Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema is an out-of-the-mainstream film festival that presents dance films and live performance annually in Boulder Colorado, USA and also tours with select submissions. Three busy volunteers do most of the work: Michelle Ellsworth, a performance artist and Professor of Dance; Ana Baer, a multimedia artist and Professor of Dance; and Hamel Bloom, a technologist, wheelchair dancer, and film editor.

The Festival began in the Sans Souci Mobile Home Park, Michelle's trailer in particular, and quickly migrated to the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) courtesy of Ellsworth's friend and curator, Brandi Mathis. BMoCA was our home for five of our seven years. The start was small and humble. In year one, Michelle and Brandi invited friends and students to show work. Once invited, if one showed up with a mini DV at BMoCA, the work was exhibited and the tape returned. Michelle and Brandi began curation in the second year.

In year three, Baer and Bloom joined the crew as Brandi headed out for NYC. Since then, Baer, Bloom, and Ellsworth have been the core curation team. Even though we're all practitioners and two of us are professors, all of us still consider ourselves to be lifelong students of the new and evolving screendance art form. We are fans of screendance and of the artists who make the work. Our intention is to provide a forum for those artists and a venue where our audiences can grow to appreciate the form.

As the screendance medium gains popularity and our festival gains visibility, the number and quality of our submissions increase. Although we may need to soon, we deliberately have no set agenda. This allows a mix of creativity to flow into our funnel. As the number of submitters increases, so does the number of snacks needed for our curatorial process. And as we nibble, we ingest intellectually in form and in content.

We hold a very expansive definition of dance. This opens the festival to a wide variety of fare. We have a list of criteria for selecting works to screen. On our website we say:

We're interested in work that integrates dance and cinematography. When choosing works, we consider production values, thoughtful forms and themes, investigative / innovative / experimental approaches, audience appeal, and how the piece will fit with or complement others we are considering. None of these criteria is a must; none are more important than the others; excellence in any one or two areas may be sufficient for acceptance. Shorts are preferred. We are not interested in work that objectifies the female body or in simple recordings of dance on a proscenium stage – cinematic elements must be an integral part of the entry.

But in the end, what we admire most is artistic innovation and courage. If a piece is moving or compelling, if it tells some truth about the human or political condition, that may become more important than high production values or the moving image.

We find it compelling when an artist takes risks – whether we like the aesthetic or not. There is something inspiring about the fearlessness of an artist to go deep and reveal herself. It may be that some of the works we choose are artifacts of an artistic process, evidence of a commitment, rather than fully polished finished works. So be it. Sometimes we put things in just for their chutzpah – just because they dare to be.

Our curation process is a kind of intensive, yet intuitive and worry-free, snack-based undertaking, held together with an array of web-based custom- made administrative tools created by Hamel. With these tools, we can be confident that our thoughts are being captured as we curate. It supports the conversation that we can each assign a numeric score and record a comment in a shared and structured interactive document. But those scores are not even factors in our decision, just crumbs dropped to help us find our way.

Once works are selected, Ana or Michelle will program the event. We find a tension between ordering works in such a way as to aid the audience's understanding of the new medium and the aleatoric juxtapositional pleasures of the coincidental. We walk the line.