SSF @ Dairy Arts Center 2023

Adumu is the story of the struggle of an African choreographer to achieve his dream of fusing his contemporary dance with Maasai traditional dance in performance in Nairobi. The Maasai are happy to oblige but Kenyan society and Covid put obstacles in his way.

This video leans on the recent recomposition of a Danish medieval ballad fragment “Raven Leads Runes.” The Nordic Raven symbol is an expression of land connectedness and part of a transcultural field of Raven totemism in order to renew modes of community that are less destructive to the world. In Raven I explore my own understanding of this symbol, I strive to give it form and narrate it through movement. Trying to create transcultural bounds through shared symbols like the Raven can be a way of building communities. For me it’s about going back to what I know from my native Central African culture but that I have grown up away from. In order to interpret the figure of the Raven in the Nordic symbolism, I deliberately chose a Wax fabric, a typically African cultural feature, that illustrates nature to establish a transcultural connection, thus emphasizing the fundamental power of Nature. The choreography, which is built both around grounding and upward impulse aims at placing the body firmly rooted into the earth, while reaching for new horizons.

Developed on journeys through the streets and paths of Malta, a group of women, the local, the nomad, and the visitor, experience sites through the perspective of the other. The resident local provides depth and authenticity and vice versa, placing a stranger into a familiar environment highlights the features that have forgotten to be seen. The editing intensifies the opposing features of historic architecture and the sounds of construction sites, illuminating themes of heritage and development, and frictions between community and commerce.

iuSui is an ode to the visceral power of beauty, nature, freedom, and the vulnerability of the human psyche. You will be taken on an aesthetic and kinaesthetic voyage to what might be a very tangible place on earth or the most hidden site within the mind. From dark underwater depths to soaring above the clouds of Sweden, our female protagonist explores what it means to be human. Learn more.

Entangled is a hypnotic dance film exploring how we can radically change our relationship with nature.

A solo dancer (wearing a dress made from the plastic trash she generated over four months) embodies simultaneously both a woman and planet Earth reckoning with the impact of humans on the environment. Through her dancing body, we see Earth’s resiliency and ability to adapt to accommodate outside forces, but also its vulnerability when fighting certain sustained assaults. Filmed on location at Glacier National Park as Artists-in-Residence.

Yn Y Golau (In Visible Light) is an experimental vertical dance film, following two dancers on a journey through natural light phenomena.

Like rooms of a home, we live in rooms of our lives; trapping moments and memories to the subtle things surrounding us. In the home of our mind, we repeat the past to move on into the future. This 30 minute dance for film was shot in one take, to explore the memories sewing our rooms together and how we choose to step outside or stay recessed in our past.

Struggling with writer’s block, a woman moves through surreal worlds to discover the ebbs and flows of creativity. Learn more.

Dancers Dominika Feiglewicz & Patrycja Jarosińska focus on love letters to themselves and their bodies exploring female pressures, disability and expectations whilst coming together through friendship solidarity, and nature.Pióra is a film created in collaboration with Metal, UK and The National Institute of Music and Dance, Warsaw. Filmed on location in the UK and Poland.

Inspired by the work of Ida Bell Wells, whose writing documented the episodic period of lynchings in the 1890s, What’s Bred in the Blood and Bone is a study of space and place, girded by the collective experiences of brown bodies. “Blood” explores “blood memory” as body memory and the ways in which our collective experiences bind and fortify us as African Americans.

“I am a dancer from Ukraine. Right now I have to work on a volunteer kitchen as Russia started the War in my country. As well as all the team that gathered in a black room to film the feelings of all the Ukrainians these days – they also have been directors, screenwriters, cameraman etc before the 24.02.2022. Today it all became unimportant. This video is about darkness and light, life and death, struggle and peace…The war is not over. The war continues but always the light swallows the darkness.”

A portrait of star ballerina, Lauren Cuthbertson, returning to dance after having a baby.

Sole is a short dance film exploring themes of individual autonomy, coexistence within the group, celebration of individuality within a group.