SSF @ Dairy Arts Center 2026

A community-based dance film that explores the construction of identity and democracy through navigating everyday poetics and pressures, finding belonging at intersecting social systems, and embodying artifacts of personal and collective histories.

This screendance explores a state of “uprootedness” in the continuing context of events following the Iraq War and the 2008 World Financial Crisis. The film utilizes the metaphor of a historic building and its astonishing relationship to its foundation to illustrate the second wave of erosion of American democracy after 9/11. The film features three movers: two dancers and one building. In 2009, this five million-pound, historic building underwent an engineering feat when it was raised eleven feet off its foundation and moved in one piece. Interleaved footage of the dancers and the building in motion illustrates their correlation—a mounting tension that speaks to democracy in the US being shaken, uprooted and redefined underneath people’s feet. Dizzying changes silence oppositional voices occupying public spaces. Pursuing everyday occupations equals prevailing war in the name of democratic values. This film raises the question if we still live in a democracy.

A Last Sonnet is a 7 minute semi-narrative, lyrical, poetic statement shot in Venice with spoken text. The text is based on an original sonnet written for the film on the theme of aging and finding timelessness in the presence of absence. Venice is the metaphoric backdrop for this theme, with its sinking, eroding, decaying, crumbling, vanishing, intemporal grandeur. Venice with its continuously transforming tidal motion, shifting light, and multitudinous bridges and labyrinths of passageways reflects the inner landscape of a lone figure traversing the cityscape.

Touching Waters film was created as part of the Global Water Dances project, an international day of dancing that raises awareness about local and global water issues. The film was derived from a performance at a community event at Ollin Farms in Longmont, CO, which celebrated water from the perspectives of spirit, science, food, conservation, and arts.

Synopsis coming soon.

Synopsis coming soon.

Mirage is an experimental dance film exploring magical ecoism, the timeless energetic forces of ecosystems, and the human draw to return to the natural world.

Now That I’m Not New drifts between mirrored worlds where inner youth and external perception collide. A dancer slips through shifting realities, guided by a body that remembers more than it reveals. She seeks truth in sensation—rolling through sand, plunging into cold water, chasing the versions of herself others cannot see. Woven through these moments is a sense of humor in the mundane: the quiet absurdities of daily gestures, the unglamorous in-betweens, the small misalignments that make being human strangely funny. The film is a journey through perception, presence, and the odd adventure of becoming.

Why can’t I go forward?

As daylight falls, La Fée Électricité (The Goddess of Electricity) awakens beneath Paris, charged to bring light to the streets above. As she begins to move, she galvanises her power and emerges onto the streets of Paris, illuminating the city with electricity. By dawn, having danced all night her electric powers are overwhelmed by the daylight. By morning, her powers are extinguished. This is a short dance film filmed on location in Paris, featuring Royal Ballet soloist, Viola Pantuso. The story is built on the concept of “La Fée Électricité” – the personification of electricity in France in the late 1800s, as a woman, or fairy, who brought light and power to the people and streets.

Being tied to the land is not only a matter of geography, but of culture. Soil, inspired by SheHuo, a Chinese folk celebration, traces the movement of tradition through migration — what is carried, altered, or remains.

Synopsis coming soon.

In the vineyards of Northern Italy, at harvest time, cultures clash, and a wine commercial shoot goes astray, until dance, music, comedy — and the magic of a harlequin — intervene.

Set against a majestic outdoor rock wall, Jinshan: Seams of Gold is a site-specific vertical dance film that reimagines gravity as a partner in storytelling. Harnessing the power of rock climbing technology, dancers are lifted into the air—not just to defy gravity, but to awaken a sense of flight, freedom, and deep connection. Suspended in space, they soar, tumble, and reach across stone surfaces, turning sheer rock into a canvas for memory, imagination, and transformation. Inspired by the courage, creativity, and resilience of ancestors and elders, the film honors the strength it takes to rise—literally and metaphorically. As bodies float and cling, release and return, the film evokes a sense of wonder and reflection, expanding what we believe is possible when we move together. This is a dance of flight, of legacy, and of the golden seams that bind us through time and across space.

Sheltering Gestures is a videodance that traces the ritual and spiritual movements revived by a group of young dancers who witnessed the gradual disappearance of the traditional Danza de las Tabliteras. Determined to bring it back to life, they learned its rhythms and choreography from the four remaining elders who still carried the dance in their bodies. Once again, these gestures echo the movements that decades ago filled the community of San Antonio, Bolívar, with pride, vitality, and collective spirit.

