SSF @ CU Boulder: Dancing on the Edge of Cinema

An interdisciplinary exploration of human connections set to specific environments. A kinesthetic visual and aural study on freedom, restraint, resistance, flexibility, adaptability and despair.

Three characters are carried away in a frantic race. They will fight to win… But for what? What if all this was just a decoy? This dance film transposes into our contemporary world the ancestral fable of Jiang Gong, humble fisherman and great strategist of the Zhou dynasty, whose catches were caught without bait. A universal story about the loss of identity, the abandonment of oneself and the renunciation of free will.

This dance film combines biography, poetry, and ritual with the energy of live performance to bridge stories of resistance and liberation between Puerto Rico and Richmond, VA, honoring Black women tobacco workers in Richmond and Puerto Rican tobacco factory readers and activists Dominga de La Cruz Becerril (1909-1981) and Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922).

Artists / performers Martin and Facundo Lombard and five-time Grammy-winning drummer / composer Antonio Sánchez, tell, through the language of music and dance, the story of a man who struggles to make his voice heard and what this can cause.

Filmed amidst ruins of the Minneapolis Uprising following the murder of George Floyd, Dastak: Fire, part 3 of a series created with Guggenheim Award winning choreographer Ananya Chatterjea and her company of fierce, BIPOC Women & Femmes, is a soul-stirring dance meditation tracing the knockings of disruption and injustice on our hearts and communities.

Through the exaggerated mannerisms of daytime television, the six characters of Los Perros del Barrio Colosal take us on a wild romp through the challenges of creative decision making. Diving dramatically into the adventure of an imagination yet to be physicalized, they ask us to consider the far side of the moments when our ideas threaten, with disjointed urgency, to swallow us whole.

Female Jingle Dancers and Male Fancy Dancers offer a combined piece in honor and recognition of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (specifically amongst Native American and Alaskan Native women). “Ozhigaabawi” means “One Stands Ready.” As a group of indigenous dancers, we feel it is important that we not only represent the beauty of our communities, but also the realities of our people. It was important to me to create a work that empowers both our female and male dancers to show that they stand ready to make a change for the better. Traditionally, Jingle is a dance of healing and strength. Men’s Fancy is a dance of agility and strength. Our hope is that by putting them together, we offer strength and healing to those who have been harmed by sexual and physical violence–not just the individuals but also the families and communities at large.

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.

Tide contrasts the pace of industry with human movement, and the soft yielding nature of the body with the hard edges of manmade objects.

Kauã dances in the hill, like a bird of prey.

Exhale starts in shock, when a traumatic event makes you aware of your vulnerability. Your reality has been affected. Can you trust your senses? Exhale evokes reflection, letting go of your anger and overcoming the feeling of powerlessness. And ultimately regaining confidence in your own instincts and body.

The “axis mundi” is a connection between heaven and earth, between the divine and the material. With this gravity-defying choreography, imagined and performed at the top of a mountain and on the verticality of a pole dance bar, I wanted to deliver my own vision of this “axis mundi.” Two bodies merge and evolve precisely between earth and sky, in a quest for physical and spiritual elevation along this invisible thread.

A veritable physical and technical performance, Jann Gallois upends the senses and solicits five B-boys to not take their head off the ground. How can one find meaning in a topsy-turvy world like the one today, where we seem to be walking more and more on our heads? Jann Gallois develops a choreographic language from different hip hop figures that she trained in, such as the Reverse, the Head Spin, and the Chair Freeze. From these figures, there is a whole range and variation of movements with the head constantly on the floor. Choreographed to the smallest detail, Reverse evokes the man-machine caught in the cogs of a complex and ordered system and evolves finally to leave space for a circular composition that softens the angles and progressively allows a collective osmosis to emerge.

Flatland has been made based on a book of the same name written by Edwin Abbott in 1884, which describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures. The narrator is a square named A Square, a member of the caste of gentlemen and professionals, who guides the readers through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. On New Year’s Eve he visited by a three-dimensional sphere named A Sphere, which he cannot comprehend until he sees Space land (a tridimensional world) for himself. This experimental short film has come out of a group exhibition under the collective title Flatland, curated by Ms. Golbarg Barzin. The exhibition comprised works by seven other artists in various fields of art, such as sculpture, painting and visual art.

Liminality is inspired by reimagining what Odette may have experienced upon plunging to her death in the lake from the classical ballet “Swan Lake.” It is a moment of suspended reality and a story of disenchantment, self-discovery and transformation. In our modern world we know that “happily ever after” is a journey and we have the ability to exercise our own agency to create our experience. In our story, the heroine is exploring the space in between life and death. She is coming to terms with the end of her world as she knew it and finding the strength and courage to move into a new existence.

An impressionistic screendance poem constructed from 3 days of improvised duets, The Window Kind of Opens by Itself is an intergenerational dance film that centers the embodied intersection of four important experimental dance artists of this time. It explores radical expressions of self within duet form to reveal intimate and epic portals of connection, divergence, and aliveness. The work is a ritual and a reckoning, Through immediacy, touch, sweat, laughter, and exquisite composition this dance film ignites the imagination and activates spaces for transformation.

Outer Rim: Attending to the Edges works improvisationally and ecologically, asking us to consider the margins and edges of our lives. How do I feel the edges of my body? Of my self? How do I locate myself in a location, a history?

Dry white and wintry black. Outlines of a movement practice.