Dance and film lovers, rejoice! The 52nd Annual Dance on Camera Festival is coming to Lincoln Center, starting today (February 9) and running through February 12. Over four days, the festival will feature eleven thoughtfully curated programs of thirty-six films from around the world. The films range in length from three to 103 minutes, and in style too. There are documentaries, experimental films, comedies, and music videos. There is a healthy mix of the beautiful and the absurd, the familiar and the I’ve-never-seen-anything-like-this-before.
For those in the dance film (or screen dance or screendance or video dance) industry, having your work shown at this festival means you’ve made it. Dance on Camera is the longest-running dance film festival in the world, inaugurated in 1971 and co-presented with Film at Lincoln Center since 1996. Every year, curators review hundreds of entries to find the best of the best and create an exciting program that appeals to general audiences and dance insiders alike.
I spoke with a curator, Cara Hagan, a dance film practitioner, scholar, educator, and writer, as well as associate professor and program director of the MFA in Contemporary Theater Performance at The New School. dance cinema for a long time and is the Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice article published in 2022. She knows what she’s talking about.
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Hagan explained with infectious enthusiasm that the history of the motion picture movement is the history of cinema. When movie cameras were invented, one of the first things people sought out was cinematic dance. “Because they were saying, ‘People are moving! Let’s move. “!’ There is no sound. There is no dialogue. What are you going to capture besides live choreography or actual choreography? »
He went on to say that cinema (his favorite term) “is magical. We have power over the legislation of time and physics. . . Every time we take a leap, we move in time, we teleport. . . I think what we get when we put movement on the screen is the extension of the functions of the human body. We can go incredibly slow. We can go by incredibly fast. We can do things out of order. We can take other people into spaces where we wouldn’t necessarily do it. to be able to attract an audience.
“That’s not to say that one area is better than another,” Hagan added. “There are things in the live functionality that you don’t get in the cinema area. The most important thing is the lively exchange you get between the live actors. “performers and live audiences. However, kinesthetic empathy manifests itself in other ways. And we don’t necessarily want to be in a living room to feel kinesthetic empathy. We can delight in it through the screen.
The Festival is full of options, so if you’re feeling defeated (4 days is a lot, 11 sets is a lot, thirty-six films is a lot), here are some suggestions:
Romance (as part of the Global Shorts program on February 10 at 3:15 p. m. ), directed by Samantha Shay and created in collaboration with an intergenerational ensemble of dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal, is one of the highlights of the entire festival. The film is based on Miranda July’s short story “It Romance” and the real-life accounts of Naomi Brito, a Brazilian-born transgender member of the company. It’s superbly shot on 16mm film in Pina Bausch’s practice studio and slips between fictional narrative, documentary, and heartbreakingly enchanting dance.
Also on the program are Slipping, an all-female surrealist film by Karen Kaeja and Roshanak Jaberi, set in the Quebec countryside, Gabriela Cavanagh and Grace McNally’s OtherSide, set in Cuba, and Laura Steiner’s short but hard, three-minute Thick Skin, set in Colombia. .
Chin-Yuan Ke’s Sea Spray / 海之岸, set in Taiwan, is another highly anticipated film. It is part of the Environmental Expressions program (on February 11 at 11:30 a.m.), along with other films in conversation with the climate crisis. Director Ke is considered Taiwan’s first investigative filmmaker focused on the environment, and his dedicated passion runs through the film. It is part nature documentary, part site-specific dance performance. It is visually stunning and thought-provoking. “In this setting,” one of the dancers says during the film, “dance takes on a wild, animalistic quality. It reveals a raw humanity. We’re animals too… biological organisms.”
Branché, through Janique L. Robillard and Eric Bate, follows with a poignant exploration through circus arts, nature and deforestation in Quebec. And then Vajrasara’s short film (8m), A State of Thirst, which takes place in India, imagines a lonely person and sparse lifestyles on the water.
The exhibit Provocative Perspectives (Feb. 10 at 8:15 p. m. ) is the most productive example of what Hagan calls “magic. “In those films, time is doubled, narratives lose recognizable arcs, and cinematic editing tricks are more productive. Viewers are invited to enjoy the paintings and draw their own conclusions. In 3 Horsewomen, a supernatural film by Kimberley Cooper and Noel Bégin, based on F. W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film Faust, the three performers dance on mechanical horses covered in silver leaf. Zap McConnell’s Cat Rider and Devouring Stones Up Close is a hallucinatory vision of Virginia’s East Coast, and Eva Tang’s Am I Here is a claustrophobic portrayal of a house. The seven films in this show promise to expand your mind and lead you into engaging conversations after the screening.
“We got so many films about love,” Hagan said. Maybe it’s because we are all still reeling from the isolation of the Covid pandemic, but the curators got so many entries that dealt with connection in all its many wonderful forms. “People are talking about love, people are talking about family, people are talking about communities and trusting each other and holding each other up.”
The curators created a program specifically dedicated to the theme Human Connections (February 11 at 7:45 p.m.). Many of Hagan’s personal favorites are on this program—Marc Grey’s humorous Life Hacks for Lovers, James Kinney and Pierre Marais’s moving Bound By A Thread, and Jaden Esse’s delightful What Lies Beneath.
So when we get those documentaries and articles about the work of other people who are looking to keep some of our hitale as makers and creators and as other people working and creators of the movement, it feels really important.
One of the films that sheds light on a history almost lost in the hitale is Jennifer Lin’s Ten Times Better, which is part of the ballet-focused Classical Combines program (February 10 at 6:00 p. m. m. ). The documentary is about George Lee, an 88-year-old blackjack broker who was a refugee from Shanghai and danced tea in the original production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.
Obsessed with Light by Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbuhl Saunders (festival closes on February 12 at 6:30 p. m. ) is a documentary about Loïe Fuller, a pioneer of fashion dance, theatrical costumes and lighting design. This is the moment in the film that Oelbaum and Saunders have created in combination under their corporate production company Between the Rivers Productions. The first, Letters From Baghdad (voiced and produced by Tilda Swinton), tells the story of Gertrude Bell, the brilliant woman overshadowed by T. E. Lawrence. That’s what drives us to make movies,” Saunders said. “The concept of finding women who are unusual, attractive, and forgotten. “
Saunders came across footage of Fuller’s serpentine dance (while working on a film about cubism’s early influence on cinema) and was mesmerized. “When we started to research her,” Oelbaum told me, “We came across so many contemporary writers and artists and designers who referenced her.” Just a few: Red Hot Chili Peppers, William Kentridge, Taylor Swift, Alexander McQueen, and Shakira. “We were blown away how she was sort of everywhere, but no one knew anything about her.” They decided she would make a great subject.
The film weaves together archival (hand-tinted!) footage of Fuller’s pioneering dances, an exploration of the creation of new paintings through choreographer Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse Dance Company, and interviews with new artists influenced by the Fuller paintings. Fuller on the big screen is a delight not to be missed.
The Dance on Camera Festival kicks off today, Feb. 9, and will take place Feb. 12 at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
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