Commissioned, developed and produced as part of the DANCE MOViES Commission, a program that supports the creation of new dance works for the screen, with projects developed and produced through the EMPAC artist-in-residence program, contemporary artist Seline Baumgartner collaborates with professional dancers over the age of 50, exploring how contemporary dance indulges in the eternal cult of youth. Is there a physical memory? How does the movement or style of a dancer change with aging? The work examines how a traditional vocabulary of the dance form usually links criteria such as elegance, grace, and dignity with flexibility and vigor. The research involved looking at age and the inability to move with agility not as a disadvantage, but as a conceptual framework for choreography.

A presentation of five dance films, commissioned or developed at EMPAC. Three of the works were supported by the DANCE MOViES Commission—experimental dance works for the screen, which vary widely in content and form, yet are united by the fact that they are crafted by a choreographer or movement-based artist. Commissions were awarded through a competitive open-proposal process conducted annually and supported bythe Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts.

Seline Baumgartner: Nothing Else (DANCE MOViES 2014/15) This installation for Studio 2 featured dancers over the age of 50 and approached age and the inability to move with agility not as a disadvantage, but as a conceptual framework for choreography.

Orit Ben-Shitrit: Ward of the Feral Horses (DANCE MOViES 2014/15) Rooted in our current technological anxiety and cognitive capitalism—
employing semiotics to produce personal social capital—Ward details the schizophrenic collapse of a mind trapped in the apparatus.

chameckilerner: ESKASIZER & Samba#2 This installation for Studio 1 featured four women of various age, heritage, and shape. Using high-speed video equipment, the film zooms in to the point of abstraction, resulting in a dance of the flesh.

Dana Gingras: Chainreaction A collision of dance, animation, and sound that juxtaposes the movements of live performers with the motion of animated projections in a continuous, interactive evolution of action and reaction.

Marianne Kim: Lost & Found (DANCE MOViES 2014/15) Lost & Found encounters a man in the midst of an internal crisis. During his wandering fugue state, he ruminates about fugue music and the vision quest a young J.S. Bach took on foot from his home in Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear the music of Dietrich Buxtehude.

The genesis of Product of Circumstances began when, as Xavier Le Roy says, “i began to take two dance classes a week at the same time that I started to work on my thesis for my PhD in molecular and cellular biology.” Many years later, after ceasing work as a biologist, Le Roy was invited to present a lecture on theory and praxis in performance. That lecture then became a performance, Product of Circumstances, where actions subvert the traditional hierarchy of organization and form, and in turn inspire an awareness of the ways that hierarchies are manifested in society today—and the complex rationalizations that support them.

Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. Le Roy develops his work like a researcher while simultaneously focusing on the relationships between process and product and his own involvement in the process. He regularly initiates projects to question modes of production, collaboration, and conditions of group work.

In Other Words included six artists who delivered lecture-performances, juxtaposed with talks by six thinkers in order to cross boundaries and make dialogue a continuous process of renewal. 

This performance is presented in conjunction with Avital Ronell’s talk The Test Drive.

Commissioned, developed and produced as part of the DANCE MOViES Commission, a program that supports the creation of new dance works for the screen, with projects developed and produced through the EMPAC artist-in-residence program, interdisciplinary artist Orit Ben-Shitrit explores the sensation of a person being trapped in their body. Has the loss of privacy in our public and private lives gone too far? Why do we have the need to go wild? How can we break free? In the past 30 years, we have gradually moved from industrial production to a cognitive phase of Capitalism. From social networks to the marketplace, our online presence has merged the public with the private to an unprecedented degree of personal exposure.

A speech can be a mighty weapon. Throughout the centuries it has enthused countless masses and mobilized them into action, for better or worse. It has unleashed revolutions and fueled wars. Such is the power of words. Belgian-based choreographer and dancer Lisbeth Gruwez transforms a recorded speech by ultraconservative American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart into a disturbing gesture and dance form. Her body juggles with words, makes syllables, shouts, stammers, horrifies, and fascinates. The piece deals less with the direct meanings of words and phrases and more with the violence that can lie in the rhetorical strategies of someone in a trance-like state.

In this commissioned talk, New York University professor Randy Martin will link the movement of capital within financial markets to the history of dance.

Made in response to Bureau de l'APA’s La Jeune-Fille et la Mort, performed on October 12, Martin will draw parallels between choreographies of currency and bodily movement. Using the concept of the derivative as a key example, he will show how logics from financial markets inform social values and ultimately impact cultural production.

Trieste is a contemporary fable inspired by the Italian city of the same name located on the Adriatic Sea. The performance unfolds in five segments, each relating to one feature of Trieste: The Abyss, The Caves, The Sea, The Castles, and The Bora. As in the board game Snakes and Ladders, where destiny is randomly decided, protagonists climb or fall from one level to another through breaches in the storyline. 

Marie Brassard and Infrarouge, her Montréal-based theater company, completed the work in residence and then premiered it at EMPAC. The company developed reactive video, light, and sound environments that would respond to performers in a mix of accidental and planned ways. After years of collaboration with director Robert Lepage, actress, director, and author Marie Brassard formed her own company, Infrarouge, to create multidisciplinary works throughout Europe, the Americas, and in Australia.

Part of the DANCE MOViES Commission, this installation officially premieres on April 6, and will be followed by an open reception and panel discussion with all commissioned artists. -- Lecoq trained actor, principal clown for Cirque du Soleil, and contemporary artist Colin Gee presents In the First Place…, a multi-layered dance film installation. The project, filmed in Rome, reframes Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream), an Italian pastoral romance published in 1499. In the First Place… applies a relationship between memory and location by referencing a mnemonic technique called “Memory Palace” that uses architectural spaces to organize and remember information.

Part of the DANCE MOViES Commission, this screening marks the official premiere of the 2011 commissions and will be followed by an open reception and panel discussion with all commissioned artists.

TAO (11 min, Argentina, 2013) is the third collaborative dance film between Argentinian filmmaker Cayetana Vidal and choreographer and dancer Sofia Mazza, who explore the superimposition of movement and image. Male and female, winter and summer, day and night, and nature and city are overlayed, creating a new single image in which opposites coexist. The technique of video overlay proposes an imaginary world of new shapes, proportions, and perspectives. The film was shot in the city of Buenos Aires and on the Argentine Atlantic Coast. Footage was also shot in Germany, Spain, and Tigre, a river delta near Buenos Aires. As it was winter in Europe and summer in South America, and since dancer Diego Poblete was traveling around Europe, a “live experiment” was conducted and images were collected during the same time period in both hemispheres.

SCHEDULE

• Introduction with founding curator Hélene Lesterlin
• Screening of TAO
• Commissioned artists' presentations + discussion with curators
• Reception on stage serving lite fare

Inspired by meditations on horror films, the work of Antonin Artaud, and Ardunio open-source electronics, Radiohole’s Inflatable Frankenstein is a visually and sonically driven performance based on Mary Shelley’s early life and her novel Frankenstein. Arising from a world of gods and monsters (and thousands of Walmart and Price Chopper grocery bags) is a desecration too terrible to behold and too beautiful to turn away from, leading to an improbable question: what is it like to be a metaphor for everything? 

Radiohole is a Brooklyn-based performance collective founded in 1998 by Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer, Maggie Hoffman, and Scott Halvorsen Gillette. At the heart of the company’s ethic is collaboration and play. Their cut-up techniques, rich object-oriented visual sense, amplified, sampled sound, and raw, energetic performance style owe as much to the punk and new wave movements of the 1970s and ’80s as they do to any formal theatrical tradition.