Skip to main content
Film Festival

Motion Pictures

By 30th April 2020February 9th, 2021No Comments

Notes

As the title suggests, this programme will talk about different styles and ways of approaching movement.

First up is Grace Jones, the famous Jamaican singer songwriter and actress, tangoing through the night with her slightly spooky manikin partner and Dolly, the ballerina, on strings in her white tutu. Aesha Ash, the only African-American Ballerina in the New York City Ballet then brings her art to the streets of her neighbourhood in Rochester, New York. At the other side of the world, Sabine Maier, an Austrian media artist and photographer discovers an abandoned communist-bloc swimming pool in a building called Kúpele Central in Prague. It was the location where the Spartakiad, a gymnastics event held every five years, had taken place and where the ‘synchronised swimming’ performance was staged.

This is echoed by the elegant movements of a swimmer in the work by Jayne Parker, a British artist and film maker, and is taken up again, by celestial bodies, in Maya Deren’s film. Born in 1917 in the Ukraine, this US-American avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, dancer, choreographer, poet and photographer abandoned established notions of physical space and time in film by using different techniques such as superimposition, slow motion and jump cuts.

Jody Sperling, dancer and choreographer from NY, founded the Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance Company, a non-profit organisation. She was inspired by many of the dancing works made by Loie Fuller such as Serpentine Dance from 1899. (If you set the speed at 0.75, it may be closer to the original speed). Delicate movements and garments are central to the next piece too. Performance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is a commemoration and a lament for the lost First Nations, Inuit and Métis women which continues as  a result of “state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies” (2019 Canadian government report).

This very strong and emotional piece is followed by an uplifting finale, 100 Femmes, which is dedicated to encounters and exchanges between all women around the world and so connects up with celebrating the Hundred Heroines of photography.

* being open source or obtained from a permitted uploader to either YouTube or Vimeo