Film Categories: dance

  • Hunt, The

    The intensity of an internal struggle manifests itself externally, as revealed through an intimate, fragmented view of dancer, Peter Trosztmer, as choreographed by Sharon Moore. “The Hunt” explores the anatomy of the hunter and the transformation that occurs inside – calmness, pressure, extreme tension, consequence of the hunt, calling up/manufacturing the condition of enemy in order to justify killing, delirium and gleefulness that denotes insanity, and enjoyment of such experience. This ultimately returns to calm and cascading back into the pleasure moments, attempts to return to sanity.

  • Pepper’s Lost Highway

    Pepper Highway is a reclusive poetess who lives in the desert under a Joshua Tree. She is a distant cousin of Canadian playwright / musician Tomson Highway and dancer / choreographer René Highway. This short piece is one of her very few public appearances. Pepper’s Lost Highway: Like rain on a blackened highway in a David Lynch film I dance over asphalt Splashing a peppery light reflecting off water Pirouetting a tangible memory of René His long red muscles An intertwinement of sinew, an oil gloss Whipping blue black hair In the darkness of a lost highway I dance over…

  • Greater the Weight, The

    “The way it usually goes down is like this – the greater the weight, the better it feels. When it hurts, nothing feels better to me than hurting a bit more.” – Dana Michel We live in a world where people will fall. The film plays with the idea of falling – the heaviness and the lightness, the emotion, and the sounds associated with falling. It reflects on moments when one stumbles… by accident, on purpose. Sometimes you can get up again right away and you’re fine, and sometimes you’re not. A young woman (Dana Michel) is in a rebellious…

  • In the NA

    Pairing the gestures of modern, interpretive dance to the ecstatically, high-energy pop song, “In the NA” depicts a scientific experiment in hypnotism / human behavior gone awry. The subjects cognitive information is examined, recorded, inputted and finally obliterated by the performers. In its surrealistic climax, the music overpowers the experiment demanding that a new language for scientific understanding be established.

  • Faces West

    “Faces West” is a hand-processed dance film that explores the conflict between desire and inhibition, intimacy and distance. Created in collaboration between Rebecca Gruihn (Director) and Niomi Cherney (Choreographer/Performer), it takes the viewer to three city spaces that can be considered both public and private. The tensions of Cherney’s unique movement style are captured by Gruihn’s 16mm camera.

  • King County

    “King County” follows Camile Schwartzbaum as she leads her community theatre company in a frantic search for a bad 80s movie to turn into the next Broadway Smash ala XANADU.

  • Three Part Harmony: Composition in RGB #1

    This experimental dance film employs a bastardized version of the 1930s’ three-strip Technicolor process. Shot entirely on black-and-white film through colour filters, the images were recombined into full colour through optical printing techniques, one frame at a time. The gestures in this dance work explore the psychological fracturing and reunification in representations of the female body.

  • Raising the Bar: The Fresh Voices Project

    A documentary tracing the experiences of five Canadian contemporary-dance choreographers. Anne Troake (St. John’s, NFLD), Sarah Williams (Montreal, QC), Nova Bhattacharya (Toronto, ON), Tania Alvarado (Edmonton, AB), and Susan Elliott (Vancouver, BC) are poised to make their mark nationally. Their backgrounds are as varied as the regions they come from. All were selected by the Canada Dance Festival (CDF) in 2002 to participate in a three-year multi-faceted project. The documentary begins at the 2002 festival with the choreographers in performance. The filmmakers follow the progress of the artists at a three-week residency the next year at the Banff Centre where…

  • Chasmic Dance

    A visual metaphor for creative process as a sustained state of flux, whereby the deconstruction and reconfiguration of source material manifest themselves as a series of rapid abstract movements. Alluding to the cosmic dance of Shiva, the film is an expression of primal rhythmic energy, moving dialectically but without sublimation. Regeneration ignites destruction, and transformation invites mutation, through clashes of opposing modes such as video/film, surface/depth, and light/darkness.

  • Chiasmus

    An exploration into perceptual processes in the act of seeing and listening, “Chiasmus” takes film as a metaphor for the breathing body, through the intercrossing of the medium and the fragmented images of the body in movement. The rhythm and tension created by the interplay between sound and image, and their disjunction and conjunction, aspire to an organic and sensual moment where inside becomes outside, and outside inside.