VideoDance2004
Athens: September 10-18 at BIOS, 84 Piraeus St. Screenings: 19:00-23:00 Events: 23:00-00:30
Thessaloniki: September 17-23, Thessaloniki Cinema Museum, Thessaloniki Port Screenings: 20:00-00:00
Entrance free
VideoDance grows into a festival that monitors the experiments of tomorrow's stars of the creative avant-garde in their early steps. This year, following the film screenings, live events will also be hosted, featuring a varied array of experimentation in new media, movement and the moving image. With an emphasis on experimentation, therefore, the festival expands its program, featuring three groups from Europe, which - even though made up of very young artists – are already well known in the European scene of experimental dancetheatre and dance, and are going to present their works in Greece for the first time.
West(Athina) (Friday, September 10 2004) Filming in Athens: September 5-8 From Italy the theatre and dance company Kinkaleri proposes a performance-installation entitled West. It is a work that is being produced step by step in various western cities - it has already been carried out in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, and the next stop is Athens. What is West? How are we to comprehend the space, the collapse, somebody's death near us? And why does the word "occidente" mean both the Occident and death in Italian? The group is coming to Athens a week before the festival. They are visiting various public areas, tourist attractions and other key spots and ask passers-by to pretend that they are dying, collapsing in front of the camera. The "deaths" will be filmed and edited, and a multiple spectacle on four screens will be produced, also using material from the other cities, which is to remain as an installation throughout the festival and will be accompanied by a happening with the audience on the festival premiere.
My dearest, my fairest (Monday September 13 , 22:00) From Germany, two dancers of Sasha Waltz's company, co-director of the most popular and revolutionary theatre in Berlin, the Shaubühne, are presenting their performance, entitled My dearest, my fairest playing impromptu musical instruments-toys and singing love songs from the Middle Ages to Italian pop in the candlelight. Extraordinary dancer Juan Kruz Diaz de Garaio Esnaola, familiar to the VideoDance public from his performance in the DV8 Physical Theatre and Sasha Waltz films, joins forces with Australian Joanna Dudley in a totally experimental performance. Juan and Joanna are the couple in love for this evening. Juan and Joanna have a passion in common: their toys. Juan and Joanna are going to sing a pocket story about the music of love, play it together, whistle it together and translate it into the French sign language. (It is the only festival event with a ticket, due to the limited seat number. Tickets cost 10 Euro and are available from Bios tel. 0030 210 34 25 335)
Speak memory, speak (Tuesday 14 September 2004, 23:00) Also from Italy, the experimental theatre company Fanny and Alexander in association with the film group A. Zapruder Filmmakersgroup are presenting two works: One is a multiple spectacle on three screens, a complex movie entitled Speak Memory, Speak, which describes the adventures of a novel and film hero, named You person, touring his pre-natal past, meeting the women he had loved. The aesthetic echoes Emil Nolde's paintings and the music is by groundbreaking independent American filmmaker and actor Vincent Gallo (familiar from last year's much-discussed film Brown Bunny)
Rebus per Ada (September 12-15, 19:00-23:00 every three quarters of an hour on the first floor of Bios, each screening for 15 spectators) The same company, Fanny and Alexander in association with film group A. Zapruder Filmmakersgroup proposes a "film installation": entitled Rebus per Ada, it is a 16-mm film presenting the story of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada in a dreamlike and playful way through a series of rebuses. A subtle film, presented as a work of art within a 19th-century frame.
A. The Films
The section that sets the tone for this year's festival and provides the title for the installation exhibition (see B.) is A vision of Reality. Films whose creators use reality with all its cruelty as material, not in order to mask it, but so as to transform this material into a vision. Their poetic views invest the material of reality with a dreamlike quality, while also emphasising their stance regarding political developments. Performance West is in full accordance with this concept.
Don't miss: - Luc Dunberry's 35' film [Left] Between Us, featuring dancers from the Sasha Waltz group. A tough presentation of the Babel of modern Berlin, its inhuman as well as its human faces, and the sense of death in Western European societies. - Silent Salvoes, the little visual masterpiece by Ana Baer Carillo, and the equally powerful inner journey Soluble Self by Vanessa Fassié - accounts of the development of the female political point of view of the kinf of Maya Deren in contemporary American experimental cinema. - Richard Sylvarnes's film Vox Populi, with a soundtrack of remixed anti-war voices from the New York protests against the war in Iraq.
