Showcase of the best DANCE SHORT FILMS in the world today.
AUDIENCE AWARD WINNERS:
Best Short Film: TANG’O
Best Dance Film: INK
Best Performances: MELANCHOLY MAN
Best Direction: ARINA
Best Cinematography: SCAPELANDS
Best Sound & Music: OUVERTURE
Theme of night: Life
NOTE: Festival took place during the COVID-19 virus lockdown so all screenings were held in private.
On an ordinary day in Union Square Park, Jordan, a soundcloud rapper, struggles to get pedestrians to listen to his music. Meanwhile, Brianna, a cypher rapper battles other freestylers for respect and Lorenzo, a 12 year old kid finds difficulty in learning how to bucket drum.
Kyriaki Gkoudina is an international (Greece) Doctorate student in Composition, at Michigan State University. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies in Aristotle’s University of Thessaloniki (2014) with specialization in Film Music, while studying Harmony (3 years) and Counterpoint of the 16th Century and Baroque (2 years). She earned a fellowship to attend Michigan State University and earned her Master’s Degree under the guidance of D. Biedenbender and L. Goeringer. She is currently studying music composition and visual narrative with Dr. Mark Sullivan. She has composed music for plays, as well as for films and documentaries. Finally, she has sound designed interactive performances and films.
“For a Helen” is a multimedia work for film, sound and electronics. It is a multimedia composition; the music and visuals were composed at the same time. It is the outcome of an ongoing research in the narrative abilities of the aforementioned media when used in tandem. The syntax of the work is characterized by parataxis – the placement of stimuli one after the other “without coordinating or subordinating connectives” (Merriam-Webster), thereby generating a spectrum of narratives by the very association of the stimuli to each other. This form of syntax provides a freer platform for the exploration of the media’s expressive as well as time construction capabilities. Both the visual and audio parts of the work were composed at the same time. I considered all three as different sides of the same tool of expression and picked each medium according to their individual characteristics that fit the part of the overall narrative the best. The paratactic syntax and the treatment of the media as equals, made me realize the different “experience of time” that audio and visual stimuli construct and the intricacies that arise when putting them together. In a hypotactic syntax, there is a hierarchy between the media, and the one on top defines – for the most part – the time experience of the work. In a paratactic syntax, time is shaped by the interjection of each medium’s individual time experience in the service of the overall narrative direction.
“For a Helen” is a journey through life, memory, the imaginary and the realistic, our struggle to understand and take control, the past and everything that’s never to return again.
Marcos has found mincing herbs and vegetables to be a therapeutic “flow” activity during the pandemic. It is a way to awaken the senses, lose track of time, and experiment with how textured ingredients come together to nourish the body. This work uses mincing as a metaphor for many different topics. It specifically expresses a process of transformation. Other words for transformation are: change, amendment, mutation, and (r)evolution. Do these words sound familiar?
As composer and taegŭm (Korean flute) soloist, Dr Hyelim Kim has been performing professionally since 2000 specialising in traditional repertoire and various cross-over genres. Kim has produced five solo recordings and performed numerous recitals around the world. Based on her belief that Korean heritage can act as an artistic inspiration for the contemporary and cosmopolitan environment, Kim has extended her new language of expression to the interdisciplinary sphere. ‘DanSang – the city’ is one of her recent efforts to incorporate sound and gestures of musicians as a tool to interact with spaces and surroundings.
As a researcher, Hyelim Kim is currently a research fellow at the Bath Spa University. She obtained her PhD in ethnomusicology from SOAS in 2014, where her dissertation was on the practice research of Korean traditional music, which is currently being prepared for publication. Most of her academic research and interests revolve around issues of intercultural and interdisciplinary music-making and practice research.
‘DanSang – the city’ is an exploration of new ways for music and movement to interact with surrounding spaces. Using the Korean bamboo flute taegŭm, native South Korean musician Hyelim Kim interacts with the landscape and soundscapes of urban London. The city becomes a multifaceted stage (‘dansang’ in Korean), which in turn transforms simultaneously into a nest and battlefield for a musician of ethnic minority background. Expressed through Kim’s music and movements, this film (with the music and sound recorded entirely live on-site, and with a fully live improvised score) explores how the non-Western female voice could express itself within the context of the cosmopolitan Western environment of the U.K., where it could easily be drowned.
Michele Giangrande, artist, writer and designer was born in Bari in 1979. He has been a Decoration teacher at the School of Fine Arts of Catanzaro and a Painting Techniques teacher at the School of Fine Arts of Lecce. Currently he is a Decoration teacher at the School of Fine Arts of Bari. A very versatile artist, provided with scathing irony, transfigures reality playing with the concepts of being and appearing. Since the first researches he has lent the objects chosen, mostly in common use, a new identity. For years he has been running a search which draws inspiration from what’s archaic, primitive, from rereading the past, through a systemic approach to painting, sculpture, handicraft, performance, cinema, installation and architecture. Starting with his origins, the artist decides to go all the way back to folk traditions and Human History itself, ending with the first artistic expressions and, by doing so, gathering the fundamental sparkle of it and trapping it in his works. Giangrande’s search is intended to be an attempt to detect in the remote past a present but forward-looking communication, through a playful and analytic journey which starts from his own memories going through, with accurate levity, the very genesis of the making. He has participated in a number of solo exhibitions, collective exhibitions and group exhibitions. His works of art can be found in museums, in private and public collections in Italy and abroad. His search has been subject of studies, of graduation thesis and of several conferences, including the most recent held at the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán di Mérida (Mexico) thanks to Prof. Giuliana Schiavone and to the technical support of Julio Cesar Beltran. Many reviews for his work have appeared onto sector newspapers and magazines such as FlashArt, Insideart, Segno, Exibart, Artribune, ARTEeCRITICA, Espoarte, Arte Mondadori, Interni. More than sixty are his publications in solo or group catalogs. In his path he met a number of art critics and curators, journalists and operators. Currently Giangrande durably or periodically collaborates with several private and public institutions such as the Pino Pascali Foundation Contemporary Art Museum.
Short film produced during the MACRO ASILO’s Atelier in which Michele Giangrande participated from July 30 to August 4, 2019. In this occasion the artist created a metamorphic, experiential and performative installation that involved the entire museum audience. Human zoos, also called ethnological exhibitions, were public displayings of human beings during the 19th and 20th centuries , usually in a so-called natural or primitive state. Ethnological exhibitions have been criticized as highly degrading and racist. We live in a society where we are always under observation and judgment, at the mercy of the people of the network and all this by choice. No one forces us, on the other hand, we choose to “share” and let everyone know what we eat, what we drink, what we live, what we love. A continuous and inexorable stream of private information which becomes public and that is spread in the ocean of online information, but that is there anyway, available to everyone, every day and at any time. For sure features are not all so negative or dramatic, on the contrary, but what would happen if reality also complies with these dictates we no longer lived in real time? If in addition to virtual life, ever more important than the real one, even reality was subjected to certain mechanisms of “sharing at all costs” and “obsessive compulsive observation”? Today this film, in the pandemic era, takes on a sinisterly prophetic aspect.
SCAPELANDS, 4min., UK, Dance
TANG’O, 3min., France, Dance
INK, 4min., USA, Dance
MELANCHOLY MAN, 5min., Dance
OUTSIDE MY WINDOW, 6min,. Canada, Dance
Séance, The Holding On and The Letting Go, 7min., UK, Dance
OUVERTURE, 3min., Canada, Dance
ARINA, 11min,. Sweden, Dance
