Image by Michele Mola
Photo by Michael Hart

Jia Wu
"Situ-Asian"

BOMBA
to be shown in
SHALL WE DANCE
series

Young Choreographers Initiative/ Susan Braun Award
An opportunity for New York City choreographers ages 16-25 to win a cash award to create a short work and/or adapt a stage choreography for the camera, in collaboration with a young filmmaker with a grant from DFA named after DFAfounder, the late Susan Braun. Michelle Mola is the 2008 winner; Austin McCormick was the 2007 winner. Read more about 2008-2007 winners.

Alliance with on-line channels and editing platforms
DFA works to explore on-line opportunities for its members, dance film artists and educators on an on-going basis. Recent partnerships with DFA include dancemedia.com which gives dance filmmakers a chance to reach a largely untapped audience -- the young dancer; CrushedPlanet (see "Stream of Theater") designed so that the majority of fees paid to view work go to the artists; Kaltura.com, an on-line editing platform which Wikipedia will be using as soon as October; and a premier performance venue, Tendu.tv, which is designed with the goal of providing revenue for dance companies.

Fiscal Sponsorships
Read about current projects including those by Yelena Demikovksy, Annette Macdonald's documentary on Jack Cole, "The Nutcracker Nation, "Channeling Martha, a portrait of Richard Move" and more.

Dance Film Lab
A marvelous community-building, bi-monthly series hosted by Dance Theatre Workshop, 219 West 19th Street, New York City. Filmmakers join together to present raw footage, drafts, works-in- progress and newly finished films to their peers for constructive feedback, share information, and address technical, practical and artistic challenges. Free and open to public. For a review of the first Lab in October, '06, click here . To attend and/or present in the Labs, contact Zachary Morris.

Dance film in China
Developing a new generation of dance filmmakers
Jia Wu, a graduate from the Beijing Dance Academy and UCLA is developing a curriculum and touring program in China with the help of DFA's resources. She will launch her new program in the Spring of 2009 with director Daniel Conrad in Beijing. Read more

Film production for “PR Roots and Beyond”
William Cepeda’s “Puerto Rican Music Roots and Beyond” is a project of el Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños/Center for Puerto Rican Studies, CUNY, in collaboration with the Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture, City Lore, DFA, and the Puerto Rican Day Parade of Western New York.

Hostos' BomPlenazo: Mark your calendar October 7-12, 2008.

Project director Roberta Singer, who produced the documentary BOMBA is producing concerts, lecture demonstrations, master and intermediate level workshops, residencies, pubic school performances, a package of educational materials, extensive historical and contextual essays, and DVDs and CDs. The project will be presented by Puerto Rican institutions in Buffalo and the Albany Capitol region. Each of the concerts and related activities will focus on one of the four traditional Puerto Rican music genres: la bomba, música jibara, la danza and la plena. The first set will be a presentation by expert exponents of the tradition; the second set will incorporate these artists into William Cepeda’s Afro-Boricua Jazz Ensemble performing his compositions written specifically for this project. The concerts at Hostos will be professionally audio and video recorded, professionally edited, and released with the accompanying essays. The project’s lead organization is the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, an institution founded in 1974 to research and document the Puerto Rican experience in the Island, New York, and other Diaspora regions in the U.S.

El Centro is a university-based research institute whose mission is to collect, preserve and provide access to archival and library resources documenting the history and culture of Puerto Ricans. The other is to produce, facilitate, and disseminate interdisciplinary research about the diasporic experiences of Puerto Ricans and to link this scholarly inquiry to social action and policy debates. www.centropr.org

The Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, on the campus of Hostos Community College, CUNY, at Grand Concourse at E.149th Street in the Bronx, New York. www.hostos.cuny.edu/culturearts

Funding “Puerto Rican Music Roots and Beyond” is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For additional information about the artists and partner organizations:
William Cepeda: www.williamcepeda.com
Victoria Sanabria: www.victoriasanabria.com
Grupo Mapeyé: www.musicofpuertorico.com/ind...tistas/mapeye
City Lore: www.citylore.org
Puerto Rican Day Parade of Western New York: www.prparadeofwny.org

Commissions
DFA commissioned its first moving image to announce the call for entries for the 2007 Festival. As recommended by filmmaker/animator Pooh Kaye, DFA hired Jaamil Kosoko, a video, movement, and literary artist who creates interdisciplinary work, made POOL PERMIT, with dancer Magan Mazarick, sound designer Sean Mattio, and cameraman Les Rivera.

Jaamil Kosoko finds "no limits" in the art of dance on camera "besides the inherent limitations the dancefilm creates for itself within the rendering of the work. In POOL PERMIT, we discover a woman searching for a balance of her own kind. Attempting to understand the natural forms and nuance within her body while also trying to break free from its physical constraints, she cannot move forward until she can pull herself together and experience her body's full potential."

Click to see POOL PERMIT

Read Reviews; Write Your Own
As editorial space for reviews of dance and independent films shrinks in magazines and newspapers around the world, this initiative is an attempt to create a forum for critical review, feedback for the filmmakers, and community debate. After minimal contribution to this site by artists and maximal, unwanted additions by salesmen, we have discontinued this initiative until further notice.