SSF @ Dairy Arts Center 2025

TerraMontes is a meditative site-specific screendance which explores an embodied sense of healing with the environment. As with the two previous works from the WECreate Productions’ Terra series, (HinterTerra and UrbáTerra), the dancers and camera explore the poetics of place through improvisation. In a matter of hours, The Lower North Fork Fire blazed through more than four thousand acres of pristine forest. Thousands were displaced, the fire destroyed almost thirty homes and resulted in three fatalities. The fire began on March 26, 2012 when firefighters lost control of a planned burn in Foxton, Colorado. Some of the fire was classified as high intensity, making the recovery of the land a very long process or impossible in some cases.

A movement exploration of the audible interaction of calved glacial ice, sea, and air, Ice of Breen embodies the nuanced popping, crackling and complex composition of the ice and sea. Themes of erratic and randomness within a continuous flow are embodied and expressed through the movement and editing. The music composition is comprised of sound picked up from the camera during the filming process, overlayed with a simple composed score.

In September 2023, Dr. Alessandra Ribeiro Martins, Bianca Lucia Martins Lopes, and Flávia Tamiris Soares Silva, members of Comunidade Jongo Dito Ribeiro, from Campinas, Brazil were invited by Rosely Conz, Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS), to spend a week sharing their traditions in Colorado, USA. Using archival footage filmed at Fazenda Roseira, Comunidade Jongo Dito Ribeiro headquarters, and UCCS, this documentary plays with the concept of transit – geographical, cultural, and social of Jongo. It includes points of view of the members of Comunidade Jongo Dito Ribeiro and UCCS students to highlighting dance education and race issues.

Students ranging from 6th grade to 12th grade shyly relate to each other, finding their human connection. We ask ourselves how can we spread more compassion, more understanding, and most of all patience, to each other? How can we encourage each other to do our best, and believe, deep in our bones, that others are truly trying to do their best as well? That is the sentiment behind the creation of this piece, and how fitting to find Trevor Hall and East Forest’s song “A Reminder” with lyrics that state, “everything’s changing, all re-arranging….My love it’s just a reminder, find your center,” while we resonate with the Tender Gravity of Kindness, a line from Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful poem, Kindness.

Shot in part at 10,000 feet at Gross Reservoir in Colorado over a span of 12 years, this short film, featuring the indomitable Rennie Harris, shares a dreamscape glimpse into the vernacular dance form, hambone, or “Patin’ Juba.” This work positions the powerful resilience of the Black male body in the face of white surveillance and the survival and evolution of the dance/music form of hambone within and beyond the histories of enslavement.

Two dancers move toward connection while navigating the fundamental disorientation of being human.

A woman explores the far reaches of rural Ireland in an attempt to make peace with the darker aspect of her spirit. Shot on location in County Kerry, Ireland in 2025, Directions to the Other Side of the World is a blessing, in the style of noted Irish poet John O’Donahue, for those of us visited by a depressed and desolate spirit, a sincere wish for friendship with the greyer aspects of self, and the darker times of day and season. Narrated and accompanied by the modern master of the Sean-nós tradition of singing, Iarla ó Lionáird, and scored by contemporary Irish composers Linda Buckley and Hannah Peel, the film attempts to bridge generations of place and ritual into poetic and practical film of belonging and peace.

An embodied site exploration, engaging with the dynamic flow and the urban textures of the city. Filmed on locations across London.

A meditation in movement on the strained limitations of the California landscape.

Two dancers gently perch on a fragile landscape of craggy slate and weathered wildflowers, teetering on the edge of balance within their fragile ecosystem.

This film was created during the Screendance in the Landscape workshop with Katrina McPherson and Colin McPherson, Easdale Island, Scotland.

Directed and choreographed by Li Chiao-Ping, Never Lost is an 11-minute dance film shot en route to and on location in South Korea, during dancer and adoptee Elisabeth (O’Keefe) Roskopf’s first trip to her birthplace since adoption took her away out of her home country. Featuring personal unscripted narration, choreography, and poetic landscapes, Never Lost witnesses and captures the body in between, in search, and in the moment of facing the challenges of reclaiming self and identity, as well as familial and cultural histories. With cinematography and editing by Christal Wagner, this is Li and Wagner’s third screendance project together and their second with Elisabeth Roskopf.

A sensitive exchange between choreography, music, nature, and a camera. Seasons of Dance brings together four internationally acclaimed choreographers and four dance duos to depict four phases of love, set to the music of Max Richter’s “The New Four Seasons”. In this groundbreaking composition, Richter combines Vivaldi’s iconic “The Four Seasons” with modern electronic elements, creating a fresh and emotionally layered soundscape that respects the original work while adding a contemporary dimension. Each of the four choreographers brings a unique vision to one phase of love, while the four dance couples bring these emotions to life through powerful and expressive movement.

Ravel’s Bolero, thanks to its universalitý and contagious energy, transcends generations and cultures. Conceived for dance, it continues to inspire artists. Mehdi Kerkouche brings us his version of Bolero.S choreographed in keeping with his inclusive and visual universe, recounting the life of a youth in different scenes in Créteil.

This short film is a far cry of the impulses to escape from a suffocating but all-too-familiar setting, which erodes our souls. The circular shapes, repetitive tasks, swirling movements seem to carry the lady into a sinking hole. Can she finally break free and find her way out?

Dust is a dance film that explores themes of legacy and mortality in the cycle of intergenerational caregiving. It pays tribute to the compassion, reciprocity, and unconditional love present as we guide one another into and out of this life. It depicts the experience of caring for my father as he died of cancer.

Ballerina is the story of an 8-year-old girl who is about to have a dance performance but due to the Iranian rules, her father and other men are prohibited to watch the ballet…it is vital for Mana, the ballerina, to have her father watch her cause she has lost her mother…the ballet starts and children bloke on the stage but they see no men between spectators…Mana refuses to start the dance and unites with other children to go outside to perform for her father…it is a portrayal of a united civil protest.

Kielo finds it hard to sit still in class. She takes a break venturing into the corridors of her imagination. The film Kielo touches on the subject of love, support as well as contempt between young people in the school environment, with a focus on the convergence of neurodivergence and sisterhood/peer-hood. We all have a poetic body that dances when‬ encouraged. It just needs to be given a chance to exist alongside the body that goes by the‬ rules and is used to shy away from expression.

Wormwood explores themes of depression and the inner dialogue of someone navigating suicidal ideation. AUDIENCE WARNING: This film references suicidal ideations.

Your Love: ‘Walking’ Beside Me explores the dichotomy of love being in our past and supporting our steps forward. This new film work series is based on Brodsky’s live duet ‘walking’ and challenges the stigma around grief by giving audiences a moment to be present with their personal experiences of loss.

A short movement study on sapphic longing and obsession.

“…They loathe art, the product of a yearning for life, because that, too, evades control.” – Josef Skvorecky

From Jazz to Jackboots is an experimental animated dance film exploring the Nazi regime’s methodical restriction of jazz through their “10 Rules for Dance Bands.” The film reimagines itself through progressively censored variations of jazz standard, “Minnie the Moocher,” transitioning from freeform expressionist painting and collage to statuesque perfection. Through sophisticated animation techniques and meticulous visual design, the work unfolds as simultaneously joyful, lyrical, ethereal, surgical, horrific and funereal — a timely reminder that the battle between artistic expression and authoritarian control remains urgently relevant today. AUDIENCE WARNING: This film references Nazi propaganda and may be unsuitable for some viewers.