SSF @ Dairy Arts Center 2022

The result of a collaboration between the Senegalese contemporary dance company Diagn’art and the Belgian and Swiss artists Kita Bauchet and Stéphanie Pfister, Saint-Louis on the Move presents a subjective sketch of the city and the rhythm of its daily life. An exploration of Saint-Louis through several choreographies performed by 2 dancers and 2 cameras on Siegfried Canto’s music that highlight the cities energy and the fierce creativity of its youth.

Scapelands explores our primal connections with nature and the effect of urban living on the human mind. Due to the current global pandemic, the psychological impact of our physical environments is being felt more significantly than ever before. Scapelands depicts this feeling of being boxed in and the inherent need to reconnect with something beyond our man-made walls. Scapelands was commissioned by BBC Arts and Arts Council England as part of the New Creatives Scheme.

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.

While merging and intertwining with nature, three young girls create a metaphorical and visionary narrative of their present condition and their projections towards the future. Through their lightness, disorientation, vitality and strength, they embark on an choreographic journey facing high and low tides, turbulence and contradictions, calm and turmoil. Guided by absurd questions the oranges reflect the path of the protagonists in their delicate passage to adulthood and guide us in a poetic reflection on our lives.

This one minute dance film shows an intimate meeting between the self and another as a mirror and a friend. By reflecting what we recognize of ourselves in the other, we learn when to lean on or trust each other and when to stand on your own feet.

This short film tries to recap the personal experience of a dancer, whose old house and the associated memories are shadowed by the fast-going urbanization. On a bright sunny day in the near future, when skyscrapers erect from the ruins, will we forget all the textured past？

Moving Barcelona is a magical realist dance story about the Catalonian capital, an autonomous region in the Spanish State contending with an identity crisis. A city with everything going for it is still haunted by the ghosts of its past and despite much progress, it finds itself unearthing old wounds. Narrated by celebrated actor, Pep Munné, who appeals for calm, there is a sense of reassurance that all is okay. The movement of the city however tells a different story, and he is resigned to the fact that things inevitably, are the way they are. Barcelonians, in pursuit of happiness, find themselves on a treadmill  to nowhere in a tale of modern day life. Moving Barcelona is the eighth film in an award-winning collection of works by the London-based film-maker, Jevan Chowdhury to capture the world as a stage. Life on the street in London, Paris, Brussels, Dallas, Prague, Yerevan and Athens have all been recorded in this growing canon.

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.

Make Me Feel Free is a music video by Australian synth pop band Tycho Brahe. Tycho Brahe are an independent duo formed in Brisbane by Ken Evans and Georgina Emery in 1993. Make Me Feel Free is a dance film that explores a story of a relationship in constant flux, where deception and emotional manipulation unfolds. Featuring contemporary dancers Richard Causer and Anthony Trojman as two men in the relationship, the full dance film “Love Song” is presented in a parallel, split-screen structure, highlighting two aspects of a relationship occurring concurrently. However, the three videos for Tycho Brahe are not in a split screen structure and focus on different perspectives of the story and relationship.

Social Waves presents the bond between people and the degree of influence exerted by one on the other. Social Waves, demonstrates how the modern way of life, the storm of information and the creation of imaginary needs, affect human psychology. Through the movement an attempt is made to search for human thoughts, endless impasses but also the strong bond of influence between people.

In the wake of the most recent Black Lives Matter movement, I wondered how Ballet Black should react to the apparent shift in global thinking about race, inclusion and equity. My overriding feeling was one of exhaustion; micro aggressions, persecution, death – it seemed never ending. I wanted to see the passionate, joyful aspects of our diverse existence brought to the fore, not just the tragic. Blackness it is not a singular experience: we do not all share the same background, beliefs, trauma or skin colour. I felt compelled to respond by showcasing the multifaceted aspects of joyous human emotion, and also the artistic power of Ballet Black, an organisation that has been championing positive change for Black and Asian dancers for twenty years.

Before We Turned To Stone portrays the manifestation of mind chatter and how enticing it can be to stay busy, avoid the stillness and believe our thoughts.

A Lucky Generation is a dance expression that highlights the effects of change, modernization and identity crisis within the Nigerian society, with Lagos as a visual reference point. It starts with a brief narrative extracted from A Lucky Generation in the book, “There was a Country” by Chinua Achebe. Afterwards, we see our Subject interact with various environments within Lagos state, Nigeria. Our Subject’s face is barely visible from the beginning. The mask and skeletal costume are all symbols representing mystery, conflict (internal and external) and eventually, rediscovery and renewal. The film ends with the Subject revealing his face, suggesting that he has found himself, but yet isn’t satisfied with the results. It now poses a question as to whether he embarks on another journey to understand this Self or he allows the society dictate for him.

Moving Parts is a meditation on returning to movement comprised of the physical embodiment of curiosity after a period of dormancy.

And Somewhere In Between is a duet. A connection. A hello. A goodbye. A relationship. A family. A moment in between many moments. An unknown.

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.