Dance on Camera Ezine (excerpts)
February, 2007

Dance on Camera Workshop
July 30 - August 12, 2007 VICTORIA BC CANADA
Dance for the Camera (DFTC) Intensive Summer Program for choreographers, filmmakers, and dancers facilitated and mentored by award winning choreographer, filmmaker, curator, educator and recipient of the 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, Ellen Bromberg.
Set on beautiful Vancouver Island in the city of Victoria this two-week program offers in-depth experience for choreographers, filmmakers, and dancers in shooting and editing dance for the camera in a safe, collaborative, and creative environment.

For more information, visit www.danceforthecamera.org

BREAK wins Jury Prize of Dance on Camera Festival 2007

BREAK by New Zealand choreographer/director/writer Shona McCullagh wins the 2007 Jury Award for DFA's 35th annual Dance on Camera Festival. The Festival 2007 Jury, comprised of Elizabeth Zimmer, Ronald Gray, Hélène Lesterlin, Kelly Hargraves, and Larry Keigwin, unanimously chose the 14 minute BREAK as the Festival winner. Elizabeth Zimmer writes on behalf of the jury,

“Using delicious New Zealand landscapes and digital imaging techniques, Shona McCullagh in BREAK creates an engaging, timeless family drama. Economy of means joins emotional truth in a taut exploration of the end of a relationship.”

BREAK is Shona McCullagh’s third short film. The two earlier films HURTLE, which won the Paula Citron Award for Choreography for Camera at the Moving Pictures Festival in Toronto, and FLY, which won a Reel Dance Award, were both shown by Dance on Camera Festival in New York and on its tour.

A graduate from the New Zealand School of Dance in 1983, Shona is an acclaimed dancer who performed for Chris Jannides' Sydney based company Darc Swan, Limbs Dance Company, Douglas Wright & Dancers, as well as her own company Human Garden. In 2005, Shona choreographed for three feature films PERFECT CREATURE, KING KONG, and the THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE; saw her work Verge tour with the Royal New Zealand Ballet Company and choreographed for the Auckland Theatre Company's production of "Equus."

DFA will give Shona McCullagh a cash award of $1,500 and arrange for screenings and live dance events for her in conjunction with DFA’s Dance on Camera Festival internationally touring program. Nominated for the Jury Award were the following titles: BAHUDHA; BONE, CAUGHT IN PAINT; MINOTAUR-EX, MOVEMENT (R)EVOLUTION AFRICA; LUCINDA CHILDS; JOSEPHINE BAKER, A BLACK DIVA IN A WHITE MAN'S WORLD. Only those films that formally entered the DFA 2007 competition were applicable for the Jury Award.

To purchase any of Shona's films:

HURTLE (Winner, Paula Citron Award for Choreography for Camera)
FLY (Winner, Reeldance 2002)
BREAK (Winner, Dance On Camera 2007)

please contact humangarden@paradise.net.nz

 

This image (left) The dance team of Tibor von Halmay and Eva Sylt, ca. 1931  by Martin Munkacsi Gelatin silver print    © Joan Munkacsi, Courtesy F.C. Gundlach Collection is part of the wonderful exhibit Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot! at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY. www.icp.org Hours Tuesday-Sunday, 10-6pm; Fridays open til 8pm.

The exhibit runs from January 19 – April 29, 2007. Running with this exhibit are Henri Cartier-Bresson's "Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932-46" and Louise Brooks and the "New Woman" in Weimar Cinema.

Don't miss this inspiring show. *

Waking Somewhere Else (excerpt)
By Marcia B. Siegel

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), the 20th century's most famous aesthete, made art in many forms. He may never have danced himself, but he contributed to a surprising number of ballets and films that became landmarks of modernism. An intimate of both the Ballets Russes and the Ballets Suédois circles in the teens and twenties, he provided libretti, design ideas, and/or conceptual triggers for Parade (1917), considered the first Cubist ballet; for the collage-satire Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921); and for Bronislava Nijinska's beach ballet, Le Train Bleu (1924). Cocteau violated the conventions of the ballet stage by grafting avant-garde nonsense and illogic onto the rationality of everyday life. He had a hand in thirteen other ballets and produced a constant stream of writings, graphics, and lyrical films, including the psychological dreamscape Le Sang d'un Poète (1932) and the surrealist masterpiece La Belle et la Bête (1946).

Cocteau was an intellectual dandy. Film historian Gerald Mast called him a "cinematic amateur." Yet his poetic sensibility, his recurring themes of transformation, transcendence, and the interdependence of love and death, have inspired filmmakers to this day. Opium, screened at the 2007 Dance on Camera festival, was co-directed by the Canadian writer Miles Lowry and dancer David Ferguson as an adaptation of their stage work about one of Cocteau's visits to a detoxification clinic. The film incorporates many of Cocteau's artistic symbols and gestures into an impressionistic narrative.

