SSF @ Museum of Boulder: Festival Premiere 2024

A man alone in a lunar landscape experiences the transition from light to night.

Inspired by political theorist and author Dr. Achille Mbembe’s perspective on human existence as “le passant,” our film Passerby explores diasporic themes through dance, music and poetry. We are influenced by surrealism, avant-garde and abstraction as forms of storytelling through humanistic ways.

While interacting with Cheryl Pagurek’s States of Being video and sound installation, dancers Rion Taylor and Wyeth Walker move fluidly through space and time. They traverse public and private locations, inhabit physical and virtual realms, and explore connections and relationships between the past, the present and an uncertain future. Their movements unite black and white film footage with contemporary video recordings, while building a compelling soundscape with composer Jesse Stewart’s music.

Venus in Ferns uses Victorian gardening advice columns from the 1800s as its primary source material. These early examples of self-help texts now appear absurd in the way they reinscribe toxic gender scripts. By quoting these texts verbatim, the film prompts viewers to contemplate how contemporary self-help may appear equally absurd to future generations. What results is a squabbling mix of dance, camp, drag, terrible re-enactment and farce.

Follow the bass to the place where the beat moves your feet, and catch a dose of dopamine on the dance floor. This film was created as a part of Sans Souci Festival’s Community Dance Film Project, with funding from the City of Boulder Arts & Culture. Additional funding provided by Amelia Burnett, Denise Busch, Edward Katz, Nicole Pielage, Lara Lea Roney, Nathaniel Roney, Marlene & Craig Roney. Shot on Location at Knew Conscious.

I feel confined/stuck. In this home. In this room. In this mind. Confined to both psychological and physical space. Stuck in a continuous, never ending loop. Ever changing but staying the same. I feel confined…stuck in this Home/Room. This film was created as a part of Sans Souci Festival’s Community Dance Film Project, with funding from the City of Boulder Arts & Culture.

The crow as harbinger. Shot locally with footage from The Boulder Flood.

Reflecting on the passage of time in childhood and its tendency to accelerate exponentially, young dancers improvise and perform choreography that makes them feel happy, confident, and strong. This work was filmed at Carolyn Holmberg Preserve at Rock Creek Farm, and the piece is dedicated to the women who forge paths for us that we may follow, expand, and improve upon for those who follow us.

How does water move like a body? What is the interplay between dancing and water? Channeling their innate connection to water, the dancers were deeply moved and inspired to create this work and include footage of the paintings from the exhibit “Weaving Prayers: from Ocean’s Edge to Mesa’s Ledge” by artist Roberta Begaye (Diné/Navajo) at the Sacred Space at Dairy Arts Center.

This 360 video profile of professional speed racer and dancer Maurice Hall is part of a larger project and exploration created by KT Niehoff: Before We Flew Like Birds, We Flew Like Clouds. The project illuminates the experiences of four humans with extraordinary relationships to their bodies – an astronaut, a professional athlete, a survivor of a near death experience and a differently abled person – using Virtual Reality films, prerecorded and live music staged inside a floating, immersive set of star-like objects, and centers on the question, “What is it like to be in your body?” Each contributor’s personal stories are integrated in the installation through audio interviews sampled and used in score. The film component consists of four Virtual Reality short films created in partnership with the contributor’s – each as the subject matter of their own film. Thank you to Maurice Hall, Ray Trujillo, Shelby Smout, Southgate Roller Rink, and Chris Bobotis.

This film brings the viewer into the choreography in an immersive sensory experience, which puts the audience as an integral part of the work. The name refers to the star Mira, a red giant of the brightest of the constellation Cetus, that changes appearance significantly in cycles of 304 to 353 days. It also refers to the verb “mirar,” from the Latin “miro,” which means to see, to look with astonishment or intensity or long in the distance, to admire.

Inspired by Kintsugi, the traditional Japanese craft of repairing broken ceramics using lacquer mixed with gold and the belief that something can be more beautiful through the stresses endured. Seiwert asked herself: coming out of an era that broke many of us, can we be re-formed? Can we create something both stronger and more beautiful?

At daybreak on a country road, a young couple returns from a restless night visibly exhausted. Angry with each other the couple will in a magnetic dance try to reconcile.

A dance film starring Rebecca Bassett Graham (of Company Wayne McGregor) about climate change and the consequences of our inaction. Filmed on the Norfolk coast.

80-year-old Sanna lives alone with her memories and houseplants. One day Sanna sees an event from her window that makes her reminisce about her friends and notice her own loneliness.

Eeny meeny miny humpy not your son nor your daughter eeny meeny rumpy-pumpy cling cling lamb for slaughter. Which species is the biggest predator? Behind seven lakes, seven hills, seven forests, there is a seemingly idyllic land. And in it, as if by magic, an unexpected meeting happens not only once but three times. The first time, as if from a flying carpet, we see an animalistic figure in the thicket. The second time, we observe a frisky animal herd colliding with otherness. For the third and final meeting, the moment when a man enters the ordered world of nature. How does the relationship between animals differ from the relationship between humans and animals? This is asked by the creators of the sixth choreographic film project by the Polish Dance Theatre.