Review: Dance for the Camera Festival Screening 9/16

Kitty Sailer, Dance MFA candidate

   Award-winning director Katrina McPherson presented four dance films this weekend at The Post Theater. This event, coordinated by Professor Ellen Bromberg, was sponsored by the Departments of Modern Dance and Film & Media Arts, as part of the 8^th International Dance for the Camera Festival at the University of Utah. The Festival offered three nights of screenings, as well as a week of classes with McPherson, who is considered one of the preeminent dance film-makers in the world. The University community is lucky to have her here, under the auspices of an inter-departmental event.

   The first film, There is a Place, was made in 2010, in a small town in Scotland. As it begins, a man, dancer Sang Jijia, sits in a long row of chairs. The chairs are ordinary plastic, and the room could be a forgotten classroom, with utilitarian windows, desks pushed to the wall, and a cold wood floor. Then he moves, and the ordinary room melts away from the power of his physicality. He is both sinuous and percussive, especially in a memorable section that moves horizontally across the screen, rotating and falling along a long narrow table. The articulate editing of Simon Fildes gives the film a rhythmic quality, using the repeated noise of the slap or scrape of the table as a textured sound score. The rhythm builds in intensity, and then near the end of the film we are rewarded with cut-away shots to the same dancer on a picturesque hillside, which offers a beautiful juxtaposition to the ordinary bleakness of the room. Still, it is that room that gives meaning to the movement—the long row of chairs seems to be a brink, or the edge of some life, and the dancer is poised upon it, almost ready, it seems, to move toward the light.

   That film was my favorite of the evening. For those audience members that may be unfamiliar with the art of Dance for the Camera, McPherson offers an expert example. She wields her camera with a keen eye for the movement, the bodies, and the space. In the second film, Moment (1999), filmed in a domed chapel space, the camera leads us on a rollicking exploration of the casual location. We spy the dancers from behind piles of chairs, and experience vertigo as the camera rakes the ornamental ceiling. In Sense-8 (2001), McPherson provides us with a glimpse inside a Contact Improvisation dance company with both sighted and visually-impaired dancers. This is one example of a dance film with a culturally relevant message; the last film, Adugna (2001), is another. Adugna Community Dance Theatre commissioned McPherson to make this fund-raising film for their budding outreach dance company in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. What emerges is a cinematic documentary of passion and hope. Thus the evening ends with a note of triumph—four very different films, provoking dialogue and respect in a new interdisciplinary field with much room left for growth.  


(If you are interested in writing a critique on a College of Fine Arts event, contact Rachael Shaw at rachael dot shaw at utah.edu)