SSF @ Museum of Boulder: Festival Premiere 2021

Filmed on the rooftop of the historic Bendix Building in the garment district of Los Angeles where Heidi Duckler has her office space, this work is choreographed by Heidi Duckler and performed by her dancers, her staff and several workers from the building. This short work explores a common feeling in Duckler’s oeuvre – a sense of belonging and how we define family. For more information, please visit the Heidi Duckler Dance website.

Wolf is set in the stunning natural environment of autumnal Scotland and incorporates a cast spanning three generations. At its heart is the interplay between being guided to the right path in life by older generations and the need to forge your own path and choose your own way. Not to invalidate advice or guidance given by others but to acknowledge that ultimately we must make our own choices. Using imagery from well-known fairy tales and morality folklore, Wolf explores the interaction and connection between intergenerational communities and families.

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.

Birds is a short digital choreographic piece imagined/thought/directed by John Degois. With this piece, he tries to transpose live performance into film. He thus chooses to make a sequence shot in order to keep the notion of “live,” and slow motion to allow the spectator to have time to watch where he wants. He also breaks the perspective by not necessarily centering the main action in the middle of the image. Against a background of melancholy, Birds evokes a time when the question of freedom did not arise.

A couple faces an accidental trauma on a nondescript Sunday morning, which mirror’s the world’s seemingly stable, but deeply precarious, natural balance.

On your way to reaching a goal you are often battling against yourself. You take various steps, but it is the most unpredictable move that defeats your own worst enemy.

Ways of Seeing is a film about the transformative, healing power of nature and female wisdom as expressed through movement. We wanted to bring attention to the courage it takes to sit with the inevitable pain we experience as we seek to grow. The film seeks to focus on the ways our inner world is expressed in how we move – particularly subconscious movement. And, based on this, to investigate the healing effects of liberated movement.

WECreate Spaces: Limerick is a poetic visual portrait of the historic city of Limerick. Bodies and costume merge with the materials and shapes, resonating the textural and rhythmic layers of the urban landscapes. The work suggests an embodied ethnographic view of the local, drawing on the visceral ability of the artists to capture ephemeral sensibilities through their presence. This montage highlights echoes of the now along with fragments of the past, revealing the stories that are engrained in the desecrated architecture and felt through the movements of the people of the city.

Water – Leonardo da Vinci called it ‘the blood of the planet.’ A group of people emerges from the water. They try to resist the current of the river and the stream of people in the city, but have to surrender to the flow and are washed ashore. On the shore, the stranded seek for hold and refuge. In the course of the film ‘against or with the flow’, ‘resistance and devotion’ manifest as a primal instinct, as a survival strategy.

Boy meets girl at a coffee shop, and the two are thrown into a mud wrestling ring to find a common path forward, while their best friends act as coaches.

The Gift is a dance performance to express the beauty inside all of us.

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.

Basement: Virtual Reality Headset Stations (4)

Threshold is a 360-degree dance film that opens a portal into the transformational journey of four women. Starting as isolated individuals grappling with the effects of trauma, the dancers create a ritual space to move in solidarity together with resilience and strength. Made by Sans Souci alumni Malia Bruker and Ilana Goldman, Threshold is watched in a VR headset and offers a cathartic, immersive experience that celebrates women’s empowerment. Sans Souci is the film festival premiere for Threshold.

2nd Floor: Boulder Room Theater

Part of a triptych of works based on the same concept, The Protocol is filmed using a colourful, eccentric and retro-vintage cinematic language where the performers in confidence to the viewer, express their thoughts, exposing their contradictions, fears and worries about our relationship with the other. This digital take on The Protocol was inspired by our society’s virtual encounters that have become so indispensable and frequent in our current working realities.

2nd Floor: Boulder Room Theater

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.

2nd Floor: Boulder Room Theater

A performance art film featuring professional dancers, soft sculpture and an original score. Filmed and produced in the early months of the pandemic, This Holding addresses the burdens, anxieties, and hopes of these unprecedented times.

2nd Floor: Boulder Room Theater

Midas is King is a short aerial dance film about the relentless consumption of beauty as currency within the confines of a system. Especially true for people who are raised as girls, the most valuable capital we have is perceived to be our youth, beauty, and sexual viability. This axiom is embedded in the fiber of our culture and our bodies, which are consumed and exploited as a resource from an early age. In such a value system, the merit of ourselves is seen to decline steadily as soon as we reach the apex of young adulthood. Brief moments of ascension are possible, tastes of autonomy marked by their brevity and ultimate dissolution. The act of survival itself consumes as fast as it creates, leaving behind a debt unpaid.

2nd Floor: Google Garage

Rhythm, pulsation, cocoons of light, architecture of body and nature – this is how the unique Lithuanian region, the Curonian Spit, and the fragility of its life are revealed in this film featuring dancers of Šeiko Dance Company. Here the synthesis of the dancing body and natural form turns their hidden connections into visible architectural shapes, as if lifting the veil of Maya to reveal fragile interdependence between man and the world where each element undoubtedly affects the whole system. The subtle and organic approach of the French creators immerses the viewer in the poetic flow of nature and dance.

2nd Floor: The Lodge

Song of Songs is a deeply personal evocation of the erotic prose poem of the same name appears in the Old Testament. Shot in black and white with an original cello score, it evokes a cinematic space that is contemplative and austere.