DOC Journal: September/October 2011, 4th Article

Endless Possibilities: Dance Through the Camera by Jaime Kight 

  Dance Films Association’s Solar 1 film screening presented a program as imaginative as a child’s world of make-believe. Live performers interacted with Bjork on screen; dark angels investigated a snowy landscape; a romantic attraction escalated into a bar fight. Blending dance with film, choreographers allowed creativity to run rampant. Several video shorts were shown and four little films particularly stood out. In Rebecca Kelley Brooks’ Miracle Tear, Bjork’s music video “Big Time Sensuality” played on screen while a trio of live dancers permeated the space. One performer mimicked the singer’s movements while others circulated among the audience, periodically inviting them to change their perspectives by picking up their chairs and moving to different spots throughout the piece. Brooks created the perfect tension between video and live performance by balancing movement, film and the unpredictability of the audience’s vantage point. The next film — Melt by Noémie Lafrance — began with a group of female dancers dissolving on a wall beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Dripping with lanolin, beeswax and thin muslin, the performers sat in chairs attached to the wall. Captivating, inwardly focused and almost apathetic, they awaited something inevitable, stuck on the wall until it occurred. Melt consisted of highly dramatic dynamics caused not only by its gravity-defying dancers, but by the idle and unresolved ambience. Pretty Big Dig by Anne Troake proved that size doesn’t always equal strength. Three massive industrial cranes glided through a construction site as gracefully as swans. The “dancers” used their trunk-like extensions to lengthen their swan-necks, to take a bow or to share weight. Amusing, clever and visually stunning, Troake’s film also proved that the strongest can embody tranquility. End Love, starring the music group OK Go, captured hipsterdom at its finest. Directed by Eric Gunther and Jeff Lieberman, the dorky group wore brightly-colored hoodies with matching skinny jeans and white Van sneakers. Awkward and beguiling, they danced with thrusting pelvises, Sumo-wrestler poses and gawky arm movements. End Love (about 5 minutes long) had the spirit of a flash mob where the gangly and untrained are revered and welcomed. Maladroit everything made this short totally alluring. All the videos expanded the possibilities of what can be thematically and logistically achieved. Each concentrated on various elements (i.e. space, equipment, or props) that were un-theatrical yet brilliantly utilized. The medium of film allows for a flexibility and freedom impossible to attain in proscenium and theater spaces. Seeing and shooting films from new angles and environments gave fresh choreographic weight to dance/film making, creating works with greater substance, multiple layers and new perspectives. “OK, Let’s Go!”
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