SSF @ Lafayette: Dance is Like a Fine Wine

Rebirth takes us on one man’s journey through the evolution of consciousness by connecting with the elements and Nature’s metaphysical powers.

In WECreate Spaces: Morelia the artists explore the urban landscapes of Morelia, Mexico, a city that exemplifies the dichotomy found in colonial places featuring the eclectic richness of their architecture and the dilapidated parts of the town. Tuning into the environment through improvisation, the dancers, camera-person and musician create a collaborative knowledge that illuminates their multi-layered sensibility of understanding the world through the body. Generating affective spaces, highlighting the artist’s relations to environment, artist to artist and artist to locals. The serendipitous encounters with the passers-by add a flavour that transforms the usual into extraordinary, portraying the tonality, mood and atmosphere of this joyful and vibrant place.

A tale of lost letters & paper boats. From acclaimed Irish dance company CoisCéim Dance Theatre, the film delves into the mysteries of the sea – as events of Dublin Bay’s past collide with the present, bringing history to life in a bold, physical short film. Hundreds of lives and letters were lost at sea when mailboat RMS Leinster was torpedoed in Dublin Bay. In How to Sink a Paper Boat this devastating past collides with the present when two people meet. Out for a walk along the sea wall, Cora comes across a letter in the water that beckons her to a lighthouse and its keeper, Michael. Her arrival propels the historical event into our time in an emotional embodiment of a tragedy at sea.

A tree on the banks of the Mississippi: What stories does it hold? Multiple branches embedded in our environment, Listening Tree affirms our relationality with life-forces of our world.

Wake is a short dance film which explores and responds to modern attitudes around loss and grief, taking inspiration from different rituals and funeral traditions from around the world. Filmed on the stark and shifting terrain of Dartmoor, Wake steers us through one woman’s journey of grief.

What would compel you to go against the status quo and bring up your family as Irish speakers in English-speaking Ireland of the 1950s to 1980s? In I Modh Rúin (in secret), Ríonach Ní Néill blends film, dance, interviews and music to tell the story of five women who did just that.

The choreography and natural movement of twelve physically and neuro-diverse dancers, ages eight to seventy-four, blooms, flys, and flows on a journey through the Idaho Botanical Garden. This heartwarming story unfolds with poetic descriptions that create an accessible experience for all viewers, including those who are blind.

Sans Souci’s Community Dance Film Project was created to engage Boulder artists of many genres and to inspire our local community with all we have to offer. Each dancer was paired with one of the city of Boulder’s most iconic outdoor sites and asked to create movement responding to that location along a theme: “The first fresh breath in a long time.” Emerging from their spring 2020 quarantines, dancers reconnected with their own dance-deprived bodies, and brought their unique presence to each space, activating it with movement. The film encompasses ballet, tap, contemporary, house, waacking, aerial dance, samba, and poetry; collaborators include BIPOC and LGBTQ performers, those with disabilities, and dancers on the older end of the age spectrum.

A ballerina dreams a dream in which familiar spaces are not sadly empty, but joyously open, ready to be filled with movement. She dances for a fraction of a moment in time where hope can be felt.

Charmed dancers observe their own duet in a magical street art fantasy.

An impromptu tap routine in a graffiti-covered abandoned warehouse in downtown Memphis.

The choreography and natural movement of twelve physically and neuro-diverse dancers, ages eight to seventy-four, blooms, flys, and flows on a journey through the Idaho Botanical Garden. This heartwarming story unfolds with poetic descriptions that create an accessible experience for all viewers, including those who are blind.

A dancer in a poetic, kinetic dialogue with an equine partner (filmed in Elizabeth, CO).

An abstracted film to contribute to the fight against racism. As an immigrant, I have experienced it first hand. This film showcases the beauty and richness of humanity. Nine cultures unite to make art. The dancers will tell you what brings humanity together. We must come together. This project was funded by the Utah Film Commission, Utah Division of Arts and Museums, and BYU Arts Partnership.

I involuntarily question myself about my limits and limitations. I provoke myself to feel them, respect them and often cross them.

The present has long been no more important than the future. Without two kisses, without punching the clock. Everything is far, everyone is far, but the hug soon comes.

A claymation screendance short film about that terrible every day struggle to get out of bed for that first delicious cup of coffee.

With all our natural, human desire to “fly” in all that metaphoric glory, it can be a mystery where and how we can access our wings to do so. Imagine your wings now (whether visible or not) and how it might feel to unfurl them, maybe as you squeeze your shoulder blades together. Where do the wings seem to come from? Is it the shoulder blade itself? Or is it maybe deeper within?

The Macushla Dance Club for the over-50s is a motley group of people from Dublin’s north inner city, with a common love of dancing. They’ve climbed out of bedroom windows, and sneaked in back doors, to dance. They’ve danced on pianos, in backyards, up stairs and in cellars — wherever and whenever they could. This is their story. Their lives are written on Dublin’s streets. They’ve seen buildings go up and fall down, but they’ve excavated their memories from under car-parks, tenements and half-built ruins, to share their lives, loves, losses, and most of all, their irrepressible joy for life.

An intimate view at an intergenerational family living in one of the largest cities in the world. Filmed on location in Mexico City.

In Sitting with Plastic, collaborators Lisa Race and Shawn Hove interrogate Race’s reckoning with an aging dancing body. Through Hove’s questioning and set, and Race’s alternately tense gripping, then airily floating movement, the film exposes a disconnect between an external view of oneself increasingly not matching the internal view we sometimes carry of ourselves as we age.

How big is our vital space? What shapes, sounds and colors can it acquire? Through a constant search for opposites (light / dark, full / empty, sleep / wakefulness), Back Home looks at emotional perception as a vital parameter, admitting its subjectivity of manifestations in relation to the present.

Hiraeth is a Welsh noun which means “a spiritual longing for a home that perhaps never was.” Nostalgia for ancient places to which we cannot return. It is the echo of the lost places of our soul’s past and a grief for them. It is in the wind, the trees, the clouds, the rocks and the waves. It is nowhere it is everywhere. Filmed by dancer, choreographer, Jayne Lee during the pandemic mostly in 2020.

This film has been developed through the exploration of the cultural, universal and individual joy of each performer. Inviting the viewer to experience an embodied feeling of joy through dance, home-movie inspired cinematography and montage editing. Resulting in the presentation of a new harmonic, between a naturally occurring and performed expressions of joy.

Let Them Eat Cake! is a dance film on girl empowerment, where three teenagers rebel against how society dictates how they see themselves. In Let Them Eat Cake! the three characters transform from being “perfect girls” to agents of change by embracing who they really are.

A woman, who deeply sleeps inside the limbs of her past, amongst the rubble of a previous life. She awakens to the fullness of the present moment, stepping into now, forsaking the past, and mindfully moving into the future. 正念 – Now is a contemplation dancing piece that celebrates the spirit of living in the present, with mundane lives and destroyed places in Shanghai that many barely notice as the backdrops.