Very interesting for the cinephile audience, the small tribute to the early phase of Shirley Clarke's work - a great figure of the American Independent Cinema, famous for her documentaries on marginal characters in America in the '60's. Shirley Clarke began her career as a dancer but later turned to film and made a few dance films influenced by Maya Deren before finding her own personal voice in the formalist experiments Bridges Go Round and Skyscraper, in which her vision and personal technique in editing choreographs reality itself. Since her later documentaries are most characteristic of her work, these early films are rarely shown. The following films will be screened: Dance in the Sun (1953) A moment in Love (1957) Bridges Go Round (1958) Skyscraper (1959)
Don't miss: - Lilo Mangelsdorff's documentary Seeking to hire men and women over 65, which traces the lives of a group of aged people who were taught by Pina Bausch, after audition, the new production of her older choreography Kontakthoff. The film aims to highlight the qualities that the experiences of a lifetime have inscribed on thes aged people's bodies. - the amazing Canadian grandmother of modern dance, Elisabeth Langley, who at the age of seventy still teaches dancing - and living – and works as a dancer, too, in the 5' documentary Light Years by Jenn Goodwin. - DV8 Physical Theatre's latest film,: The Cost of Living, based on the performance of the same title, in which a character, a handicapped person, fights his own battle for life, dance, love, along with his able-bodied friend, and probably manages better! An amazing David Toole in a recital of performance, and our familiar, dynamic yet lyrical choreographies by DV8 in an explosive cocktail! A film that is suspicious of social discrimination yet also of their exploitation!
A short tribute to dancer, choreographer and artist Saburo Teshigawara introduces in Greece one of the most distinguished choreographers in contemporary avant-garde dance scene. Along with his group Karas, he is currently touring the world with his evocative, strange and sensitive choreographies. Yet, the most important element of this tribute is undoubtedly the two films he made in the early '90's, T-City and Keshioko, which are considered gems of video art and place him among the most groundbreaking artists. Keshioko's scenes are filmed by photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.
In section Dialogues, British Russell Maliphant converses with French José Montalvo and French Emmanuelle Huynh with Swiss Estrelle Héritier on the level of the techniques for distilling from dancers choreographies and their worldviews. Russell Maliphant, one of the most talented young British choreographers, choreographs for a unique performance on Barry Adamson's live music, asking his dancers to bring along everything they carry inscribed on their bodies, while José Montalvo follows suit, working with dancers coming from diverse backgrounds (two hip-hop dancers, an African dancer, two classical dancers, a contemporary one and two acrobats) under the sounds of Vivaldi in Paradis, one of the greatest box office hits in contemporary French dance. Emmanuelle Huynh, one of the upcoming names in contemporary French dance scene, creates a choreography on the archetypal male-female relationship with sensitivity as well as harshness in her latest work A vida Enorme and converses with Estrelle Héritier, a new voice in contemporary Swiss dance scene, who in A5 deals with the theme of "suns - brown dwarfs" who disappear immediately after being born, leaving behind their light to trick us.
The couple, not in the choreographic sense of a duet, but in an actual love relationship, is what inspires the creators of the unit The Couple. Beginning, development and end of the relationship, crisis, war and reconciliation, love, hate, peace, are the main themes in the films of this program.
Don't miss: -the amazing first film Cantique No 1 by Canadian Marie Chouinard, familiar to the Greek public from the Kalamata dance festival, in which a couple of faces in profile experiences the whole development of a relationship in 15 minutes. - the extraordinary couple of Berlin dancers Jorge Moreno and Nicola Mascia in Norbert Servos's film Elements of Mine.
In the unit Choreographed Stillness dancers and choreographers highlight the importance of stillness, led by the always groundbreaking Steve Paxton, who features in the documentary Have You Started Dancing Yet? This unit is complemented by three site-specific installations (on the first floor of Bios) and a theoretical text by British visual artist of Italian origin Gianluca Bonomo. And as always, Mixer: this year with a lot of humour and all kinds of experiments in new media.
The 14 Greek Films of the program, which represent the Greek production of 2003-2004, include well-known names of choreographers as well as new voices from the fields of dance and film direction. We are all looking forward to the three films that were made as the result of project exchange, the program supporting dance film production that the Thessaloniki Film Festival carries out through VideoDance since 2001. The two films made in joint production with the Festival after the competition and will be shown in premiere on September 11 in VideoDance are:
AΩ director: Konstantinos Chatzinikolaou choreographers: Iris Karayan, Marilena Petridou, Sania Strimbakou, Ioanna Toumbakari production: Kine Group
THREE TIMES director: Yiannis Leontaris choreographer: Katia Savrami production: Prosxima Dance company
This year the runner-up film was also completed and premieres on September 11 in VideoDance: area closed director: Stefanos Potamianos choreographer: Mariela Nestora
B. The Exhibition
Focusing on reality as vision, the exhibition consists mainly of video installations. tat0rt is a work by Stephanie Thiersch from Germany. Thiersch highlights what we normally do not pay any attention to: a piece of clothing dropped on the side of the road. Its little story is imprinted on it by a video projection that excites the viewer's curiosity. Marginal people, immigrants, their little stories, the harshness of a reality dimly made out in the darkness of the street - the story of tat0rt.