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Photo by Anita Goi

PHILIPPE DECOUFLÉ COMING BACK TO NEW YORK CITY
"Solo: Le doute m'habite"
March 6-11, 2007
The Joyce Theatre, New York City

Philippe Decouflé bewitched New Yorkers with his large-scale productions "Shazam!" and "Tricodex" where creatures come to life through a blend of music, dance, acrobatics and multi-media. He has gained many a fan with his films, including LE P'TIT BAL, CODEX, and ABRACADABRA. In his Joyce debut, Decouflé garners his skills as a dancer, illusionist, clown and film-maker in the charming, intimate Solo: Le doute m'habite (The Doubt Within Me). He may be the only dancer on stage, but Decouflé is never alone in this theatrical, multi-media work, as videos, light and shadows conger up a kaleidoscope of himself over the ages.

For tickets, call JoyceCharge at 212.242.0800 or visit www.joyce.org.

Identifying what is particular to dance on camera (excerpt)
by Abigail Stopper

The success of dance performance relies on the interactive experience of the audience, an experience in which those performing make an emotional and kinetic connection that transforms the spectator into an intimate participant. Some may argue that cinematic dance destroys the pure energy experienced in live performance. More than likely, this argument is based on videos made with a static, presidium viewpoint. Dance on camera offers countless possibilities ranging from historic preservation to bold experimentation, but always acknowledges distinct qualities of time, space, location, and cultural exploration.

Location, location, location…

“She had these strange dreams where the land forms took animal shapes and the animal shapes took on human characteristics.”- Daniel Conrad in reference to choreographer Aszure Barton, Afternoon of the Chimeras, Canada, 2006, 15m

Daniel Conrad’s film sliced the envelope for site specific work when he took his artistic team on a month's camping excursion to capture footage of humans interacting with a natural environment. The movement, choreographed by Aszure Barton, reflects the lush qualities of its surroundings and the camera adopts a respectful relationship with nature as well as with the dancers. Dancers materialize from rock formations and spring up out of the brush once Conrad has approved the perfect natural lighting and hiked to the exact camera angles. More than a formal stage setting, the image presented to the viewer is delicately crafted, allowing the director to transport the viewer to a stunning new world.

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Composer for dance seeks film director for
“Every Lover Is a Warrior”

“Every Lover Is a Warrior” was composed by New York City based Kati Agocs.  The cycle for harp solo takes traditional folk tunes from three countries: 1) John Riley, an Appalachian folk ballad; 2) Love is Come Again, a French hymn, and 3) When They Take Me for a Soldier, a Hungarian soldier’s letter to his beloved.  Filming for the first section will be early October 2007 in San Francisco, California.  Sections 2 and 3 will be filmed in Paris, France and Budapest, Hungary.  Dates TBA.  Choreographers have been commissioned. 

The film director position includes salary, travel expenses and lodging paid, as well as a food stipend.  It is a low budget production. If interested, please send sample reels (DVD or VHS) with contact information, resume, references, and website address to:

Dance Film Project, Teresa Wimmer, Producer, c/o ABCT, 305 Seventh Avenue, 16th floor, New York, NY  10001-6008. Deadline for submissions is Friday, February 23, 2007.

For more information, contact Teresa Wimmer at: harpdance@hotmail.com.*

STOMP THE YARD
multi-million dollar winning dance flick

Say what you like, Sylvain White, a son of a pro-basketball player and a French stewardess who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, is dancing with his dancers, when he is not preaching the merits of college and team playing. White was raised mostly in France and came to America where he studied film at Pomona College in southern California and worked at Propaganda Films alongside Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.

Sylvain White discussed his film on National Public Radio, “Stepping is new to most people, but it has been around for over 100 years. I grew up in Paris, France so I was really foreign to this world in many ways. What really impressed me when I went to step shows, the practices, that I saw in black colleges in the south was the level of dedication and tradition within it that was just amazing.”

“People say to me all kinds of things. Americans say my work is very edgy, very European. It’s very commercial, it’s very American. I kinda like that because I grew up with both cultures (European and American).”

Regarding White’s cinematography. “To make the film feel different, I studied a lot of sports movies and the way football is shot and also some Korean Kung fu films. Stepping is interesting because it is a dance form but sometimes it also looks like a martial art as well. I tried to apply these different techniques and bring the audience within the performance because Stepping is really about the unity of the group. And I wanted the audience to feel as though they are a part of the team, especially when they are going into the competition.”

Elston Gunn from AintitCool website ( interviewed Mr. White.

EG “I've always thought dance really lent itself to the nature of cinema. It's about as visual as you can get even if the camera is kept still. What do you think sets STOMP THE YARD apart from other dance films? How did you shoot it?”

SW: I really went to work on the dance scenes. I applied tailored shooting techniques to each dance sequence. I studied everything that had been done up till now, starting with the classics, and really tried to break new ground. I also studied how some classic Hong Kong films shot fight sequences and re-adapted the technique to dance. The result is quite impressive, if I may say.

EG: “Why do you think a lot of dance films today do not connect with the audience?”

SW: “Well, they often feel artificial and the dancing contrived. But in this case you'll almost feel like you are watching a documentary.”

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