Dance Made for Video, June 8, 2005, Aurora Picture Show

This program is part of the Big Range Dance Festival. Six films were shown, ranging from 5 minutes to 26 minutes in length. These were not videos of stage performances but works created for and integrated into the filmmaking. The presentation was curated by Louie Saletan of Suchu. I liked all of the works for one reason or another, but I think my favorite was Measure (US), choreographed by Dayna Hanson and directed by Ms. Hanson and Gaelen Hanson. The film was shot entirely in a hallway of a dilapidated building that nonetheless had bright blue paint on the walls. I can't recall for sure, but I don't think the camera moved, except maybe for brief closeups during transitions. Two dancers, a man and a woman, moved up and down the hall and in and out of the many doorways while having a "conversation" through their dance steps. There was no music, just the rhythm of their feet tapping and sliding across the floor. (If the word "foley" means anything to you, I'm told that's what they did with the sound. If it doesn't mean anything to you and you would like it to, check out this website.) My second-favorite piece was Reines d'un Jour (Switzerland), with choreography by Marie Nespolo and Christine Kung and direction by Pascal Magnin. Filmed in the Swiss Alps (drool), the film featured six dancers moving about and around a small village. There was a lot of gentle humor in this work, including a sequence in which the dancers take inspiration from the interaction of bulls in a field. ("I gotta have more cowbell.") In another great sequence, the dancers move in response to puffs of air from other dancers. I'm curious to know if that part was entirely set or if there was an element of improv. The dancers also interacted with the landscape, first by rolling down hills and later when the three women dance in a pond with graceful reverence. Other works on the program included The Village Trilogy (Canada), of which we saw parts 1 and 3. Part 1 showed a woman dancing in a war-torn town "inspired by the displacement and destruction of WWII." Here the film medium played the biggest role, as our attention was directed to specific movements of the dancer. For some reason I really liked a moment where the dancer moved out of the picture and then back in; by not following the movement, the camera was given its own inertia. In contrast, in Cornered (Canada) the camera's movement was almost the whole point. A single dancer moved around a corner of a cube, and the perspective was contantly changed so that "up" shifted to different axes. According to the program, this film "redefines gravity as an attractive force of right angles." Unfortunately my interest ran out before the film did. If they could redefine gravity as a repulsive tangential force of the sine of a second-order Bessel function, now THAT would be something. That leaves Contrecoup (Switzerland), a film that loosely tells the story of young city dwellers. Sorry to use this analogy, but it's kind of like Friends in that there are several characters that act independently but also sometimes connect with each other. This film had a constructed set that provided several surreal moments such as the scene in which all of the furniture suddenly had 10-foot legs. It was dark and violent but had some interesting choreography for the couples. In one dance, the man uses himself and his partner as something of a subsitute for castanets, clapping and slapping in time to the music. Although far cooler and more serious, it made me think of Monty Python's fish-slapping dance. I seem to have TV on the brain, but it makes sense given this was dance on film. You may have noticed that most of the pieces came from outside of the US. It's nice to know that art is funded somewhere else in the world, because it sure isn't here. Today a House Appropriations panel cut the funding for public radio and television almost in half. Tell me, how do you justify cutting funding for Sesame Street?