SEPT 6th, 21:00 – 22:30
CINÉMA ELVIRE POPESCO

When does dance become one of the means of resistance? When does it transform into a meditation on the effects that time has on our bodies? How do we humorously treat a subject as controversial as objectifying a woman's body? What is the relationship between power and intimacy? The eight short films, from the last BIDFF evening, present dance and the body as either unstable or unifying ways.

The Embrace of the Valkyries

16:29, 2019, CAN
D: Alan Lake
C: Alan Lake

Through The Embrace of the Valkyries, Alan Lake continues the symbolist epic begun with the film Ravages. In a variation of solos thought for his long-time collaborators, he advances not on his intimate territories, but on those of the interpreters. The piece shows a series of portraits revealing the moving layers of their interior landscapes, and this, in a multidisciplinary approach that combines dance, visual arts and cinema. These stories and fantasies are magnified beyond human experience, contributing to the enrichment of Lake’s own language and mythology.

The Gods of Tiny Things

5:22, 2019, AUS
D: Deborah Kelly

The Gods of Tiny Things thinks poetically and urgently about the current array of threats to life; the shift to the right across the political world, the tolls of colonialism, climate catastrophe, human profligacy; and conversely the dynamic, kaleidoscopic pleasures and desires of life itself, at all scales, in all its teeming, prancing, hectic, clamouring fertility. We are dancing at the end of time.

Canning Town

10:27, 2020, UK
D: Fabiola Santana, Will Dickie
C: Fabiola Santana, Will Dickie

Canning Town is a dance film shot beneath its street lights, capturing desolate cityscapes that will soon no longer be there. House prices continue to rise and the redevelopers of East London are steadily encroaching from all sides. Fabiola Santana and her Mother Leah moved to Canning Town from Portugal in 2008. In 2018 they moved out. This film honours those 10 years by making a dance with the forces of union and separation – between two lovers, a mum and daughter, a country and its continent.

Escape

14:14, 2019, CL
D: Heidi Duckler
C: Heidi Duckler

In November 2019 Heidi Duckler Dance performed as part of the international programming at the Centro de Experimentación Escénica in Valdivia and at the LOFT International Dance Festival in Concepción, Chile. The company arrived at a time of mass protests fueled by the increased cost of living and prevalent inequality in Chile. Despite the rising fear of violence and feelings of trauma coming back from the days of the dictatorship, the festivals moved forward with their programming.
Duckler, impacted by the protests, decided to create a film titled, ESCAPE, with HDD Dancers Tess Hewlett, Ryan Walker Page, and Himerria Wortham along with Chilean filmmaker Felipe Díaz Galarce and dEUSeXmACHINA Films to develop a powerful work that reveals the correlation between the Chilean and American experiences.
The team traveled and filmed in Valdivia, Concepción, and Los Ángeles, Chile, listening to the stories of local residents, using dance as a tool of expression and resistance. Now as we confront police brutality in America face a global crisis, the themes of fear, increasing inequality, and unstable leadership feel more relevant than ever and are explored through this cinematic experience.

Correspondance (Contact)

9:09, 2019, UK / CH
D: Murat Adash
C: Murat Adash

An exercise in crossing thresholds, two performers move through and are moved by their surroundings on a moment-by-moment basis, triggered through a collective becoming-with ebbs and flows while occurring through a co-constitutive manner. Together in interplay, the choreography unfolds as an entangled process of becoming-with one another. Through processes of attunement, correspondence, contagion and contact, the performers trace qualities of force and breath in vibration – reorganizing, shape-shifting and boundary-probing the patterns of a potential new becoming. Experimenting with variable morphologies of co-presence, Correspondance (Contact) establishes an encounter of a field of relations in a shared, mutually affective field of resonance.

Men

4:26, 2020, FI
D: Hanna Brotherus
C: Hanna Brotherus

A group of men from different backgrounds between the ages of 12 and 85 feel the power and intimacy of touch. What does it mean to be a man and to connect with other men?

Lazarus

8:34, 2020, USA / SP
D: Tuixén Benet
C: Tuixén Benet, Àngela Boix

Through a dialogue between movement and landscape, Lazarus reflects on the objectification of the woman body in film. The famous quote by Edgar Allan Poe "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" triggers a succession of falls and recoveries that escape the poetic by trying too hard to find it.

SHE/I

7:15, 2020, USA
D: Shaun Clarke
C: John Lam

A meditation on the human body, identity and movement.