SSF @ Museum of Boulder: Festival Premiere 2022

Moving through time along Bae Ceredigion/Cardigan Bay, we arrive at today’s climate crisis. Sarn Gynfelyn is revealed every low tide and looks like a road into the sea. In fact, it is a glacial moraine laid down 20,000 years ago when ice sheets melted, and it marks the beginning of the global conditions that have enabled human expansion. At Borth, a 6,000 year old forest flourished for a few thousand years. Submerged by the sea, it has since been re-exposed in recent storms. Sarn Gynfelyn and Borth’s forest are both cited as supporting the Cantre’r Gwaelod legend of lost fertile lands in Cardigan Bay, but the geology tells a different story. Moving forwards, we arrive at Fairbourne, a seaside town built on saltmarsh and English industrial wealth. It is now set to become the first UK town to be decommissioned due to sea level rise. It will be demolished and returned to salt marsh and will have existed for less than 200 years. In the intertidal zone, between land and sea, three people move, with arresting visual imagery through these three remarkable sites.

Scapelands is a short dance film that explores our primal connections with nature and the effect of urban living on the human mind. With countries in lockdown due to the current global pandemic, the psychological impact of our physical environments is being felt more significantly across the world than ever before. Scapelands was commissioned by BBC Arts and Arts Council England as part of the New Creatives scheme.

We all walk according to who we are socially. The body is a receptacle for everything we have experienced. Our identities are boxes filled with ideas imposed upon us according to the norms of the world we live in. Since childhood, we are trained in a way that dictates who we will be and perhaps takes away the awareness of choosing or the freedom to choose ourselves. Do we have the capacity to reinvent ourselves? What tools can we put in place to return to a state of awareness of who we are without external influence? Who would we be if we could see into our learned habits? “Brain drain” is an expression that designates a gradual exhaustion or flight of youth by emigration to a more favorable place according to its qualities. This expression, often used in a political or economic context (it would be, for example, often used to speak about the Italian youth who leave their country for fear of not finding a job in a situation favorable to the desires of their generation), in this video finds another meaning. Here, this flight will be deployed by those who wish to find a meaning to their life, towards nature and towards their nature. “Favorable” becomes the opposite of what it was. Instead of a flight to pursue over-individualization, the “favorable” place is one of collective effort to return to the essence of things.

An experimental dance film about grief, substance abuse, and recovery.

Ghostly Labor: A Dance Film explores the history of labor in the US–Mexico borderlands through Tap Dance, Mexican Zapateado, Son Jarocho, Afro Caribbean movement, and live music. This work brings together polyrhythmic movement and an original score to look at the (ongoing) years of systemic exploitation of labor while highlighting the power and joy of collective resistance. Based on farmworker interviews in California, this excerpt honors the sacred hands that feed us and was filmed on a farm with support from Ayudando Latinos a Soñar (ALAS), a non-profit advocacy organization for farmworkers in Half Moon Bay, CA. A full-length dance theater production of Ghostly Labor will premiere in 2023.

A lonely naked man is fast asleep, surrounded by the sounds of his dreams. The protagonist wakes up in an unfamiliar area, there is no one around. The Voice appeals to him, it’s a mother’s voice, which accompanies him and brings him to conversation. When the man is ready to answer, the Voice breaks off. The dance sets in.

Caught in a room, the protagonist, Clarice, unfolds a vision of her own identity through a mirror interrogator. She is a cinematic adaptation of a solo dance performance with the same name. The original performance work was created and performed by Dorotea Saykaly and premiered at 5éme Salle at Place des Arts in Montréal, Quebec in 2019. Inspired by The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, the solo revolved around identity and doubt. Manifested through movement, distortion and an interview with a phantom interrogator, the original work proposed looking at a questioning body through a female lens. The cinematic adaptation of the original performance work arose during the first COVID lockdown in 2020 as a collaboration between Dorotea Saykaly and film director Emil Dam Seidel.

Antonio José Martínez Palacios was going to be the biggest Spanish musician of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, he was incarcerated and executed without a trial at the age of 33, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Seen through the eyes of a child, this is a film made like a dream, but a dream we are all in. It’s a dream of our future, blurred and indistinct, seen through a glass windshield, windswept by sand, hidden beneath the waves. Two children scavenge the carcass of a world decimated by negligence and come across the leftovers of the past, buried in the sand but still moving towards an end that’s out of sight. Award winning companies Jerrycan Films and The Farm (dance theatre) bring a uniquely physical and visceral aesthetic to the screen in a work of sweeping imagery that asks all of us to remember what keeps us together when it all falls apart.

Above the waves, beneath the sky, against the rock. Moving against a staggering vertical cliff face, suspended above wild crashing ocean, two artists dance with the roaring wind and each-other in a celebration of human connection, our experience of nature and the vast wilderness that is the Wilyabrup sea cliffs. A choreographed performance of two bodies in gravity-defying motion tethered to the rockface, this vertical dance frames the artform against truly wild nature that shows the beauty, fragility and resilience of the human body and the environment. Filmed on Wadandi land in the south west of Western Australia.

In High Winds & Slippery Surfaces a fleeting body fights to maintain control of their movement as they find themselves in an unstable and unpredictable environment. The film experiments with the friction between physical action, sound and space to awaken the kinaesthetic sense of the viewer. Repeated disruption in the flow of action and sound together with the abrupt changes between involuntary and choreographed movements creates a dark, unsettling viewing experience as the sonically immersive environment takes the viewer beyond the screen supporting a greater sense of awareness of the space surrounding them. High Winds & Slippery Surfaces was a ‘One Minute’ commission by GOAT media and Screen.dance.

The aftermath of being unexpectedly drowned.

A lonely dancer finds herself trapped, facing a door. With no escape, she is confronted by multiple beings caught in an unexpected battle. Deeply personal and playful, DayDreaming speaks to the isolation and anxiety of our contemporary times, and the power of our imaginations to shed light where there is darkness.

5 Stages of Drowning is a virtual reality experience that explores climate change and the climate gap in Miami through dance. Designed and choreographed on location in Little Haiti, East Little Havana/ Miami River and Virginia Key, 5 Stages of Drowning juxtaposes movement, performance, and climate change in a cohesive narrative that prompts audiences to question their relationship with the environment.

A dance film about the ebb and flow of wind and the movement inspired by it.

A dancer enters the caverns of her own mind, to find and bury someone from her past.