Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema - Press Reports

2005 BMoCA Screening San Souci Festival Event spotlights 'dance for camera' phenomenon Daily Camera, Boulder Colorado, USA by Cari Cunningham, Camera Dance Critic Friday, April 22, 2005
*et toi?,* Nina Winthrop and Dancers, Choreographed by Nina Winthrop, Dancer: Verena Tremel. (photo by Maria Antelman)

The television screen is black until a watery white strip traverses it horizontally, splitting the screen and revealing mirror images of the same figure. One is lying on her back; the other seems suspended face down over an abyss of darkness. The two figures begin to move in refracted tandem like a single panel in a kaleidoscope. Gradually, the two dancers become four in a series of diagonal refractions and then return to their horizontal mirrored duet. After two minutes and 45 seconds the strangely beautiful movement sequence concludes and the screen returns to black. In dance, live performance and the three-dimensional body take precedence, but when audiences become more familiar with the television box than they are with the box seats in the theater, new ways of envisioning dance emerge. Mimi Garrard`s "Omagbitse Suite," described above, is one take on a new catch phrase permeating the fields of dance and filmmaking - "dance for camera." A genre of work that is by no means new, "dance for camera" implies bringing two-dimensional and three-dimensional together in a medium that is much more widely accessible than the average dance performance. Boulder is home to a vibrant community of artists creating dances for camera, so it only seems fitting that there be a local venue for this work. On Saturday and Sunday, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art presents the second annual San Souci Festival of Projected Dance. The festival began in 2004 as a collaborative effort between local performance and video artist Michelle Ellsworth and BMoCA artistic director Brandi Mathis. In one year`s time, San Souci moved from a small, primarily invitational festival featuring mostly local artists to an event spanning two evenings and including work from artists in San Francisco; New York City; London; Provo, Utah; Norway and Los Angeles. The experimental performance space at BMoCA is a fitting home for an atypical evening at the movies. " I think at first glance people mistake us for just simply an art museum. You know, pictures hanging on the wall, that kind of thing," Mathis says. "But one of the missions (of BMoCA) is to explore intersections between genres, specifically visual and performing arts. I think that film, in particular with this dance for camera work, is a good intersection of a performing art with a visual art." This year, each evening of the San Souci Festival begins with a full-length dance for camera work by an established artist in the field. On Saturday the documentary about dancer Anna Halperin, "Returning Home," precedes the "Short Souci" program of curated dance for camera shorts by Garrard, Ashley Hartka, Gaute Lid Larssen, Tara Jones, Carrie Noel, Cassandra Weston and Leslie Merrill. "Returning Home" is a collaborative creation between director and cinematographer Andy Abrahams Wilson, Halprin and visual artist Eeo Stubblefield. Sunday`s program opens with Elliott Caplan`s "Steel Works." Caplan, who created dance for camera projects with such legendary choreographers as Merce Cunningham, plays a large role in cultivating the next generation of dance for camera artists and regularly offers workshops in choreography for the camera in Boulder. Following "Steel Works" is a program of invited dance for camera works, primarily by local artists. " Risking Cardboard," a piece by San Francisco-based filmmaker and choreographer Noel that is part of the "Short Souci" program, began as a live dance work presented on the proscenium stage. It was an adaptation of sorts, based on the story in a Velvet Underground song about a man who mails himself in a box to his beloved. " I was really happy with some of the responses to it on stage, but I also just felt like it wasn`t the right place," Noel says of "Risking Cardboard`s" staged premiere. "It needed to have a setting and context and real people in a sort of real situation." Noel, who currently is enrolled in the graduate film studies program at San Francisco State University, felt compelled to explore the work as a dance film instead. " I have kind of felt like modern dance especially is a little stale in the theater. I feel like the same people come and watch the shows and the same people are in the shows and they`re all kind of the same thing over and over and over," she says of her initial interest in dance for the camera. "My choreography in particular is geared toward really, really small details and gestures, and I just started realizing that if I can use a camera and a lens and really highlight the little tiny details that are interesting to me that I have more control over an audience." Though the field is not young, dance for camera festivals still are relatively scarce. Bringing such a festival to Boulder is a treat for Mathis and Ellsworth. " It`s always an intention of mine to introduce Boulder audiences to things that they might not have ever encountered before and would never encounter unless they visited a larger city," Mathis says. "For the dance community, I think it just shakes things up a little bit to have a chance to see what other people in the country and around the world are working on. I think it tends to reinvigorate and inspire the local community, seeing things from outside."