Installation UMBO by New Zealander James Hutchinson in association with Rotor Plus, one of the most important electronica groups in New Zealand treats the theme in a different language. The installation video is a vivid visual expression of the fear for the future of our planet and the need to protest. It begins from the images of our old favorite viewmaster and, reflecting its aesthetic, switches to a constant interchange of images of an humanity in turmoil trying to find peace.
Lina Selander from Sweden in Total Eclipse of the Heart stages a personal yet impersonal space. Political scenes alternate with more personal black and white scenes projected on a screen and a monitor, while the description of a series of Polaroid photographs is heard through an old tape recorder. Greeks Voltnoi and STMC incise the sonic environment of a dance rehearsal in order to create a new environment in their audio installation rehearsal random variations.
Specially made for three of the spaces in the first floor of Bios, the three video installations entitled Blind mirrors by Italian Gianluca Bonomo deal with the minimum of movement and the concept of political death. Finally, a work by Dimitris Merantzas entitled Cheers! from the series Reality is the Informer of Imagination will be on show. Merantzas's work is characterized its cruel images, by rawness and by a strange poetry of detail, which emerges out of the harshness. Finally, the last three days of VideoDance (September 16, 17 and 18) feature an interactive workshop by Efthimis Theodosis, entitled Free Piece of Tape. The artist describes his work as "an active community in which the spectator becomes the artist, producing a projection and a product at the same time."
C. The Events
(The program has been curated by Bios and Christiana Galanopoulou)
Andrea Parker, dj set, UK Friday, September 10, 2004 Certainly, Andrea's musical past is a wildly varied one. Her early explorations with Inky Blacknuss and Two Sandwiches Short of a Lunchbox (a collaboration with David Morley) were at the cutting edge of experimental leftfield electronica. Even then, she was also showcasing her vocal skills. In "Kiss my Arp", her latest album, Andrea paints the bigger picture, drawing on her experience as an experimental DJ at clubs like Lost and the legendary, defunct Megatripolis, her love of hard dancefloor techno and her ear for a classic song, in equal amounts. Which might well be down to growing up in Yalding, Kent, initially divorced by geography from the club scene until she grew up and she discovered funk in London hip-hop jams. Following the release of 'Kiss My Arp', there were tours of Germany and America which led to Andrea opening for Radiohead on the West Coast leg of their US tour this year.
Mitchell Akiyama, Canada Saturday, September 11 2004 A multimedia artist (he teaches visual arts at the University of Quebec), Mitchell Akiyama is interested in the urban space seen as a natural habitat, an ecosystem, in the fashion of the encyclopedists of the 18th century. His videos represent for example empty spaces or urban spots filmed close up with the help of a micro-surgery camera, and through the subtle interplay of slow motion and superimpressions he manages to invoke a flowing sensation, something between hypnosis and extreme lucidity. The same organic dimension prevails in his music, although it pours out of the circuits of a laptop. Whether recorded or live, his music is realized through processing instrumental sources played by himself (piano, guitar) or other musicians on his latest album "If Night Is A Weed And Day Grows Legs" released by the prestigious Brussels label Sub Rosa. Seeking to capture and invoke through various effects the multiple resonances of his instruments, he manages to create fascinating sonic landscapes, occasionally evoking the music of Sylvain Chauveau and Christian Fennesz, Erik Satie and Steve Reich (his favorite musician), My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno...
Ramon Bauer > Tina Frank, Austria Friday, September 17, 2004 Ramon Bauer is the founder of Mego - the most important record label in Austria, which has played a definitive role in establishing and popularizing the Viennese electronica scene. He has collaborated with Pete Rehberg, and their work has been published by famous British Touch label, while he is also a member of General Magic. A pioneer laptop composer, Ramon Bauer in his live performances seeks electronic improvisation often materializing through a subtle sense of humor. Established as one of the most important designers in the world since the mid-'90's, Tina Frank has created some of the most emblematic electronic CD covers, logos and t-shirts, while she increasingly focuses on the production of videos as well as of visuals meant to create "design for music." She regularly cooperates with musicians such as Chicks on Speed or Mathias Gmachl, with whom they have established the audiovisual group Skot. In Athens, Tina Frank is in charge of the visuals for Ramon Bauer concert.
Robin Rimbaud > Scanner Saturday September 18 2004 Scanner is one of the most eccentric and groundbreaking personalities in the international electronic scene. Seeking sounds from the most unexpected sources is his main source for inspiration for "democracy in music," as he terms his main creative obsession. Characterized as a "sonic terrorist," Robin Rimbaud heralds future techno-data sonic landscapes whose transformation and visual flow he personally sees to, creating a multiple sonic and visual effect that shocks listeners-spectators.
