SSF @ Ursinus 2022

Sans Souci’s Community Dance Film Project was created to engage Boulder artists of many genres and to inspire our local community with all we have to offer. Each dancer was paired with one of the city of Boulder’s most iconic outdoor sites and asked to create movement responding to that location along a theme: “The first fresh breath in a long time.” Emerging from their spring 2020 quarantines, dancers reconnected with their own dance-deprived bodies, and brought their unique presence to each space, activating it with movement. The film encompasses ballet, tap, contemporary, house, waacking, aerial dance, samba, and poetry; collaborators include BIPOC and LGBTQ performers, those with disabilities, and dancers on the older end of the age spectrum.

Birds is a short digital choreographic piece imagined/thought/directed by John Degois. With this piece, he tries to transpose live performance into film. He thus chooses to make a sequence shot in order to keep the notion of “live,” and slow motion to allow the spectator to have time to watch where he wants. He also breaks the perspective by not necessarily centering the main action in the middle of the image. Against a background of melancholy, Birds evokes a time when the question of freedom did not arise.

In WECreate Spaces: Morelia the artists explore the urban landscapes of Morelia, Mexico, a city that exemplifies the dichotomy found in colonial places featuring the eclectic richness of their architecture and the dilapidated parts of the town. Tuning into the environment through improvisation, the dancers, camera-person and musician create a collaborative knowledge that illuminates their multi-layered sensibility of understanding the world through the body. Generating affective spaces, highlighting the artist’s relations to environment, artist to artist and artist to locals. The serendipitous encounters with the passers-by add a flavour that transforms the usual into extraordinary, portraying the tonality, mood and atmosphere of this joyful and vibrant place.

RadioBody is a collaboration with composer Mike Lauer exploring the jazz sensibilities and human toil and triumph embedded in the work of pioneering alt-electronic band Radiohead.

Tide contrasts the pace of industry with human movement, and the soft yielding nature of the body with the hard edges of manmade objects.

Through the exaggerated mannerisms of daytime television, the six characters of Los Perros del Barrio Colosal take us on a wild romp through the challenges of creative decision making. Diving dramatically into the adventure of an imagination yet to be physicalized, they ask us to consider the far side of the moments when our ideas threaten, with disjointed urgency, to swallow us whole.

The “axis mundi” is a connection between heaven and earth, between the divine and the material. With this gravity-defying choreography, imagined and performed at the top of a mountain and on the verticality of a pole dance bar, I wanted to deliver my own vision of this “axis mundi.” Two bodies merge and evolve precisely between earth and sky, in a quest for physical and spiritual elevation along this invisible thread.