broken Nightingale, here.)
Simon Fildes and Kirstie Simson
Simon Fildes has spent most of his working life as a freelancer in the arts, music and media sectors, editing and producing for broadcast television, arts and corporate sectors while developing a personal practice in creative media arts. Originally a musician, for the past two decades Simon has been a practicing artist, working mainly in the field of video art and interactive sound and visual installations. He has created video projections for live performances and worked with Katrina McPherson on all her video dance works over the past 18 years. He was a recipient of a ‘Year of the Artist’ award in 2001, and in 2006 he was shortlisted for the Creative Scotland Award. He lives in the Highlands of Scotland with Katrina and their 3 children.
Kirstie Simson (UK) has been a continuous explosion in the contemporary dance scene, bringing audiences into contact with the vitality of pure creation in moment after moment of virtuoso improvisation. Called “a force of nature” by the New York Times, she is an award-winning dancer and teacher who has “immeasurably enriched and expanded the boundaries of New Dance” according to Time Out Magazine, London: “Simson’s eternal subject is freedom, as she dares to go beyond the boundaries of form and structure to create movement out of the rhythm of life itself.” Kirstie is renowned today as an excellent teacher and captivating performer and a leading light in the field of Dance Improvisation. She currently holds a position at the University of Illinois, and continues to teach and perform all over the world.