Tara leaves in a traditional rural village where a construction program of new houses takes place. She meets a worker and will escape with him on a romantic journey, at the risk of creating jealousy in the village. The film struggle with the social yoke about marriage and the danger of a forbidden love in South India, the land of snakes.

Résonance explores the themes of presence, vibrations, and echoes of our sensitiveness. Through the simple yet profound ritual of reconnecting with others, with the environment, with the body, and with the essence of what it means to be fully present, we believe we can ground ourselves, heal and enter a deeper communion with the world around us. In Résonance, the danse becomes the medium for “The Circle of Presence,” where the physical and emotional connections between individuals, can lead to deeper consciousness. Self-awareness in a chaotic world. An empty industrial space filled with empathy. Art, through movement, as a ritual of resistance.

An endless cycle. A dance of stagnation. A relationship’s rhythm, caught in a relentless tide, is about to break.

Set beneath an open sky, The _____ Between Us tells a story about connection through dialogue, dance, and AI-generated imagery. It invites viewers to reflect on how we relate to one another, to ourselves, and to the world around us. Through contact improvisation technique and digital compositing, a narrative unfolds. Movements draw from physical principles such as responsiveness, weight-sharing, touch, and momentum. Digital transformations fluidly alternate between the dancers, continuously reshaping their visual identities. This shared dance with a partner shows how we perceive others through our own inner states of longing, fear, acceptance, resistance, curiosity, and more. The film encourages us to notice our emotional state and how it shapes how we interpret and project ourselves onto others. It calls our attention back to what is already present: our bodies, our awareness, and the _____ between us.

A female silhouette, sketched with fine white lines, disintegrates. A few bars ring out from “Loca” — a classic tune from the golden age of Argentinean tango. The spellbinding music sweeps the woman into a dance. As she whirls, a duo forms, their bodies intertwined in black and white. Their complete abandonment to the music is expressed in abundant waves of ink, creating a mesmerizing visual spectacle.

Martha Graham Company’s principal dancer Xin Ying embodies the spirit of the snake in a fluid metamorphosis. Drawing on themes of rebirth and reinvention, the dichotomy of repulsion and seduction, Ying’s dance improvisations evoke the Snake-woman motif in Chinese folklore and the Sorceress Medea in Graham’s “Cave of the Heart.”

Eight dancers meet in movement in a space filled with light and shadow, sound and silence. They come together to explore with each other and the audience the question of how we communicate through movement and what connections are created in the process. They find a dance language that knows no right or wrong. Commissioned by the Museum of Communication in Bern for the exhibition DANCE!, the film shows the beauty of movement and a touching language that is created through human encounters.

A lonely programmer must leave his digital shell to experience that true connection cannot be programmed. An unexpected glitch forces him to confront his repressed anxieties about human contact and prove that even in the age of automation, human closeness is irreplaceable.

Manuel Liñán is a flamenco dancer and choreographer who has transformed the art form, making it freer and more contemporary. Intellectual and deeply expressive, he combines impeccable technique with a vivid imagination. Recipient of Spain’s National Dance Award, he performs to sold-out theatres around the world, yet he feels most alive in the tablao: a space of barely twelve square metres, with the audience pressed close, where every breath can be heard and where he is compelled to sustain extraordinary focus and honesty. Without them, he could not move an audience. The Flight of the Shawl, filmed somewhere between documentary and dreamlike journey, is a soleá performed with a bata de cola—the traditional flamenco dress with a long train — and a shawl, elements historically associated with women’s flamenco.

“Mushi no shirase” is a Japanese expression that describes a subtle, often unexplainable feeling or intuition that something is about to happen, especially something negative or unexpected. From an insect’s point of view, try to sense that presence yourself.

Whiteout gives resonance to the complexities of bi-racial relationships. Informed by her personal experiences as a white European who married a black African and as the mother of bi-racial children, Natasha Gilmore explores this issue with honesty and humour. Powerful, and touching, this film stimulates conversation about race and racism, even within a family unit, while celebrating human connections beyond racial difference.

A ballerina warms up at the barre. As the music develops her movement becomes inspired, and, joined by two male dancers, she is taken on a choreographic flight of fancy, transported onto the main stage of London’s Royal Opera House.